Locations
A few weeks ago, I was browsing Twitter as I so often find myself doing. There, I stumbled upon a tweet by the awesome Sam of Rhystic Studies fame.
been thinking a lot about "elegant" magic cards, and i'm curious what you'd point to as exemplary. pic.twitter.com/iJyKQDtuh1
— Rhystic Studies (@RhysticStudies) March 18, 2024
Sam was asking for peoples' thoughts on elegant card designs, no doubt for an upcoming video. There were a lot of cool and interesting answers and examples in the thread, and Sam's own choice of Ethereal Forager is excellent in its own right. However, I'm not here to talk about the elegance of cards today. Well, perhaps a little bit, but I'll let him talk about that in greater length in whatever artistic marvel he crafts. I'd rather discuss something a little different instead: the best cards of all time.
How do I get there from Sam's tweet? Well simply put it's due to my own answer, which was this:
Just something sublime about it. I remember a few years back when it ended up being this vs. Lightning Bolt in the finals of the best card of all time poll and it was like...yeah, that tracks perfectly. pic.twitter.com/kCOtu8wAC0
— Paige, On The Grind (@TheMaverickGal) March 18, 2024
You see, when I think of elegance in card design, my mind immediately jumps to Birds of Paradise. There's probably some readers here who might think I'd go to something like Llanowar Elves instead if I was thinking of a mana dork. It's a great one, to be sure, but it's got nothing on Birds of Paradise. There's something interesting about the fact that it flies - something often not very Green by modern color pie standards - yet can't exactly attack. As real birds of paradise are known for their colorful looks, they make any color of mana. It's so simple yet effective in conveying both a flavorful and functional level it's baffling, especially when you take into consideration the fact that it was only created to make use of some extra art in Alpha.
All of this factored in tremendously to something that happened a few years ago around 2018 where a bracket was held that pitted every single Magic card against one another. As noted in the above tweet, Birds of Paradise ended up being one of the two finalists. It was beaten out by another evergreen classic in Lightning Bolt, proving a fitting end to the contest where the community Bolted the Bird.
What's really interesting, though, is the cards that were beaten out in the top 8 of this bracket. In addition to Birds of Paradise and Lightning Bolt, these cards took the remaining slots:
Of the top 8 cards, six come from Alpha, showing how excellent the card design was right out of the gate that would set the standard going forward. Dark Confidant is a powerful yet not unbeatable card, and then there's Jace, the Mind Sculptor who is famously known as being better than all.
The list begs several questions, though. How do you define what the best is? Birds of Paradise beat out Black Lotus, yet isn't Black Lotus almost universally considered one of the best cards in the game? What about another piece of the Power Nine in Ancestral Recall losing out to a simple board wipe in the form of Wrath of God? So then is there some metric to go by here, or is it simply a toss up? These are the things I want to look at, and I think looking at this list makes for an interesting discussion about what determines "the best."
(card pics: Birds of Paradise and Lightning Bolt)
Let's start with the finalists. I already talked about Birds of Paradise and how it has this certain simple yet tremendously evocative design. Lightning Bolt falls into a similar vein of simplistic purity in how it perfectly sums up what Red does. One mana for three damage. It's nice, simple, and clean. That card also inspired several other designs over the years from strictly worse in the form of Volcanic Hammer and Shock to more interesting options like Incinerate or Play With Fire for a more recent example. None of these have that simple purity and influence of the original, though, which makes the original Lightning Bolt hold such a strong place in players' hearts.
It also speaks to the massive appeal of the card itself. Many of the cards among this top 8 only appeal to very specific types of players. Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall appeal the most to top level players interested in playing with the best of the best. Counterspell, Wrath of God, and Jace, the Mind Sculptor are all infamous control cards, which are very popular yet lack universal appeal. When you look at Lightning Bolt, though, everyone loves it. If you're an aggro player, you love how it dishes out more damage. If you're a control player, you enjoy how it helps you control the board or close things out in the endgame. Even combo players like it since it can help set up Storm counts or, again, get those last couple points of damage.
 |  |
That isn't to say the other cards don't have their own universality to them. I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't love the thrill of firing off a well-timed Counterspell or Wrath of God, for example. Both of these also fit the bill of being simple designs that continue to influence cards to this day. Just about every set there's some fresh riff on cheap countermagic and there's usually some kind of sweeper effect in the vein of Wrath of God. These cards are here because of how wide the appeal still is and just how influential they were.
Yet the question remains: does this actually make them the best? After all, none of them would be your average player's pick for the most powerful card of all time. Many would naturally jump to the Power Nine instead here.
