The Ten Most Dreadful Black Magic Cards, According to Gatherer – Part One

Black.  The color of death, and the untimely ripping of creatures spirits from the field of battle.  The color of the grave, and of a relentless army that neither eats, sleeps, nor fears.  The color of dark magics to fetch any answer to your greatest desire, for a pittance of your soul.  Black betrays humanity, strangling all opponents in its quest for ultimate dominance.

Black, however, has selective hearing.  Sometimes it listens to the whispers of its corrupt followers and rewards them with terrible magics, and sometimes it chooses not to hear the screams of frustration from those same followers as it jettisons a pile of terrible magics on them.  The problem with Black is one of cost versus reward.  Some spells ask you to pay tribute for ruinous magics, and some spells ruin you while demanding tribute.  Black can be an amoral jerk like that.

As per usual in According to Gatherer, these little monsters aren’t chosen by me, but by the Magic playing public who vote on cards in Gatherer‘s database.  Today, we’ll be descending into the Heart of Darkness via slipping on an over-sized banana peel.  Forget all the tantalizing wonders your geriatric Sunday school teacher warned you the Devil would tempt you with if you played Magic: the Gathering.  We’ll be exploring the cards that same teacher really should have prepared you for.  If you value your soul, turn back now!  Lest you become like me!  A balding, thirty-something game reviewer who writes Magic: the Gathering articles for the fun of it!  Turn away!  Turn away!

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We’re going to do things a bit different today and skip ahead.

Number One – Bog Hoodlums

Good old Bog Hoodlums.  This should come as no surprise for those paying attention on According to Gatherer.  Bog Hoodlums was rated 5th worst card in the 10 Most Reviled Cards list, and third worst in the 2013 update.  It also scored worst black card on both those lists, as well as worst creature with a relevant creature type, most unnecessary use for clash, best way to thoroughly humiliate a locked out opponent, best name for a Magic: the Gathering punk rock band and ugliest unicorn.

Casting and playing Bog Hoodlums is similar to the shame and embarrassment you feel when you realize you voted for the wrong candidate on election night.  And you made the same mistake over fifty times, because you were illegally voting all day in different voting stations in a swing state.  And the only reason why the cops caught you is because local news cameras covering the elections were entranced by the gigantic rip in the back of your pants.  Or, in other words, Bog Hoodlums takes an already awful card (a 5/2 for ) and makes it cartoonishly worse.  The card should come with a microchip implanted in it so it can make a ‘boi-oi-oi-oing’ noise when it enters the battlefield, and play the Scooby-Doo-running-in-place-shuffle when it attacks (while trying to block with it would cause crickets to chirp.)

That’s a theme you’ll witness time and time again in this article.  Sure, these cards could be stronger cards if they cost less.  But then they’d be well-costed sucky cards.  Like Veruca Salt, these are some bad eggs.  The only proper place for them is down the garbage chute and into the incinerator.

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Number Ten – Crawling Filth

Well, at least they got the name right.

In Kamigawa, some spirits contained the keyword Soulshift, allowing that creature to return another Spirit costing one less from your graveyard to your hand (excluding one notable exception.)  Crawling Filth is what happens when design extends the Soulshift mechanic to its logical conclusion, and development forgets to ask “Why?”

Fear can be a potent tool.  But Severed Legion, a common 2/2 with Fear for , was printed in Onslaught, two years previous.  And I don’t remember a mass exodus from the game due to the environment warping power of ‘The Hands’.  In contrast, Crawling Filth doesn’t care what its power, toughness and abilities are.  All it wants is to be a six cost speed bump that fetches a five cost speed bump to your hand.

