MTG Connive Explained: Rules, All 50 Cards, the Villain Comeback, and a $77 Raffine Deck (2026)

Connive is the mechanic that pays you for throwing a card away. Draw a card, discard a card, and if the card you discarded was not a land, the creature that connived gets a +1/+1 counter. It is looting with a bonus attached, and the bonus is the entire point: a connive deck wants to discard spells, which means it wants a graveyard that does something with them, which means connive is quietly one of the best enablers reanimator, madness and counters decks have been given since 2022.

There are 50 paper cards with the keyword as of 12 September 2026, and they arrived in two waves that are exactly the same size: 20 cards in 2022, when the Obscura crime family introduced it in Streets of New Capenna, and 20 cards in June 2026, when Marvel Super Heroes made it the mechanic of its Villains. This guide covers all of it: the rules and the six rulings that actually matter, how connive differs from loot, rummage and surveil, all 50 cards counted five different ways, the two precons built around it, what the whole mechanic costs, the six cards that reward you for conniving, and a 100-card Raffine, Scheming Seer Commander deck that comes in at $77. Every card fact was pulled from the live Scryfall database on 12 September 2026 and checked against the Comprehensive Rules effective 7 August 2026.

What connive actually does

The Comprehensive Rules define it in section 701.50. The core rule and the connive N variant are short enough to quote whole:

701.50a Certain spells and abilities instruct a permanent to connive. To do so, that permanent’s controller draws a card, then discards a card. If a nonland card is discarded this way, that player puts a +1/+1 counter on the conniving permanent.

701.50d Connive N is a variant of connive. To have a permanent connive N, the permanent’s controller draws N cards, discards N cards, then puts a number of +1/+1 counters on the permanent equal to the number of nonland cards discarded this way.

Comprehensive Rules, effective 7 August 2026

Three details in that text decide how the mechanic plays. The draw comes first. You see the new card before you choose what to discard, so a connive is never a blind loot — you always pick the worst card out of a hand that is one card bigger than it was. Only a nonland discard makes a counter. Discarding a land is still a legal choice and still a full connive for any “whenever a creature connives” trigger, but the creature stays the same size. And the rule says “permanent,” not “creature.” That wording exists because a conniving object is not always a creature at the moment it connives — a Vehicle after combat, for instance — and the counter goes on whatever the permanent is.

The reminder text on the cards compresses all of that into one line. Ledger Shredder, the most-played connive card in the game, reads:

Flying
Whenever a player casts their second spell each turn, this creature connives. (Draw a card, then discard a card. If you discarded a nonland card, put a +1/+1 counter on this creature.)

Ledger Shredder, oracle text via Scryfall

Connive is loot, then a counter — and the counter is why it exists

Strip the last sentence off the reminder text and you have looting, one of the oldest effects in Magic. By exact oracle wording, 140 paper cards say “draw a card, then discard a card” without conniving, and another 16 rummage — discard first, then draw. Connive is the keyworded, upgraded version: the same card selection with a body attached to it. That is why every connive card is a permanent or a spell that targets one; there is no such thing as a connive sorcery that connives on its own, because there would be nothing to put the counter on.

Multiple creatures connive one at a time, in your order

701.50c If multiple permanents are instructed to connive at the same time, the first player in APNAP order who controls (or, in the case of a permanent no longer on the battlefield, last controlled; see rule 701.50b) one or more of those permanents chooses one of them and it connives. Then this process is repeated for each remaining instruction to connive.

Comprehensive Rules, effective 7 August 2026

Two cards make this rule matter. Lethal Scheme connives every creature you tapped to convoke it, and Change of Plans connives X creatures at instant speed. In both cases you resolve one connive completely — draw, discard, counter — before starting the next, and you choose the order. The official ruling on both cards says so directly: “they connive one at a time in the order of their controller’s choice.” Because each draw happens before the next discard, four creatures conniving off one Lethal Scheme is not “draw four, discard four” — it is four separate decisions, each made with more information than the last.

A creature that has left the battlefield still connives

701.50b If a permanent is no longer on the battlefield as an effect instructs it to connive, its last known information is used to determine which object connived and who controlled it.

