Every Magic player knows that certain rares are more playable in popular formats than others, but some rares just want to make you scratch your head and ask why Wizards of the Coast ever made that card. There must be some hidden synergy or strategy that could make it viable, you’d think, or did the designers underestimate the intelligence of an average MTG consumer and intentionally made them terrible to test their card evaluation skills? Here are 34 of the worst Magic cards ever printed, and I’ve included their current market value (at the time of this writing) as well as the original sets they were printed in. Most of these cards are useless or extremely situational to make them work while others are too weak to be considered worthy of being a rare.
Set originally printed: The Dark Originally printed in 1994’s The Dark, Sorrow’s Path is considered to be one of the worst rare cards ever printed in Magic’s history for multiple reasons: To make useful: Your opponent will have to block with two of their creatures. Note that they are still deciding the initial blockers while being aware that you have Sorrow’s Path on the field, so they can just choose the opposite of what Sorrow’s Path can make them do, right? On top of that, when you tap it, it deals 2 damage to you and each creature you control so those creatures you attack will get 2 additional damage, so they will most likely die in combat! Oh, did I mention that it’s a land that doesn’t add mana? So pretty much this card is useless if your opponent doesn’t have two blocking creatures. The only thing I can see valuable in this card is its old-school art illustrated by Randy Asplund-Faith. Set originally printed: Ice Age For triple blue mana, you get an enchantment that can change the color of mana plains, swamps, mountains, and forests produce. There might be a scenario that can make this ability useful but with a cumulative upkeep of one colorless mana and two blue mana, is it really worth it? Just in case you don’t know, cumulative upkeep is a keyword ability on permanents that requires the permanent’s controller to pay an increasing cost each turn, or else sacrifice the permanent, so this card will need to spend mana every turn just to keep Reality Twist in play, but what for? Its flavor text says “Nothing is what it seems” but I think it just seems nothing. Set originally printed: Ice Age Many blue creatures allow you, the owner or controller, to draw a card when they attack or deal combat damage, but Sibilant Spirit does the opposite: It lets your opponent draw when it attacks! Letting your opponent draw can be a drawback in some powerful cards or cards with low mana costs for their great value, but all you get here is a 5/6 creature with Flying for 6 mana. We’ve seen better commons and uncommons than this crap. Set originally printed: Prophecy Back way before the vehicle card subtype were designed, Wizards of the Coast printed artifact creature cards that are essentially vehicles but don’t need require crewing, but Keldon Battlewagon lets you tap a creature similar to the crew mechanic - first introduced in the Kaladesh set - to give it power. So this five-to-cast 0/3 artifact creature that can’t block and must be sacrificed at end of combat if you attack still requires another creature to get power? Why not just attack with the creature you used to “crew” it? But wait, this one has Trample! Maybe this card will go up a few cents if there’s a combo that lets you deal damage quadruple to the creature’s power you sacrifice, but seriously, why did they ever print this card? Set originally printed: Planeshift Any land card that lets you tap a mana for any color is usually efficient but Forsaken City is a bad deal: You have to exile a card from your hand during your upkeep to untap it. I wouldn’t even put it in a five-color Commander deck when there are clearly better alternatives to getting any color of mana. Set originally printed: Alpha I remember seeing Force of Nature when I was a kid and thought that it’s an awesome 8/8 creature with Trample and it has a lot of green mana in its mana cost, and more green mana on its text box. Plus the artwork by Douglas Shuler reminds me of Predator. It’s easy for green to generate a bunch of mana every turn if you have the right cards so preventing the 8 damage-to-self drawback is probably easy in certain builds, but if you have to do it every turn just to prevent that amount, why not just use the extra mana for more efficient strategies? Maybe if you have a card that lets your opponent control this card, it can be a win condition Set originally printed: Alpha For one mana, you can give a creature an ability to band until end of turn. Why not just have a cheap creature to help in combat instead of having this ugly card on the field? Here’s how banding works: (Any creatures with banding, and up to one without, can attack in a band. Bands are blocked as a group. If any creatures with banding a player controls are blocking or being blocked by a creature, that player divides that creature’s combat damage, not its controller, among any of the creatures it’s being blocked by or is blocking.) Set originally printed: Legends Wood Elemental is one of the most terrible green creatures ever printed, but like many bad Magic cards, there are ways you can turn its drawback into an advantage. Sure, sacrificing multiple untapped Forests suck, but if having more lands in your graveyard matters in your game-winning strategy while you put a fairly large creature on the board, then it’s not too bad, is it? Its art also reminds me of a cheesy Yu-Gi-Oh! card. Set originally printed: Tempest A 4/4 First Strike creature that punishes