The 100 Worst Cards in Modern, Part 2

Posted on April 10, 2012

Last week, I covered fifty-two cards that are in Modern and terrible. These forty-eight are individually more interesting than stupid Auras or narrow solutions, but that doesn’t make them better. It just means I can say more words about them. So, what’s on the putrescent plate this time?

The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Mana (16 citizens)

In every country that uses one of the twenty-three languages into which the Berenstain Bears books are translated, it is legally binding to put “The Berenstain Bears” in front of every time you say “Too Much _____.” I’m a lawyer. You can trust me on that statement.

Some things are over-costed. You probably knew that. But whatever card you think fits that description, these cards somehow cost even more (unless you’re thinking of one on this list, of course). They don’t generally resemble each other, but they don’t have to; they have the same rotten smell.

Bog Hoodlums – Dripping Dead was so amazing that they had to make one with clash. This and costing

instead of

somehow made up for the lack of pseudo-deathtouch. It’s clashable! It’s splashable! It’s trashable!

Deathknell Kami – Soulshift 1 is cool, but is a 0/1 flyer that dies in a blaze of mediocrity worth it? Also, I ask rhetorical questions.

Grimclaw Bats – Like Deathknell Kami, except you have to pay life and mana to make it better. It is fun to say Grimclaw Bats, though—particularly if you use the intonation from the cartoon show Gargoyles.

Numai Outcast – Since bushido already pumps Numai Outcast, you can spare the life to regenerate it since you’re not using that life on Grimclaw Bats. 5 life and 1 mana is at that sweet spot for regenerating a creature.

Myr Prototype – It gets bigger and then becomes next-to-impossible to use. Its cheapest use is as a vanilla 2/2 for 5 mana. Sign me up.

Talonrend – The difference between paying for a blue flyer like Air Elemental and for Talonrend is that you get an extra point of toughness. Sounds great . . . unless you’d like your flyer to have any power. That will cost you mana and toughness every turn.

Wandering Goblins – Like Talonrend, but possibly worse.

Wurmskin Forger – Vedalken Dismisser is a 2/2 for 6 mana with an enters-the-battlefield ability that normally costs around 4 mana. Wurmskin Forger is sort of like Incremental Growth . . . except it’s worse and is a 2/2 for 7 mana. 7-mana 2/2s need to do a lot. In contrast, Wurmskin Forger exists.

Zephyr Spirit – Pretty sure the Red Hot Chili Peppers had as high hopes for their song “Zephyr” as WotC had for Zephyr Spirit. I certainly view them similarly.

Cyclical Evolution – Every green deck I’ve played has wanted to bring back Llanowar Augur every three turns while skipping the trample.

Cyclopean Snare/Razor Boomerang – The flavor texts allude to how expensive/useless these cards are. If the card’s telling you . . .

Death of a Thousand Stings – Or, as it was known in playtesting, Waste of a Good Name.

Hankyu – It wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t have to remove all the aim counters every time. It’s outclassed by Wolfhunter's Quiver, which takes some doing.

Nivix, Aerie of the Firemind – I would like to pay 4 mana for a small chance to pay more mana.

Warlord's Axe – This is an uncommon. Uncommonly bad maybe.

You Think It Does Something, But It Doesn’t (18 citizens)

These give the worst kind of disappointment to deck-builders. False advertising usually reveals itself in the middle of a game, and then you lose because you had a terrible card. You know to stay away from the others on this list, but these can break your heart on the battlefield.

Exiled Boggart – Would you play a 2/2 for that made you discard a card as it entered the battlefield? I wouldn’t. Why would I play one that made me discard when it died?

Kjeldoran Javelineer – It promises so much damage. It costs basically all your mana to do it. Would you ever play this on the first turn?

Putrid Cyclops – An aggressivish creature . . . unless of course you get a bad scry, in which case you paid for a creature to die.

Razorgrass Screen – It’s a 2/1 for a single mana! Wow! Oh wait; it auto-blocks the first thing that’s sent in.

Scrib Nibblers – Great name. Theoretically cool ability. That life-gain ability is supposed to tempt you into running it—if it’s a card that doesn’t matter, you gained a life point! It appears from this article that I use exclamation marks only when I’m sarcastic.

Scythe Tiger – A 3/2 for is very cool, but the drawback of sacrificing a land is just too much. Shroud means that ordinarily Scythe Tiger can’t even wield a Scythe (be it Strata or of the Wretched). Blech.

Shinka Gatekeeper – It isn’t Jackal Pup. Also, it isn’t Jackal Pup.

Vectis Dominator – Remember all those Prophecy cards that let you do cool things unless someone breathed? That’s this on a gaunt 0/2 body. If you want this and are in W/B, why aren’t you running Minister of Impediments? I’d love for this card to be good—I like Browbeat-type effects more than most people—but this is one time when the opponent choosing makes the card useless.

Bountiful Harvest – Joyous Respite costs 1 fewer mana and is Arcane. Arcane’s only a drawback if Kitsune Riftwalker is on the board. Joyous Respite can’t target Kitsune Riftwalker. You see the problem with Bountiful Harvest.

Circle of Affliction – I’m aware this is a cool combo with Manabarbs. It’s also a terrible use of mana basically everywhere else.

Cryptwailing – Before you get a use out of this card, you will have to pay and exile two creatures from your graveyard. That is to make one person discard one card at sorcery speed.

