A booster for Magic: The Gathering can be filled with cards that help your opponent rather than the person playing them. It also contains many cards that would prove to be so much more powerful than their designers intended that they had to be banned from most formats.
This is a list of cards that were so incredibly powerful that they completely dominated the game for a while – until they were banished to the Shadow Realm.
Skull clamp
Equipment cards are designed to give the equipped creature power, defense, or additional abilities—or so you might think. The most powerful use of equipment in the game’s history is when you have to sacrifice your own creatures to draw more cards. Skullclamp’s negative toughness modifier kills any creature with toughness of 1 and instantly gives its user two cards.
Skullclamp was an incredibly broken card, ironically much more powerful than it would be if it gave your creatures +1/+1. It appeared in far too many decks because, as an artifact, it didn’t require a specific type of mana to be playable. Skullclamp more than earned its ban in Modern and Legacy formats.
Oko, Thief of Crowns
Planeswalker cards are meant to be incredibly powerful, but there are incredibly powerful ones and then there are Oko-powerful ones. While he lacks an obvious game-winning ability that would make him a great card, he does have one. But first, let’s look at all the other elements that make him excellent. He costs three mana and starts with four loyalty points, which is a pretty low price for a pretty high loyalty value.
Oko is also very useful as he can generate food counters while gaining two more loyalty points and can swap control of creatures between his owner and the opponent. However, Oko’s game-winning ability is the one that turns any creature into an abilityless 3/3 Moose creature. This seems like something you can use to make your 1/1 creatures into stronger Moose, but it’s even better at severely weakening the opponent’s best creatures.
And the best part: This extremely useful ability doesn’t cost him any loyalty points, but instead earns Oko an additional point. Oko naturally became one of the most dominant cards in the history of the game and had to be banned everywhere except Commander and Vintage.
Time walk
This magic is part of the famous “Power 9”, MTG Cards so incredibly powerful you’d think they were made at a time when Wizards of the Coast didn’t care about balancing at all. Spoiler: A lot of them will be on this list.
Time Walk is as simple as it gets: you play it and get a whole extra turn once this one is over, with no penalty. It would be an incredibly overpowered curse even if it didn’t cost a measly two mana.
balance
Plot twist: The one card called Balance is actually anything but fair and balanced.
Despite its claim to balance the game, Balance allowed the sneaky player holding it to dictate the pace of the game. If you had Balance in your hand, you could play slowly, wait for the player to get greedy and bring all their power into play, and then destroy everything they had.
Even worse, Balance costs extremely little, meaning you don’t even need to control a lot of mana to be able to use it. If anything, Balance taught us that there is no such thing as neutrality in war – then it got banned everywhere outside of Vintage, where it’s just restricted.
Remembering the ancestors/ Treasure cruise
Buying cards is one of the best things both outside and inside the game MTG. There are many overpowered cards when it comes to making players draw cards, but none come close to Ancestral Recall. This member of the “Power 9” is an instant that lets you choose a player to draw three cards for just one blue mana.
Later, when Wizards tried to develop a successor to Ancestral Recall, they came up with Treasure Cruise. To give you an idea of how powerful Ancestral Recall really was, Treasure Cruise costs eight mana—unless you can banish seven cards from your graveyard, in which case it costs the same as Ancestral Recall. Unsurprisingly, Treasure Cruise was banned in all formats except Vintage, where it is restricted. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Demonic Tutor
Cards that allow you to draw cards are some of the most powerful cards in the game, as they speed up your play while increasing the chances of you getting what you need to finish off your opponent. Demonic Tutor takes this a step further by allowing you to search for exactly the card you want and then put it into your hand. It’s like unlocking Teleport in a Marathon.
Demonic Tutor has been banned and MTG later, a similar card was released, Vampiric Tutor, which required players to pay two life and only put the card on top of the library, but it only cost one mana and was instant. All in all, Vampiric Tutor was almost as overpowered as its creator and was banned outside of Vintage, where it is restricted.
Necropotence
At first, many considered the disadvantages of skipping the draw phase and having to pay a life for every card they wanted to buy to be absolute deal breakers. Then players began to realize that it was a great deal to get cards when combined with spells that drained life from your opponent, and usually only at the expense of your opponent.
While Necropotence was great on its own, in many combinations it became a godlike enchantment that completely dominated the game for a short time. After its reign in the early 2000s, it was inevitably banned everywhere outside of Commander and Vintage, where its use is restricted.
Tolarian Academy
Unlike Ice Age, the set that featured the amazing Necropotence and not much else, Urza’s Saga is one of the best sets in the history of the game. Aside from the “Power 9” sets, Urza’s Saga is hard to beat, as it features top-notch cards for pretty much every color in the game.
Urza’s Saga is known for land cards like Gaea’s Cradle, which you can transform to gain one green mana for each creature you have in play. That’s nice, but instead of syncing with creatures, Tolarian Acadamy syncs with artifacts, and there are a ton of useful artifacts in the game that only cost 0 mana to enter the battlefield.
It’s not entirely impossible for Tolarian Academy to give you four blue mana on your first turn, making it the most destroyed land in the game’s history. Tolarian Academy is so destroyed that it’s banned everywhere except Vintage, where it’s restricted.
Black Lotus
This is the most famous and expensive card in the history of the game. While much of this value may be due to shady tricks to drive up the price, there is no denying that this is the best card in the history of MTG.
Think about it. A card that gives you three mana for free that you can use for anything. A Black Lotus lets you cast Necropotence or Ancestral Recall plus Timewalking on your first turn. How crazy is that? Well, it’s crazy enough to just be banned everywhere outside of Vintage where it’s restricted.
Cards that play for ante
And what could be worse than a black lotus? Well, earlier, MTG featured a crazy mechanic named Mission. This game mechanic did not give players any real advantage, but rather raised the stakes of the game to an insurmountable level. Ante cards ensured that the outcome of the game resulted in the losing player handing over possession of a card in real life to his opponent.
Although it certainly raised the stakes of the game –Triple Triad from Final Fantasy VIII Style — this mechanic made MTG from a trading card game to a gambling card game, so these cards all had to go in all formats.
If all the ante cards seem to have some kind of cursed aura about them, it’s probably because they could.
