Not gonna lie, I always find the "worst" videos the most entertaining since I get to see cards that I may not know. With the "Best" videos I can usually guess most of the list.
Yeah llike what if the controller could activate the ability, and then after it resolves an opponent can do the same once, but then the controller can follow suit
I love looking at cycles because it's a cool "what does each color bring to the table" view. Would love to see a Top 10 most-unbalanced (same cycle with both godly card(s) and awful card(s)) cycles and Top 10 most over-powered cycles.
Most Unbalance: Boon Cycle Oddysey Dog Cycle Decree cycle Oath cycle Alliance free cast cycle (Contains Force of Will) Best cycles: Moxen Titans Origins Flip Walkers I bet I'm forgetting a whole lot.
@@Ninjamanhammer are boons the cycle from which Ancient Recall originated? Cause I agree that Recall is OP, but the other cards in the cycle except for Healing Salve are quite good cards. I would rather put it in the best cycles cause it is quite similar to the Titans cycle - 4 cards are strong or really playable and the 5th one is bad. Unless Frost Titan or whatever he is called was at least playable in Standard cause I didn't play MTG then
@@sallomon2357 The boon cycle is unbalanced because one of the cards is arguably the strongest card ever printed. If all the rest were on the level of Dark Ritual and Lightning Bolt it would qualify for both lists. Frost Titan has multiple pro tour and grand prix top8s, in different decks.
How would you count it? And for what format? Would you rank the cards effectiveness to counter specific strategies?(like graveyard, artifacts, burn)The sideboard has always been the most meta dependent portion of deck building and as such it’s the most variable.
These worst top 10s are really hard to make a "Top 10 Vintage Cards (Minus Power 9)" segue for, since they obviously see no play in Vintage. Instead, I'll mention that I run Castle Sengir in my Bolas tribal deck on EDH, for the fun of it.
@@nickbalmes6640 Unfortunately, as much as I want to include Castle Sengir in my Baron Sengir deck, because it's colour identity is Grixis and not mono-black, you can't.
@@TheGloriousLobsterEmperor then we hold out hope for a Grixis version of Baron Sengir in the future. Kazarov, Sengir Pureblood from Dominaria has a Rakdos color identity so there might still be a chance 😀
I've actually used the Cephalid Shrine once in casual magic. Cause i had Death Wish in my deck. And Death Wish the way we played it meant i could put any card i have into my hand not just my sideboard. So i put Cephalid Shrine into my hand when i was up against a Relentless rats deck my friend built. This was really casual magic as you can tell. The best kind of magic imo.
"Any card you own" is actually how the Wish cards are supposed to work -- it's only tournament rules that limit them to your sideboard. Presumably either for balance reasons, or because you have to register your deck for tournaments and with wish cards involved, registering all the cards every player who has one in their deck *might* use would probably take longer than the tournament itself.
Top 10 Hellions! :D Hellions are one of the coolest and unique and underappreciated types of creatures in MTG. They're gigantic volcanic hellish beasts. Hellions need the love!
@@Blacturne859 they're more like Centipedes to me haha And in general mythology they're extremely cool. They hide in hell and eat lava and once they get huge, they then come up to the surface and wreck havoc in hopes they can get injured and chopped in half. As if you cut a Hellion in half, the 2 halves will grow into 2 separate Hellions! It's an absolutely amazing idea for a monster I find myself using them in some of D&D campaigns
Banding is one of my favorite mechanics. Not only can it be very powerful in the right hands, it's fun to watch the look on your opponent's face as the rules are explained, then the look of confusion, then the concession...
The one-mana instants spells back in Alpha is a prime example of power discrepancy; to think Wizards initially thought that Ancestral Recall was on the same level as Healing Salve boggles me to this day.
They didn't, Richard Garfield has gone on record saying he knew that shit was broken but that he had to just think of cards to print early on. He knew even back then that gain 3 life isn't comparable to draw 3 cards, but he needed to print cards to help cement the identity of each color.
@@PokeBattlerJaze Hoooo I did not know that. Being a former YGO player I know for a fact that Pot of Greed was a broken card so Ancestral Recall was on the same level.
Imagine being the very first major TCG to ever exist. There is zero knowledge nor data to go from so one must assume the numbers are fair. Like for example. Bob gets 3 Apples and Joe gets 3 Pears. It's still "fair" as they both have 3 of something. This is the reasoning behind those 5 instant "3 spells" And thanks to the knowledge and experience we've gained from that, we know how unfair 3 cards is compared to 3 life.
@@nickbalmes6640 Clonekiller66 also has a point, card balance has gotten a TINY bit better, obviously there are still cards that are still miles better then others, but for the most part, the balance has even out. You also have to realize that the creator when he first thought it up didn't really have ideas of the phenom of a game it would become today, he was just a college guy who loved high fantasy and DnD and made a card game so that him and his friends could play and then it blew up into this thing that we know and love and hate today.
@@PokeBattlerJaze You guys are right. Being one of the pioneer card games (if not THE pioneer card game) comes with setting the precedents for power balancing in the future. It's just now that I realize that I've been judging the discrepancy based on already established boundaries and guidelines. Thanks for the enlightening discussion 😀
I immensely disagree about the talismans. They were the only things apart from Twiddle at the time to untap Time Vault which had today's effect back then
Man I love cycles. Something about the simplicity of them mixed with showcasing the differences in the color pie really appeals to me. I kinda want to make an EDH deck that only uses cards in a cycle or has cycle.
Holy heck I never knew of that planeswalker “feelings” cycle that’s pretty interesting in very casual EDH Thank you for showing me that, no matter how many years I’ve played there’s always something new I haven’t seen yet.
