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Outlaws of Thunder Junction had an interesting way of lumping things together. First it was the outlaw creature type, which included assassins, mercenaries, pirates, rogues, and warlocks. Then it was crimes, or rather "committing a crime." Committing a crime is a game action that combines several other game actions into one. Specifically:
"Targeting opponents, anything they control, and/or cards in their graveyards is a crime."
So basically, targeting anything related to the opponent is considered committing a crime. If my searching skills have done me right, there looks to be about 26 cards that involve committing a crime, or reference the player having committed a crime.
Crime as an action isn't too complicated to grasp; it's just more of an efficient way to lump together a bunch of different qualifiers that would otherwise have to be lengthily written out. I actually really enjoy when game actions in Magic become keyworded or shortened like this. Like when putting cards from your library into your graveyard officially became shortened to "mill," which happened as recently as in the 2021 Core Set.
As a personal aside, there are two mechanics I would love to see keyworded: "bite" and "enters the battlefield." Bite is basically the same as fight, but the opposing creature doesn't deal damage back, while keywording "enters the battlefield" would save a ton of space on thousands of cards. Space that is becoming more and more scarce based on the number of cards that are printed, and how complex the abilities on cards need to be nowadays. When was the last time you saw a new Commander card that didn't have at least seven lines of text? I suppose they actually did just shorten "enters the battlefield" to "enters" recently, which is a good move, but I just don't love the term "enters" in this context. I think I like "appears" better.
"When Bloodbraid Elf appears..." That just feels better to me.
Anyway, we're talking about criminality!
The most prestigious card that involves committing a crime was certainly Duelist of the Mind, which is actually Nathan Steuer's World Champion XXVIII card. This card was initially thought to be pretty decent, but it never really seemed to take off or find a consistent home, so now it's only going for about a quarter.
Outside of Duelist, there are several other cards that involve crime that ended up being pretty decent, including Forsaken Miner; Freestrider Lookout; Gisa, the Hellraiser; Kaervek, the Punisher; Magda, the Hoardmaster; Marchesa, Dealer of Death; Oko, the Ringleader; and Vadmir, New Blood. That was a shocking amount of legendary cards, and more than I expected, but Outlaws of Thunder Junction is known for its quantity of legendary creatures, after all.
Ultimately, crime or committing a crime isn't really an ability, per se, and as such doesn't really open up a ton of new design space. It's just a clever, flavorful way of wording how we interact with things in the game, the same way a card like True-Name Nemesis did when it first introduced "protection from the chosen player." In fact, crime kind of reminds me of "protection from a player" in a way. Crime "triggers" when you interact with the player in almost any way, and having protection from a player means they basically can't interact with you in any way. Both are very all-encompassing.
Committing a crime is more of a flavorful turn of phrase than anything else, and it reminds me a lot of the reminder text on Obsidian Fireheart: "The land continues to burn after Obsidian Fireheart has left the battlefield." I'm a big fan of branching out from the rigid structure and wording that Magic often feels confined to. While I know committing a crime will be solely reserved for use in Outlaws, the "crime" set, it would be great to see more flavorful phrasing like this used more frequently in the game.
Frank Lepore
