Got Wood?

I just realized that I haven't included a green card in this blog yet. That needs to change.

Of Gods and Not Winning

How often do you go out of your way to not win the game? My guess would be not very.

Don't Take a Chance On Me

I get to talk about the card chosen by the contest's 3rd placer today. It even covers a new aspect of gameplay that I haven't talked about yet!

Contest Results!

Finally, the long-awaited contest results! Continue on, dear reader, and be amazed!

Laziness!

Last week there was no post because the holidays dragged me out to do something inconsequential like see my family or something.

This week is going to be a late post because I forgot what day it was today. I'll post the contest results this weekend.

Commence with the throwing of painful objects.

Scramble Your Eggs

Skyrim is going to make me lazy today. Apologies in advance.

It's Contest Time

Yes, it's finally time. Today I'm going to talk about the contest I mentioned a while back!

Pentafail

I guess I get to pick on Legends some more.

What's your favorite keyword? It's probably either something that does something interesting, or is overpowered somehow. If you're one of the four guys who said "banding", congratulations! Today's post will probably offend you somewhat. Or perhaps not, if you're into that sort of thing. I don't judge.

It Won't Guide You Home

Oh, Legends. You gave us so many laughs. Despite the good things (and somewhat overpowered, to boot) that might have come out of you, you still housed probably the largest percentage of useless cards. Sets like Homelands and Fallen Empires were on a different power curve entirely, but you at least didn't want to kill yourself for playing with most of the cards in the set. Sure, they were bad. But not... this bad:

Evolution Not Complete

Isn't it funny how the most useless cards are in certain colors? Even just looking back on the archives for this blog, you can see that most of them are artifacts, blue, or red. That's not to say that other colors don't have bad cards. Quite the contrary. However, the highest concentration of them is in red and blue mostly because, when we get to the lower end of things, spells tend to be worse than creatures and those are the "spell colors." I mean, Wood Elemental is pretty God-awful and I wouldn't recommend anyone actually played it, but it still bashes for like 2 damage, which is more than some previously reviewed cards can say.

What does this have to do with today's card, you ask? Well, it's because it's a red one. Go figure.

Lamer Than it Looks (And That's Saying Something)

Okay, so what do you think of when you think of extraplanar beings dueling in the outermost reaches of the multiverse? A massively busty sorceress standing on top of a teetering precipice wielding a powerful artifact that turns night into day and blood into fire while storms rage in the background and her opponent mounts his army of dinosaurs bristling with laser cannons and nukes and the earth trembles from their combined might? Yeah, that's pretty kickass. But did you think of something else? How about making someone trivially more defensible? Isn't that kickass? Isn't it?

The Mongolians Would Crap Themselves in Joy

People have pretty much figured out which cards are bad and which ones aren't by now. You can do a pretty easy search on Google to find "top 50 worst Magic cards ever" or "top 10 best mustaches on Magic cards". Today's card is one that regularly tops the list, and for once isn't even a blue or red card! Are you ready to find out? Here... we... GO!

Bustin' Out

Who remembers Onslaught? I sure do. It was back in the heyday when I had a crappy 90-card almost-singleton Elf deck monstrosity to bring to play against my friends during lunchtime at school. It was also the origin of one of my favorite mechanics: Morph. Having cards with concealed information is one of my favorite things to play with in Magic, whether it be simply because they're in your hand, hidden from Hideaway, or on the front side of a Morph creature. Today's card attempts to make that hidden information public. It also fails hardcore.

The Zephyr Card

I have a question to ask all of you out there. Have you ever cast a Wall and thought to yourself "Oh man, I wish this had a crippling drawback in addition to not doing anything proactive!". Well, my friend, you should look no further than Ravnica block to deliver!

Kumano (Don't) Bless Us, Everyone!

Okay, so I have a confession. I have a stack of like 40 copies of today's card sitting around in a box somewhere. They're from the prerelease for the set that I attended. They're in that box along with several foam shuriken that were given out as promotional material. Yeah, we're going to Betrayers of Kamigawa today.

The Trail of Tears

Lands are kind of a tricky proposition to be horrible. I mean, there are things like Tarnished Citadel that are bad but still fulfill a purpose. In fact, I was originally going to write today's article about the Citadel, but I couldn't bring myself to say it was horribad, because under the worst circumstances it's still a land that taps for a colorless mana. I had to come up with something worse. Fortunately, The Dark delivers yet again.

The Hot Spot

Quick, what's that sound? Is that the sound of Spike crying? Because I think it's the sound of Spike crying! Spike must have just caught a glimpse of this twister!

Conehead

Grills looked down to remind himself of where he was, and why. His entire body tingled with vigor, as if his master had personally seen to his summons. Grills wasn't sure it hadn't. All he knew was that his longsword itched to find something to sink its length of steel into.

That's No Moon!

Let me take you on a journey to the past. Actually, we need to go to the half-past. Back to a little set that was called Time Spiral.

The Sphere of Not-Quite-Annihiliation

I could probably do a year's worth of articles about The Dark. And they'd probably all be awesome. But for now, I have to limit myself, lest I take the easy route of low comedy for making fun of cards who can't help being bad.

They were made this way, and they have to live with the fact that they're inferior. Maybe no one will ever understand. But every day--every. day.--new bad cards come upon us. With the advent of custom card generators, any old fool can whip up a new artifact that does something woefully overcosted.

It's up to me to prove that Wizards has already beaten them to the punch.

I'm On a Boat

Ahhh, Arabian Nights. On the whole, not really that awful of a set. Most of the cards don't hold up much to modern standards of power creep balance, but that's okay, because it was young and stupid when it came out.

The Crazed Coterie of Goblins

Okay, so people usually associate bad cards with older sets. I'm looking at you, Homelands.