It's right there in the name after all, right? They're the Power Nine, the most broken cards in all of Magic! Well, for one, that element in and of itself is quite often debated nowadays. For example, there's the fact that you can play Timetwister in a format like Commander, but you can't play something like a Library of Alexandria or Time Vault. Even in something like Vintage Cube, there's many times where you'll find yourself passing on a Timetwister over other cards, simply because it's not quite as good on its own despite the amount of cards it provides you.
Then there's the argument of cards that actually compete for the space as well. You might hear discussions creep up all the time of what would be the tenth card if it were a Power Ten instead of a Power Nine. Frequently, you'll hear the aforementioned Library and Time Vault mentioned alongside Mishra's Workshop and Bazaar of Baghdad. Then there's Sol Ring, which many players would argue is potentially worth taking in a Vintage Cube over a Black Lotus because of the raw power it gives you.
As you can see, there's actually a lot of factors to explore and no card is simply "the best" in all circumstances. In fact, many of these cards would be looked upon as design mistakes by today's standards. Can you imagine if none of the Power Nine was printed in Alpha and was instead printed today after thirty years of the game's history? Instead of being lauded as some of the greatest cards of all time, they'd be lambasted for how miserable they make games of Magic.
In many cases it simply comes down to the vantage point by which you look at cards. Take for example Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. This card ended up a little bit outside of the top 8 in the greatest of all time bracket, and for good reason. Emrakul was instantly iconic when it came out for being this gigantic and nigh unstoppable force - especially for an era when Commander was really starting to take root as a major format of play. Yet the card was quickly banned from that format and when you look at it in most other formats, its uses are minimal. It often simply either acts as an anti-mill bit of sideboard fodder or a finisher in decks with either access to tons of mana or ways to cheat the card out.
Now compare it to something like Channel.
I love playing a decent amount of Vintage Cube and one of my favorite cards to cast is Channel because of the absolutely brutal wins you can manage with it. You do so alongside cards like Emrakul or any of the other Eldrazi Titans by casting a turn one or two Channel and dumping all of your life into it to put one of these monstrous creatures into play right out of the gate. Yet usually when you see an Emrakul in this situation, you'll often turn your nose up at it. It simply isn't worth taking unless you have a way to utilize it. So then, is Channel or Emrakul the better option to choose for "best of all time?" The neat part here, though, is how there's no simple answer which makes it interesting to discuss and think about.
 |  |
Last among these top 8 would be Dark Confidant and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Both of these cards are undoubtedly strong, yet feel almost out of place amongst the bunch. Neither is close to the level of the Power Nine in terms of raw, er, power, yet they also lack that simple universality of Counterspell, Wrath of God, Birds of Paradise, and Lightning Bolt. What's more, they make for the most interesting cases among this list due to the years that have passed since.
Dark Confidant hardly sees the play it used to, and while it still remains an iconic piece in Magic's history, it doesn't command the same respect it used to. Consider similarly how Tarmogoyf is so often noted for its price having crashed to below $10 when it used to be worth about $200 around 10 years ago. The ol' Bob tends to feel similarly these days, being swept aside by tons of potent removal spells while also getting harder to use effectively himself thanks to the ever-increasing mana costs of powerful spells such as Leyline Binding or the pitch elementals.
Even Jace, the Mind Sculptor - often considered the greatest planeswalker of all time - has lost a lot of his shine over the years. Now rather than hearing about JTMS, you'll likely hear people going on about cards such as Wrenn and Six, various Teferis, or Oko, Thief of Crowns as being the best of the best by today's standards. Right now they're still too new and too reminiscent of recent design mistakes to bolster the level of love that Jace did, however remember that Jace too was once loathed during the old Caw Blade days, yet with time was elevated to almost mythical levels amongst the player base.
All this is to say that there's no real clear answer for what the best cards of all time truly are. Yes, a bracket determined a set of cards years ago, but I'd bet that were we to see such a thing happen today, it could look quite different. I'd even go so far as to expect there to be cards that surprise many people, like how something like Golos, Tireless Pilgrim gained so much popularity despite only having minimal competitive play.
The best simply means different things to different people, like how to me personally, Wellwisher is the best and most influential card for me personally. That doesn't necessarily make it the greatest of all time, though, but rather the best in my eyes, and if I were to provide a more general answer, I'd come right back to the card that kickstarted this train of thought in Birds of Paradise. When I say that, though, there's going to be someone else saying Bolt the Bird, and so the cycle begins anew.
So, with all that in mind, what would you say the best card of all time is?
Paige Smith
Twitter: @TheMaverickGal
Twitch: twitch.tv/themaverickgirl
YouTube: TheMaverickGal
