For three years prior to this, core sets disappeared in the wake of the two-set block structure. Thanks to this release schedule, it was no longer possible to have a core set with only four Standard sets a year. With the dissolution of blocks entirely, though, Wizards was afforded an opportunity to bring back core sets once again and it began here with Core Set 2019. This release enabled several classic cards to be reprinted along with a slew of new ones, largely themed around the Elder Dragons backdrop for the ongoing Bolas Arc in the story. With seventeen powerful mythics in this set, there's plenty to cover as we rank them all! Let's dive on in and get ranking!

Number Seventeen

The original Palladia-Mors is personally one of my favorite cards. As an enfranchised player, you may look at it and just see a big dumb creature, and you'd be right on that. To a little kid discovering the game in the late 90s, though, the card felt far more epic than most of the other creatures available. In 2018, though, we'd seen quite a number of these larger epic-style legends to where something like this is far less exciting. It's basically just a big dumb french vanilla creature, and is far and away the most underwhelming of the bunch by a lot.

Number Sixteen

Bone Dragon isn't that much more exciting than Palladia-Mors, but it does have one upside to it that that legend lacks: the ability to reanimate itself. For the low cost of seven cards out of your graveyard, you can bring it back tapped whenever you feel like it! In practice, this isn't particularly practical, as it's tough to even get seven cards into your graveyard in the first place. But hey, it's some extra upside that's worth the mention!

Number Fifteen

Players usually love a good Liliana card, but much less so when it's as narrow as this one is. Cards like this fall into the Nissa Revane camp of planeswalkers where they're good with one very specific creature type and nothing else. Even then, Nissa tended to get you a creature pretty easily as well as refill your life tremendously. Liliana doesn't do much of anything without a ton of mana and a full graveyard, making her largely underwhelming in a number of cases. If you're a rocking dedicated zombie Commander deck, playing a copy of her is probably reasonable for a late-game scenario, but any other space should steer clear of her.

Number Fourteen

Vaevictis is a really cool new take on the original card. Where Palladia-Mors' new card reflects the original's french vanilla aesthetic, this one eschews the original's firebreathing angle for something entirely new. While it does something rather cool in blowing things up and causing chaos, it also presents opportunities for things to blow up in your face as you destroy something modest and it turns into something truly threatening. If you're not looking to win, this can lead to some great stories with friends, but in terms of raw strength and playability, look elsewhere.

Number Thirteen

A very Commander-focused card, this lives up to its name and offers you a ridiculous amount of card advantage as well as a free rebate on the mana you put into it, provided you cast it from your hand. Unfortunately, 10 mana is still a lot, even in a format like Commander. As a result, Apex of Power remains a bit on the lower side of cards from this set, but is still a cool and flashy thing many players seek to do, providing it some higher appeal compared to the rest of the lower end of this list.

Number Twelve

It's a little weird to have two typal specific planeswalkers in a single set, but Sarkhan, Fireblood is far and away the better of the two. Even if you simply ignore the mana production side of the card, the fact that it repeatedly rummages is great on its own. Control the board around it, and you can find yourself with four huge dragons for your opponent to contend with. The usefulness of this is somewhat limited, though, and as such it's found a more prominent home in Commander where dragons are plentiful as a way to get them into play more quickly.

Number Eleven

Players everywhere love their artifact decks and this is a great enabler for those kinds of decks. Thanks to the higher mana cost, Tezzeret is unfortunately typically relegated to Commander and little else. However, in the specific decks he occupies, he's one heck of a draw engine, easily drawing multiple cards per turn in any artifact-heavy build. It's also worth noting as well that he was one of the best things you could be doing in Limited, proving to be a bomb that could easily take over games.

Number Ten

Chromium had a fairly modest showing in Standard, owing in no small part to her evasiveness. As a control player, odds are good you're drawing tons of cards and can spare a discard or two. This ensures Chromium sticks around and if your opponent is out of removal, you'll be able to get in for a huge swing of damage. This also made Chromium quite a Limited bomb, as it was a threat that was extremely difficult to deal with, making for a creature that you were almost certain to die to if it showed up in your draft.