Warmonger is legit one of my favorite cards of all time. I had a R/B deck back in the day that was essentially an EDH deck before EDH was a thing built with the sole purpose of dealing damage to everything at the same time. Plaguesplitter, flame rift, warmonger, etc. Warmonger was a 3/3 creature that could attack once then just potentially wrath away the board, or at worst would be activated by my opponent...who just used their own resources to do what I was going to do anyways. One of the few magic cards I'd love to realistically own the art for because I know no one else would want it.
Yep, and the second one wasn't printed until Portal Three Kingdoms, which never released in North America. The second one here didn't come around until Odyssey.
Not sure why I keep on losing. I was told my 60 cards deck should have 24 lands, and that I should add Evolving Wilds for manafixing. So I have 4x Evolving Wilds and each land from #1 four times. Still can't manage to cast anything. Game is broken.
I have a soft spot for the laces. Back in the day, I used to run a blue/red deck that used chaos and thought laces to enable elemental blasts, pyro- and hydroblasts, and other similar cards. It was never all that great, but it was fun.
"There are also a lot of duds" *shows the most iconic cycle in all of MtG* Like I get it, as a monowhite player Healing Salve just hurts me where I live, but don't discount everything else
Malachite talisman is pretty good in edh, as there are quite a few green creatures that can tap for an absurd amount of mana. It's a sleeper bomb in my Marwyn elf tribal deck, and can make for some pretty fun elfball shenanigans
Good video. I'd also like to see a video on cycles with the biggest power level gap among their cards (the boon cycle, Cranial Plating versus the other ones in its cycle, etc.)
Years ago a local game shop had a format called Godzilla, 6-8 player round table. 100 card decks (not Singleton) that must include at least 20 creatures totaling 60+ power. I played Planeswalker's Myrth in my deck because it was common to have a hand full of 7+ Mana cost creatures. In a very slow round table game it wasn't uncommon to have 100+ life before things started to get interesting.
It would probably take more involved calculations, but a "Most successful cycles" list would be really cool. That is, looking at cycles that have done the best in constructed, without major deviation from one card to the next. That way the Alpha Charms are disqualified, since Healing Salve brings down the overpowering lead Ancestral Recall and Lightning Bolt would add.
I wouldn't say it's completely disqualified. Healing salve weighs it down, but other then renowned allstars Recall & Bolt, there is also Dark Ritual and Gaint Growth. Dark Ritual also been a multi format allstar, allowing for some busted plays over the decades (Ritual into Nercopotence, Ritual into Phyrexian Negator, multiple Dark Rituals in a storm deck, etc.). Giant Growth Isn't super amazing, but it alone surpasses Healing slave by being one of the premier combat tricks and pump spells since the early days of mtg, and bound to have scored 'some' number of points in the long history of the game.
Giant Growth has something like 20 points, sometimes in stuff like Infect but a lot of them from back in the days of Batch Timing when it was generally better.
@@TheShinyFeraligatr That and the combined trio of Recall, Ritual, and Bolt is still more then enough to outweigh the terribleness of healing salve. 4 out of 5 cards seeing seeing some number of point, and 3 out of those 4 being absolutely bonkers and seeing considerable play, is good enough to easily outweigh the runt of the litter. If it was only one or two merely good card out of a cycle of 5, that would of DQ it form top ten best cycles. But as it stands, it only one not so good card with four cards other cards that each atleast have 20 points, and three of them still seeing play decades after first being printed. That's honestly not to bad.
@@matthewutech5970 It's the same problem as the Alliances Pitch cycle. Scars of the Veteran is awful, straight up, a miserably bad card. Bounty of the Hunt saw very minor play, and I don't think it ever got a Top 8. But then the rest of the cycle are Pyrokinesis, an alright card, Contagion, a card which has seen on and off Legacy play for its entire lifespan essentially, and Force of Will, which... yeah. That said, don't count out GG yet. It is about to rotate, but it'll be back eventually, and when it returns it holds the same outside chance of seeing Standard play it always does.
Since you specifically requested I do so, I'm mentioning you bashed one of my favourite cards, hahah. Nantuko Shrine may be a sloppy joke of a card, but if you're playing an in-block Eggs deck, you'll find no greater companion :P
8:40 the Malachite Talisman is actually kind of broken. As long as you have a mana dork like Marwyn the Nuturer and can tap her for at least 7 mana, then you can net mana as you cast spells, while untapping her each time.
The leech cycle is actually good considering you can use Chromeshell Crab to exchange a leech of yours for an opponets creature, getting a better creature and exchanging a creature to weaken your opponent.
Lol it was just an editing thing that idk if you have control over but it cutting to the cycle with ancestral recall, lightning bolt, dark ritual and giant growth as you were talking about duds made me chuckle.
Touch of darkness plus Horobi deaths wail is a one black mana board wipe, touch of darkness only changes the color of any number of target creatures to black but since they get targeted they get destroyed thanks to horobi's effect
Dragon's Claw from the Mirrodin color-spell-for-life cycle is actually very good (modern-playable) because it's a colorless card that plays well against aggressive red decks. Prowess runs it for the mirror, burn runs it sometimes, etc.
I think the biggest problem with the Odyssey "shrine" cycle is the fact that they all cost 3 mana, and double-color at that. If they all cost just 1 mana of the respective color, they could have formed the basis for an interesting singleton control deck. "Grixis Shrine Control", or back then, it would have been called "Crosis's Shrines" or something. There was a wide enough diversity of decent blue, black, and red cards in Invasion-Odyssey Standard (especially Black when Torment hit the scene) that I could imagine the deck doing stuff (except in the mirror...).
I love these worst videos because they’re more subjective than objective. It’s cool to see what other people’s opinions are since there’s so many cards.
There are not actually eight cards with planeswalk. There are actually just eight that mention it in their text box. One of them is Great Wall, and another is Lord Magnus, one of the original legends, who also shuts down planeswalk along with forestwalk. Lastly, Old Fogey is a silver bordered card that only has snow-covered plainswalk
I think Banding is actually pretty powerful, especially in the current day of creature combat mattering much more. It's just that most people don't know how it works.