you if your opponent doesn’t have a creature is not too bad if dealing damage to yourself is part of your main strategy or if you have Death’s Shadow in play, but for four mana that can keep dealing 4 damage to you every upkeep just hurts. Set originally printed: Legends For 10 mana total, you can make a 1/1 creature that can give an opponent a poison counter. Sure, you can do it once every turn (or more if you can find a way to untap it), but still: 10 mana! Set originally printed: Champions of Kamigawa The Kamigawa block featured a lot of bad and broken Magic cards, but Numai Outcast has to be the worst rare you can possibly get from that block. Bushido ability is not bad but a four-to-cast 1/1 creature that can regenerate if you pay 5 life is just ridiculous. Why is this even rare? Set originally printed: Homelands Many MTG players consider the 1995 expansion Homelands to be one of the worst sets ever released, and one of its rare cards, Apocalypse Chime, would be great if many of the set’s cards are viable in various Constructed formats, but imagine bringing this card in a Commander game, and none of your opponents even play any cards from Homelands. Maybe if there’s a card that can change the expansions of other cards, it could work? Set originally printed: Invasion Back in the day, Wizards of the Coast printed some overpowered cards but they also printed dumb rares like Alabaster Leech. One of the designers probably though 1/3 for one mana was too good, so they had to add a drawback of making your white spells cost one white mana more to play. Core Set 2021 released a similar card called Staunch Shieldmate, and it’s a 1/3 for one white mana with no drawback, and did I mention that it’s a common? I’d feel horrible if I open a pack of Homelands and get this damn leech. Set originally printed: Legends Creatures with plainswalk can’t be blocked as long as defending player controls a Plains, but did the designers ever think the creatures with plainswalk were so threatening that they had to make an enchantment to deal with them? According to the Gatherer, there are only about six creatures with plainswalk. Great Wall isn’t that great at all. Set originally printed: Homelands Speaking of plainswalk, Homelands has another horrible enchantment with “plainswalk” in its rules text: Aysen Highway. For only six mana, all your white creatures gain plainswalk so if your opponent controls Plains, your white creatures’ combat damage will surely go through, right? That’s why you need Great Wall in your sideboard! What were they thinking when they designed Homelands? Set originally printed: Legends Nowadays, Magic players are complaining about the “power creep” in Standard, but I wonder if back in the day, did players complain about “power crap”? Mold Demon will make you think they did. For seven mana, you get a 6/6 creature that forces you to sacrifice two Swamps or it’s buried right away. They didn’t even bother to give it Flying, Trample , or whatever that could make this rare card more rare-like. At least some cards in this list have decent art, but this fungus demon illustrated by Jesper Myrfors is just ugly. It looks like a kindergardener was assigned to make art for a Magic card, and Wizards just didn’t give a crap. Out of curiousity, I also looked up all of the cards illustrated by Myrforts, and most of them just look creepy. Market Price: $0.40 Set originally printed: Ice Age You can probably find dozens of common and uncommon four-to-cast 3powered creatures that are more reliable than Mercenaries. Giving the player an option to prevent the damage for 3 mana is just horrible. Maybe if this card has a bonus effect that triggers when it deals combat damage, it would make sense, but for a 3/3 rare with no other abilities, this is clearly one of the worst. Set originally printed: Odyssey I wasn’t actively playing the Standard format when Odyssey was Standard-legal, but I wonder if there’s actually a viable strategy that requires you to put land cards in the graveyard to unleash a powerful game-winning move. Mudhole was probably desingned as a sideboard card, but what is it good against? Decks that run Life of the Loam? It’s not even legal in Pioneer of Modern. Set originally printed: Arabian Nights Its name suggests that it’s both an Island and a Fish but it’s card type is just a creature and not a land. The design of Island Fish Jasconius is as ridiculous as many Yu-Gi-Oh cards. For seven mana, triple blue, you get a 6/8 fish that doesn’t untap unless you pay three blue mana on your upkeep, but wait, there’s another restriction! It can’t attack unless defending player controls no Islands, and if you don’t have any Islands, you have to bury it! Set originally printed: Ravnica: City of Guilds Blood Funnel is a great example of a card that’s confused. It makes your noncreature spells cheaper to cast, but they won’t resolve unless you sacrifice a creature, so I guess that means you have to build a deck filled with noncreature spells that make enough creature tokens so you can have some creatures to sacrifice to play your other noncreature spells. Still follow? Okay, at least some of us can appreciate the wicked art by Thomas M. Baxa. Set originally printed: Homelands Panned as Magic’s all-time low in game design, Homelands featured some of the worst cards in the game’s history, and Baki’s Curse is another card that made it to this list. The Sorcery’s effectiveness depends on the opponent having creatures with auras (formerly known as creature enchantment) attached on them, but with those buffs, they would most likely be strong enough to withstand the damages that Baki’s Curse deals. It’s useless in formats it’s legal