The Ten Most Devastating Red Magic Cards, According to Gatherer – Part Two

Number Eight – Apocalypse

The card so good, they named a set after it.  But not before they made a Playstation game out of the card, starring Bruce Willis.

Apocalyse represents an enigma on this list.  Scanning through player comments on the internet, many agree that Obliterate is the better card.  But they don’t vote that way.  Obliterate comes with a respectible 4.268 stars on Gatherer.  But Apocalypse sports a far superior 4.622.  Obliterate can’t be countered and clears the field without wrecking your hand.  Why does Apocalyse have a higher rating?

1).  The ability to not be countered is overrated.  Your opponent needs to have a counterspell in hand and be ready to use it.  It happens.  But for most games, that’s a rare event.   If you really don’t want Apocalyspe to be countered, though, you could always use Boseiju, Who Shelters All.

2).  Not discarding your hand is overrated.  You’re playing red.  By the time you cast a board wiper, you’ve probably expended your best threats.  That’s why you want a reset button in the first place.

3).  It’s far cheaper.  If you’re playing mono-red, and you survived to eight mana, you probably didn’t need to clear the board anyway.  You’re doing fine.  Instead, cast Insurrection, take control of your opponent’s creatures, and win the game.

4).  It gets rid of everything.  None of this destroy-without-regeneration bull.  This is The Apocalypse!  Human sacrifice!  Dogs and cats living together!  Mass Hysteria!  Zombies, Trolls, Darksteel, Legendary immortal goblins?  Gone.  In many games, this will act as both Wrath of God and Morningtide.

5).  It gets rid of everything.  This is a red card that exiles enchantments.  The number of other mono-red cards that reliably knock a single enchantment off the board?  Zero.  Apocalyse exiles all of them.  Oh, and this must be the single funniest sideboard answer to your opponent’s Oblivion Rings.

6).  It. Gets. Rid. Of. Everything.  Nicol Bolas may claim he’s “survived more apocalypses than you’ve had chest colds,” but he’s full of crap.  This is the end of times.  Nothing, not even planeswalkers, can survive an event horizon.

Apocalyse only achieved grazing success with tournament decks, but as the game continues to grow, Apocalypse continues to dump more and more permanents into the waste bin.  And over time it’s picked up some tricks.  There’s a slew of suspend and madness cards just itching for another Apocalyse.  Not bad for a card your opponent is bound to underestimate.  I know plenty of players who scream bloody murder when they glimpse Armageddon, but think The Apocalyse is a joke.

Best comment, by PhyrexianAdvocate:  ” …Practical? Not really… But it gets 5 stars for being the absolute peak of removal. Nothing else surpasses this in terms of clearing the board of stuff. And the best part? It’s red.

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Number Seven – Simian Spirit Guide

Look at that beautiul monkey.  See those brawny bulges?  That’s the form of a healthy tournament enviornment.

The first winningest Magic decks were about control.  By the time Mirage/Ice Age rocked your face, though, Magic became a game of ‘Who could combo-win first?’.  Winning on turn three was “playing it safe”.  And the mechanic which players abused to achieve this meta-game?  Fast mana.

Fast mana got you there, off the back of artifacts and enchantments that added more mana than they cost to cast, or off the back of one shot instants whose drawback was a lack of long term resources for an end game that didn’t exist.  Oh, sure, all those abusive open-ended engine cards didn’t help.  But combo would’ve played fair if there wasn’t all this bonus mana kicking around.

In those crazy times, Elvish Spirit Guide, the planar shift of this card, was just okay.  It was less explosive than Dark Ritual and more mana specific than Lotus Petal.  Still, it was technically a green creature, so it merited in decks which intereacted well with creatures.  It was yet another abusive piece of the fast mana puzzle, but few people rallied against it, since it saw play in ‘good’/’interactive’ combo decks.

But what would happen if a piece of fast mana fell out of 1997, changed color, and dropped into Time Spiral boosters?  Would combo wreak havoc once again on an unsuspecting Magic world?  Nope.  Decks flirted with Simian Spirit Guide, but it was never a staple.  Standard was a well-balanced machine throughout Time Spiral’s run, and interaction between decks remained at an all time high.

That’s a lie.  I told you, in the first part of this article that Dragonstorm dominated Standard.  Man, you’ve got a terrible memory.  The reason people didn’t use SSG was because it didn’t count as a spell, so it didn’t add to your storm count.  Besides, the other three fast mana spells provided more mana.

