Last updated on May 21, 2024
Curse of Opulence | Illustration by Kieran Yanner
Cynics say the golden rule is: “Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.”
That would be Wizards of the Coast in our case; not sure how much gold they have, but they sure get to write all of Magic's rules. Including how Gold works in their game!
Let's grab our Gold Pan and spade for a bit of gold-digging and learn about how Gold works in MTG; there are very few cards that generate Gold tokens, but as we'll see, gold led to a very similar mechanic that’s everywhere.
How Do Gold Tokens Work?
Gild | Illustration by Richard Wright
A Gold token is a colorless artifact with an activated ability that states: “Sacrifice this artifact: Add one mana of any color.”
They work exactly like Treasure tokens, with two differences:
- Gold tokens don't need to be tapped to be sacrificed for mana.
- Gold tokens have the “gold” artifact subtype.
Gold tokens are one of Magic's predefined tokens; this illustrious family includes other staples like Food tokens, Blood tokens, Clue tokens, the Junk tokens introduced by Fallout, and of course Treasure tokens.
The History of Gold Tokens in MTG
Gold tokens were introduced in the Theros block back in 2014.
The first card that produced Gold tokens was Gild, released in Born of the Gods, the middle MTG set from that block. Back then, Gold wasn’t yet a predefined token, so the original wording was a mouthful: “Put a colorless artifact token named Gold onto the battlefield.”
WotC struck gold again with King Macar, the Gold-Cursed from Journey into Nyx, Curse of Opulence from Commander 2017, and lastly with The First Iroan Games from when Magic returned to the Theros plane with Theros Beyond Death in January 2020.
It was with The First Iroan Games that Gold was finally made into a predefined token, and the rules text on the cards shortened to just: “Create a Gold token.” The previous cards received errata to reflect this change.
To this day, the four cards above are the only ones in all of Magic to reference Gold tokens.
Gold Tokens vs. Treasures
Why only four cards that produce Gold? Probably because in 2017, the Ixalan pirates discovered a similar, but better artifact: Treasure!
Gold and Treasure produce the exact same effect; the main difference is that Gold doesn’t need to be tapped to be sacrificed. That's probably why WotC leaned towards Treasure: Gold allows you to “double-dip” in case some other effect requires you to tap permanents (because you can tap your Gold to pay for that other effect, and then still sacrifice the Gold for mana in the same turn).
The other subtle difference is their card subtype: even if Gold and Treasure have very similar effects, cards that specifically mention Treasure won't affect Gold. For example, Professional Face-Breaker requires you to sacrifice a Treasure to activate its second ability, so a Gold token won't do.
Is a Gold Token a Permanent?
Yes; all tokens are permanents.
Can Gold Tokens Create Colorless Mana?
Nope!
This one is a bit hard to parse, so here's the thing:
- There are five mana colors (namely ),
- There are six mana types (the five colors, plus colorless mana).
Colorless mana is a mana type, but it's not a mana color.
Effects that reference any type of mana, like Mana Flare for players that also have Unknown Shores, can produce colorless mana (in addition to any of the five colors).
But effects that let you choose any color of mana, as with Gold, Treasure, or a land like City of Brass, don't allow you to choose colorless.
In short: colorless is not a color!
Are Gold Tokens Sent to the Graveyard?
Yes, they are.
That's another of Magic's rules that can be a bit of a headache to grasp, so let's break it down:
- Tokens (of any type, Gold tokens included) can only exist on the battlefield.
- Whenever an effect moves them to any other game zone (be it bounced back to your hand, exiled, sacrificed and sent to your graveyard, being shuffled back into your library, etc.), they cease to exist – they basically vanish into thin air.
- But, here's the thing: They vanish right after they arrive at their destination.
This means that a token going from the battlefield to the graveyard fires off all the “leaves the battlefield” triggers, death triggers, and “enters the graveyard” triggers that apply to them. Then the token vanishes; but the triggers still go on the stack.
For example: If you sacrifice a Gold token with Aetherworks Marvel in play, the Marvel sees a permanent you control enter a graveyard and gives you an energy counter.
And if you sacrifice a Gold token with Marionette Master in play, the Master sees an artifact you control being tossed into the graveyard – therefore, you get to target an opponent with the Marionette Master’s life loss.
On the other hand, remember that although tokens are permanents, tokens are not cards (even if you may be using a WotC official token that you found inside a Play Booster). Effects that care about cards only care about cards in the sense of: “This thing was in your starting deck.” No matter how many Gold and Treasure token artifacts you sacrifice, they won't count towards transforming The Everflowing Well – the Well wants cards in your graveyard!
Can You Proliferate Gold Tokens?
If you mean it along the lines of “Does proliferate create more Gold?”, nope. Proliferate creates more counters; counters aren’t tokens, and tokens aren’t counters. You can choose to proliferate the counters on your Gold token if it has any for some weird reason, but that's a pretty uncommon situation.
There are some cards, with Doubling Season being a very prominent example, that can generate double the tokens and double the counters – but those are two different effects rolled into a single card.
Proliferate adds counters; it doesn't produce tokens of any kind.
Gallery and List of Gold Token Cards
There are only four Gold-creating cards in existence, so I guess we can be 100% certain that these are the best of the best in all of Magic!
In chronological order:
Wrap Up
King Macar, the Gold-Cursed | Illustration by Greg Staples
Gold seems to have been a very short-lived mechanic, but that's only because Magic's pirates found a slightly different, but much better alternative: Treasure. I doubt we'll ever see Gold again except for flavor reasons; but if you've played Magic for more than five minutes, you know that Treasure is as evergreen a mechanic as there ever was.
I hope you've enjoyed this mechanical deep dive, and if you have comments or questions, please post them below, or stop by the Draftsim Discord for a chat.
Good luck out there!
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