The Six Most Boring Magic Cards, According to Gatherer – Part One

We’ve witnessed the worst Magic has to offer, and the best.  There’s only one way left to go, and that’s a dive straight into the mouth of malaise.  Welcome to the six most boring blah, blah, blah Gatherer.

This past month, I lead an expedition on the S.S. Banal to discover the heart of humdrum.  I wasn’t searching for simple tediosity;  I wanted the exact combination of images and words to make you slump.   I wanted the type of card that reminds you there’s plenty of laundry to do.  I wanted a card that instilled total apathetic breakdown.

My largest roadblock, however, is the format I use to rank cards.  You see, in my ‘According to Gatherer’ article series, I don’t decide which cards win or lose.  I go to Gatherer, look at how people vote, and let the masses choose for me.  Most of my time is spent figuring out why the the collective Magic playing audience voted the way it did.  It’s easy to use Gatherer to find what the most desirable and despised cards in Magic are.  But what number do you use to express a complete disinterest?

Since Gatherer allows you to cast a vote between 0.5 and 5.0 stars, my first attempt was to take the dead middle, 2.75, and build my article around that.  The cards were promising, but far too interesting.  Whirling Catapult and Charmed Pendant aren’t good cards, but they’re good at making you wonder how they can be made good.  Disrupting Scepter is a boring card, but has its uses.  Heck, I pack one in my Isamaru Commander Deck, just to knock the last few power cards out of my opponents’ hands.  Phyrexian Hulk shows promise,  but if I’m to admit that Phyrexian Hulk is the most boring card in Magic, I need to do it while staring into the eyes of Obsianus Golem.  I just can’t bring myself to do that.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

The problem is that too few people ever click half a star.  Most people don’t even know the option exists.  You’re much more likely to get a rating of 2.75 out of 40 votes when thirty people click three stars and ten click two, then to when twenty click five and twenty click point-five.  75% of the audience thought these cards were acceptable.  That won’t do.

My next thought was to cater to an audience unlikely to click on half stars and use 2.50.  That didn’t fair much better.  While 2.50 isn’t exactly exciting, it turns out that it’s the correct number for ‘Most awesome Magic card names’, supplying us with Kjeldoran Skycaptain, Nightshade Schemers and Axelrod Gunnarson.  I was reasonably uninterested in Brassclaw Orcs, but… well… you know.

We could have had a good life together! Had us a place of our own. But you didn’t want it! So what we have now is The Song of the Artificer! Everything’s built on that, and that’s all.

This target number won’t work either.  Which makes sense since 2.50 isn’t boring; it’s average.  On average, I enjoy playing Magic, so the average Magic card is enjoyable.  Clearly, we need to sink far lower down the scale than 2.50.  But a problem bubbles up the further we plunge down the scale.  At some point, we sink to a layer where the cards stop being so bad they’re uninteresting, and start becoming so bad they’re offensive.  Or, to some players, they start being so bad that they’re exciting again.  There’s a subset of players who enjoy tripe like Chimney Imp because they envision a day when they destroy their opponent with twenty points of Chimney Imp to the face, and that will be a glorious, glorious day.  Personally, I love the two star format, where players must build a sixty card deck using cards ranked two stars or lower.  It’s a format where people play Cavern Crawler because it’s a reasonable blocker.

This thing has Mountainwalk, too? Bonus!

In despair for the correct number, I brought my quandary to a friend who flipped the question on me.  Perhaps, I should find the most boring card in Magic, then use that card’s rating to determine what the other cards surrounding it are.  But what is the most boring card in Magic?  I asked Google.  And, man, Google was dead right.  If I found another, more boring card out there than number one on this list, then I’d be so apathetic, I wouldn’t care what I’d do.

By the way, the magic number is 2.071, which, now that I’m reflecting on it, makes sense.  2.071 hovers right above the line where the card becomes unplayable, but it’s something you’d play only if you there was no other option.  These are the ‘Too lazy to get up and fetch the remote’ cards.  The ‘I guess there’s nothing else in the fridge, so tangerines for dinner it is’ cards.  The ‘Personally, I think sweatpants will be the next big fashion statement’ of Magic cards.

~

So I heard Laura is going out with someone from Human Resourses. You’ll never guess who. Mostly, because I don’t know, either.

Honorable Mention – Uproot

Uproot gets honorable mention because 21 votes brought it to 2.071 stars.  In a weird twist of events, all the other cards on this list are exactly 2.071 stars with 28 votes.  My best guess?  Twenty-six people voted two stars, and two voted three stars for each and every card.  Crazy.  I have no idea how to get to 2.071 from 21 votes, though, and I’m far too lazy to run the numbers.