Not only that, but Wizards treated Banding as if it was an exceptionally powerful mechanic and never really printed it on a creature that it would matter on.
I love your Worst videos since I like the challenge of making the showcased cards work (I have combo decks around Hellcarver Demon or Sorrow's Path). I actually play Cathedral of Serra (the white Banding land) in my Tymna/Sidar Kondo EDH deck and it is not SO bad to be rated worse than the Great Wall. The gimmick of the deck is that all creatures are legendary (so the Banding With changes to regular Banding) and all the creatures are small to fit in with Sidar. This makes Banding very valuable on defense against any green deck trying to Trample over you (Banding beats Trample by allowing you to assign excess damage that would normally trample over to one of the blocking creatures instead. A 10/10 Trample vs 2 1/1s with banding results in 1 1/1 dying and 0 trample damage, compared to 2 regular 1/1s dying and 8 trample damage to the face). The fact Cathedral of Serra is a non-mana producing land is just a matter of perspective. Like playable non-mana producing lands Maze of Ith or Tabernacle, you gotta think of them as spells that cost you a land drop instead of mana, not lands. In that case, EDH staples like Exploration or Burgeoning make that cost mostly trivial. So yeah, these lands are highly HIGHLY situational but that's still better than the anti-landwalking enchantments that don't really fill any niche you would want to prepare for (like anti-islandwalk in case you play against Merfolks).
The original Lucky Charms cycle was playable. They saw play in Atog decks back in the day as cheap Atog food that had the upside. Granted, that's hardly a pro tour level deck, but as a fun casual deck it could definitely be done. Think of it as what 'Affinity' was like before they broke it all to heck.
Now I feel like a cool kid because I run Squallmonger in EDH... I use it in a gruul group slug deck and I love it as a political tool... the deck doesn't run flyers, and making everyone lose life is the main theme anyway.
Exactly, I was running it with a Trostani Commander. It wasn't terribly efficient but the mayhem it could create as people killed each other was only minimally affecting me as 1) I had no flyers and one of the things that could harm me is Commander flyers and 2) life was not an issue
Second in the ration of the life gain artifacts are actually useful in mono color decks of their perspective color. In fact I actually use one in my white knight deck that one being angel’s Feather
I use Nantuko Shrine in my EDH deck; I run a ton of Shadowborn Apostles so it generates a lot of value for me; and at virtually no risk my opponent can take advantage of it
Rampage 1 gave you +1/+1 for every blocker past the first. So if you were blocked by 3 creatures with rampage 1, you would have gained +2/+2. The ideal behind this is that a large creature could only be answered by another large creature. There were also cards with higher than rampage 1. I think there was a rampage 3 out there.
Coming from someone that used to think Leviathan was a good card when they got into the game, even I could tell the Talismans were absolutely awful cards. One thing that should be mentioned about the Lucky Charms; they were also created in an era where it was quite possible to have extra mana laying around due to the Moxen, Sol Ring, Mana Vault, Black Lotus, dual lands, Dark Ritual and a bunch of other fast mana effects. I am not implying there were 'great' but they were useful to pick up a few health points as you swiftly unloaded your hand via all these other things. Of them, Throne of Bone was played the most by far to offset some of black's many 'pay life...' cards.
The talismans and the Planeswalker's cycle is amazing in mono colour. The green talisman is broken in any green deck that has a creature that repeatedly add more than 3 Mana or a benefit essentially a nyx lotus without a downside. The Planeswalker's cycle is incredible in mono blue haldan or a combo deck I really wish no actual card with a Planeswalker type was made and there was cards like these that referenced their story.
I agree that, as a general rule, the Ice Age talisman cycle stinks. However, with cards that produce multiple mana per tap (like Priest of Titania), and repeatable spells (like the returning enchantments cycles from Urza block), these talismans can let you go from "Okay. That's annoying" to "Holy crap! That's arbitrarily repeatable! That's means I win!". I even had a deck built around this idea, sacrificing Rancor to Auratog over and over that could do so as early as turn 3. Granted, the cards I had available for the construction meant I had like a 1 in 10 million chance of going arbitrary on turn 3, but the possibility was there.
The Trigons, I think, deserve a better grade because several of them were significant in the Scars limited environment. I don't know if you considered cycles that are entirely within a color and merely reference each of the other colors (for whatever reason, a lot of these seem to be in white, e.g. the Voices cycle from Urza block or the Circles of Protection), but if those were eligible, I'd put the Wards from Alpha on the list, as they combine hyper-situational usefulness, abysmal value (including all the usual problems of Auras), and lazy design, and as an added bonus had to be errataed because White Ward, as printed, literally didn't work within the rules of Magic. Alternately, the execrable Dragon's Maze had a couple of candidates in the Gatekeepers and the Maze Elementals, both of which were much worse in limited and (I think-- I don't have access to a searchable list of cards that have appeared in top 8s, but I'm fairly sure they're all zeros across the board) comparably nonexistent in constructed as the Trigons.
Malachite Talisman does WORK in elfball decks. You really don't need to do too much work for it, just have a combo going.. But I do get where you're coming from on it
I guess you could make an orzhov edh rat deck with Aven Shrine and get some life when you play rats, but I feel like if you wanted to do that then Ajani's Welcome or Soul Warden or something would do a better job at that, just by being cheaper and easier to set up.
Could have a land cycle that doesn't produce mana but taps to do something for the rest of the turn. With a red that gives your creatures +1/+1, takes away there abilities, and make them attack if able. A white that's the same but with blocking if able. A green that gives your other lands a boost. etc…
There is also momir vig, if you change the text to blue, you can just keep going. but now that i think about it, hes caring about the actual word on the card to make it work i belive. So never mind 😂
I never understood Wizards’ fascination with landwalk in the early days of the game. Did people even like it? It’s too specific and requires the opponent to play a certain deck for them to matter. Plus, wasn’t the most common of them islandwalk and mostly stapled on to blue cards? That made the best anti-blue decks to be...blue. Not a good look for what’s still considered the best color in the overall game.