in (Vintage, Legacy, and Commander), and even if it’s legal in Modern, I don’t think any smart player would use this as a sideboard against Bogles. Set originally printed: Homelands Here’s another Homelands card that will make you wonder why some rare cards are designed to suck. Gaining a few life while removing a couple of creatures from defending player’s graveyard may help in some situations but at the cost of preventing the badger’s 2 damage when it’s not blocked? Totally not worth it! And what are the odds that 2/2 badger with no evasion or other abilites will not get blocked? Set originally printed: Starter 1999 You’d think a half-bunny, half-pirahna beast would have some fitting abilities like First Strike or Menace but the only thing that this 6/6 blue rare creature boasts is flavor text that seemed to be ripped from a cheap horror novel. Set originally printed: Starter 1999 Here’s another rare big creature card that does nothing else. Even Colossal Dreadmaw costs 1 less mana to cast than this card, and that dinosaur has Trample. This one is just plain vanilla 6/6, and the art is not even good. Both Vizzerdrix and Trained Orgg are from the Starter 1999 product. Whoever thought making big creatures with no abilities rares was the right idea for beginners clearly made a bad mistake. Set originally printed: Dragon’s Maze Like a kid’s abstract painting, Trait Doctoring looks sophisticated but meaningless in any format. This Sorcery is so situational that it’s extremely hard to find a scenario that will make it work, so that’s why we rarely see this card played in any format. Changing instances of one color word or one basic land type until end of turn doesn’t do much, but wait…it has the lame Cipher ability, so when you deal combat damage to a player with a creature this spell is encoded on, you can do another useless thing. It’s just sad that the fantastic art by Clint Cearly was used in such a bad card. Set originally printed: Prophecy Undercosted creatures with high power and toughness usually come with a drawback, and Mungha Wurm punishes you hard for having a 6/5 creature on the board for only 4 mana. Unless there’s a great benefit to keeping your lands tapped, this creature will just crumble you under its weight just like what its flavor text says. Set originally printed: Fallen Empires In Magic, there are various rare land cards that produce any color of mana, and if they don’t come into play tapped, they usually have other drawbacks to make the card more balanced. Rainbow Vale may be a nice card to pass around in multiplayer Commander formats, but compared to other rare lands that can give you any color of mana you need, this one could give your opponents a mana advantage. Set originally printed: Ice Age Ice Age and Homelands are really two of the worst-designed sets in the history of Magic. Despotic Scepter is one of the more playable cards in this list because there are viable strategies that give you an advantage when you destroy your own permanents, but there are better ways to do that than a one-mana Artifact that usually can only be used once each turn. Sure, it can also deal with permanents you own that your opponents gain control of, but you’d rather include a different card to your deck than this garbage that will be useless 99.5% of the time. Set originally printed: War of the Spark Silent Submersible is clearly the worst rare Vehicle card ever printed. Sure, you can draw a card when it deals combat damage to a player or planeswalker, but you still need to Crew 2 and it doesn’t even have any evasion. Set originally printed: Mercadian Masques There are many Enchantment cards that produce creature tokens that are viable in formats they’re legal in since Enchantments are immune to creature removal and can keep providing creatures to fill the board. However, Security Detail is not one of them. For two white mana, you get an enchantment that could make a 1/1 Soldier token, but you can only activate this ability if you have no creatures and only once each turn. With those stupid restrictions, it would be great if that’s a Super Soldier with multiple game-winning abilities, but it’s just a 1/1 creature. Set originally printed: Judgment There is nothing nightmarish or beastly about this Nightmare Beast. A card that forces you to skip a turn is usually a game-changer but all you get here is a 6/1 Flying that can give you an extra turn when it dies, but what’s the point of getting an extra turn if you will have to lose a turn first? Set originally printed: Visions Suleiman’s Legacy is the best card to take down Djinns and Efreets, but the problem: There are just not enough problematic Djinns or Efreets that would make this card playable. According to The Gatherer, there are just nearly 50 Djinn creature cards ever printed, but back then there were much less. Set originally printed: Saviors of Kamigawa Considered to be among the most useless cards in the entire history of Magic, One with Nothing may be useful with the cards that have the Madness mechanic (you can cast cards for its Madness cost when you discard it), Flashback, and other graveyard-focused strategies, but most of the time, it’s just nothing. Set originally printed: Battle for Zendikar Converge mechanic encourages players to cast the spell with as many color of mana they can. Prism Array rewards you with crystal counters that you can use to tap creatures, so that means for five mana, you can tap up to five creatures. You can even Scry 3 if you have can tap a mana of each color. There are much better ways to spend all five color of mana than just tap creatures or Scry 3. For more Magic: The Gathering news, check out MTGRocks.com.