Uproot is an excellent example of what it takes to get on this list.  When you cast it, your opponent skips their next draw step, and is minus one land drop.  But by drawing uproot, you already missed your draw step, and you probably missed a land drop.  If you didn’t miss a land drop, you sure did miss your chance to use your mana on a spell that mattered.

Like Chad from Marketing, this piece of cardboard is mostly here to waste your time.  Chad has his advantages.  You don’t mind listening to him talk about Laura from Accounting, since you aren’t raring to get back to work.  And Chad comes with Arcane, which means that, even though this card is a giant waste of time, you can piggyback other effects onto it.  When combined with a couple Glacial Rays, for example, this card could read “Pay 8 mana.  Deal four damage to target player, who skips his or her next turn, just like how you already skipped this one.”

Chad even has relevance in a post-Kamigawa world, assuming that world is Zendikar.  Even in landfall heavy Zendikar, though, you’re probably better off packing an extra Forest over a card that sometimes wastes everyone’s time, but on special occasions, really wastes your time to give a creature +2/+2 until end of turn, next turn.  Assuming, of course, that the top card of your library isn’t already a land.

Best comment, made by luca_barreli:  “Pretty funny with Hana Kami and Rootrunner.  And by funny, I mean annoying.”

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“Oh, come on! How do I always end up in this dimension?!”

Number Six – Tuknir Deathlock

Tuknir Deathlock followed it’s own path to 2.071 stars with 28 votes.  This creature isn’t boring, it’s… well… what the hell is this thing?

I mean, I give the card some props.  It tries, yet fails hard, at being boring.  Tuknir’s flavor text tells us that Tuknir often discovers him/herself in the most unusual physical realms.  I believe it, too, since he/she has traveled from the Æther to a plane where everyone is an aluminum imprint, and all that’s left of him/her is a flying head with… is that a triceratops head on Tuknir’s head?  Is Tuknir being swallowed by a very portly diminutive triceratops?

The power level of creatures has come a long way.  Let’s compare this card to Ghost Council of Orzhova‘s casting cost, shall we?  Now when we look down… ah, screw it.  All I can do is stare at that anaconda/dinosaur waiting to suck my brains out.  That thing is ridiculous.  I fear I must report that when The Grand Creature Type Update took place, Tuknir Dreathlock became a ‘Legendary Creature – Human Wizard’.  That isn’t even close to right.  This card is clearly some sort of ‘Legendary Creature – Dinosaur Shaman’.  Or, actually, it’s probably a ‘Creature – Tuknir’.  I don’t think this thing can be anything but a Tuknir.

Best comment, made by Saxophonist:  “Do anything for Deathlock!  Do anything for Deathlock!”

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The Lord Replied, “The times you filed only one dependent on lines 1 through 5, those are the times I carried your adjusted gross income from line 37 to line 38 for you.

Number Five – Treespring Lorian

Okay, by default, a morph creature can’t be the most boring card in all of Magic.  In order for that to happen, you would need to design the morpher to be as unexciting as possible, layer it with a level of disinterest, then somehow combine the two in a fusion of commonness.  That would be the rough equivalent of living in an apartment complex with an ice cream vendor for your across-the-hall-neighbor who gives you free ice cream whenever he comes home from work, but he’s also a Jehovah’s Witness with some strange fascination with tax codes, so he’s constantly trying to convert you to become a Jehovah’s Witness by comparing Jesus to a standard 1040.  But, hey!  Free ice cream!

This creature sure works hard at being the most boring morph creature of the bunch, though.  It’s expensive to cast and de-morph.  The flavor text is as compelling as a cub scout bragging about his imaginary pack-mates.  The artwork infers that the Lorian should have the least exciting of keyword abilities – Reach – but it doesn’t for whatever reason, making it plain vanilla morph.  The creature type is wrong, since this is obviously some sort of Creature – Monkey Sloth.

And I must admit, I can’t think of many morph scenarios where this is the exact creature you need.  When you de-morph the Lorian, you’re less likely to receive a response of “Arg!  You caught me!” than a response of “Lol, wut?”.  The creature makes sense in Onslaught, since it fits a curve of ever-larger vanilla morphing threats.  But as an individual card in your personal sixty, it’s a joke.  But, hey!  Free ice cream!

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Continue on to Part Two.