The Ten Most Devastating Red Magic Cards, According to Gatherer – Part One
“Some have said there is no subtlety to destruction. You know what? They’re dead.”
—Jaya Ballard, task mage
When I wrote my now classic article Ten Most Desirable Magic Cards According to Gatherer, I noticed something missing: The color red. Red wasn’t absent by choice. The According to Gatherer series ranks the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ cards in the game by which cards have the most or least stars on Gatherer. I only examine the data, and report on what I find. If red didn’t break the top ten list, then red doesn’t get a top ten card.
Earlier this year, I also wrote The Ten Most Awesome Legendary Commanders According to Gatherer, and discovered a disturbing trend. Not counting a certain five-color Commander, red didn’t break top ten among Legendary Creatures, either. Jaya Ballard tried to represent, but she finished at a discouraging 17th place. What’s wrong with red?
Part of the problem is the nature of the game. Red is defined by dealing damage directly. The goal of Magic is to drop your opponent from twenty to zero life. Therefore, throughout Magic’s history, however much damage red deals in a particular year becomes the base line. When a spell like Pyroclasm is designed, shipped out in packs, and becomes a tier one card, all future creatures will be graded based on if they can survive Pyroclasm, or if their failure to avoid dying to Pyroclasm is relevant. Since Red is the most aggresive, most destructive color, the game must respond to Red’s threats.
The same isn’t neccessary for a Blue control deck, for example. That’s because when it’s obvious a card like Jace, the Mind Sculptor is broken, there’s one good strategy for stopping the card from being abusive; kill the opponent before his or her Jace becomes relevent. Wizards can print cards that help defeat Jace or ban Jace. But they’ll often wait and see if a deck can evolve that’s fast enough to take the Jace-deck down before it gets online. The give and take between the dominant control deck and the aggresive answer deck is what meta-games are made of. If a consistant and aggresive fast deck dominates the environment, however, then Wizards must print trump cards if they don’t want to ban cards. A slow deck cannot evolve to take down a fast deck if the tools don’t exist in the environment. If the other colors in a particular environment can’t respond to Red, there is no game.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at today’s example of a card that didn’t make the top 10 list:
Dragonstorm was a fun, harmless spell when first printed in Scourge. By the time Wizards reprinted it in Time Spiral, the card was a monstrocity. Players could charge up to Dragonstorm’s cost of nine by cracking open Lotus Blooms on turn four, and supplement them with Seething Songs and Rites of Flame. What more, the tools that rocketed you to nine on turn four fed storm. Three land, plus one of each of those four spells, let you dig through your library and dump four Bogardan Hellkites on the table, dealing twenty damage to your flabbergasted opponent. But wait! Your opponent looks at his hand and realizes he has a Cancel! He can counter… a copy of Dragonstorm. Meanwhile, he’s taken fifteen damage, and staring down a trio of dragons.
Dragonstorm has multiple qualities necessary to make it on our list today. It’s goofy, explosive, disasterous for the opponent, simple to build around and open-ended (you don’t need to play with Bogardan Hellkite. You don’t even need to race up to it using fast mana. You could always play the card in a ‘fair’ way by tapping nine lands and dropping three Shivan Dragons into play with a couple Ornithopters). But Dragonstorm demands you build a deck a certain way to take full advantage of it. And Dragonstorm doesn’t play well with red’s core strategy. Barbarians don’t waste time on researching ancient artifacts, or erecting complex defensives. While armies strategize and bureucrats negotiate, barbarians swarm your village, set fire to your crops, rape your horses and ride off on the women.
The value of most red cards aren’t a mystery to be cracked, but is written on the face of the card. And while numerous broken red cards have slipped between the cracks, the real value of red is consistancy. Red’s thrust is to murder the opposition. No hidden agendas—no surprises. Red wants to wreck your stuff, then end you. Each red card piles on top the last to achieve its ultimatate goal. Its those cards, with clear murderous intent, that fill the ranks of the the ten most devastating red cards according to Gatherer.
Honorable Mentions – Goblin Sharpshooter…
…and Siege-Gang Commander
~
Landing at numbers 14, 12 and 11 are some of the nastiest Goblins in the game. Unlike Dragonstorm, these cards define the ideal ‘kill you’ red strategy. Goblin Lackey does ask to be in a Goblin deck to hit peak peformance, but unlike Dragonstorm, the Lackey can drop any one of 300 Goblins on the table on round two (including Boggart Shenanigans and 23 changeling creatures), and counting. With these three cards in hand and a couple of Mountains, a typical game could look like this:
Player One, Turn One: Play Mountain. Cast Lackey.
Player Two, Turn Two: Play Forest.
Player One, Turn Two: Play Mountain. Swing with Lackey, connect, and drop a Siege-Gang on the table.
Player Two, Turn Two: Play Forest. Cast Lotus Cobra. End of turn, Player One sacrifice a goblin token and knocks the cobra off the board.
Player One, Turn Three: Swing with the team. Connect. Drop a Goblin Sharpshooter into play.