Comprehensive Rules, effective 7 August 2026

This is the ruling that surprises people. If an opponent kills your Obscura Interceptor in response to its enters trigger, the Interceptor still connives: you still draw, you still discard, and because the card says “when it connives this way, return up to one target spell to its owner’s hand,” the bounce still happens. The only thing you lose is the +1/+1 counter, which has nothing to sit on. The rulings on Interceptor and Psychic Pickpocket both spell this out, and Pickpocket’s adds that the target for the bounce is chosen after the connive, so you get to see your new card before you decide what to send back.

No responses in the middle, and no counter for an empty connive

Two more rulings printed on nearly every connive card since 2022. First: once a connive starts resolving, “no player may take any other actions until it’s done” — an opponent cannot wait until you have discarded a nonland card and then kill the creature before it receives the counter. Second: if no card is discarded, most likely because your hand is empty and something stops you from drawing, no counter is placed. And per rule 701.50e, connive 0 is nothing at all: no draw, no discard, and no trigger for any “whenever a creature connives” payoff. That last rule bites Spymaster’s Vault on a turn where nothing died, and Raffine, Scheming Seer never, because Raffine only triggers when you attack and an attack with zero creatures is not an attack.

Connive vs loot vs rummage vs surveil

Five actions in Magic look at cards and put some of them in the graveyard. They are not interchangeable, and the difference is where the card you reject goes and whether you get anything for it.

The practical rule of thumb: surveil and scry protect your draws, loot and connive change your hand, and only connive leaves a creature bigger than it found it. If your deck wants a specific card in the graveyard — a reanimation target, a flashback spell, a madness card — surveil gets it there without costing you a card in hand, while connive costs a card in hand and pays you a counter for it. We have full guides to the 235 surveil cards and the 443 scry cards; the rest of this one is about the 50 with connive.

All 50 connive cards, counted

For once, the counting is clean. Scryfall’s keyword filter, its full-text search and its oracle-text search all return the same 50 cards, which is the first time in this series of mechanic guides that all three have agreed — surveil, overload and devotion each disagreed with themselves by somewhere between two and thirty thousand cards. Connive has no reminder-text-only cards, no old cards retrofitted with the keyword, and no card that carries the word in its name without having the ability. It does have two cards tagged with the keyword that never connive: Glorious Purpose and Iron Monger, Sadistic Tycoon only reward you when something else does. Scryfall lists “Connive” in their keyword array anyway.

Who actually connives

The 14 cards in the middle row are where the mechanic’s design space lives. Nine of them are creatures or lands that hand the connive to another creature — Leader, Super-Genius, Namor, Scourge of the Seas, Spymaster’s Vault, Villainous Hideout — and five are instants and sorceries. That split matters for deckbuilding: a “self” connive creature is a self-contained value engine, while a “target” connive card wants you to already have the creature worth growing.

How the 50 cards connive

Enters-the-battlefield and attack triggers cover 23 of the 50, which tells you what the mechanic is for at common and uncommon: a small creature that replaces itself the moment it lands or swings. The interesting shapes are the rare ones. Ledger Shredder connives off any player’s second spell in a turn, which is why it was a format staple in Pioneer and Modern — opponents feed it. Illuminator Virtuoso connives whenever it becomes the target of your own spell, turning every Aura and pump spell into a loot. Body Launderer connives whenever another nontoken creature of yours dies, and then reanimates one of them when it dies itself. And M.O.D.O.K. connives for three life, as often as you like during your turn, with no mana involved at all.

Only three cards connive X

The other 47 cards all connive exactly once per trigger. That makes Raffine, Scheming Seer the only commander in the game that scales connive with board size: attack with five creatures and one of them draws five, discards five, and can pick up five counters. Mask of the Schemer is the same idea on an Equipment, keyed to combat damage instead of attackers, and Spymaster’s Vault is a land that connives X after a board wipe — the only one of the three that works on an opponent’s turn, since you can activate it in response to their sweeper as long as the creatures have already died.

