Every year since 2006, Wizards of the Coast has created a special “Holiday Card.” These are winter holiday-themed silver-bordered/acorn Magic cards that Wizards of the Coast gives to its employees, holiday party attendees, WPN stores, and business partners. You can of course also get your hands on many of these by buying them from Card Kingdom!
These cards are fun and festive. They reference both Magic and holiday festivities. And we’re in the holiday season now, so I thought it would be a good time to review these cards, with an eye towards what these cards are riffing on.
WHERE CAN I PLAY THESE?
As you’ll see, these cards have pretty wacky effects, with many of them involving props. As such, holiday cards aren’t legal in any 60-card formats, nor are they technically legal in Commander. However, it can be a lot of fun to play these with a Commander pod that has agreed to their legality, especially this time of year!
THE FIRST WAVE OF HOLIDAY CARDS ARE ONLY A LITTLE WACKY (2006-2010)
This 2006 holiday card got it all started, and I think it’s still one of the best. Store bought fruitcake is a notoriously terrible gift for the holidays. It tastes awful and has the texture of a brick. They also basically never expire, making one wonder if they are food at all. And if you ever eat one, you’re not going to feel very good.
Fruitcake Elemental is as indestructible as its namesake, and having it in play actively hurts you. But worry not! You can “gift” it to your opponent so they are the ones who truly suffer. Of course, it quickly becomes a game of hot potato (hot fruitcake?) since they can “regift” it.
Fruitcake Elemental is also one of the most “normal” Holiday Card. It doesn’t actually do anything that requires props or flies in the face of the game’s normal rules, so it might be the easiest to sneak into your Commander deck.
This one is a humorous riff on Gifts Ungiven and not only when it comes to the name and the art. The actual effect is really similar too. They are practically identical, but Gifts Given lets you search your opponent’s library instead of your own, and they end up being forced to gift you two of those cards. The only tricky part of this card in terms of gameplay is that you can’t normally have an opponent’s cards in your hand.
While these two cards have a name that is pronounced exactly the same, Evil Presents actually has very little in common with Evil Presence. This holiday card lets you put one of your own creatures onto the battlefield for free, and forces it to attack your opponent every single turn! That is definitely an evil present. And it’s a very cool take on a card that lets you cheat something into play. Typically, it’s impossible for a creature to attack its controller, but this is another one where the rules aren’t super far afield from a typical game of Magic.
This is a fun play on the common holiday phrase “Season’s Greetings.” This little goblin is not thrilled about being home – as the flavor text clearly tells you – and that’s not an uncommon sentiment. Trips home for the holidays can be challenging. Although, I hope yours isn’t as challenging as his.
Like Foodcake Elemental, this actually has an effect that works perfectly fine within Magic’s rules, and it has the potential to be pretty strong, as suddenly all of your opponent’s creatures randomly start beating one another.
Another play on words, Snow Mercy is a callback to No Mercy. Both of them are 4 mana Enchantments that do something whenever a creature deals damage to you. Although, No Mercy’s effect is noticeably more powerful, since it just destroys them. Humorously, Snow Mercy seems to depict the very same Phyrexians on No Mercy, but they’re now frozen in a magical snow globe.
While Snow Mercy only gives those creatures counters, you can use Snow Mercy to tab down those creatures, and the fun part here comes with how you activated that ability – because you have to tap, then untap, then tap, then untap, then tap Snow Mercy. This is a pretty fun way to mimic shaking a snow globe on a Magic card.
This is also another early holiday card that doesn’t do anything that doesn’t work within the rules of Magic. And it’s also the last time that was the case.
GET YOUR FESTIVE PROPS READY! (2011-2018)
Yule Ooze was 2011’s holiday card, and it took things to a new level when it comes to festive cheer. A reference to yule logs – a common holiday cake in many parts of the world – this ooze requires you to actually eat something in order to activate its ability. This one hits differently these days, because we have actual Food tokens now. I don’t recommend eating those, though.
The only holiday split card, Naughty and Nice is a reference to the two designations Santa Claus famously assigns to children. The two halves have very similar effects. If you want to be naughty, you can search your opponent’s library for a card and steal it. And if you want to be nice, you can search your own library for a card and give it to one of your opponents. It’s all up to you. But remember, Santa’s always watching.
Another festive play on words, Stocking Tiger and Stalking Tiger are homophones. Stocking Tiger very much feels like a stocking stuffed with goodies, because when it enters you put a booster pack underneath it. Should you ever get in with the Tiger, you get to open your stocking and play with all the sweet cards that are contained within it. Drawing 15 cards is pretty sweet.
This was actually a holiday card that some people in the general public got their hands on, as some copies of it appeared in booster packs bought at big-box stores back in 2013.
Mishra’s Workshop is one of the most powerful lands ever printed, and Mishra’s Toy Workshop…isn’t, but it does reference that iconic card! Instead of building scary artifacts to battle his brother with, it seems Mishra has turned over a new leaf and now his workshop is churning out toys, like he’s a regular Saint Nicholas. The Toy Workshop can let you churn out lots of tokens, but you better make sure you have some toys around to represent them.
This card lets you put your creature on it and then slide it towards your opponent’s creatures. If your creature manages to stay on the sleigh, it damages every single card it touches. This might sound like the most ridiculous card so far – after all, it’s effect is based entirely on how this piece of cardboard moves on your playing surface.
