Magic: The Gathering as a game has some really great abilities. As I've mentioned before, I usually consider anything that's kicker adjacent to be pretty good. Any ability that gives your cards more versatility at different points in the game is usually a great design. We're talking about things like kicker, flashback, overload, etc. Even evoke is great at this, since it's basically the creature version of kicker.

But some mechanics just didn't hit. Either they were too confusing, or too complicated, or they just weren't very impactful. Let's talk about some of my top worst mechanics in Magic.

Cipher

Cipher was an interesting ability, and I'm not sure if it failed because it was bad or because it just wasn't utilized effectively.

Cipher is an ability that is only found on sorceries that says once you cast the card with cipher, you can ''encode'' that card onto a creature you control, and then cast a copy of the encoded card every time the creature deals combat damage to a player. Which is kind of neat. I personally love creatures that have triggers when they deal combat damage, but I assume a lot of that is because those triggers usually draw cards in some way.

Interestingly, cipher actually has a card in a top tier Pioneer deck in the form of Hidden Strings.

Cipher has only appeared on Black and Blue cards because of its cryptic, Dimir nature, which means it will likely never show up outside those colors. The ability premiered in Gatecrash in 2013, and only two new cards with cipher have been printed since then in Commander sets.

One of the main problems with cipher is that there just weren't many exciting abilities on the cards, and many were overcosted, presumably due to the presumption that they would be cast over and over. In fact you could often assume that each cipher spell would be cast twice on the turn they were initially cast: once when you cast it, and once when the creature you encode it onto attacked. So a lot of the spells seem priced as if you were getting the ability twice.

Unfortunately, I think these high initial prices, along with the fact that you really needed a creature in play to get the most out of cipher made it a pretty restrictive mechanic.

Haunt

Haunt made its first appearance way back in 2006 in Guildpact. It's always amusing to see how old some of these abilities are. Congratulations on recently graduating high school, haunt!

Haunt was the Orzhov ability in Guildpact and, similar to cipher, only appeared on Black and White cards. It is an ability that, when the card with haunt goes to the graveyard, you remove it from the game and "haunt" a creature. Then, when the haunted creature dies, the ability triggers again.

Haunt only has ten cards to its name, and there have been no new additions in modern times, not even in Commander sets. Haunt, like cipher, is an ability that requires a creature in play to fully be utilized, and just like cipher, a lot of the cards with haunt are basically only good in Limited (where they tended to be quite good). The only real cards with haunt that saw any Constructed play were Orzhov Pontiff of Blight and Seize the Soul, which are fine cards in their own right.

The place I see haunt failing is that it was restrictive, similar to cipher, and it was also a little bit confusing.

Mutate

I personally liked mutate as a mechanic, but boy was it another confusing ability. Mutate allows you to cast a creature for its mutate cost, then place that creature on top of or below other non-Human creatures. Once you do this, the creature on top will have all the abilities of both creatures, but only the characteristics of the top creature? Or something like that. Honestly, mutate was fairly confusing, and R&D actually designed mutate creatures to be fairly underwhelming just so that the complex mechanic didn't end up making too big of waves in older formats.

Mutate definitely has some cool designs, like Nethroi, Apex of Death and Sawtusk Demolisher, and one of the best parts of the mutate creatures was completely unrelated to their designs: many of them were part of the Universes Beyond (Universes Within?) Godzilla crossover, giving many of them Godzilla versions.

While a handful of mutate creatures have been reprinted in Commander sets since their debut in Ikoria, it's unlikely we'll see any new cards with the mutate mechanic any time soon. It just kind of feels like a more complex version of the bestow mechanic.

Banding

I can't really comment on banding, and neither can you, unfortunately, because we would first need to know what banding does. None of us do.

Frank Lepore

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