Every connive card, in order of release

All 50, oldest first, with how each one connives and its cheapest ordinary printing. The “how” column uses the same categories as the table above.

From the Obscura to the Villains: connive set by set

Connive was designed as the mechanic of the Obscura, the Esper-coloured crime family of Streets of New Capenna, and for two years it looked like a one-set keyword with a handful of stragglers. Then Marvel happened.

The two big years are identical: 20 cards in 2022, 20 cards in 2026. New Capenna’s 19 (14 in the main set, 5 in the Obscura Operation precon) plus Transformers’ Cyclonus on the one side; Marvel Super Heroes’ 11 plus its Commander set’s 9 on the other. Add Spider-Man’s 7 from September 2025 and 28 of the 50 connive cards are Marvel cards. The mechanic has changed factions without changing colours: the Obscura were Esper, the Villains are blue and black with a red splash, and the keyword has never been printed on a green card.

Rogues in 2022, Villains in 2026

The creature types tell the same story. Nine of New Capenna’s 14 connive creatures are Rogues — Toluz, Kamiz, Body Launderer, the Octopus Rogues — and the rest are an Advisor, two Wizards, an Assassin and one Sphinx Demon. In the Marvel sets, 22 of the 28 connive cards carry the Villain creature type, and nine of them reference Villains in their rules text: Baron Strucker makes Villain spells cheaper and lets each new Villain connive, Prowler connives whenever another Villain enters, Iron Monger puts a counter on every Villain each time anything connives. Villain has been a black-bordered creature type only since Spider-Man in September 2025 (Unstable printed five silver-bordered ones in 2017), which means the tribe and the mechanic grew up together: connive is, in practice, the Villain mechanic in the way that surveil is the Dimir one.

The pronoun shift

One small thing changed in the templating between the two waves. Every New Capenna connive creature refers to itself as “it” or “this creature.” The Marvel cards are the first to say “he connives” and “she connives.”

Kang, Ultron, Tiger Shark and Norman Osborn are “he”; Madame Masque is “she.” It has no rules weight whatsoever — a pronoun in oracle text refers to the object the same way “it” does — but it is the kind of detail a judge gets asked about, and the answer is that the card works identically either way.

Connive by colour: 48 of 50 fit one commander

Blue and black own the mechanic outright. 31 of the 50 cards have blue in their identity, 28 have black, 7 have white, 2 have red, and none have green. The consequence for Commander is unusual: an Esper commander can legally run 48 of the 50, missing only the two Grixis cards, Doctor Doom, King of Latveria and Norman Osborn. A Dimir commander gets 41; a Grixis one gets 43 but loses the seven cards with white in their identity, Raffine included. If you want every connive card in one deck, the commander is Raffine and the cost of the 48 is $47.49 on their cheapest ordinary printings.

Connive legality by format

Three things stand out. All 18 Standard-legal connive cards are Marvel cards — every New Capenna card rotated out in 2024, so the only connive you will face in Standard today is Marvel connive. Pauper’s 13 is exactly the number of commons, with no printing-rarity surprises in either direction. And nothing is banned anywhere: not one of the 50 is on a ban list in any format — the only status short of “legal” across all fifty is Raffine’s “restricted” entry in Duel Commander, the format’s term for a card that cannot be your commander — which for a mechanic that includes a Ledger Shredder is a mild surprise.

What the whole mechanic costs

All 50 cards, on the cheapest ordinary printing of each (promos and Secret Lair printings excluded from the basis, but shown beside it), come to $71.67. That is cheap for a keyword: the 235 surveil cards cost $305, and 28 of those were lands.

The distribution is lopsided in the usual way. Three cards are 59.5% of the total: Norman Osborn at $18.96, the Obscura Operation instant Change of Plans at $13.89, and Ledger Shredder at $9.80. Forty of the fifty are under a dollar, and together those forty cost $10.23. Only two cards diverge between the cheapest-ordinary and cheapest-any basis, both by a few cents on a New Capenna promo, so unlike modular or surveil there is no masterpiece printing here quietly undercutting the ordinary one.