Old Wizards loved landwalk because they thought it was flavorful. "Oh, this creature can swim, so it's good against opponents with island, this one is a goat and goats are good at traversing mountains, etc". Eventually, the akwardness of the mechanic plus weirdness regarding the flavor of lands (are the creatures literally fighting on those lands or are the players only gathering power from them?) led to landwalk being discontinued.
They even designed landwalk into duel masters with the "stealth" mechanic (and yes it's even worse there because blockers can attack directly into tapped creatures making them fight)
Part of it was for flavor, but part of it was the fact that they didn’t have effective evasion in non flying colors. Landwalk became fear/intimidate which then would eventually become menace.
@@garettkutcher9531 Ah yes. Also the days before we had card lists and the internet for a global metagame. (I actually ran a swampwalk deck for a while. But then, I was also pretty certain that CoP: Red was rarer than the other colors, because duh, burn decks and occasionally actually played the lucky charms.)
True, but one of the thing the video and what was the state for many years after Great Wall was printed, there was only a single thing in the entire game with plainswalk.
Obviously now you need to do the best cycles, the only question is what the other nine are, or if you'll mention the moxen at the beginning to get them out of the way to feature more interesting cards.
Warmonger is actually quite nice in Torbran, Thane of Red Fell EDH deck. When Torbran is also out, it doesn't matter if they kill Warmonger using the ability, because at that point they most likely have wiped their board and dealt 9 to all my opponents.
I think the hematite talisman would actually be good in a krenko deck as a way to go infinite if you can get a skirk prospector out first (unless summoning the new goblins would not trigger the effect)
I wouldn't say that Banding is a bad mechanic from a power standpoint. It's not great but it's reasonable and in limited, it's pretty good. You wouldn't want to pay extra mana for it on a creature but if you got it tossed onto something, it would be worth talking about. The issue with banding is that it's not intuitive and works differently on offense and defense. It's fine if combat just goes through without interruption but when things start dying or changing abilities, what happens is not obvious and it leads to more questions than is needed.
Made a five color Planeswalker's __________ deck back in the day. It was horrible. But fun. Current market pricing indicates just how bad that cycle is.
Not gonna lie, I always find the "worst" videos the most entertaining since I get to see cards that I may not know. With the "Best" videos I can usually guess most of the list.
I built a fungus deck after watching his worst creatures list and I would have never found out about them otherwise.
me2
The Mongers could have been so neat if the caster got some kind of upside if another player activated the Mongers' abilities.
Yeah llike what if the controller could activate the ability, and then after it resolves an opponent can do the same once, but then the controller can follow suit
Always love the “worst” top 10s.
They're the "worst!!"
Especially those guys in the comments who say “Actually that one card is good for this one specific commander.”
@@cadenchampion3244 hi me
Shouldnt it just be a ‘bottom ten’ list?
Yes please ( :
I love looking at cycles because it's a cool "what does each color bring to the table" view. Would love to see a Top 10 most-unbalanced (same cycle with both godly card(s) and awful card(s)) cycles and Top 10 most over-powered cycles.
Was about to suggest this. Healing salve op
Most Unbalance:
Boon Cycle
Oddysey Dog Cycle
Decree cycle
Oath cycle
Alliance free cast cycle (Contains Force of Will)
Best cycles:
Moxen
Titans
Origins Flip Walkers
I bet I'm forgetting a whole lot.
@@Ninjamanhammer are boons the cycle from which Ancient Recall originated? Cause I agree that Recall is OP, but the other cards in the cycle except for Healing Salve are quite good cards. I would rather put it in the best cycles cause it is quite similar to the Titans cycle - 4 cards are strong or really playable and the 5th one is bad. Unless Frost Titan or whatever he is called was at least playable in Standard cause I didn't play MTG then
@@sallomon2357 The boon cycle is unbalanced because one of the cards is arguably the strongest card ever printed. If all the rest were on the level of Dark Ritual and Lightning Bolt it would qualify for both lists.
Frost Titan has multiple pro tour and grand prix top8s, in different decks.
@@Ninjamanhammer I'd say origin flip walkers were heavily unbalanced. Gideon Vs Jace? I think if you need like 5 Gideon's to be worth one Jace
I would love to see your picks for a top 10 sideboard staples list (pithing needle, duress, abrade, etc).
Yeah that sounds awesome!
awesome suggestion
In each format
Abrade sees a lot of mainboard play though.
How would you count it? And for what format? Would you rank the cards effectiveness to counter specific strategies?(like graveyard, artifacts, burn)The sideboard has always been the most meta dependent portion of deck building and as such it’s the most variable.
I'm really sad that the Odyssey shrines haven't been errated to be actual shrines.
Creatures then: "A 4 mana 5/5 should have a pretty big downside."
Creatures now: "Lmao let's make a 5 mana 10/10"
The power creep is real haha. I just think the evolution of serra angel. Serra angel to bane slayer angel for the same 3ww.
Lol verdurous gearhulk isn’t even playable
@@alanyuan8565 neither is gigantosaurus.
"It's ok. It dies to Doom Blade so it's balanced"
As someone getting back into the game now after stopping around the time of Mirrodin, I cannot BELIEVE what has happened to creatures!
These worst top 10s are really hard to make a "Top 10 Vintage Cards (Minus Power 9)" segue for, since they obviously see no play in Vintage. Instead, I'll mention that I run Castle Sengir in my Bolas tribal deck on EDH, for the fun of it.
Ahh Castle Sengir. A very tasteful inclusion to what I am certain is a refined and exquisite mono-Black EDH deck 👌
@@nickbalmes6640 Unfortunately, as much as I want to include Castle Sengir in my Baron Sengir deck, because it's colour identity is Grixis and not mono-black, you can't.