Best comment, by unclebabylon, who does a much better job than I did summing up why this card is rated so high:  “This spirit ape can quickly set you a turn ahead in any deck without your friends feeling bullied or your wallet being plundered.  5/5.”

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Number Six – Goblin Piledriver

Are you sick of goblins yet?  Don’t worry, Piledriver is the real Goblin King, and has it’s own prestigious title of ‘highest rated goblin in the game’.

And for a good reason: Piledriver plays straight into the goblin game.  He costs two, and swings for three or five damage on round three.  Because, you know, the goblin player probably played a goblin on turn one, and probably played a goblin with haste on turn three.  Piledriver gets bigger from there on in.

Then there’s protection from blue.  Let me tell you, sitting across the table from Piledriver with a Tidehollow Strix is a frustrating experience.  When the goblin swarm comes in, you must block.  The creature you want to block is the ginormous 9/2 goblin, but that’s not an option.  You have to trade with a goblin token, take twelve damage, and pray for a non-blue answer.  No Doom Blade?  Game over.  It doesn’t matter how many emergency Kraken Hatchlings you can drop.  You can’t block the goblin that matters.

The real shame of this goblin?  He’s putting a soldier in a sleeper hold.  The card’s name is Goblin Piledriver.  Why isn’t this goblin flipping a blue wizard over his shoulder, leaping in the air, and driving the wizard’s head on the ground between his legs?

Best Comment by boneclub: “I can just imagine that guy with a shrill girly scream ‘MERCY!'”

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Number Five – Manamorphose

Merry Christmas!  I didn’t know what you wanted, so I got you this gift certificate.  Use it at any store for two mana in any combination of colors.

Manamorphose does nothing in the best way possible.  It’s the only card in the game to cost zero resources when you play it, and immediately replace itself.  Putting four Manamorphose in your deck means you’re starting the game with 56 cards.  The only drawback is it makes opening mulligans tricky, since you don’t know what cards are on top of your library.  Here, I’ll help you with that decision.  If you have one land in your hand, you should mulligain.  If you have two lands and at least one Manamorphose, you should keep that hand.  Feel better?

If all this card said was “Draw a card” it would be a fine addition to your deck.   Many mono-red decks run Manamorphose, ‘just cuz’.  But the mana fixing this card performs is some of the best one-shot filtering in the game, letting you play intensive mono-colored spells, like Dawn Elemental with little trouble.  Two Manamorphoses and any five basic land, one of which is a Forest or Mountain, gives you access to splashy and powerful five color spells.  Ever see a Red/Green deck cast a Counterspell  out of nowhere on round two?

And have you seen what this card does to the Izzet Guild in Ravnica?  Storm?  Talrand, Sky Summoner?  Charmbreaker Devils? Drawing Manamorphose isn’t ‘winning the lottery’ awesome.  It’s more like ‘scanning the back of the newspaper and finding a coupon for a free haircut at a new barbershop’ awesome.  Except you’re the editor of your deck, and can guarantee free coupons on a regular basis.

Best comment, by SeiberTross: “Shadowmoor: Flipping tables since 2008.”

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Number Four – Lighting Bolt

Ka-Pow!  A common from Alpha, reprinted nine times, and the best piece of direct damage in the game.  Nothing beats Lightning Bolt.  In any standard environment Lightning Bolt is printed in, it’s a red-deck-automatic-four.  It’s one of the few one cost commons you’d consider spalshing for in a draft.  It’s so good, when the pendulum swung away from direct damage spells, it swung hard, giving us two of the most reviled cards in the game, Scorching Spear and Thermal Blast.  It’s so good it popularized the term ‘bolt-bait’ as a means of expressing whether a creature could withstand three damage.  Aproximately 57 out of 92 creatures in Alpha were bolt-bait.  74.7% of all 6,940 creatures in Magic have three or less toughness.  72.4% of the creatures in the game are not black or artifact creatures, which means that Lightning Bolt theorhetically kills more creature than staple classic kill spell Terror.  And if you don’t need to kill a creature?  Three to the head!