And therein lies the ultimate problem with Soulshift.  Kamigawa featured 27 creatures with the ability, 15 of which were common.  They did this, I’m sure, so that soulshift decks didn’t consist of the same old linear selection of Spirits; with 27 cards to choose from, each deck could contain individual identity.  But if the 15 common creatures that chumped to get another chumper from the graveyard were any good, then half the matchups in draft would become predictable, drag-out grudge battles.  The only way to keep limited interesting was to turn at least half the soulshifters into questionable choices, and a handful of those cards into ‘never-should-play’s.  Contrariwise, there are only a handful of soulshifters you would ever play if you were making a soulshift deck.  So much for individual identity; by trying to fix the problem, Wizards created the exact problem they were trying to fix.  Except now there were more crap cards to show for it.

Best comment by IncrediSteve:  “In the art, it’s vomiting at its own terribleness. It’s so bad it’s vomiting from every orifice, and growing bonus orifices for extra emphasis.”

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Number Nine – Hint of Insanity

The first hint that a person is insane: they are thinking about playing this card.

Okay, okay, so you’re thinking about it.  Don’t worry, dude, it’s just a hint of insanity.  It’s not like you played the card.  So let’s pretend you did play the card.  Even if it only hits two cards, the effect is still better than Mind Rot since Hint of Insanity eliminates your opponent’s ability to choose which cards he or she is discarding (kind of like discarding at random.)  So what are the odds we can profit from this card?  What are the chances that, in a 60 card deck consisting of nine different non-land cards repeated four times, that a hand of seven random cards will provide a positive duplicate?

What?  You expected an answer?  I’m no mathematician, and Google is doing me no favors.  That said, I do know a few things.  The chances of you drawing any one particular card in your opening hand, if there are four copies of that card in your deck, is about 40%.  I also happen to know that if you stick 23 people in a room that there’s a fifty-fifty chance two of them share a birthday.  I know that doesn’t sound right, what with their being 365 days in the year and all, but the important thing to remember here is that you’re looking for any two people sharing a birthday.  Those two people are only made special after the fact.

So maybe the odds aren’t unreasonable?  Strapped for a quick way to find an answer, I tried the imprecise, but precise enough for our reasons, method of drawing opening hands (Digitally.  I didn’t want the way I shuffled to interfere with the math.)  For reference, I hit the ‘sample hand’ button on this particular ‘Big Skred Red‘ deck.  It wasn’t a perfect 36/24, 4x card breakdown, but it’s the closest you can reasonably expect in the real world.  The results?  Twenty-Nine misses out of fifty potential hands. That’s a failure rate of 58%.  However, I did catch five of those successful hands with two pairs, and one jackpot of a hand with three pairs (interestingly, no triples) giving me a 12% chance of dropping a smack down.

I should remind you that this was the perfect deck, with seven random cards in hand.  I wasn’t even counting what would happen if the opponent mulliganed.  There was at least one hand with no lands at all.  Of course there was a duplicate in that hand.  Admittedly, Big Skred Red is consistent and doesn’t need to mulligan often… but it’s consistent, and probably won’t keep the card in hand for very long.  And if your opponent knows you’re playing Hint of Insanity, they will cast their duplicates.  That said, I don’t think Hint of Insanity is out of the question if you’re already playing with cards like Time Reversal and Echoing Truth.  It’s still not a great choice.  But if that’s your idea of fun, then knock yourself out.

Best comment by zk3:  “Guys, guys, guys, we need this card to keep Relentless Rats out of significant tournament play.”

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Number Eight – Shinen of Fear’s Chill

“Hello, I’m a sucky card.  But when you discard me, you impart a choice piece of my suckitude to the creature of your choice!  Sucktastic!”

Shinen of Fear’s Chill always boggles my head.  In draft I repeatedly rated this incorrectly because I kept imagining it was a 3/2 with Fear, that channeled Fear.  To be honest, I think I kept making the same mistake because even that would just be a below average card.  How many layers of bad did we need to work backwards from to get to here?

What I really want to know, though, is if anyone ever Channeled Shinen to stop a black creature from blocking, thereby forcing a different black creature to trade with an incoming Crawling Filth, then, when the Crawling Filth died,  returned the Shinen to its owner’s hand via Soulshift?  Because I’m curious to find out if anyone watching that game survived the process of tearing their own eyes out.