@@TheGloriousLobsterEmperor then we hold out hope for a Grixis version of Baron Sengir in the future. Kazarov, Sengir Pureblood from Dominaria has a Rakdos color identity so there might still be a chance 😀
The disappointment when opening a lace as a kid... You get chaoslace while you could have had an amazingly valuable card, such as Lord of the pit.
Theres some real garbage in Revised
I just love it when you talk about Landwalk, it used to be such a big deal, when it was rarely relevant.
The Jade Leech part made me want a Top 10 Best Worst video, cards that make you go "*That* got top 8?!"
I've actually used the Cephalid Shrine once in casual magic. Cause i had Death Wish in my deck. And Death Wish the way we played it meant i could put any card i have into my hand not just my sideboard. So i put Cephalid Shrine into my hand when i was up against a Relentless rats deck my friend built. This was really casual magic as you can tell. The best kind of magic imo.
"Any card you own" is actually how the Wish cards are supposed to work -- it's only tournament rules that limit them to your sideboard.
Presumably either for balance reasons, or because you have to register your deck for tournaments and with wish cards involved, registering all the cards every player who has one in their deck *might* use would probably take longer than the tournament itself.
Top 10 Hellions! :D
Hellions are one of the coolest and unique and underappreciated types of creatures in MTG. They're gigantic volcanic hellish beasts. Hellions need the love!
Hellions are really cool; i always think of them as red wurms
@@Blacturne859 they're more like Centipedes to me haha
And in general mythology they're extremely cool. They hide in hell and eat lava and once they get huge, they then come up to the surface and wreck havoc in hopes they can get injured and chopped in half. As if you cut a Hellion in half, the 2 halves will grow into 2 separate Hellions!
It's an absolutely amazing idea for a monster I find myself using them in some of D&D campaigns
@@Clonekiller66 thats really cool i never knew that! And i agree the centipede parallels are stronger than the wurm ones
Yet another video where I'm sad I own most of the featured cards.
Banding is one of my favorite mechanics. Not only can it be very powerful in the right hands, it's fun to watch the look on your opponent's face as the rules are explained, then the look of confusion, then the concession...
Love subjective lists.
Have you done a top ten of "Cards that let you play the top card of your deck" or top ten best plane/plane gimmicks?
The one-mana instants spells back in Alpha is a prime example of power discrepancy; to think Wizards initially thought that Ancestral Recall was on the same level as Healing Salve boggles me to this day.
They didn't, Richard Garfield has gone on record saying he knew that shit was broken but that he had to just think of cards to print early on. He knew even back then that gain 3 life isn't comparable to draw 3 cards, but he needed to print cards to help cement the identity of each color.
@@PokeBattlerJaze Hoooo I did not know that. Being a former YGO player I know for a fact that Pot of Greed was a broken card so Ancestral Recall was on the same level.
Imagine being the very first major TCG to ever exist.
There is zero knowledge nor data to go from so one must assume the numbers are fair.
Like for example. Bob gets 3 Apples and Joe gets 3 Pears.
It's still "fair" as they both have 3 of something. This is the reasoning behind those 5 instant "3 spells"
And thanks to the knowledge and experience we've gained from that, we know how unfair 3 cards is compared to 3 life.
@@nickbalmes6640 Clonekiller66 also has a point, card balance has gotten a TINY bit better, obviously there are still cards that are still miles better then others, but for the most part, the balance has even out.
You also have to realize that the creator when he first thought it up didn't really have ideas of the phenom of a game it would become today, he was just a college guy who loved high fantasy and DnD and made a card game so that him and his friends could play and then it blew up into this thing that we know and love and hate today.
@@PokeBattlerJaze You guys are right. Being one of the pioneer card games (if not THE pioneer card game) comes with setting the precedents for power balancing in the future. It's just now that I realize that I've been judging the discrepancy based on already established boundaries and guidelines. Thanks for the enlightening discussion 😀
I love the artwork of those banding legends lands. I never realized that Cathedral Of Serra has a double moon.
I’m fascinated that you didn’t even mention the glyph cycle from Legends.
I like watching these "Worst" lists to look at the cards and try to see if I can fit any of them in a wacky commander strategy XD
May I recommend a color change deck, run all the strong color screwing cards and then run all the good color changing cards
I immensely disagree about the talismans. They were the only things apart from Twiddle at the time to untap Time Vault which had today's effect back then
Man I love cycles. Something about the simplicity of them mixed with showcasing the differences in the color pie really appeals to me. I kinda want to make an EDH deck that only uses cards in a cycle or has cycle.
Holy heck I never knew of that planeswalker “feelings” cycle that’s pretty interesting in very casual EDH
Thank you for showing me that, no matter how many years I’ve played there’s always something new I haven’t seen yet.
Magic has been such a throw anything at the wall and see what sticks in design over the years.
Warmonger is legit one of my favorite cards of all time. I had a R/B deck back in the day that was essentially an EDH deck before EDH was a thing built with the sole purpose of dealing damage to everything at the same time. Plaguesplitter, flame rift, warmonger, etc. Warmonger was a 3/3 creature that could attack once then just potentially wrath away the board, or at worst would be activated by my opponent...who just used their own resources to do what I was going to do anyways. One of the few magic cards I'd love to realistically own the art for because I know no one else would want it.
Great list. Great criteria for how you judge these Cycles as well. Thank you!
Glad you liked it!
Heaven's Gate is good in a Heroic deck, since it targets everything you want at instant speed for one mana
Thats insane
Sea Kings' Blessing (the blue card in the cycle) combined with Dismiss into Dream makes for a monoblue Plague Wind.
If I recall correctly, when Great Wall was released, there was only one creature with plainswalk in the entire game.
