Think of a really crappy Magic card. Not one that pisses you off or beats you all the time; I mean, a card that, no matter which way you frame it, just sucks.

The general idea there are cards that are always going to be more or less terrible in every competitive sense is an evaluation tool we take entirely for granted at a certain level.

Compare a card that takes some advanced knowledge of understanding why it's currently "bad," and compare it with one of these universal unplayables. Start with the former category:

Why isn't this card popular in Modern?

A seasoned player might say something about it being a turn or more too slow for the format, or there's an abundance of cheap artifact removal, or Snapcaster Mage; that's all actually even a little more advanced than we need here.

Let's dial it back way further. Look at this card:

Even beyond all nuance this is a card a fairly novice player would be able to evaluate fairly easily, assuming they were able to digest what the hell "clashing" was about by the time they finished that reminder text. Even if you forgive its tribal synergies - Lorwyn was about tribe drafting, you'll recall - it's still kind of a pathetic creature.

To put it in scientific terms: This card positively blows.

No. This isn't an article about Bog Hoodlums.

But you want to know what the scary thing is?

...

It's way closer than it should be.

Best One at Best of One Disclaimer

One caveat before we start. We're going to be talking about my current Magic lot in life: Arena! Most notably, jamming best of ones. Though the theory is still useful here, you're probably not going to be effectively blowing up lands like the Arena Athletes out there once we're done here. You just get some good and useful ideas. The Arena crew gets to get nasty on the world if they so choose.

Still here? No? Excellent.

Our tale begins with an innocuous game of Love Letter a few years back. If you've never played, the short of it is a handful of people, preferably four, take turns trying to out-poker face one another as they make deductive guesses about who has which class of card in their hand. The player holding the Princess is generally screwed, and there is only one Princess card in a given round.

In one chatty, casual game, I began a round by accusing a friend of having the Princess, which she did not have. I knew this, as I had the Princess - scandal! - and I felt I could divert attention from players who were thinking less about the game than I was. It was a very lax summer session, though I suspect finding people playing Love Letter with prison rules is pretty rare in any season. Anyway, by the time we got around to the fourth player, the one I had "tricked" by suggesting she held the Princess, she had been so disengaged with the round (and engaged with good conversation) that she'd forgotten I'd named the Princess earlier at all. She "called" my bluff by just instinctively naming me as a prospective Princess holder, more or less at random, and I was out of the round then and there.

If you've ever been confused when you practice a high level metagame and then your proven deck gets slaughtered at FNM, yes, it's that exact same thing.

You next leveled so far that you came back around the other side to previous level.

I have a wider and more theoretical approach to Magic most of the time, I'd say. But even at my most open, my most willing to indulge my imagination, I'd never have expected to be writing about a card like...this.

Please. Please. Let me finish.

It all started with a Dominaria draft. I was rusty - War of the Spark is obviously the big focus for everyone, Dom is historic in more ways than one- and the outcomes suffered. On Arena, you can really learn to interact favorably with the latest bot behavior, but it can definitely go wrong when your brain doesn't recall the specifics and you're not particularly motivated to regain any of them because the format is old news in all the practical ways.

I was about to finish up pack two when I realized that my honest ceiling for gems was going to be to just jam a horrid Mono-Red deck but hope I had ridiculous draws on the play. I did a generous count of what my Red cards were and found that I was going to be pretty low on "real" cards no matter what I did. I had already accumulated a few Skirk Prospectors, so if I could find some combos with them that I had just ignored for over a year now, then maybe I could...

Best of one...

Look, I know I made the right call. In fact, in this spot it was right even if it was wrong. People, Stone Rain, like actual "Daniel Gelon dude getting arm pit assaulted by smoky sky rocks" Stone Rain, was in the Magic deck I learned on. Day one. There it was.

I didn't love it even then. It had the same problems for me that these current land destruction spells have: they're too situational. If you get someone at the right spot, you could end the game immediately. But otherwise? It doesn't do really do anything, and it's kind of sad to boot. No one wants to be the person that breaks Memorial to War as their last play before their opponent comfortably kills them. It's downright taboo! And this variety has been holding such a terrible effect near this rate for so long that no one is willing to even look at it twice. Its only role is to provide you with the question of how badly you need another basic land when the end of a draft pack comes up.

I think if it stopped there, it have been all right.

But it wasn't enough for me.

The issue wasn't that draft, it really wasn't. I went like 2-3. The specific problem was that the stupid land destruction spells stole the two games. But the deck was still unplayable, and that's fine. At the end of the day it was a bad draft deck. Period.

The trouble came later.

