Almost every rules argument at a kitchen table comes down to the same four words: first strike, double strike, deathtouch and trample. They look like simple bonuses printed on a card. They are not bonuses. Each one is an edit to a specific part of how combat damage gets dealt — and once you know which part each one edits, every confusing interaction between them answers itself.

That is the thing almost no guide says out loud. Search any of these keywords and you get a Reddit thread, a fan wiki stub, a Facebook group answer and a database page. What you don’t get is the order of operations. So here it is: the four damage keywords, what each one actually changes, and then the interactions — deathtouch plus trample, first strike plus deathtouch, double strike plus trample, and what beats all of them.

Every card below was checked against the live Scryfall card database at the time of writing: oracle text, mana cost, Commander legality and price. Prices are the cheapest normal printing and move around, so treat them as a guide rather than a quote.

The one idea that makes all four keywords obvious

Combat in Magic is a sequence, not a moment. It runs in this order:

1. Beginning of combat — last chance to act before attackers are locked in.
2. Declare attackers — you choose who attacks. Attacking normally taps the creature.
3. Declare blockers — the defending player chooses who blocks whom.
4. First-strike combat damage step — this step only exists if something in combat has first strike or double strike.
5. Regular combat damage step — everything else deals its damage.
6. End of combat.

Now place the keywords on that sequence:

Read that table once and the famous arguments dissolve. Deathtouch and trample interact because they both touch the same step from different angles — one redefines how much damage is “lethal,” the other decides where the leftovers go. First strike and deathtouch interact because first strike moves your lethal damage into a step your opponent isn’t in yet.

First strike: you are not stronger, you are earlier

A creature with first strike deals its combat damage in an extra damage step before creatures without first strike. If the blocker dies in that step, the blocker never deals damage at all — it’s gone before the regular damage step arrives.

That is the whole of it, and it has three consequences worth internalising:

• First strike is best on small, efficient bodies. A 2/1 first striker beats a 2/2 blocker one-for-nothing. A 7/7 first striker beats the same blocker it would have beaten anyway.
• First strike vs first strike is just normal combat. If the attacker and the blocker both have it, they both deal damage in step 4 and both may die. Nobody gets to strike “more first.”
• Blockers get it too. Nothing about first strike is offence-only. A first-striking blocker eats attackers for free, which is why the ability shows up on defensive walls.

Double strike: two damage steps, not double damage

Double strike is often described as “deals damage twice.” That is true, but the precise wording matters: a creature with double strike deals its damage in both the first-strike step and the regular step. Two separate events, not one doubled number.

Why the distinction is worth money:

• Every “deals combat damage” trigger fires twice. A creature that draws you a card or makes a Treasure when it connects does it twice per attack.
• Pump spells cast between the steps get counted twice. Give a double striker +3/+0 after its first hit and the second hit is bigger.
• Anything that already killed the blocker makes the second hit free. This is the interaction that turns double strike from good into unfair — see the matrix below.

Deathtouch: any damage is lethal damage

Deathtouch is a static ability that changes what counts as lethal: any nonzero amount of damage dealt by a source with deathtouch is treated as lethal damage to a creature. One damage kills a 12/12. That’s it — but three details follow that most players miss.

It is not a combat-only ability. Deathtouch applies to any damage from that source, not just combat damage. Put Basilisk Collar on a creature that pings for 1 and you have converted a repeatable 1 damage into repeatable “destroy target creature.” That single interaction is why the Collar costs more than the {1} on its face suggests.

It is a defensive ability first. A 1/1 with deathtouch stops any ground attacker in the game. Players build deathtouch decks to attack; deathtouch mostly earns its keep by making attacks into you a bad idea.

It has a hard counter, and it isn’t removal. See the interactions section — indestructible turns deathtouch off completely.

Trample: the leftovers go somewhere useful

Without trample, a blocked creature’s damage is spent on its blockers, and anything beyond what was needed is simply wasted. Trample changes the destination of the excess: a creature with trample can assign damage beyond lethal to the player or planeswalker it is attacking.