Dark Temper – This one doesn’t reveal how bad it is. But in order for it to be better than basically any red creature kill you could be playing, you have to control a permanent of the color with better creature kill than red. Umm . . . what?

Kite Shield – Accorder's Shield is the same thing but with vigilance. Not every card has to be better than another one, but if the strictly better one came out only nine months before, maybe the new, bad one shouldn’t be printed.

Magma Rift – Same drawback as Scythe Tiger, but it can’t kill Scythe Tiger. Scythe Tiger wins, obv.

Moonhold – “Target player skips his or her next turn. You skip this turn to cast Moonhold.”

Pulling Teeth – It can be Mind Rot for less mana, or it can be a worse Necrogen Spellbomb. Yeah, buddy. The art is gross. And how is dentistry magical?

Stomping Slabs – Oh, how I want this to be good. Oh, how it becomes worse with each time you cast one, and oh, how putting the copies on the bottom of your library makes it harder to do each time. I love paying for nothing to happen.

Yawning Fissure – This is fantastic if each of your opponents has only one land out on turn five when you cast it. So is basically everything else in that circumstance.

Junkyard of Rares (14 citizens)

These are the real disappointments—the dregs of the crop that don’t rise to the top, don’t come to get down, and don’t get out their seats and jump around. (On the other hand, they refrain from eating pigs/cops, so they’ve got that going for them.) These are the biggest heartbreaks of booster packs, the ones that make you get to the end of the pack and cry for your wasted currency.

Desecration Elemental – An 8/8 with fear for

is awesome. Make no mistake about that. Having to sacrifice a creature every time anybody plays a spell is the scientifically proven opposite of awesome. I can see it being okay in some duels some of the time, but how will this stay on a multiplayer field? Word on the street is that games with a lot of players tend to have spells.

Loxodon Peacekeeper – A 4/4 for that more or less donates itself to someone you’re hitting with it? You shouldn’t have.

Shimatsu the Bloodcloaked – It’s a fixed Wood Elemental.

Blood Funnel – I built a deck around this one. It had Infernal Genesis and G/U for some reason . . . I think it was for Patagia Viper. By the time you put in enough creatures to make your noncreature spells cheaper, you run out of room for the noncreature spells. Maybe you run this with Biorhythm? Then again, it’s not like Biorhythm needed any help. I suspect this card made everyone assume Heartless Summoning was terrible. But once you know Heartless Summoning is good, don’t think that Blood Funnel is a variation. It’s a variation on quality—called awful. (OOOH!)

Distant Memories – New cards on the list show Wizards still has the touch. Distant Memories is Diabolic Tutor for a card nobody cares about; or it’s Concentrate with an additional cost of exiling a good card from your library. And no, you don’t get a discount on this; it costs the same as Diabolic Tutor and Concentrate. Opponents let you get a worse version of either.

Liar's Pendulum – So, to draw a card, your opponent has to guess wrong about a card you name, and that opponent gets to find out what you have for next guess. That sounds like a fantastic use of a card.

Lich's Mirror – Yes, a mythic makes my list. While this has some possible applications that aren’t terrible, the basic idea here is that you’re protected against losing—except that whatever killed you will still be there while you have no permanents. Let me say that again . . . oh, you don’t give me permission to say that again? All right.

Lich's Tomb – The only effect worth that drawback is winning the game on your next upkeep. It might not even be worth that.

Moonlace – The spiritual descendant of terrible cards. I actually like the effect on this one, but it’s insignificant most of the time.

One with Nothing – No truth to the rumor that Peter Gabriel posed for this art.

Pure Intentions – Cool effect. Useless effect.

Rakdos Riteknife – You might have noticed I’m not a fan of things that require you to sacrifice a creature. It’s easy in multiplayer for people to gang up on you and make the card in question useless. Rakdos Riteknife is pretty close to this.

The Equipment bonus that requires you to sacrifice creatures isn’t that great—it takes tapping a creature twice and sacrificing two creatures to make it a more expensive Bonesplitter—and making target player sacrifice permanents when you sacrifice the Riteknife would be cool except for that you had to sacrifice an equal number of permanents over several turns to reach that point. I’d be as angry as Lyzolda in the picture if that’s all the knife did. Similarly, I’d also lose my irises and pupils.

Scrambleverse – Scrambleverse’s one use is in a control-heavy deck in which lands tend to be your only permanents. At some point, you cast Scrambleverse, and it’s like a Blatant Thievery with greater upside. This might work all of one time. Then, the players who don’t want to face Mr. or Ms. Scrambleverse will gang up on the low-permanent deck next game so they can play real Magic. Leave the title of Miss Scrambleverse to the beauty pageants.

Twinning Glass – You’re never realistically getting a use out of this from your opponents’ spells. So, what kind of spells can you cheat out with this? Preferably they’re expensive ones; a turn-four Twinning Glass speeding up two 3-mana spells on turn five isn’t a big deal. What are the odds of you having the same card and wanting to cast two copies of it on the same turn? Just stay away.

Conclusion

The bottom hundred Modern cards are a sight better than Bleiweiss’s list, but that doesn’t make them great. Wizards is still making them just about every set (the Stupid Auras Division annoys me greatly), so if you don’t like some of these choices, wait for next set, and they can come off.

As with last week, if you have comments on what shouldn’t be on this list, please think of a card that should be on this list instead and put it up as well. I’m aware that some of these cards have uses, but it’s much harder to make a list out of Modern than pre-Modern, so it can’t be an entirely useless list.