Today I'm bringing you a new series of articles! Every week for the foreseeable future, I'm going to be ranking every mythic rare in every set that utilizes booster packs - with some exceptions! That means you'll get everything that went through Standard, all the reprint Masters and similar sets, ancillary products like Conspiracy and Battlebond, and more! However, for simplicity's sake, we'll be ignoring more preconstructed products like From the Vault and Commander preconstruced decks. Smaller pack sets like March of the Machine: The Aftermath and the upcoming Universes Beyond Assassin's Creed "Beyond Boosters" will be included, but probably not things like Universes Beyond Doctor Who due to the packs being simply an extension of Commander precons.

That said, I'm going to showcase some of the coolest and most exciting cards the game has ever made. The mythic rare rarity was introduced with Shards of Alara and so I'd like to begin there, moving through the sets over the years. This allows me to talk about the cards both from a power level standpoint and how they look through a modern lens, while also talking about them historically. For example, Tarmogoyf would likely rank highly among mythics in Modern Masters due to how monumental the card was at the time, but in a later release like Ultimate Masters or Time Spiral Remastered it probably ends up way lower due to it being worse today.

I think this will be a fun way to explore what the mythic rarity has brought to the game and how it's continued to change and evolve over time. With that, let's dive into the first set to ever have mythics and talk about all kinds of multicolored goodness!

15. Lich's Mirror

For being the first set featuring mythic rares, Shards of Alara actually provides a pretty stellar showcase for the rarity's start. Coming up with this list was actually kind of tough because many of the mythics in this set are cool or at the very least interesting in some capacity. Case in point: Lich's Mirror being in last place. This is about as mythic of a design as you can get. It's too wild for rare and it plays with some interesting design space, yet in practice, it's pretty much unplayable. It keeps you alive, but you're usually going to be so unable to recover that you just end up being steamrolled. Still, it deserves points for being a card that gets you to think about the game.

14. Sphinx Sovereign

What Lich's Mirror lacks in playability, Sphinx Sovereign lacks in excitability. Nothing about this card makes me thrilled to pick it up and play it. It's the sort of card that makes me want to try finding a way to abuse it in a Standard deck, but it's too dull and unexciting to consider a great card in a general sense. It has higher playability than Lich's Mirror, so I'm giving it the edge here, but it isn't fantastic.

13. Empyrial Archangel

Empyrial Archangel is the second non-legendary mythic shard creature and once again, there's not much going on here. It has a unique ability, so it gets some points for that, though the utility doesn't often go far and it usually dies quickly. Putting it in Reanimator strategies to shut down aggressive strategies is solid, but generally it isn't enough to make it worth it. You can't even put something like a Darksteel Plate on it thanks to Shroud. Unless you build around it, it's too expensive for too little output, and most of the time you're not going to find enough value to make this worth it.

12. Prince of Thralls

This one is pretty like the last two in that it's another of the cycle of non-legendary shard mythic creatures that generally doesn't do a ton. When you take into consideration that this was probably designed more for 60-card Magic in a time when Commander wasn't as big a focus on the game, this seems a lot better. Unfortunately, it requires a huge mana investment or a bit of wonky setup, and it just ends up feeling pretty win-more by the time it hits the board. In Commander, it usually feels worse because your opponents have so much more life to spare, but you can also get a lot more creatures out of the deal as well. It's not great, but it's a bit more exciting than the last two. It also irks me that the card feels like it should be legendary - more so than the rest of the cycle - and isn't.

11. Sarkhan Vol

Sarkhan is the weakest of the set's planeswalkers, but honestly he's still a pretty great one. The Lorwyn Five were a real mixed bag in terms of power level on the whole, but here they knocked it out of the park. Sarkhan still does some pretty sweet and interesting things, which made him a really fun planeswalker to play with for some time and was popular in early Commander. There's a good reason he got reprinted in Modern Masters, after all, but he's always felt the lesser of the bunch and in a set of such quality mythics, ends up on the lower end as a result.

10. Hellkite Overlord

I generally think Sarkhan Vol is a better card than this one, but what Sarkhan lacks is some of the wow factor that Hellkite Overlord brought to the table. Whereas Sphinx Sovereign, Empyrial Archangel, and Prince of Thralls felt quite middling on the whole, you wanted to go out of your way to figure out how to get this dragon on the board. When it lands, it completely dominates and tears opponents up fast. It's powerful, evasive, and hard to get rid of thanks to regeneration. At the end of the day, it's still just a big and expensive creature that's difficult to get out, which is why it's still lower, but it's definitely on the more exciting end of things.

