Magic: The Gathering invites players to experience a game filled with many intentionally funny cards, which is a great thing to think about when trying to blow off steam after losing a game due to lack of mana.
I love those, but the cards that make me laugh the most are those that come with abilities that are just baffling—and that are still intended for serious competitive play. Let’s look at some of the strangest cards in the history of the game, shall we?
Force of Savagery
Achieving success in a match of MTG might involve engaging in perilous behavior and the employment of straight-up suicidal creatures, but Force of Savagery is a completely different beast.
Even though it has a cost of three and comes with 8 strength, that counts for nothing by itself because landing on the battleground as is will cause it to die immediately, splattered on the pavement. Force of Savagery isn’t a card that merely works better as a combo piece—it’s that very rare card that depends on combos to even stay alive, let alone be useful.
Goblin Bomb
The only predictable thing about goblins is their troublemaking ability. Goblin Bomb is hilarious because it makes the result of a game that’s meant to be about mental wits hinge entirely on luck. Its owner will only have to pay two mana, which is pretty low for something that could obliterate the opponent in 5 turns, but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get the desired outcome out of five coin tosses in a row, considering how they’re meant to be 50/50.
Though Goblin Bomb will hardly prove a reliable killing-blow machine, it might very well work wonders in terms of making your opponent feel highly anxious.
Mogg Assassin
And yet another coinflip, but this time in true hardcore goblin mode. With Mogg Assassin, losing the coinflip won’t cause you to merely delay the detonation of a bomb that will destroy the opponent but actually light the fuse that will result in its owner’s undoing.
Paying three mana for a 2/1 creature that can end up destroying every single one of its owner’s creatures is a ridiculous gamble that only a true goblin-hearted player would go for.
Divine Intervention
MTG is like tennis: It’s very expensive, and every match has a decisive result. I mean, unless you’re playing with Divine Intervention. This is the only card of the game that might force a game to end in a draw. Imagine trusting your deck and abilities so little that you put in a card that isn’t meant to help you win, but also trusting luck so much that you believe you’ll make it until you have the eight mana required to make it work.
Goblin Game
Though Planeshift was conceived as a serious expansion set, I suspect it’s but a greatest hits collection of the dumbest ideas for cards that the people at Wizards had ever come up with. So many of the Planeshift cards are bizarre to the point of feeling like someone forgot to mention that they’re not meant to be serious, and Goblin Game is the best of the bunch.
Did you come to play a card game? Too bad, because Goblin Game forces players to go look for objects, hide them, and then reveal all the concealed objects at once. The one who reveals fewer objects ends up losing half of their HP but rounded up, meaning that no one can ever lose the game to this—but they will never recover their dignity.
Shahrazad
This card has one of the longest texts in the history of the game, but going through the effort of reading and trying to understand it is more than worth it because of all the confused laughter you’ll get out of it. Long story short, Shahrazad has players pausing their current game to start another MTG match inside that one with their remaining cards. All that just to have the winner halving the HP of the adversary.
The best part about it is how there are no rules to stop the madness in case any of these players have more Shahrazad cards, meaning that they can trigger up to eight MTG subgames deep.
Raging River
At this point you’re probably already aware that long texts tend to mean just dumb and confusing abilities. I’d love to have the infamous Sorrow’s Path here, but I’ve previously talked about it in an even more fitting list, so it’s time for Raging River to get the spotlight. For some reason, this enchantment has both players picturing a river, then dividing defending and attacking creatures among the river’s two margins to make the process way more convoluted for everyone involved.
Chaos Orb
Did you ever think wind conditions could stand behind you becoming the greatest MTG player of all time?
This is the only serious card in the history of the game that you need to actively drop on top of the opponent’s side of the play area, but that’s not all. Players will also have to hope that it does a flip during its fall, because only then will it destroy all permanents it comes in contact with. Chaos Orb is such a dumb card from the early days of the game that even Wizards went on to spoof it in the Unglued set.
Illicit Auction
You gotta wonder just how confident the people behind making MTG in the early days were when so many cards just took you away from the actual game. This time, we have Illicit Auction, a card that turns a match into a silly bidding contest that will culminate with the “winner” paying a likely unreasonable amount of HP to gain or maintain control of a creature. Absolutely none of this is worth it in any way.
Quarum Trench Gnomes
A 1/1 creature for the price of four mana is quite a lot—unless it comes equipped with an amazing ability. Quarum Trench Gnomes’ ability is extremely topical, but also annoying to the point of getting the right opponent to ragequit. These little fiends can render plains incapable of producing white mana, which is just a vile ability that doesn’t exist in any other creature against any other type of land.
Whoever came up with the idea for Quarum Trench Gnomes must have really hated the color White—or was perhaps trying to warn us about the serious dangers of fracking. In that case, then kudos for the incredible foresight and satirical abilities on display.
Published: Aug 15, 2024 04:43 pm