The most-reprinted connive card is not a connive-deck card at all. Lethal Scheme has 13 paper printings across seven products — New Capenna Commander, Lost Caverns of Ixalan Commander, Fallout, Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander, Final Fantasy Commander, Marvel Super Heroes Commander and a Secret Lair — because it is a four-mana instant that destroys a creature or planeswalker and Wizards puts it in every black precon. Raffine has 8 printings, Ledger Shredder 5.

The six cards that reward you for conniving

A payoff here means a card that does something extra when a connive happens — not a card that merely connives on a trigger. Read strictly, there are six.

Four of the six are from 2026, and three of those four came in the same Marvel Commander deck. Glorious Purpose is the one worth reading twice: every connive adds a second +1/+1 counter, so with it out a nonland discard is worth two counters, and the sixth connive lets you cast any number of spells from your top four cards for free. Leader, Super-Genius is a replacement effect rather than a trigger — every connive you control becomes “draw two, discard one,” which turns Raffine’s connive X into draw X+1, discard X, and an ordinary connive into a card of pure advantage. Ultron, Unlimited converts a mana into a 2/2 Villain per connive, and with Raffine each connive X is one trigger, not X triggers, so budget accordingly.

The best connive cards, ranked

Ranked by EDHREC inclusion rank across all Commander decks, which is the closest thing to a play-rate measurement that exists for the format.

Ledger Shredder is the only connive card inside EDHREC’s top 1,000 and it sits there for the same reason it dominated 60-card formats: in a four-player game, “a player casts their second spell” happens on nearly every turn cycle, and a two-mana 1/3 flyer that connives four times a round is a card-quality engine no other two-drop matches. Spymaster’s Vault and Lethal Scheme are the other two in the top 1,300 because they are good cards that happen to connive, not connive cards that happen to be good — a black land that untaps as a Swamp-checkland and a four-mana removal spell go in decks that will never build around the mechanic.

The best Commander deck for connive: Raffine, Scheming Seer

Raffine, Scheming Seer — {W}{U}{B}, 1/4 flying, ward {1}, “whenever you attack, target attacking creature connives X, where X is the number of attacking creatures” — is the connive commander for three reasons. She is the only card that scales the mechanic with the board; she is three mana, so she is conniving on turn four; and Esper is the one identity that can run 48 of the 50 connive cards. This list runs 24 of them, and puts the rest of the deck to work on the discards.

The plan is simple. Go wide with cheap evasive creatures and token makers — Lingering Souls, Spectral Procession, Battle Screech, Dreadhorde Invasion — so that every attack is a connive 4 or 5. Discard the fat: Sun Titan, Grave Titan, Rune-Scarred Demon and Noxious Gearhulk are in the deck to be pitched, then returned by reanimation — Animate Dead, Persist, Unburial Rites, Dread Return or Zombify. Then get paid twice for every discard: Drake Haven makes a 2/2 flyer per discard for one mana, Archfiend of Ifnir shrinks every opposing creature per discard, Containment Construct lets you play the discarded nonland card the same turn, Syr Konrad, the Grim pings the table whenever a creature card hits your graveyard, and Tortured Existence turns any discarded creature into a recursion engine. The counters Raffine leaves behind are then weaponised by Herald of Secret Streams (creatures with counters can’t be blocked), Abzan Falconer (they fly) and Ainok Bond-Kin (they get first strike).

Interaction is seven pieces — Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, Counterspell, Go for the Throat, Anguished Unmaking, Vanishing Verse and a Supreme Verdict the reanimation package can rebuild from — and the mana is 36 lands plus the three Talismans, Sol Ring and Arcane Signet. The 86 non-basic cards total $77.48 on their cheapest ordinary printings. The single most expensive card is Ledger Shredder at $9.80; nothing else is over $6.50, and 63 of the 86 are under a dollar.

