What do all the powers of a card do.

Mark70

I have played mpq almost from its inception. Some of the features of magic pq are lost to me. A long time mtg card player, I'm confused, what does activate do. And how is it utilize?

Unknown

Activate means that one or more tile get high lighted. If you click on the high lighted gem it will refer to the spell/support/player that activated it.

If the player who activated the tile destroys it by matching then the effect comes into play. If the opponent destroys it nothing happens.
Some activations have a cooldown, so the effect comes also into play if nobody destroys it in that time.
Some activations tell you on which color of tile they will activate.

Example: activate 3 black for effect x will highlight 3 black tiles and each time the player of this card destroys one of them he will get effect x.

Traps work quite similar but with traps the opponent can't see which tiles are activated. Also most traps (not all) have their effect, when the opponent matches them. And they refill themselfs.

The Bookman

This has a useful list of definitions

http://decktester.com/Cards/Glossary

Morphis

Also as an additional note if a player destroys the opponents highlighted gem that refers to the activation, that "charge" does not refresh in the next turn.

Let's say you have an activate 2 effect. 2 gems are glowing.

If you destroy one of those you get the benefit, the other is still there and at the start of your next turn another one will start glowing.

If you have 2 glowing, but your opponent destroys one, you have one left BUT your next turn it will not add another glowing. You will have to wait the turn after for it to respawn.
This makes matching opponent activate glowing gem a good tactical choice most of the time it it is related to powerful effects.