There are few planeswalkers who don’t enjoy tossing lightning bolts from their fingers.  Even Wizards couldn’t resist reprinting this card in Magic 2010 and Magic 2011, despite how it outclassed every other direct damage spell ever printed.  The card rides right on the edge of sane, but power comes with a price.  When Wizards made the tough choice to pull Lightning Bolt from Fifth Edition, they did so because Lightning Bolt prevented them from printing another good direct damage spell.  Too many cards too similar to Lightning Bolt would turn any tournament environemnt into a game of “Who can toss the most effecient packages of damage at an opponent for the cheapest cost?”.  When Lightning Bolt was pulled, Shock was printed in Tempest, which became an automatic four-of in all red tournament decks despite the fact that it did the same damn job for two-thirds the power.  When Lightning Bolt rotated out of Magic 2012, the same reasoning was cited.  Lightning Bolt polarizes red, and reduces variablity in deck building.  Shock took it’s place, again, in 2012.  But not before Lightning Bolt helped Jund decks dominate in 2011.

Best Comment made by Lyoncet:

“The card text is so agonizingly close to haiku:

Lightning Bolt, when cast,
Deals three damage to target
Creature or player.

How serene. Alternatively:

There once was a sculptor named Jace
With self-confidence slightly misplaced:
He could brainstorm for free
And unsummon Tarmy,
But he died to a Bolt to the face.”

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Number Three – Blood Moon

So, I see you’ve got some crazy four-color combo/control deck there.  That’s cool.  Mind if I flip through your deck for a second?  Wow, this thing is packed to the gills with Planeswalkers.  That and, like, one of every good rare you can get your hands on.  The mana base alone must have set you back fifty or sixty dollars…

Mostly Shock and Fetch Lands?  I heard the price of Shock Lands went down since they were reprinted in Return to Ravnica block.  What’s that?  Polluted Delta costs $100 per nowadays?  You spent $740 on lands alone?

I tell you what, why don’t I pull out my deck and we’ll play.  It’s nothing special.  Just a mono-red deck with a few creatures, some burn spells and four copies of a goofy enchantment from Ninth Edition.  Your deck can handle enchantments right?  I mean, you’re playing four colors.  Red’s the color that can’t destroy enchantments, so you shouldn’t have a problem.  You’ll probably crush me.

I like playing red.  Do you like playing red?  Nah, you like playing red.  Everybody likes playing red.  I tell you what; I’ll give you a deck full of Mountains in a little while, and you can see how you like it.

Best comment, by PhyrexianAdvocate: “It breaks Valakut’s back. It trashes five-color control. It decimates landfall. This one card single handedly hoses about 80% of the current professional mana base.”

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Number Two – Goblin Welder

Okay, you caught me.  I lied again.  Goblin Welder, not Piledriver, is the higest rated goblin in Magic.

But unlike Piledriver, Goblin Welder isn’t really known for being a must-have in Goblin decks.  Oh, you could play him there.  In fact, in some Goblin decks, he’s the best one drop you can play, switching out the occasional mana rocks for a Pyrite Spellbomb.  In a goblin deck, though, Goblin Welder can only be awesome.  He can’t live up to his full potential there.

Goblin Welder’s real job is to break Magic.  Who says you need lands to cast spells?  Hogwash.  Play with one land, and the most expensive tools at your disposal.  Did your opponent destroy your gigantic monstrocity?  That sucks.  It’s a pity your opponent two-for-oned you, but it was worth it to sacrifice an artifact and the Goblin Welder to try to lock your opponent out with an early Nullstone Gargoyle.

What’s that you say?  You don’t sacrifice the goblin to use his ability?  You just tap him?  You can use his ability every turn?  What?

What?!  You mean I can keep dumping cheap artifacts on the table, and exchange them for Nullstone Gargoyle over and over again?  But if my opponent isn’t destroying my gargoyle, I can flip between two Ichor Wellsprings, drawing two cards per turn for the rest of the game? Well, all right then!  But… with this guy kicking around, my oppoent’s bound to start packing some cheap graveyard removal.  I suppose it’s only fair that my opponent can respond to a Welder activation, exiling my graveyard, so I look like a doofus when I sacrifice my artifact and get nothing back in return.  What?

What?!  You mean if I can’t make the exchange, I don’t, and my artifact remains on the battlefield?  Wow, this card is good!  But it’s only going to work right if I have both a cheap artifact to cast and an expensive artifact to discard.  Otherwise, it’s just a 1/1 Goblin for one, with no offensive abilities.  What?