Three notes on the list. Raffine’s Tower, the Esper tri-land with cycling, is the flavour pick and was cut because its cheapest printing is $12.49 for a land that enters tapped; a Plains does the job. Change of Plans ($13.89) is the first upgrade — connive X creatures at instant speed and phase them out of a board wipe is exactly what this deck wants, and it is the one Obscura Operation card that is not in the list. And if you would rather start from a precon, both connive decks are on our precon pages: the Esper Obscura Operation deck from 2022 carries five connive cards under Kamiz, Obscura Oculus, and the Grixis Doom Prevails deck from June 2026 carries nine under Doctor Doom, including three of the six payoffs. You can also browse public Esper and Dimir decks on KrakenTheMeta to see how other players have built around Raffine, and check any of these cards’ live prices with the card pricing tool.

Connive FAQ

Do you draw first or discard first when you connive?

Draw first. Rule 701.50a is “draws a card, then discards a card,” so you always choose the discard from a hand that includes the new card.

Does discarding a land give the creature a counter?

No. Only a nonland discard puts a +1/+1 counter on the conniving permanent. Discarding a land is still a complete connive, so “whenever a creature you control connives” abilities still trigger.

What is connive X?

Draw X, discard X, then put a +1/+1 counter on the permanent for each nonland card discarded. Only three cards do it: Raffine, Scheming Seer (X = attacking creatures), Mask of the Schemer (X = combat damage dealt) and Spymaster’s Vault (X = creatures that died this turn). Connive 0 does nothing and triggers nothing.

If my creature dies in response, does it still connive?

Yes. Rule 701.50b uses last known information: you still draw and discard, any “when it connives this way” ability still resolves, and only the +1/+1 counter is lost because there is nothing to put it on. Obscura Interceptor still bounces the spell; Psychic Pickpocket still bounces the permanent.

Can an opponent respond in the middle of a connive?

No. Once a connive begins resolving no player may take actions until it is complete, so an opponent cannot kill the creature between your discard and the counter.

How does connive differ from surveil?

Surveil looks at the top of your library and puts cards into the graveyard without drawing; connive draws a card into your hand and discards one from it. Surveil never changes your hand size or gives a counter; connive does both. See the full surveil guide for the other side.

Is connive the same as looting?

Mechanically it is looting plus a conditional +1/+1 counter. The 140 paper cards that say “draw a card, then discard a card” without the keyword are loot effects; the 50 that connive are the keyworded version with the bonus.

How many connive cards are there?

50 paper cards as of 12 September 2026: 14 from Streets of New Capenna, 5 from New Capenna Commander, 1 from Transformers, 3 from Modern Horizons 3, 7 from Spider-Man, 11 from Marvel Super Heroes and 9 from Marvel Super Heroes Commander.

Is connive in Standard?

Eighteen connive cards are Standard-legal, all of them from the Marvel sets. Every New Capenna connive card has rotated.

What colours is connive in?

Blue and black, primarily — 31 of 50 have blue in their identity and 28 have black. Seven are white or Esper, two are Grixis, and connive has never appeared on a green card.

Who is the best connive commander?

Raffine, Scheming Seer, because she is the only card that scales connive with the number of attackers and Esper can run 48 of the 50 connive cards. Doctor Doom, King of Latveria is the Grixis alternative and the face of the Doom Prevails precon.

Does connive trigger madness?

Yes. The discard is a real discard, so a card with madness can be cast for its madness cost when you discard it to a connive. It is one of the cleaner madness outlets printed since Shadows over Innistrad.

Does a connive counter count for proliferate?

Yes. It is an ordinary +1/+1 counter with no special status; anything that proliferates, doubles or moves counters treats it like any other.

Where connive sits in 2026

Connive spent two years as a New Capenna curiosity with one genuinely great card in it, and then a licensed set turned it into the identity of an entire faction. The 2026 wave more than doubled the mechanic’s Commander-relevant payoffs, gave it a precon, kept it in Standard after Spider-Man brought it back in 2025, and did all of it without a single card that costs more than a Marvel mythic on release week. The rules have not changed since Streets of New Capenna — draw, discard, counter if it was a spell — and the two precons on the shelf both build on exactly the same three-step loop. If you have never built around it, the entry point is a $2 sphinx demon, a stack of cheap flyers, and a graveyard full of things you meant to discard.