Yep, and the second one wasn't printed until Portal Three Kingdoms, which never released in North America. The second one here didn't come around until Odyssey.
Super interesting topic. I'd love to see one on the best cycles too. I'd wager on the Moxen being there.
Not sure why I keep on losing.
I was told my 60 cards deck should have 24 lands, and that I should add Evolving Wilds for manafixing.
So I have 4x Evolving Wilds and each land from #1 four times. Still can't manage to cast anything. Game is broken.
You should replace most of your basics with lands that can add multiple colors - or else focus on 1 or 2 colors...
@@user-jd5zt4of8q Dude, I was joking.
@@Lovuschka oh, ok - it is very hard to detect that in text like this...
I thought you might have been a noob - I actually started like that...
I have a soft spot for the laces. Back in the day, I used to run a blue/red deck that used chaos and thought laces to enable elemental blasts, pyro- and hydroblasts, and other similar cards. It was never all that great, but it was fun.
the leech cards when used in a edh deck based on giving your opponent things is evil and hilarious
When i see the Mongers at #8, i knew this list was gonna get interesting.
"There are also a lot of duds"
*shows the most iconic cycle in all of MtG*
Like I get it, as a monowhite player Healing Salve just hurts me where I live, but don't discount everything else
Malachite talisman is pretty good in edh, as there are quite a few green creatures that can tap for an absurd amount of mana. It's a sleeper bomb in my Marwyn elf tribal deck, and can make for some pretty fun elfball shenanigans
Good video. I'd also like to see a video on cycles with the biggest power level gap among their cards (the boon cycle, Cranial Plating versus the other ones in its cycle, etc.)
I actually don't think the boons would make it, sure Recall is nuts, but Lightning Bolt and Dark Ritual are no joke eithsr.
"hello I'm needs-a-home"
underrated comment
The banding lands are some guilt favorites of mine. I will make them work one day!
Wish you all the success ( :
Years ago a local game shop had a format called Godzilla, 6-8 player round table. 100 card decks (not Singleton) that must include at least 20 creatures totaling 60+ power.
I played Planeswalker's Myrth in my deck because it was common to have a hand full of 7+ Mana cost creatures. In a very slow round table game it wasn't uncommon to have 100+ life before things started to get interesting.
the leeches are my favorite cycle because with Zedruu and Blim you can give them to your opponents and its always great.
It would probably take more involved calculations, but a "Most successful cycles" list would be really cool. That is, looking at cycles that have done the best in constructed, without major deviation from one card to the next. That way the Alpha Charms are disqualified, since Healing Salve brings down the overpowering lead Ancestral Recall and Lightning Bolt would add.
I wouldn't say it's completely disqualified. Healing salve weighs it down, but other then renowned allstars Recall & Bolt, there is also Dark Ritual and Gaint Growth. Dark Ritual also been a multi format allstar, allowing for some busted plays over the decades (Ritual into Nercopotence, Ritual into Phyrexian Negator, multiple Dark Rituals in a storm deck, etc.). Giant Growth Isn't super amazing, but it alone surpasses Healing slave by being one of the premier combat tricks and pump spells since the early days of mtg, and bound to have scored 'some' number of points in the long history of the game.
Giant Growth has something like 20 points, sometimes in stuff like Infect but a lot of them from back in the days of Batch Timing when it was generally better.
@@TheShinyFeraligatr That and the combined trio of Recall, Ritual, and Bolt is still more then enough to outweigh the terribleness of healing salve. 4 out of 5 cards seeing seeing some number of point, and 3 out of those 4 being absolutely bonkers and seeing considerable play, is good enough to easily outweigh the runt of the litter.
If it was only one or two merely good card out of a cycle of 5, that would of DQ it form top ten best cycles. But as it stands, it only one not so good card with four cards other cards that each atleast have 20 points, and three of them still seeing play decades after first being printed. That's honestly not to bad.
@@matthewutech5970 It's the same problem as the Alliances Pitch cycle. Scars of the Veteran is awful, straight up, a miserably bad card. Bounty of the Hunt saw very minor play, and I don't think it ever got a Top 8. But then the rest of the cycle are Pyrokinesis, an alright card, Contagion, a card which has seen on and off Legacy play for its entire lifespan essentially, and Force of Will, which... yeah.
That said, don't count out GG yet. It is about to rotate, but it'll be back eventually, and when it returns it holds the same outside chance of seeing Standard play it always does.
Since you specifically requested I do so, I'm mentioning you bashed one of my favourite cards, hahah. Nantuko Shrine may be a sloppy joke of a card, but if you're playing an in-block Eggs deck, you'll find no greater companion :P
Yes finalllly! I've wanted this list for so long!
I saw Lord Windgrace and immediately thought that "Planeswalker's Fury" was misspelled.
8:40 the Malachite Talisman is actually kind of broken. As long as you have a mana dork like Marwyn the Nuturer and can tap her for at least 7 mana, then you can net mana as you cast spells, while untapping her each time.
The leech cycle is actually good considering you can use Chromeshell Crab to exchange a leech of yours for an opponets creature, getting a better creature and exchanging a creature to weaken your opponent.
Lol it was just an editing thing that idk if you have control over but it cutting to the cycle with ancestral recall, lightning bolt, dark ritual and giant growth as you were talking about duds made me chuckle.
Squallmonger + Grafted Exoskeleton is peak EDH.
Lmao I have a bunch of the number 10s. I remember getting them in a bulk lot and thinking "Who the hell thought this was a good card idea?"
Touch of darkness plus Horobi deaths wail is a one black mana board wipe, touch of darkness only changes the color of any number of target creatures to black but since they get targeted they get destroyed thanks to horobi's effect
Dragon's Claw from the Mirrodin color-spell-for-life cycle is actually very good (modern-playable) because it's a colorless card that plays well against aggressive red decks. Prowess runs it for the mirror, burn runs it sometimes, etc.