Player One can still cast another spell with his untapped lands. Or not. It doesn’t matter, since Player One is crushing their opponent. Not only have they dealt six damage, but they’re presenting a small army. And Goblin Sharpshooter is ready to deal incidental damage into the opponent if Player Two shows a large blocker, or wipe the opponent’s board if that player plays multiple small blockers instead. That’s both an excellent and reasonable start to any game featuring these three cards. And the crazy thing? You’re not even sure if Player One is playing an aggro deck. For all we know, this is a control deck who lucked into a fast start. Nothing about Siege-Gang Commander or Goblin Sharpshooter demands they play into an aggresive strategy, and if you’re already playing 8+ Goblins, why not play with a few Lackeys in your one spot? For all we know, this could be the early game to a wacky Warp World deck. It’s this kind of versatility that the very best cards in Magic are made of, and these three cards didn’t even break the top ten.
Best Comment, made by stygimoloch and DespisedIcon for Siege-Gang Commander, but could have applied to any of these three cards: “An excellently designed card. One of those rare creations which Timmy, Johnny and Spike can all appreciate equally.” “And Vorthos as well.”
~
Number Ten – Goblin Recruiter
It’s amazing when you think about it. There was a time when this was a bad card. Sure, you could put any number of goblins from your library on top of your deck, but who wants their next four draws to be Goblins of the Flarg? You couldn’t even pile four Gobln Kings on top of your deck, since they read “Summon Lord” in 1996.
Today, if your opponent plays Goblin Recruiter on turn four, you can expect him to show you Siege-Gang, Siege-Gang, Kiki-Jiki and Krenko. Think about how silly this is for a second: Goblins is already a tier one deck. When you cast this two-cost goblin, it gives you unlimited Vampiric Tutors, since every card you would tutor for is a goblin. Unlimited Vampiric Tutors with no loss of life. And a free goblin. If your deck conists of 100% Goblins and Mountains, when you cast this spell it reads, “Scry – Your Library”.
Cripes, that’s crazy. Now look at Goblin Ringleader.
Yup. For six mana and two cards, you can search your library for any four Goblins and put them in your hand. Oh, and you get a 1/1 and a 2/2 goblin with haste as a bonus. Since both creatures were designed before ‘a good goblin deck’ existed, both cards were priced aggresively. In Apocalypse, Goblin Ringleader might gift you a Goblin Legionnaire or two, which is nice, but isn’t cukoo bananas like the sort of cards the Ringleader peels off the top of decks today. Oh, and since I already invited the Recruiter and the Ringleader, I might as well make it a party, and invite the last combo piece in a stupid good extended deck from 2003: Food Chain.
Untap the turn after casting Food Chain, and cast Recruiter. Stack your deck, then exile Recruiter for 3 red mana. You have access to four mana total, so cast Ringleader. Draw the four goblins off the top of your deck. Exile the Ringleader for 5 red mana. Now play the goblins you drew. What did you tutor for? Did you say three more Ringleaders? Sure! Keep throwing ringleaders onto the compost pile! By the time you’re done casting and recycling ringleaders, you’ll have tutored twelve other goblins into your hand, and have eight red mana in your pool. You can take over from there.
Best Comment, by Gwafa_Hazid:
“Turn 4: Play Goblin Charbelcher.
Turn 5: Play the Recruiter, put about 20 goblins on top of your deck[…]
Rest of game: Laugh Maniacally.”
~
Number Nine – Burning Wish
“Mwah ha ha! You have summoned The Genie of the Girdle! You may have any wish you desire! But know this: your wish will come with a cost!”
“I wish to destroy all my enemies, oh genie! What price will I be forced to pay for such extreme magics!”
“Ah! A destructive spell, indeed! The cost is that I will no longer be your friend!”
“um…”
“Yes?”
“That’s it?”
“What do you mean ‘That’s it?’ A genie’s companionship is a valuable thing, indeed. Think of all the nights we could have spent together, I, regailing you with tales of time immemoriale!”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult, or anything. But I thought you’d, you know, maim my body and foul my spirit or something. Perhaps curse three of my offspring for every man killed through my hatred and avarice, or something of that nature.”
“Oh no, that would be mean! To offer someone anything they desire, but make the salvo to their conundrum ironically worse than their current predicament? What would be the point? No, no, you just lose my respect. It’s a pity. I’m sure we could have been friends.”
Two mana. For any sorcery you want. Unbelieveable. I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but the wish cycle from Judgement was inspired by (no-longer) fan favorite Ring of Ma’rûf. That card would let you fetch any card from outside the game for five mana. Then pay five more mana, tap and exile the ring. Then you put a card from outside the game in your hand and skip your draw step. Sure you could get any card, but by the time you lined the ring up, you probably only wanted a select number of game finishers. Why not just make the game finisher one of your original sixty cards?
That thought process must have rolled through Wizards developers heads when they tweaked this card. Wouldn’t it be nice to have Burning Wish be cheap, so you could cast it on round two and could cast the spell you wished for next turn? Sure would! While we’re at it, why don’t we invalidate every red tutor spell printed before or after this card? Sounds great!
Best Comment, by NeverendingDreams:
“A Burning Nursery Rhyme
I’ve wished for balance, wished for will,
wished for final combo kills,
I’ve wished for time enough for gains,
for growth and wind and hurricanes,
I’ve wished for what I most desired,
and–once–to set myself on fire;
I’ve wished Tutor could seal the deal;
I’ve wished to spin the golden wheel.
My wishes carried me the day,
until they took three-fourths away.
That brought an end to all my rhymes…
but I still dare to dream, sometimes.”
~
