Activated Abilities in Magic: The Gathering

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Mike Lopez with Expert Village. Today we're going to be discussing Magic: the Gathering the card game. And now we're going to go over activated abilities. Activated abilities are abilities that occur after you pay mana or tap a creature to activate those abilities. It will say directly on the card. We have the Icatain Priest. He's a creature, but his ability is pay 1 colorless and 2 plains and target creature, of your choice, once again, gets 1/ 1 until end of turn. There is no limit to this because it does not say so. So, as long as you have enough mana you can continually use this ability. Over here we have a Crafty Pathmage. Her activated ability, is a tap. When you tap this, Target creature with power 2 or less is unblockable this turn. But you can only use this once because you can only tap her once and untap her during your upkeep. Down here we have Wall of Fire. It's the best wall ever made. This is an offensive technique, but it's ability is pay one mountain: Wall of Fire gets 1/ 0 until end of turn. Which means you can pay as many mountains as you want or you have available and bump this walls attack to as many points as you need to destroy the attacker. Very useful. And these are all activated abilities."