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

These cards are boring.  For those too lazy to read The Six Most Boring Badabing Badaboo – Part One:  Congratulations!  You really latched onto the theme of this article!  Man, will you be confused, though, when I remind you that these cards all received a total of 2.071 stars on Gatherer.  The four most boring Magic cards of all time happen to have the exact same score?  What a crazy coincidence!

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Number Four – Ice Age Flame Spirit

Over the years, we saw Firebreathing creatures with sleeker and sleeker power and toughness to casting cost ratios.  The standard today is  Fiery Hellhound, sporting an agile 2/2 body for .  Granted, you need to dedicate to red… but why would your deck include firebreathing creatures otherwise?  Flame Spirit costs two mana more.  For your hard earned two extra mana, you get a full point of toughness.  Could you imagine how awesome this creature would be if you paid seven mana instead?  Oh, and he’s a Spirit, which is relevant for all you mono-red spiritcraft players.

Heck, the power level of this creature wasn’t good for 1997.  It features the same stats as its mirror card, He-of-the-awkwardly-placed-hand Sea Spirit.  In Time Spiral, creatures were mashed together, adding some abilities, then taking others away to balance the card.  Not Sea Spirit, though, which only gained an ability to become Viscerid Deepwalker,  Now you can suspend your Blue Flame Spirit/Homarid on turn one, so it can pop out of the aether and swing for seven damage on turn five, and even that card isn’t very good.

The text and casting cost are depressing.  However, the rest of the card refuses to stay full-on dull.  That’s some cool artwork by Justin Hampton, made amazing considering it comes from Ice Age.  I mean, we’re talking about a set with a Howl from Beyond whose artwork is only appropriate as an ironic T-Shirt.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t really scream ‘Power!’ to me. Maybe if the wolf was shooting green lightning bolts out of his mouth?”

And check out the flavor text on Flame Spirit:

“The spirit of the flame is the spirit of change.”  -Lovisa Coldeyes, Balduvian Chieftan

Those are some serious arena rock lyrics right there.  I would pay good money to see Lovisa Coldeyes and the Balduvian Horde.  That would be a kick-ass concert.  I’d also pay a chunk of change if they sold T-Shirts with Flame Spirit’s artwork on the front, and its flavor text on the back.  Sure I’d be paying too much for a piece of fabric and a couple iron-ons, but sometimes you got to pay a little extra for the things you enjoy.

Best comment by Goatllama:  “Flame spirits have strange abdominal muscles…”

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Number Three – Master’s Edition II, Ambush Party

Ambush Party, what happened?  There was a time when you were cool, I swear!  When Homelands came out, haste was a rare event.  Ball Lightning and Ashen Ghoul were popular, but, in the early days of Magic, getting your hands on chase uncommons could be daunting.  Ambush Party was a common with haste from a set that didn’t spiral out of control in value.  Before Ambush Party, if your opponent controlled no creatures, you attacked.  After Ambush Party, attacking into an open board wasn’t so clear cut a choice.  Your opponent might be holding a Mountain and ambush you next turn.  Within a couple years, though, Ambush Party was outclassed by cheaper commons with haste like Suq’Ata Lancer and Lightning Elemental.  What went wrong?

In the murky, early days of Magic, designers seemed to center the cost of their common creatures around a formula.  At one mana, you get a 1/1 creature.  Then, for each ability, or for every +0/+1, or +1/+0, you add one mana.  So, for example, a 3/1 would cost 3 mana.  Add first strike for an extra colorless to end up with Halberdier.  Then, for one more mana, add Haste.  Hence, you get Ambush Party.

Except, when you think about it, haste isn’t worth a full colorless mana.  Which would you rather have?  A Halberdier you can play on turn four, and attack on turn five with?  Or an Ambush Party you can cast and swing with on round five if you have five lands in play.  The benefit of surprise is nice, but you can’t surprise your opponent with a spell you can’t cast.  That, and a deck can only sport so many cards in the five slot.  Do you really want to fill that space with more Halberdiers?  Simple creature costs might have been a good guideline when the game was new, but now we know better.  Haste is great, but it’s only worth a full colorless on a creature that can flip control of the game in your favor when it hits (see also Akki Lavarunner.)

Since I’m using entries in Gatherer with exactly 2.071 stars, I couldn’t choose what version of Ambush Party I showcased.  Lucky me, 2.071 is the Master’s Edition version of the card.  Not only is this card embarrassing when compared to contemporary casting costs, the artwork is He-Man action figure reject camp.  Maybe it’s nostalgia talking, but I always found the goofy Mark Poole art and Eron the Relentless flavor text to be more fun, which is what this card should represent.

Instead, The Master ‘s/Fifth Edition art and flavor is laughable in its attempt to make Ambush Party awe-inspiring.  What a terrible artistic choice.

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Number Two – Starter Coral Eel

There are many 2/1 creatures for two mana.  Out of all of them, Coral Eel is the derpiest.

I find it difficult to accept this creature’s power.  It’s a fish.  I know Moray Eels look scary, but if I must guess which would win, an eel or a fisherman, I’d go with the guy who pulls fish out of the water for a living.  In theory this could be a mammoth-sized eel, but unless the clown fish in the bottom right corner of the artwork are dog-sized, then that eel contains as much bulk as a house cat.  It really throws off your sense of scale.  Can you imagine how silly the Benalish Cavalry must feel?  “Yes, sir, we could have outflanked it if we were on the attack.  But the eel had enough forward momentum to control the battlefield.  We had to retreat.  Otherwise, I’m sure we would have lost a few men.”

