Hand

A player's hand consists of cards that have been drawn, but not played. It is one of six zones of the game. 
==Description==
Flavor-wise, the hand represents the conscious mind of the player as a planeswalker and the starting hand is the first seven items that occur to you when you begin a duel with another planeswalker. The starting hand may be reduced when a mulligan is performed. After the optional mulligan, it is called your opening hand.
==Rules==
==Mechanics interacting with hands==
===Hand size===
Mechanics which change your hand size.
===Putting cards from hand onto the battlefield===
Putting unspecified cards from hand onto the battlefield is an effect that is not used anymore, but it used to be primary green.
====Artifacts====
Putting artifacts from hand onto the battlefield is primary blue, as it is the "friendly to artifacts" color. White will do it when it involves Equipment.
====Creatures====
Putting creatures from hand onto the battlefield is primary green, secondary in blue and red, and tertiary in white and black. Green does this effect the most often. Blue will do it usually flavored as transformation, and will return one of its creatures to its owner's hand. When red does this the creature is most often sacrificed or returned to hand at end of turn. 
====Enchantments====
Putting enchantments from hand onto the battlefield is primary white, secondary green, and tertiary in blue. White and blue tend to do this tied to Auras, while green will put out any enchantment.
====Lands====
Putting lands from hand onto the battlefield is essentially only a green mechanic. Green used to do this all the time. It still does it, but not as often as it used to.
===Returning cards from graveyard to hand===
The ability to get back any card from the graveyard is primary done in green and usually appears at uncommon or higher in rarity.
====Artifacts====
Blue used to be the color that returned artifacts from the graveyard to the hand, but the ability is now in white.
====Creatures====
Black can return any creature from the graveyard. It will often do this as an enters the battlefield effect nicknamed after <c>Gravedigger</c>, as that was the card that did it first. White usually returns creatures with smaller converted mana costs.
====Enchantments====
Getting back enchantments is primary a white thing.
====Instant and sorceries====
As blue and red are the spell colors (they have the highest percentage of spells versus creatures), they are the two colors that can get instants and sorceries back (blue primary and red secondary). When there is a choice to separate them, blue leans toward getting back instants, and red leans toward getting back sorceries.
====Lands====
While green can get back any card, it often gets back lands.
===Looking at opponent's hand===
The ability to look at an opponent's hand is primary in blue and secondary in black. The latter does it only in conjunction with discarding where it has to choose what gets discarded. R&D has been scaling back on this effect, as it tends to slow down gameplay. This has had the effect of making the ability appear more in black than blue, as they still make the discard spells.
===Cards with a special ability in an opening hand===
===Mechanics active while in the hand===
===Cards with a special ability while in the hand===
==References==