A Curiosity Becomes an Obsession

It's been about eight or nine years...maybe ten. But I know I've seen Cancel be good enough for tournament Standard play. Sure, anyone playing Cancel against Bloodbraid Elf decks had to be doing it mostly to challenge themselves, but it still happened. Surely there are formats where one more mana for this effect isn't entirely off the table. In other words, the card is theoretically possible in some context. Whether we'll ever see that format, who knows, but it's okay for me to at least think about.

Right...?

Best of one...

Wait. If there were a format that Demolish and pals would least horrible in, whatever that would look like, wouldn't it be a format where you just had to get your opponent one time instead of two? Could Arena be the place where Stone Rain Magic could return and sneak up on the world?

The Arena Variable

One of the coolest aspects of Arena that I think is really unmined so far is the way we think about how their experience strategies affect the way we evaluate how cards actually function. For a majority of cards, the difference between Arena and paper Magic is pretty minimal. Others may have fairly significant differences that we tend to ignore as part of the translation between digital and physical - think of the way you look at and think about your opponent and their game state in a physical tournament versus the way you just sort of type the name you know you're going for on Arena with a card like Lost Legacy.

This is all to say that there are other cards, very simple and eloquent cards, that could end up speaking a very different language on Arena than they do in paper. It's already fairly common knowledge that the way Arena shuffles cards and provides you with an opening hand is mathematically different than a pure randomization of your deck. Especially lean decks with low land counts - 23 is current conventional wisdom as far as I've been told (unless you're aiming for something distinctively leaner, like the previously popular Drake decks and their Phoenix cousins) - would be extremely vulnerable on the draw in some configurations. When you combine that with Arena's love of reasonable two-landers, the importance of always available land in playing out of mulligans, and the legality of accelerators like Llanowar Elves and Druid of the Cowl, things start to go from interesting to intriguing.

The Inevitable Design Dam Break

One of the smart strategies of current Magic design and development is their constant awareness of how much power a kind of card design has and when it should get more. The easiest recent case is this beast:

Compare to...

I call it, "The incremental pinch."

The incremental pinch is when a card's power is off relative to the rest of its desired format context so it's error corrected closer to where it needs to ideally be without changing the spirit of the design. This continues in perpetuity as the game's pieces are constantly moving around one another.

Specific card effects overlap so it's not always a linear progression, but here's a general overview of the effect with some famous examples. We'll start with the oldest design and move forward chronologically. As we progress from one to the next, think about what the developers may have been thinking with each change. What were the advantages and disadvantages of each iteration? What does the perfect version of this card look like, and is the answer the same all the time?

You could make the case that this card design family is more or less right about where it should be and has been for a few years now. The reason Toll of the Invasion is so relevant to this discussion is that it's a part of the "Coercion" design family - it's the common little sister to those incorrigibly rare Thoughtseize girls - a kind of design that is trending way up in terms of power level. It spent too long at the floor of its competitive potential, and they've now "pinched" it upward it to the point where it is a very real player in its Limited format. Here are a few of its previous iterations, because God knows none of us can remember actually playing with most of them:

Getting an actual body (a Zombie Army one, no less!) was the difference between a mostly useless sideboard design held over since forever and a real Magic card with Magic card uses.

Back to blowing up lands: We may already be in the midst of an incremental pinch on the Demolish card design.

Scry 2 isn't a world-changer. It's not going to suddenly change the way all Magic works. But it is more game text than this style of card has been allowed to have in some time. It's not Molten Rain. It's not even Mwonvuli Acid-Moss. But in a world where you're often locked into askew land draws and you don't have a sideboard game to save you when things go wrong in Game 1, it doesn't have to be to at least be interesting.

Unless of course Arena floods people out as often as they claim it does, in which case land destruction is doomed to fail forever.

Don't Demolish Your Playbook Yet

We've got a few mana dorks in Standard. We've got Skirk Prospectors and a lot of Goblins. And we've certainly got game code that arranges our cards in ways we know gets a little bit more specific than full on random. We've got a great big Standard card pool here to go with it all, but I have certainly not found "the answer" to this theory experiment as of yet. I'm not much more convinced that Rubble Reading or some similar iteration of its familiar, limp template could be a real card in some competitive system than I was before I took on this idea.

The important thing isn't whether it is or it isn't; the important thing is that we're willing to consider such things and to understand why they can or why they can't work and why they someday could. Being able to frame even the most universally discarded cards will make you a much better deck-builder, and it will prevent you from being surprised when that next strange and amazing idea comes along. Because it'll be your idea, the one you found by giving an extra look to a card conventional wisdom abandoned.