Zones & Moving Cards Between Them

Every card is always in exactly one zone. There are seven:

• Library — your deck. Hidden and ordered.
• Hand — cards you're holding. Hidden.
• Battlefield — where permanents live once they resolve. Public and shared.
• Graveyard — your discard/destroyed pile. Public.
• Stack — where spells and abilities wait to resolve. Public and shared.
• Exile — cards set aside "out of the game." Usually public and shared.
• Command — for special objects like commanders and emblems.

Shared zones (battlefield, stack, exile, command) are used by all players at once; individual zones (library, hand, graveyard) belong to a single player. Hidden zones are the library and hand — opponents can't see their contents.

These are different and it matters constantly:

• The owner of a card is the player whose deck it started in.
• The controller is whoever currently controls it (which can change, e.g. via "gain control" effects).

Cards always return to their owner's zones. If you steal an opponent's creature and it dies, it goes to its owner's graveyard, not yours.

When a card moves to a new zone it becomes a brand-new object with no memory of its past (CR 400.7). Practically:

• Counters on it disappear.
• Auras and Equipment attached to it fall off.
• Continuous effects that were affecting it (e.g. "+2/+2 until end of turn") no longer apply.

A handful of effects deliberately track a card across zones, but the default is a clean slate.

A token can only exist on the battlefield. If it ever leaves — bounced, destroyed, exiled — it briefly changes zones and then ceases to exist the next time state-based actions are checked.

"Dies" is precise: it means a creature moved from the battlefield to the graveyard. A creature discarded from hand didn't "die." Exile is not the graveyard and is not "destruction," so indestructible does not stop a card from being exiled.