What fear does
A creature with fear cannot be blocked except by:
- Artifact creatures
- Creatures that are black
That is the complete rule. Fear is a blocking restriction and nothing else. It does not affect damage, targeting, or anything outside the declare blockers step.
Why it is unreliable
Fear has an unusually wide range of outcomes, and that variance is its defining problem.
Against a white and green deck with no artifacts, a creature with fear is fully unblockable. Every attack connects. It might as well read “this creature is unblockable”.
Against a black deck, fear does nothing at all. Every creature they control can block it, and you have paid for a keyword that is blank.
Against an artifact deck, same story. Colorless artifact creatures block it freely.
Compare that to trample or flying, which are worth something against almost every opponent and occasionally worth a lot. Fear is worth everything or nothing, decided entirely by an opponent’s color choice that you cannot influence.
For a limited environment or a known metagame you can evaluate that gamble. In an open format you are playing a coin flip printed on a card.
Why artifact creatures can block
This looks arbitrary and is not.
Colorless artifact creatures have no color at all. If fear only allowed black creatures to block, a mono-artifact deck playing colorless creatures would have literally no legal blocker against any creature with fear, in any game, ever.
That is not an interesting play pattern, it is a lockout. Allowing artifact creatures through is a deliberate release valve so that colorless strategies are not structurally helpless.
The same carve-out appears in intimidate for exactly the same reason.
The lineage: fear, intimidate, menace
Three keywords, one design problem, twenty years of iteration.
Fear (1994 to roughly 2010)
Black-only evasion. The restriction is hard-coded to the color black, which means the keyword can only sensibly be printed on black cards. A red creature with fear would be strange, since it would be blockable by black creatures for no thematic reason.
That color-locking is the first problem: it constrains the keyword to one fifth of the card pool.
Intimidate (roughly 2010 to 2013)
Intimidate generalised the rule: a creature with intimidate cannot be blocked except by artifact creatures and creatures that share a color with it.
Now the keyword works in every color. A red creature with intimidate is blockable by red creatures and artifacts. Same shape, universal application. Fear became a special case of intimidate where the color happened to be black, and Wizards updated the card pool accordingly.
This solved the color-locking problem and kept the variance problem entirely intact. Intimidate is just as swingy as fear.
Menace (2013 to now)
Menace took a different approach: a creature with menace cannot be blocked except by two or more creatures.
No colors involved. The restriction is numerical rather than conditional, which means:
- It is never completely blank, since it always costs the defender an extra blocker
- It is never a free unblockable, since two creatures always get through it
- It creates a real decision for the defender, who must decide whether double-blocking is worth the risk
- It is printable in any color without oddity
That combination is why menace stuck. It is the version of the idea with the smallest variance and the most interesting gameplay.
The three compared
| Fear | Intimidate | Menace | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blockable by | Artifact creatures and black creatures | Artifact creatures and creatures sharing its color | Any two or more creatures |
| Depends on opponent colors | Yes, heavily | Yes, heavily | No |
| Can be fully unblockable | Yes | Yes | No |
| Can be completely blank | Yes | Yes | No |
| Printable in all colors | No | Yes | Yes |
| Still printed | No | No | Yes |
| Rules reference | 702.36 | 702.13 | 702.110 |
Do the old cards still work?
Yes. Fear was never functionally errata’d into intimidate or menace. Cards printed with fear still have fear and still work exactly as written. The keyword remains defined in the Comprehensive Rules at 702.36 precisely so those cards continue to function.
Retiring a keyword means Wizards stops printing new cards with it. It does not mean existing cards change.
You will still encounter fear in Commander, in older cubes, and in any format with a deep card pool. Knowing the rule is not merely historical trivia.
How to play against fear
If you are the defender, your options are narrow but real:
- Black creatures block it. If you are in black at all, you have blockers.
- Artifact creatures block it. Any colorless artifact creature works, including tokens.
- Removal. The most common answer, since fear does nothing about being targeted.
- Chump blocking is off the table unless you have one of the above, so plan life totals accordingly.
If you are the attacker, evaluate before you commit: check your opponent’s colors and artifact count first. A creature with fear against a black opponent is a vanilla creature, and building around one is a mistake.