Mana ability

A mana ability is an activated ability that creates mana (including with lands like <c>Mountain</c> or other cards like <c>Birds of Paradise</c> and <c>Ur-Golem's Eye</c>), or a triggered ability that triggers off of mana creation and makes more mana itself (such as with <c>Overgrowth</c> or the last ability on <c>Gauntlet of Power</c>). However, abilities with targets or loyalty abilities never count as mana abilities.
==Description==
The five most common mana abilities are the intrinsic abilities of the basic lands and other lands with basic land types, which add one mana of a given color at the cost of tapping the land. Many other lands and ramp cards are printed with identical abilities. However, a wide variety of other kinds of mana abilities exist, such as those that create multiple mana, variable or conditional amounts of mana, flexible types of mana, or mana that has special properties or restrictions.
Mana abilities are among the few activated or triggered abilities that don't use the stack or require passing priority to resolve, so they cannot be responded to or targeted. This means that as soon as the ability is used, the mana is created. Furthermore, they are the only abilities that can be activated while paying costs rather than needing to be resolved beforehand, and without requiring priority. In practice, this simply means that a player can use mana abilities any time they please, usually while playing a spell or ability and paying the cost. Other effects of the mana ability, such as the damage that sometimes happens when using <c>Adarkar Wastes</c>, also occur immediately and can't be responded to. This can cause unusual situations such as a player "countering" a split second spell like with the passive ability of a permanent like or .
Spells that generate mana, such as <c>Seething Song</c>, use the stack normally and can be responded to and targeted. For a brief period from 1996 to 1997, the Mana source card type was used for such cards, behaving similarly to mana abilities, but this was quickly reworked, and those cards errataed to simple instants.
==Rules==
===Rulings===
*If a mana ability can't produce any mana, it's still legal to play the ability, but no mana will be produced on resolution.
*Playing a mana ability that happens to produce no mana still counts as playing that ability. Some abilities trigger when a land is tapped for mana, and they will trigger when a land is tapped for a mana ability even if that ability generates zero mana.
==References==