That’s what makes it extra crazy that the early days of Magic had tournament-legal cards that did exactly this kind of thing. Chaos Orb is the most notable example of this – and people were playing that thing at the first World Championship. Now a card with this kind of effect is just a joke. The times have changed.
Thopter Pie Network is a card that rewards you for playing a game of Magic at the same time as your holiday dinner. If you aren’t eating, it’s just an entirely blank card. But if you are eating during your upkeep it spits out a 1/1 Thopter just like the card it references. That token has to be represented by food (again, this card is talking about actual food, not Food tokens which were still 3 years away from making their debut) and you have to eat it any time one of those tokens dies.
This card makes you play a careful balancing act, because if you run out of food to eat on your upkeep, or food to represent your tokens, the card becomes significantly less powerful. Pace yourself!
There are tons of gifts that look great at first. But opening it only to find that it’s in lots of pieces and going to take a ton of work for you to actually use it is one of the biggest let downs ever. Some Disassembly Required does this in reverse, instead letting you rip apart one of your creatures and put its keywords wherever you want. Sometimes when you’re trying to assemble a Christmas gift, you certainly want to tear it apart and throw it at the wall – and this certainly does the Magic equivalent.
One notable thing here – this card prefigured keyword counters, which we see pretty often these days. Now, a card could conceivably have this effect within the game’s rules. Of course, the December payoff is still pretty wacky.
I hope you aren’t tone deaf, because you’re going to have to if you want your Bog Humbugs to really get going. You’ll have to hum more of each tune every time it hits your opponent. This card’s name is also a humorous reference to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, where Ebenezer Scrooge famously utters “Bah! Humbug!” about everything he considers frivolous, including Christmas.
I DIDN’T THINK THEY COULD GET SILLIER, BUT…(2019-PRESENT)
We’ve already seen holiday cards get considerably wackier with the passage of time. Just as Magic itself has become increasingly complex, so too have the holiday cards. Decorated Knight is a funny play on words. Normally, if a knight were “decorated,” that would mean he has received much recognition and awards for his role in the military. But…not this guy, he’s just some dude covered in Christmas decorations.
His Adventure is also arguably the most ridiculous thing so far – he lets you exchange your entire deck with another one!
2020’s holiday card would make Decorated Knight proud. It pays you off for having a super blinged out deck, since you get to miracle cards off the top of your library for only a single snow mana. That also makes it a lot easier for you to achieve the alternate win condition. The card’s name is a reference to the Christmas Carol “Deck the Halls,” and the alternate win condition requires 12 permanents because there are 12 days of Christmas.
Sometimes we have a lot going on, and remembering to get a present for someone can slip your mind. This might lead to you rushing out in the cold for some last-minute shopping. Gisa and Geralf are a different sort, though. As stitchers on the plane of Innistrad, they’re all about putting a bunch of body parts together and creating reanimated corpses. So, when Gisa forgot about her brother, she did some last-minute chopping, knowing he’d appreciate a random dismembered arm.
The card’s effect is great too – they either get forced into giving you a card from their hand or a permanent on the battlefield.
This is perhaps the most unique holiday card. Because it isn’t a card! It’s just a cool treasure token featuring Liliana Vess and some of her zombies having a good Christmas.
Chaos Wrap is a festive riff on Chaos Warp. They have very similar effects, with both forcing the owner of a permanent to shuffle it into their library, and then they reveal the top card and if it’s a permanent they can put it on the battlefield. Chaos Warp has the added step of “wrapping” that card with multiple sleeves, and those sleeves offer some pretty significant protection. It also makes the player who got Wrapped always gets something, which is in keeping with the holiday spirit.
You’ll also notice that this card does not have a silver border the way all of its predecessors do. This is because Wizards of the Coast now uses the acorn stamp at the bottom of the card to indicate that it’s a card that’s not typically legal.
It’s very common to watch holiday movies during this time of year, and many of those movies end up getting sequels. Both the art and the flavor text feature Magic-themed sequels of real-world Christmas movies. The art references Die Hard and Elf, while the flavor text mentions Home Alone, Eight Crazy Nights, Holiday Inn, and Gremlins. The card asks you to come up with even more silly names, but you have to do it for a card on the stack in order to make copies of it.
While Bootleggers’ Stash is definitely the more powerful card, Eggnogger’s ‘Stache is way more fun! Your lands can now refill your cup, and if you make sure to have a drink mustache of some kind at the beginning of combat, you get to grow your creatures. I recommend non-alcoholic eggnog for this challenge, or things are going to get sloppy in a hurry.
And that brings us to this year’s card. It’s a reference to the Elemental Incarnations from Modern Horizons 2, and we’re about to get more of them in Lorwyn Eclipsed. They are all physical manifestations of emotions that come with Evoke. “Cheer” is a great emotion for the holiday season, and you can Evoke it by doing something nice for your opponent. Of all the holiday cards, this one might just do the most to foster a cheerful and giving environment.
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What’s your favorite holiday card? Let me know over on X or Bluesky.
Happy holidays, everyone!
Jacob has been playing Magic for the better part of 24 years, and he especially loves playing Magic’s Limited formats. He also holds a PhD in history from the University of Oklahoma. In 2015, he started his YouTube channel, “Nizzahon Magic,” where he combines his interests with many videos covering Magic’s competitive history. When he’s not playing Magic or making Magic content, he can be found teaching college-level history courses or caring for a menagerie of pets with his wife.