What?!  I don’t have to target my own artifacts?  If my opponent sacrifices a Darksteel Relic to Tinker and slams a Darksteel Colossus on the table, then I can activate the Welder, put the Relic back on the table, and force the player to shuffle the Colossus back in his library?  That I can stop an artifact creature from attacking every turn by switching it with another artifact mid-combat?  That has got to be one of the most power cards I’ve ever heard of!  Well, if Polluted Delta costs a Benjamin, then I’m sure I can’t afford an even older rare that’s on the reserve list, and therefore has never been, or can be, reprinted.  What?

What?!  Seven dollars?  For one of the most broken rares in the game?  What?!!

Best comment, by NeverendingDream: “Soot counters getting you down? Reset that pesky smokestack and start afresh! Renew your Tangle Wire today! Goblin Welder, Just one red mana, while supplies last.”

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Number One – Wheel! Of! Fortune!

Hi gang!  You ready for this?  You won the toss up, so it’s your turn.  The category is People and Places.  Five thousand dollar jackpot.  Vanna’s ready at the board.  Go ahead and give that wheel a spin!

Three mana, Seven cards and no chance to spin a Bankrupt.  That’s… that’s a lot of cards for three mana.  Let’s take a step back for a second and wipe the casting cost off this card.  How much should this spell really cost?

Because Wizards tried their hands at rebottling the lightning from Wheel of Fortune many times over.  One early attempt was an Urza’s Legacy card called Memory Jar.  It held many similar features to Wheel of Fortune, except you had one turn to cast all seven of those cards, or they were discarded.  It cost a total of five mana, and was the only card ever to be emergency banned between seasonal bannings.  In fact, the card broke Urza Block so wide open, it was banned before booster packs hit store shelves.

Wizards took a long time to settle down, and reforge the card after that experience.  Yet, between Time Reversal and Reforge the Soul, it’s clear Wizards thinks “Each player discards their hand and draws seven cards” can cost five mana today.  Don’t get me wrong.  Those spells are very, very good.  But a five mana Wheel doesn’t break Magic in the same way a three mana one does.  How could a measly two mana make that much of a difference?

There’s an old decklist that might shed some light here.  It comes from Duels of the Planeswalkers.  Well, no, not that Duels of the Planeswalkers.  I’m talking the original Microprose Magic: the Gathering game for Windows 95′s expansion ‘Duels of the Planeswalkers’.  First, before we go on, I have to say that game was awesome.  The reviews online lead me to believe the game still holds up after sixteen years.  There are plenty of features, like an overland map and roleplaying elements, that modern renditions of Duels of the Planeswalkers haven’t even touched on.  Seek it out if you want; it’s an excellent piece of gaming history.

Anyhow, in the Duels of the Planeswalkers expansion there’s a decklist which pretends there’s no banned or restricted list in Magic, but also plays by the sixty card deck, maximum four of any card rule.  I’m operating off of memory, so I only have a partial decklist in my head.  When I come across the real decklist, I’ll update this article.  But, for now, the deck looked something like this:

4x Wheel of Fortune
4x Timetwister
4x Time Walk
4x Ancestral Recall
4x Lightning Bolt
4x Psionic Blast
4x Hurkyl’s Recall

–
4x Black Lotus
4x Mox Ruby
4x Mox Sapphire
4x Mox Emerald
4x Mox Pearl
4x Mox Jet
4x Sol Ring
2x Volcanic Island

On round one, you dump all your fast mana on the board, maybe slip out a Lightning Bolt, then cast Wheel of Fortune.  Draw seven new cards, including more fast mana, and maybe draw three cards off an Ancestral Recall.  Cast Hurkyl’s Recall, return the artifacts  to your hand, and recast them, putting them into play untapped.  Cast Psionic Blast, deal four to the opponent, Time Walk, taking an extra turn after this one, then Timetwister, drawing seven more cards  On your extra turn, untap your lands.  Play, play, play until your opponent is burried under a pile of Lightning Bolts and Psionic Blasts.

The deck was awesome to solitaire against computer opponents.  The raw power was magnificent.  After playing far too many times for me to own up to it, I guaged that deck yielded a 70% chance of winning on round one (which includes extra turns taken from Time Walks).  Given a chance to untap, the deck jumped to a 97% chance of winning by turn two.  I never saw the deck fail to win on turn three.

The fast mana from Alpha was unfair.  But getting a lot of mana, fast, means nothing without a way to exploit it.  Timetwister and Wheel of Fortune gave you that means.  Back to back, those two cards serve up a one-quarter slice of your deck.  What you do from that point on is up to you.  Most people choose to win the game.

Best comment, from berserkerberserker:  “Shoot outside of the screen to reload!”

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