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.



See, people usually refer to Magic "back in the day" as a place where creatures went to die. They sucked. Oh, sure, we had some gems, even in The Dark (*cough*BallLightning*cough*), but on the whole, old creatures were comparable to coasters. Serra Angel was good enough to be banned back then, and most people don't even give it a second thought nowadays.

When you ask people about spells "back in the day" you get answers like Counterspell, Necropotence, Ancestral Recall, Berserk, etc. etc. like it was the Renaissance of Magic noncreature cards or something. Well, let me tell you, there were plenty of stinkers to go along with those.

Everything's so... brown.

There's not much to say here, but I'm sure most of the people who read this blog are aware of the massive amount of fail included above. First off, it does literally nothing until you sacrifice it. That'd be fine, except that it's sacrifice ability is absolutely horrid. How often is this going to be better than a Healing Salve? Only if something with power 8 or greater slaps you around town, at which point you're better off spending a card actually dealing with it instead of wasting your time preventing only a portion of the damage.

Maybe if you could prevent damage to creatures, this would be better. Except, oh wait, it has to be on the table before you can use it, meaning your opponent will see it coming a mile away. For those of you keeping track at home, this means your opponent will now play around the card, instead of you having a combat trick. So its usefulness would only be marginally increased if that were the case.

I've been looking for new cards to use as bookmarks. I think I've found a candidate.