9. Godsire

I had a lot of time to determine which I wanted first: this or Hellkite Overlord. In the end, I went with my gut, because I think, if you're a new player especially, Godsire is just the coolest looking card in the world. Hellkite Overlord has a ton going on, but it's just one creature. Godsire, on the other hand, gets to beat your opponents' face and then make even more tokens. Is the big hasty and evasive dragon better? Yes, absolutely. A lot of the time Godsire will just die before it gets to do anything. But there's just something thrilling about the card that Hellkite Overlord lacks, and that's why it goes a little higher for me.

8. Sedris, the Traitor King

Let me get this out of the way right now: all five of the legendary creature mythics in this set rule. They were some of the most essential creatures for early Commander and they're still immensely popular today. Take Sedris, the Traitor King for example. Fifteen years later and he's still a fairly popular creature to put as the Commander thanks to the ability to repeatedly reanimate creatures for exciting shenanigans and value. It's hard not to love it, and it remains a fun Commander to this day.

7. Sharuum the Hegemon

My love, my baby, Sharuum is a favorite of artifact combo aficionados everywhere. If you see a Sharuum come down, you just know there's some tomfoolery afoot. This legendary sphinx is a pretty innocuous card, simply reanimating artifacts on a sizable body. It turns out it's really easy to put artifacts into your graveyard, which makes getting back powerful artifacts like Darksteel Forge, Akroma's Memorial, and Bolas's Citadel absolutely trivial. You can even just combo kill opponents with her, a Sculpting Steel, and a Disciple of the Vault no problem, making her a veritable threat even by today's standards.

6. Kresh the Bloodbraided

Sharuum is a great legend and all, but she struggles a little in having a very narrow strategy. You need to be artifact focused and generally focus on synergy to make the reanimation worthwhile. Kresh is a lot more open in how you play him. You can build him with a sacrifice strategy or one that focuses on mowing down your opponents' creatures with removal. Heck, you could even just toss in a bunch of cards from your trade binder and he'd play well just by virtue of how games of Magic progress. An iconic classic commander whose legacy persists even today.

5. Ajani Vengeant

By today's standards, Ajani Vengeant might not seem very exciting. Back in the day, however, he was the backbone of Control decks. You can start off by using the Lightning Helix minus, or if you're already in a state where your opponent isn't able to do much against you, you simply stop their stuff from untapping - even if it's just a land. Build up high enough and you get a one-sided Armageddon to completely shut out your opponent. The card was a staple in the Magic Online Vintage Cube for many years and while it's not as good as it once was, it still holds a strong pedigree.

4. Tezzeret the Seeker

While Ajani may have fallen out of favor a bit in recent years, Tezzeret the Seeker feels like it has gotten more love as time has gone on. For a good while, Ajani Vengeant seemed the more popular card thanks to broader use cases. As the years have passed, artifact decks have gotten stronger and more popular and Tezzeret's value as a means of tutoring artifacts or untapping mana rocks has made him a beloved card. This often applies to Commander, but it can get downright silly in the aforementioned MTGO Vintage Cube thanks to the number of mana rocks in it.

3. Mayael the Anima

I remember Mayael being one of the coolest cards that did the silliest things in Commander. Every turn you got to just go ahead and find a huge thing to enter the battlefield with a monstrous thud. If you're a Timmy or a Tammy, this is one of the most fun legends you can stick into the command zone and build around. Even to this day, Mayael remains the fifteenth most popular Naya commander, and given how the set is also fifteen years old, that stands as a testament to how great this card is.

2. Elspeth, Knight-Errant

You might not think it as much now, but once upon a time Elspeth, Knight-Errant was one of the gold standards for planeswalkers. Throughout the early 2010s, it wasn't uncommon to hear her placed in the top five planeswalkers alongside the likes of Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Liliana of the Veil. She's both a great card for control strategies for helping you maintain a board presence, and plays a stellar role in midrange decks to help get creatures in for damage. In Commander, she helps you build her up to the point where you can make everything indestructible. She's about as iconic of a card as they come, but I feel like she loses out in the end to...

1. Rafiq of the Many

There was once a time where Rafiq was among the most feared legends you could find sitting across from you in a Commander pod. Attacking with one creature doesn't seem exciting, which makes reading the card feel a little underwhelming. However, all it takes is one game with him to realize just how much damage he ends up dishing out. Even on his own, just one attack will smack a defenseless opponent for eight commander damage, and it snowballs fast from there. Using equipment and auras makes him even more of a force to be reckoned with, and playing additional exalted creatures to hang back on defense while you decimate opponents solely on the back of Rafiq. Even now, Rafiq is among the top ten Bant commanders, and for good reason. A truly iconic card in Magic's history.

Paige Smith

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