With the release of Magic Origins (and the subsequent heavy use of several of the Planeswalker/Legendary cards from it!), we’ve seen a reintroduction of Checklist cards to the Standard format. Some players remember when they were first introduced with the Innistrad block, while some players have never seen them before, but either way it’s always good to go over some of the rules for these peculiar cards. Five cards in Magic Origins are “double faced”- instead of having a normal Magic card back, they have a Planeswalker version on the back, and a Legendary Creature version on the front. There are two ways to play the “Flipwalkers”- you can play with the cards themselves (so long as your deck is sleeved in opaque sleeves so you can’t tell them apart), or by using special “Checklist” cards. The checklists are mainly intended to be used if your sleeves aren’t opaque, or if you aren’t USING sleeves, so you can “play” the double-faced cards without them looking different!

To use a checklist is simple. You “check off” one of the five lines on the front of the card, to designate which of the Flipwalkers it stands for. Then, you just put it in your deck, and when you play your Jace or your Liliana, grab the “real” card from your deckbox so everyone can see what’s going on. You need to have as many real cards as you have checklists! If you want to run 4 checklists that say “Liliana, Heretical Healer”, then you need to have four copies of Liliana. You can’t just use one real card for multiple checklists. You also have to be consistent- either ALL of your flipwalkers are represented by checklists, or none of them are. You can’t have 2 Lilianas and 2 Liliana checklists with the real versions in your box- it’s 4 real ones, or 4 checklists. Finally, be sure to check your sleeves before an event! Even some of the ‘darker’ sleeves might not be fully opaque, and you don’t want to get a Game Loss for having marked cards. Grab one of your sleeved flipwalkers and a few other random sleeved cards, shuffle them up and lay them face-down on the table. If you can tell the flipwalker apart from the others, you either need checklists or new sleeves!

Today’s Tournament Tip was written by Trevor Nunez