I say all of this, but most of the problem isn’t the eel’s, but poor communication between the artist and Wizard’s creative department.  Giant moray eels can grow to ten feet long, and weigh up to seventy pounds.  Imagine a boxer with a ten foot reach, packing a seventy pound arm cannon, with rows of jagged, gnashing teeth for a fist.   No wonder these monsters are kings of the coral reef.

Una Fricker, however, downplayed the eels’ power and terrible rows of teeth, leaving us with an eel that thinks the only way to break into the music business is to sing everywhere it goes.  Even the clown fish in the painting aren’t impressed.  Shouldn’t they be swimming away from the large apex predator?  Maybe they’re music fans as well. If I remember The Little Mermaid correctly, though, clown fish don’t got a part in the Under the Sea band.  But oh, that blowfish blow.

Best comment, made by Anathame:  “Combos with tartar sauce.”

Alternate best comment, depending on your maturity level, made by Drewsel:  “WAAAAAAAZZAAAAAAAAAAAP”

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Number One – Portal Border Guard

Ladies and gentleman, we got a winner.  Take a moment, and listen deep within you.  Do you hear that?  That is the sound of your mind shutting off in the presence of a paragon of pocucorontism.  What a thing of beauty; let’s dissect it.  This card features:

♦ A boring name:  Border guards are, by their very nature, the most boring feature of armed conflict.  They wait until something exciting happens.  When something exciting does happen, they tell someone else about it.  But most of the time, they wait.

Heaven forbid these guys should get an adjective to describe where they might come from, or what they’re guarding.  Kinsbaile Borderguard made a bunch of hobbits guarding a border exciting and sexy, somehow.  Not these guys.  These aren’t Jhessian Borderguards, or Western Border Guards or even Human Border Guards.  Nope.  Just some border guards.

♦ A boring casting cost:  Two generic mana and a white.  Nothing special there.

♦ A boring expansion:  I know few people who get excited about Portal, and know many that stop reading my articles when I type the words “Portal Common”.  I was given a choice between the Portal and Starter version.  I chose Portal because of…

♦ A boring creature type line:  “Summon Creature”.  I couldn’t be more proud of this card.  It’s exceeding every expectation I laid out for it.  Because Portal was designed as an introductory set to Magic, Wizards cut back on many details so players would stress less over learning the game.  Evidently, the word “Soldier” was far too much for the fragile new player’s mind to handle.  “What the heck is this now?  A Soldier?  The last card I looked at said it was a Goblin!  I just learned that people don’t magically disappear when they play peek-a-boo.  How am I supposed to deal with this?”

♦ Non-existing game text.  Just a beautiful blank field of white.

♦ A reasonable, yet unexciting power and toughness.  Horned Turtle may not be exciting, but it fills a crucial role in blue decks as an early blocker.  It holds the ground, while fairies, drakes and merfolk slip around your opponent’s defenses.  Border Guard could fill the same role in white decks, except, it doesn’t need to.  If you’re playing white, you probably included enough defensive creatures to hold off your opponents early threats, and you did it by accident.  ‘Protecting against attackers’ is a by-product of playing white.  Regal Unicorn, for example, is a common in the same set, both acts as an attacking creature and pulls double duty as a border guard the moment the game goes wrong, dropping small critters for the same cost.

The little sword and shield in the power and toughness threatens to make the card more interesting – but every Portal card features them.  We already established that Portal is the most boring set in Magic’s history, so the icons don’t add any intrigue value.

♦  A retread joke of a flavor text (in the passive voice, no less.  It’s like they’re doing it on purpose now).  For those who don’t recognize the reference, (which, I must admit, I’m ashamed we’re in the same article if you don’t recognize what that line is referencing) that’s Magic: the Gathering taking a poke at a Warcraft II quote:

“Join the army, they said.  See the world, they said.  I’d rather be sailing.”

It’s a summation of an old military gripe (with multiple variants in print) attached to the bumper sticker logo “I’d rather be sailing”, which was ubiquitous throughout the eighties.  It’s an old line, but it’s cute.  One of the things that makes that line cute, though, is that it follows the comedy rule of three.  Set-up, support, then kicker.  The quote on Border Guard isn’t cute.  It hinges on the fact that you know the Warcraft quote, and that you understand what made that quote funny, because this card isn’t supplying a punchline.  That’s the flavor text equivalent of “Think of a dirty limerick you once heard.”

♦  The art.  I’m in love with this art:

What, exactly, is that guard pointing at?  Because it looks like Kev Walker spilled some coffee on this painting, decided that the right side of the card didn’t meet his expectations, set the painting aside, then accidentally submitted it to Wizards before he got a chance to draw in an attacking army.  What are these guys guarding against?  What are they guarding?  Are they even in a guard tower?  Or is this someone’s front porch?  Maybe the guy in green is training dolphins, and this painting takes place after the dolphin jumped up and took the fish out of his hand?

Here’s another question:  Which one of these guys is the guard?  Because this card’s name is singular: ‘Border Guard’.  Is the Border Guard the guy in brown, who was all psyched to get his painting taken, only to be interrupted by his older brother?  He doesn’t look too happy to be paintingbombed.  “You remember planking?  Yeah!  Yeah!  That was 2011.  There’s this new thing called ‘pointing’.  I’m pointing!”

I don’t know.  There’s no context for anything.  This is a painting of two dudes standing uncomfortably close to each other.  And in its own, very boring way, it somehow achieved specialness.  It’s a very special card, and we are all worse because of it.

Best Comment from Goatllama: “‘Click random on the Gatherer, find interesting cards!’ they’d said.”

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