I think the biggest problem with the Odyssey "shrine" cycle is the fact that they all cost 3 mana, and double-color at that. If they all cost just 1 mana of the respective color, they could have formed the basis for an interesting singleton control deck. "Grixis Shrine Control", or back then, it would have been called "Crosis's Shrines" or something. There was a wide enough diversity of decent blue, black, and red cards in Invasion-Odyssey Standard (especially Black when Torment hit the scene) that I could imagine the deck doing stuff (except in the mirror...).
I think a list of something along the lines of "Top 10 Worst Rares in the 2010s" would be pretty cool.
Somehow I was expecting the Volvers to come into the conversation, but I guess they are actually pretty versatile!
I love these worst videos because they’re more subjective than objective. It’s cool to see what other people’s opinions are since there’s so many cards.
Planeswalkers Fury has one of my favorite arts. Just because I love Windgrace, but theres not many cards featuring him in the game
Wizard's School actually was played in a top tournament once upon a time. It was in the championship deck from PT New York 1996.
I know that there isn't a lot of competitive data on Slivers... But I'm anxiously awaiting the day you finally give The Hive their top 10.
There are not actually eight cards with planeswalk. There are actually just eight that mention it in their text box. One of them is Great Wall, and another is Lord Magnus, one of the original legends, who also shuts down planeswalk along with forestwalk. Lastly, Old Fogey is a silver bordered card that only has snow-covered plainswalk
I think Banding is actually pretty powerful, especially in the current day of creature combat mattering much more. It's just that most people don't know how it works.
Not only that, but Wizards treated Banding as if it was an exceptionally powerful mechanic and never really printed it on a creature that it would matter on.
While the Ice Age Talismans are terrible the artwork on Nacre is so weird, haunting and evocative.
I love your Worst videos since I like the challenge of making the showcased cards work (I have combo decks around Hellcarver Demon or Sorrow's Path). I actually play Cathedral of Serra (the white Banding land) in my Tymna/Sidar Kondo EDH deck and it is not SO bad to be rated worse than the Great Wall.
The gimmick of the deck is that all creatures are legendary (so the Banding With changes to regular Banding) and all the creatures are small to fit in with Sidar. This makes Banding very valuable on defense against any green deck trying to Trample over you (Banding beats Trample by allowing you to assign excess damage that would normally trample over to one of the blocking creatures instead. A 10/10 Trample vs 2 1/1s with banding results in 1 1/1 dying and 0 trample damage, compared to 2 regular 1/1s dying and 8 trample damage to the face).
The fact Cathedral of Serra is a non-mana producing land is just a matter of perspective. Like playable non-mana producing lands Maze of Ith or Tabernacle, you gotta think of them as spells that cost you a land drop instead of mana, not lands. In that case, EDH staples like Exploration or Burgeoning make that cost mostly trivial.
So yeah, these lands are highly HIGHLY situational but that's still better than the anti-landwalking enchantments that don't really fill any niche you would want to prepare for (like anti-islandwalk in case you play against Merfolks).
The original Lucky Charms cycle was playable. They saw play in Atog decks back in the day as cheap Atog food that had the upside. Granted, that's hardly a pro tour level deck, but as a fun casual deck it could definitely be done. Think of it as what 'Affinity' was like before they broke it all to heck.
Now I feel like a cool kid because I run Squallmonger in EDH... I use it in a gruul group slug deck and I love it as a political tool... the deck doesn't run flyers, and making everyone lose life is the main theme anyway.
Exactly, I was running it with a Trostani Commander. It wasn't terribly efficient but the mayhem it could create as people killed each other was only minimally affecting me as 1) I had no flyers and one of the things that could harm me is Commander flyers and 2) life was not an issue
Second in the ration of the life gain artifacts are actually useful in mono color decks of their perspective color. In fact I actually use one in my white knight deck that one being angel’s Feather
I can actually see Aven shrine get some use, specifically from an Athreos player... time for some new build around.
I use Nantuko Shrine in my EDH deck; I run a ton of Shadowborn Apostles so it generates a lot of value for me; and at virtually no risk my opponent can take advantage of it
Nantuko Shrine is good in Shadowborn Apostles decks led by a green commander (such as Meren or Sek'Kuar).
Rampage 1 gave you +1/+1 for every blocker past the first. So if you were blocked by 3 creatures with rampage 1, you would have gained +2/+2. The ideal behind this is that a large creature could only be answered by another large creature. There were also cards with higher than rampage 1. I think there was a rampage 3 out there.
you should make a best cycles list, i think the praetors would have a spot, they were always some of my favorite cards
Those banding legends lands might be awful... but they're also BEAUTIFUL! Never seen them before!
The blue "anti landwalk" card could in theory help against Merfolk slightly... but not enough to matter.
Coming from someone that used to think Leviathan was a good card when they got into the game, even I could tell the Talismans were absolutely awful cards. One thing that should be mentioned about the Lucky Charms; they were also created in an era where it was quite possible to have extra mana laying around due to the Moxen, Sol Ring, Mana Vault, Black Lotus, dual lands, Dark Ritual and a bunch of other fast mana effects. I am not implying there were 'great' but they were useful to pick up a few health points as you swiftly unloaded your hand via all these other things. Of them, Throne of Bone was played the most by far to offset some of black's many 'pay life...' cards.
The talismans and the Planeswalker's cycle is amazing in mono colour. The green talisman is broken in any green deck that has a creature that repeatedly add more than 3 Mana or a benefit essentially a nyx lotus without a downside. The Planeswalker's cycle is incredible in mono blue haldan or a combo deck I really wish no actual card with a Planeswalker type was made and there was cards like these that referenced their story.