Two things follow, and one of them is the most common misconception about the keyword.

Trample does nothing on an unblocked creature. An unblocked attacker already hits the player for its full power. Trample is only ever relevant against blockers. If nobody is blocking, the Rancor on your creature is just +2/+0.

Trample turns chump blocking from a solution into a delay. A 9/9 trampler attacked into a 1/1 token deals 1 to the token and 8 to the player. This is the reason big-creature decks in Commander live and die on whether their threats have trample — a 10/10 without it is answered by a single 1/1 for the rest of the game.

The interactions — this is the section people actually search for

Here is every combination that comes up in real games, with the answer and the reason.

Two of those deserve to be spelled out, because they are the ones that cost people games.

Indestructible is the answer to deathtouch, and it is a permanent one. Deathtouch does not say “destroy” — it says the damage counts as lethal. Destruction is the step that follows, and indestructible skips it. So a deathtouch creature blocking Avacyn, Angel of Hope ({5}{W}{W}{W}, $29.43) or anything carrying Darksteel Plate ({3}, $6.82) achieves nothing at all. If you are playing against a deathtouch deck, a single Plate is worth more than any removal spell in your deck.

Damage prevention also beats deathtouch — and one card beats the prevention. Iroas, God of Victory ({2}{R}{W}, $12.91) prevents all damage that would be dealt to your attacking creatures, which means your attackers simply cannot die in combat, deathtouch or not. Fog ({G}, $2.85) does the same for one turn on a whole board, and Maze of Ith (a land, $10.07) untaps an attacker and prevents all damage it would deal and be dealt. The counter-counter is Questing Beast, whose oracle text reads “Combat damage that would be dealt by creatures you control can’t be prevented” — a four-mana green creature that turns off every Fog in the format.

The other three combat keywords: menace, vigilance and haste

These three don’t touch the damage steps, so they belong in a different mental bucket — but they are the keywords most often confused with the four above, and each one has a trap.

Menace means the creature can’t be blocked except by two or more creatures. It is not evasion in the way flying is. Against an opponent with two untapped bodies, menace does nothing except guarantee your creature gets hit by both of them — which is how a menace attacker dies to blockers it would have survived one-on-one. Menace is at its best on something big, or on something with trample, or on a board where opponents are tapped out. Menace lives in the declare-blockers step rather than the damage step, which is why it behaves so differently from everything else on this page — we cover it, along with vigilance, haste, reach and defender, in how attacking and blocking actually work.

Vigilance means attacking doesn’t cause the creature to tap. Read that carefully, because the near-universal beginner error is assuming vigilance lets a tapped creature attack. It does not. If you tapped your creature for mana, or used its tap ability, it cannot attack that turn no matter how much vigilance it has. Vigilance only prevents the tap that attacking would otherwise cause.

Haste means the creature can attack and use its {T} abilities the turn it comes under your control. The second half is the half people forget — haste is what makes a mana creature produce mana immediately, and what makes a “tap: draw a card” creature work on turn one of its life. In Commander, where the best creatures are expensive and removal is everywhere, haste is frequently the difference between a threat that does something and a threat that dies before untapping.

The keyword-sharing cards, and an honest catch about them

Two cards exist specifically to spread keywords across your board, and they are a genuine deck archetype in Commander: load one creature with abilities, then hand them to everyone.

Odric, Lunarch Marshal ({3}{W}, $1.04) shares, per his oracle text, first strike, flying, deathtouch, double strike, haste, hexproof, indestructible, lifelink, menace, reach, skulk, trample and vigilance. Concerted Effort ({2}{W}{W}, $5.45) shares flying, fear, first strike, double strike, landwalk, protection, trample and vigilance.

Here is the catch, and it is the kind of thing that decides a game: those two lists are not the same list. Odric shares deathtouch, menace, haste, hexproof, indestructible and lifelink — Concerted Effort shares none of those. Concerted Effort shares protection — Odric does not. And neither of them shares ward, because ward is a triggered ability rather than a static one, which is exactly the distinction we covered in our guide to hexproof, shroud, ward and protection. If you build a keyword-soup deck around the wrong one of these two cards for the keywords you actually have, the enchantment does nothing.