Best comment:  There is no best comment.  Everyone who looks at this card is too furious to be funny.

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Number Seven – Waste Away

 Torment’s tagline was “: Deal with it.”  I guess the makers of Torment forgot to include the and discard a card in the tagline’s cost.  May I instead suggest, “Torment: This would have been so much cooler if it wasn’t in the middle of Odyssey Block.”

I was expecting terrible things when I Googled ‘Waste Away’, but what I found instead was a chain of fitness centers called ‘Waist Away’.  Clever, I suppose.  But disturbing, too.  “I lost 165 pounds when I stopped eating due to a virulent disease, and now I’m back to my birth weight!  Thanks Waist Away!

I don’t want to make too much fun of weight loss plans, because I know my demographics.  As a general rule, we could all use a little less shuffling of the cards, and a little more shuffling of the feet.  But lose weight the safe and healthy way, people.  Don’t be the point man of an adventuring party in an Otarian dungeon triggering all the traps, or you’ll end up wasting away due to an ‘insane’ ‘living’ virus.  And if think one of you may succumb to magical disease, tell your fellow adventurers to wear surgical masks and not to touch someone’s face who is rotting away in front of you.  For Korona’s sake, just because someone dared you to do something, doesn’t mean you have to do it.

Best comment by Shieldman:  “Hello, Power Creep Inc.?  Yes, we have a Mr. Waste Away here.  He’s complaining about… Dismember?

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Number Six – Psychic Spear

Oh!  We played this game before with Hisoka’s Defiance in The Ten Most Revolting Blue Cards.  This is a tier one card masquerading as one of the worst cards in Magic.  Don’t believe me?  Then checkout the deck lists for the Pro Tour – Los Angeles Top 8, which features seventeen copies of Psychic Spears in five different decks.

Granted, Pro Tour – Los Angeles was a Kamigawa block constructed format, and roughly half of all cards printed in Kamigawa were Spirit or Arcane cards.  In that environment, it still would be possible for a card like Duress to be a better choice… but it’s not like Duress was an option players could choose from.  In 2004, Psychic Spear was that world’s Thoughtseize.  You either played it, or you worked around it.

Today we can play Duress, Thoughtseize and Despise.  In comparison to these cards, Psychic Spear looks hilariously narrow.  I know Wizards talked about why they make super-narrow cards like this.  So I did some digging and dredged up an article by Zac Hill on why Grafdigger’s Cage exists, and why answer cards will continue to exist in the same block as potential problem mechanics for when things go wrong.  But Psychic Spear and Grafdigger’s Cage belong to two different worlds.  Grafdigger’s cage exists in Innistrad block as a release valve to protect the Standard environment from a potentially dominant Flashback and/or Zombie recursion deck (and it was far from a perfect solution.  Snapcaster Mage decks remained dominant that year.)  Meanwhile, Psychic Spear hoses for the heck of it.  It does not come with an interesting statement about the nature of the block, like with the mirrored effects on Rend Flesh and Rend Spirit.  Psychic Spear hosed because it could, devaluing half the cards because they were different.  Psychic Spear altered the environment because it existed, but only by encouraging players not to run cards from the block (personally speaking, I used to play Suntail Hawk over Lantern Kami as a passive defense against the Spear and Hisoka’s Defiance.)  Players played the cards they felt they needed to play.  But when the block was over no one was loyal to Psychic Spear, so it received the rating it deserved.

Best comment by Jerec_Onyx: “5/5 for artist’s name.“

Which makes me wonder.  If Ron Spears is Psychic, did he know he’d draw the art for this card, and could he have somehow prevented it?

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Salvador Dali once wrote, “Have no fear of perfection.  You’ll never achieve it.”  Check out part two examine how fearless our intrepid designers can truly be.