I agree that, as a general rule, the Ice Age talisman cycle stinks. However, with cards that produce multiple mana per tap (like Priest of Titania), and repeatable spells (like the returning enchantments cycles from Urza block), these talismans can let you go from "Okay. That's annoying" to "Holy crap! That's arbitrarily repeatable! That's means I win!". I even had a deck built around this idea, sacrificing Rancor to Auratog over and over that could do so as early as turn 3. Granted, the cards I had available for the construction meant I had like a 1 in 10 million chance of going arbitrary on turn 3, but the possibility was there.
Thankfully a friend showed me this interaction and it's lovely art ( :
The Trigons, I think, deserve a better grade because several of them were significant in the Scars limited environment.
I don't know if you considered cycles that are entirely within a color and merely reference each of the other colors (for whatever reason, a lot of these seem to be in white, e.g. the Voices cycle from Urza block or the Circles of Protection), but if those were eligible, I'd put the Wards from Alpha on the list, as they combine hyper-situational usefulness, abysmal value (including all the usual problems of Auras), and lazy design, and as an added bonus had to be errataed because White Ward, as printed, literally didn't work within the rules of Magic.
Alternately, the execrable Dragon's Maze had a couple of candidates in the Gatekeepers and the Maze Elementals, both of which were much worse in limited and (I think-- I don't have access to a searchable list of cards that have appeared in top 8s, but I'm fairly sure they're all zeros across the board) comparably nonexistent in constructed as the Trigons.
Malachite Talisman does WORK in elfball decks. You really don't need to do too much work for it, just have a combo going.. But I do get where you're coming from on it
I guess you could make an orzhov edh rat deck with Aven Shrine and get some life when you play rats, but I feel like if you wanted to do that then Ajani's Welcome or Soul Warden or something would do a better job at that, just by being cheaper and easier to set up.
Monger hype!!! I love those cards so much!
Could have a land cycle that doesn't produce mana but taps to do something for the rest of the turn. With a red that gives your creatures +1/+1, takes away there abilities, and make them attack if able. A white that's the same but with blocking if able. A green that gives your other lands a boost. etc…
There is also momir vig, if you change the text to blue, you can just keep going. but now that i think about it, hes caring about the actual word on the card to make it work i belive. So never mind 😂
"plainswalking", huh?
You walk on Plains, so plainswalk. But what about Mountain? Mountainclimb? And as for Islands, my friend told me long ago it was Islandswim 🤣
Nick balmes how is your comment posted 11 hours before the original. AHHHHH!!!
Can you please make a playlist for all your opinion based MTG Top 10s?
I never understood Wizards’ fascination with landwalk in the early days of the game. Did people even like it? It’s too specific and requires the opponent to play a certain deck for them to matter. Plus, wasn’t the most common of them islandwalk and mostly stapled on to blue cards? That made the best anti-blue decks to be...blue. Not a good look for what’s still considered the best color in the overall game.
Old Wizards loved landwalk because they thought it was flavorful. "Oh, this creature can swim, so it's good against opponents with island, this one is a goat and goats are good at traversing mountains, etc".
Eventually, the akwardness of the mechanic plus weirdness regarding the flavor of lands (are the creatures literally fighting on those lands or are the players only gathering power from them?) led to landwalk being discontinued.
They even designed landwalk into duel masters with the "stealth" mechanic (and yes it's even worse there because blockers can attack directly into tapped creatures making them fight)
Part of it was for flavor, but part of it was the fact that they didn’t have effective evasion in non flying colors. Landwalk became fear/intimidate which then would eventually become menace.
@@garettkutcher9531 Ah yes. Also the days before we had card lists and the internet for a global metagame. (I actually ran a swampwalk deck for a while. But then, I was also pretty certain that CoP: Red was rarer than the other colors, because duh, burn decks and occasionally actually played the lucky charms.)
Imagine Nantuko shrine in deck with "shadowborn apostle" or other of this kind. It will work pretty well actually xd
Next top 10 make it about "peek" cards, look at opponents cards and choose one for whatever
There are 6 things that have or grant plainswalk, 43 for islandwalk, 51 for swampwalk, 26 for mountainwalk, and 45 for forestwalk.
True, but one of the thing the video and what was the state for many years after Great Wall was printed, there was only a single thing in the entire game with plainswalk.
Obviously now you need to do the best cycles, the only question is what the other nine are, or if you'll mention the moxen at the beginning to get them out of the way to feature more interesting cards.
Warmonger is actually quite nice in Torbran, Thane of Red Fell EDH deck. When Torbran is also out, it doesn't matter if they kill Warmonger using the ability, because at that point they most likely have wiped their board and dealt 9 to all my opponents.
It works well with Gisela, Blade of Goldnight for similar reasons.
The white and green multiple matters enchantments might actually be decent in Golgari or Orzhov Shadowborn/Rat EDH decks.
I was thinking about putting Hematite Talisman in a Magda, Brazen Outlaw EDH deck...
Lol For some reason I thought this would be about the worst cards with cycling. I was wrong, but pleasantly happy with the list!
I had forgotten about the banding lands....for good reason clearly
I think the hematite talisman would actually be good in a krenko deck as a way to go infinite if you can get a skirk prospector out first (unless summoning the new goblins would not trigger the effect)
It would not. You have to cast a spell every time.
I wouldn't say that Banding is a bad mechanic from a power standpoint. It's not great but it's reasonable and in limited, it's pretty good. You wouldn't want to pay extra mana for it on a creature but if you got it tossed onto something, it would be worth talking about. The issue with banding is that it's not intuitive and works differently on offense and defense. It's fine if combat just goes through without interruption but when things start dying or changing abilities, what happens is not obvious and it leads to more questions than is needed.
Made a five color Planeswalker's __________ deck back in the day. It was horrible. But fun.
Current market pricing indicates just how bad that cycle is.
Quagmires art is pure gold
That quagmire art though
Right on time for breakfast!
Hope you enjoy
Ohh..... I actually have an edh deck that runs the banding lands. I should probably upload it to tappedout at some point. XD