Escape is a graveyard mechanic that can appear on any non-land card. Escape will always be written with a mana cost, and then an amount of cards to exile from your graveyard after that. When a card with Escape is in your graveyard, you may cast it by paying its escape cost, which is both the mana cost written and exiling the cards.
That’s the basic idea, but there’s a few more notes to go along with it:
- Some cards with the mechanic will have extra effects that only occur when they escape – if they are put back onto the battlefield from the graveyard some other way, those effects will not trigger.
- You are casting a card when it escapes, so it can be countered.
- You still have to follow the normal timing restrictions for the card when you cast it this way.
- Unlike a lot of other graveyard recursion mechanics, if an escaped card would be put back into the graveyard for any reason, it does in fact go back to that graveyard rather than get exiled.
- Escape costs are affected by cost reduction or addition effects.
- Once you begin to cast a spell using its escape ability, it is on the stack and no longer in the graveyard, and so can’t be removed from that graveyard in response.
Escape was a well-received mechanic, and spawned several tournament-caliber cards (at least one of which developed a deck based completely around it). As with any graveyard recursion mechanic, it can get a bit out of control if it’s too powerful in a given set, and it is thematically tied to Theros, so don’t expect to see it too often, but it certainly could come around again.
If you want to Escape and add some Magic to your life, head over to cardkingdom.com!