The blunt-instrument alternative is Akroma’s Memorial ({7}, $32.98), which simply gives your creatures flying, first strike, vigilance, trample, haste and protection from black and from red with no conditions at all. Seven mana, but it needs no setup and no matching creature.

What beats a combat-keyword deck

Building around combat keywords means building a board that has to connect. That has clear, cheap answers, and knowing them is half of playing against them.

If you want the wider version of this list, our guides to the best board wipes in MTG and the best removal spells cover the whole interaction suite.

Putting it in a deck: how many keyword cards do you need?

The failure mode of a combat-keyword deck is the same one that kills every “good cards” pile: all enablers, no bodies. Keywords are multipliers, and a multiplier applied to nothing is nothing.

For a 100-card Commander deck built around combat damage, a working ratio looks like this:

• 8–12 threats worth buffing — creatures with real power, or creatures with “deals combat damage” triggers that reward connecting twice.
• 6–10 keyword granters, weighted toward the permanent, team-wide ones (Garruk’s Uprising, Fervor, Serra’s Blessing) over one-shot spells.
• 2–3 extra-combat effects — Aggravated Assault ({2}{R}, $35.32) is the classic; an extra combat doubles every keyword you already paid for.
• 8–10 pieces of interaction, because a board that has to connect loses to a board wipe, and you need to be able to remove the blocker that is holding up your whole plan.
• 36 lands, non-negotiable in Commander. See our step-by-step Commander deck guide for the full curve.

Trample is the one keyword to over-index on. Every other keyword makes your creature better in a fight; trample makes the fight stop mattering. If you are picking one granter and one Equipment, pick the two that give trample.

Here is the shortlist as a shopping list. It is a menu across five colours, not a deck — pick the six or eight that match your commander’s colours.

If you’d rather have the ratios worked out for you, our AI deck builder takes a commander and a budget and returns a full 100-card list with the mana base already balanced — and you can browse what other players have built on the public decks page or check current prices for any of the cards above on our card pricing tool. For the cards that belong in almost any list regardless of archetype, see our Commander staples guide, and for the Equipment side of this plan specifically, our best Equipment in MTG guide goes much deeper on Voltron.

Frequently asked questions

Does deathtouch work with trample?

Yes, and the combination is one of the strongest in Magic. Because deathtouch makes any nonzero damage lethal, you only have to assign 1 damage to each blocking creature, and trample lets all the remaining damage hit the defending player. A 10/10 with deathtouch and trample blocked by two creatures deals 1 to each and 8 to the player.

What is the difference between first strike and double strike?

First strike deals damage only in the first-strike damage step. Double strike deals damage in the first-strike step and again in the regular step. Double strike includes everything first strike does, so putting both on the same creature adds nothing.

Does deathtouch kill an indestructible creature?

No. Deathtouch only makes the damage count as lethal damage; destroying the creature is a separate step, and indestructible creatures can’t be destroyed by lethal damage. Deathtouch is completely blank against indestructible. Use a -X/-X effect, exile, or a sacrifice effect instead.

Can a tapped creature attack if it has vigilance?

No. Vigilance only means that attacking doesn’t cause the creature to tap. A creature that is already tapped — because you tapped it for mana or used an ability — still cannot be declared as an attacker.

Is trample useful if my creature isn’t blocked?

No. An unblocked creature already deals all of its combat damage to the player. Trample only matters against blockers, which is also why it’s the single best keyword to have on a large creature in a multiplayer game full of small chump blockers.

Do “deals combat damage” triggers fire twice with double strike?

Yes. Double strike creates two separate damage events, so any trigger that reads “whenever this creature deals combat damage” fires once per step. This is why Equipment that copies itself or draws cards on connection scales so hard with double strike.

Can a first striker be killed before it deals damage?

Yes — by anything that happens before the first-strike damage step. Instant-speed removal in the declare-blockers step, a damage-prevention effect, or a Fog all get there first. First strike beats other creatures, not the rest of the game.