Reminder Text

Reminder Text is parenthesized text printed in italics that follows a keyword or some other ability that might be confusing to players

Details

The text found in parenthesis are explanations of rules and abilities, not abilities themselves.

Gil Polymer's Pliers is treated as a vanilla creature as it features nothing but reminder text on its card, featuring no other abilities.

• As of DMRP-08 The Showdown! Baraghiara!! Invincible OraOra Ringfinity ∞, multicolored creatures were considered to be creatures with an ability due to their text of [This creature is put into your mana zone tapped], but this has been moved to the Mana Number now.

Some keyword abilities omit the reminder text, but the rules attached to the Keyword ability don't change regardless of the presence or absence of the annotations. However, some of them don't have unified annotations, such as Crew Breaker, Dynamo, Launcher Energy and Chain. These abilities were later fixed and ruled to share each other's annotations.

Some annotations change the behavior of an ability whether or not sentence are an annotation. Happy-go-lucky Strike features reminder text in the middle of its ability that prevents you from using the cards shield trigger ability put into your hand. While reminder text could be added to a card such as Benzo, the Hidden Fury details that the card could be used, the card would also be able to be used with the absence of either reminder text.

• Annotations of keyword abilities are not always definitions of their keyword abilities. For example, Blocker is not the definition of the blocker ability, but a definition of how a creature can block.
• Due to reprints, many cards have added or removed reminder text from their reprinted cards.

Often cards at higher rarities have less reminder text on their keywords, both as a way to fit more text on the card, and also as they are seen as more advanced cards.