There Are No Bad Cards. Magic players, especially competitive ones, tend to be exceptionally biased towards group-think. You will often hear a player speaking in such black and white terms as, "That card's just bad. No one plays that." While a card may not size up in terms of conventional metrics (Cancel), there are far more dimensions to some cards than you might think. It seems that there's a "Bad" card that suddenly rises to stardom every season. If that is indeed the case, then it stands to reason that cards considered to be terrible have a high potential to suddenly become relevant.

Why is that? Bad cards, especially rares, tend to be on the complex side of things. They often feature many lines of text or a set of abilities that are not often combined. It is due to their inherent complexities that theyare so consistently sleeper cards. It's very easy to look at a Goblin Shortcutter and a Goblin Piker and see why one's better than the other, much the same as you can tell that a vanilla 2/2 for 2 is better than another vanilla 2/2 for 3. This sort of basic comparison makes it easy to evaluate creatures and spells. Everyone knows why Burst Lightning and Lightning Bolt are strictly better than Shock. That part's not a challenge.

Now toss a card like Oath of Druids into the mix. Imagine cracking this at the Exodus prerelease. What on earth are you going to use as a reference point? You've probably never seen a card like this before, so until some nut goes and breaks it, you relegate it to the dollar box.

It's very hard to teach how to evaluate potential sleeper cards, but for trying to dredge the future stars out of the reject rare muck, there's a simple little mental shortcut that I use. I'm going to use the examples of Oath of Druids and the Standard Dredge (Crypt of Agadeem) deck's sideboard staple, Immortal Coil.

1. What must be true to consider using this card? In the case of Oath of Druids, your opponent needs to have more creatures than you. That's it. For Immortal Coil, you need to have a fairly sizable graveyard.
2. What must be true to get full value out of the card? Oath, you want to trigger it only for yourself. Therefore, you need a way to give your opponents creatures at will. For Coil, you should have a specific need for a big boost in life, like trying to stop hyper-aggro decks, and the card draw should be very relevant.
3. What stops this card in the current format? These days, if Oath was around, you'd probably say that Pulse would be its main nemesis. For Immortal Coil, it's graveyard hate.

This fits in very well with a template-based style of deck building, in which slots in a deck are blocked off by "concept" and are then filled by the best available cards in the format. Think of that like a top-down design, as opposed to "lets build around aggro red guys and Ranger of Eos." Once you have taken the time to go through those 3 mental steps, you'll have a decent idea of its relevance to the format.

This ties in to being a savvy trader rather easily. It's simple - if you can identify the right cards before they shoot up in price, you can make a lot of profit. Imagine if you'd bought Tarmogoyf at the pre-release, 4 bucks a playset. If you looked at the numbers, really looked, you'd have seen something. Tarmogoyf is an 0/1 when he hits, which means the first two card types are keeping him on-par. 2/3 for 1G is nothing to get excited about, but the fact that he will become much more is why he's the best beater ever. It should have come as no surprise that in an Extended format with fetch lands, cantrips, disposable 1-drops and artifacts galore, that it was easy to make 'Goyf a 4/5 for 1G. As another writer said recently, I remember casting Ehrnam Djinn and being amazed at how efficient he was. My, how spoiled we've become.

Some people call this 'Magical Christmasland' thinking, but I'd beg to differ. Xmasland is when everything has to go just right to get some insane payoff. Usually, this hinges on drawing good mana, an accelerator of some sort, and at least one or two other cards in a short series of turns. The trick with these sometimes-bizarre low-end rares is that often, entire game plans can be sculpted around their abilities. Compare a card like Lotus Cobra to Immortal Coil.

Yes, I'm serious. Compare Zendikar's most prolific mythic rare to a Shards of Alara "untouchable." When was the last time I won a game with Lotus Cobra? Well, the only deck it's even in is a deck that describes its condition flawlessly. Immortal Coil, on the other hand, is directly responsible for many games won out of the board with Standard Dredge. While that's not enough data to draw any conclusions, it has to be acknowledged; Immortal Coil has the power to double your draws each turn and keep you from outright losing the game. Wait, but isn't Immortal Coil a "bad card"? Won't the good players at the shop laugh at you for playing such a BAD CARD? Maybe. But good tech makes waves very quickly. It turns out that Coil is precisely what Dredge needs against Mono Red and Boros - a card drawing engine that buys 3 or 4 turns extra. I have never lost when I've had Coil online. Not even to graveyard hate.

It's odd how often bad cards turn out to be very good. It doesn't seem terribly profitable to simply relegate a card to untouchable status due to its lack of apparent power. The truth is, you don't have to be right very often with these cards. Many playsets of "crap rares" sell for pennies via pre-order when a set comes out. You could order 2 playsets of every so-called garbage rare and break even when even one becomes in-demand. It doesn't require a Lion's Eye Diamond-style meteoric rise to make money on this either. In general, most crap rares that see tournament play will rise from the 50c pile to the realm of $4. That's a healthy amount of return on investment, wouldn't you say? The truth of it is, you're likely to hit a winner and you're likely to make your money back, and then some. Most people can't be bothered or haven't done the math, but it makes a lot of sense to pre-order a few sets of everything that's cheap. At worst case, you can always sell or trade those true bulk rares to set collectors.