Number Nine

The reprinting of Omniscience here was pretty big for a couple of reasons. For one, it only had one prior printing in Magic 2013, and thanks to being a potent player in Legacy and a Commander all-star, this put more copies into players' hands that needed it. More importantly, though, was the fact that the reprinting here ended up putting the card into Pioneer, where it sees play primarily in Lotus Field Combo decks. Without this printing, that might not have happened (at least until Foundations this year) so for that reason alone, it deserves a solid place here.

Number Eight

One of the few cards ever made through the "You Make the Card" promotion, Crucible of Worlds has proven tremendously popular among casual audiences everywhere. With the rise in popularity of Commander, it was high time for this card to finally see a reprint. This was it's first in over a decade - excluding a judge promo and Kaladesh invention card - and it was sorely needed. That alone is enough to get it pretty high up on the list, especially when so much of the rest of the set is a bit on the ho-hum side.

Number Seven

It's pretty easy to look at this iteration of Ajani and wonder why it's so high on this list. The creatures he reanimates are tiny and the counters are meager offerings. In competitive Standard, though, this was more than enough. Mono-White and later Boros Aggro lists used a couple copies of him typically to both push through more damage and refill the board after removal and/or board wipes. In rare instances, you could even manage to ultimate him and really go to town with a slew of tokens coming down every turn. A really awesome walker for the time.

Number Six

In this pre-Modern Horizons point in time, Titan Shift was still a fairly popular deck. However, in 2018 the card had never seen a true reprint. That's somewhat astounding given that the card was so central to a major Modern deck yet hadn't once been reprinted in any of the previous six Masters sets (three of which were centered around Modern). That alone is enough to see this card get a decent inclusion in this list, however when Field of the Dead arrived in Core Set 2020 the following year, the two paired together for one heck of a Standard deck for a few months until Core Set 2019 finally rotated out.

Number Five

Unquestionably, the elder dragon card players were most eager to see from this set was Nicol Bolas. When it was previewed, though, the card had a bit of a tepid reception. The front side was a decent body, but the back side looked a bit too difficult to flip over into, even if the abilities were strong. It turns out, though, that a 4/4 flying creature for just four mana that also causes your opponent to discard was in fact good enough. The card saw a strong amount of Standard play and remains a casual and Cube favorite to this day.

Number Four

Vivien was a serious powerhouse of the Standard format she was in. She was great in both midrange decks and even as a sideboard option for the Mono-Green Aggro (aka Steel Leaf Stompy) list of the era. Finding creatures or blowing up problematic permanents was a huge boon, particularly when you found yourself in a rather grindy matchup versus the control decks that were popular at the time. Even now, several years later, players everywhere broke out their copies once more thanks to the recent reprinting in Foundations, showing once again just how good this planeswalker can be.

Number Three

A well performing deck of the era was Boros Angels, and it ran multiple copies of this powerful mythic. The deck was somewhat of a lower tier, though, and didn't put up the biggest showing as the format post-Guilds of Ravnica settled. However, the card soon after would become a mainstay in the soon-to-be created format of Pioneer. Selesnya Angels has become a strong contender of that format, and a big reason is the amount of life it generates enables Resplendent Angel to make a constant stream of tokens, overwhelming your opponent.

Number Two

It's not often I make a note for Commander considerations in these mythic rankings, as they typically tend to be fodder for the middle of the lists. In this case, however, Arcades is so overwhelmingly popular, it'd be hard to make a list like this and not have him listed highly. This is thanks to a deck revolving around him being dirt cheap to build - as most walls cost mere pennies - while still being extremely effective to play. This has caused Arcades to become one of the most beloved commanders in the game, ranking as the 22nd most popular commander on EDHREC.com to this day.

Number One

I normally skip the non-booster planeswalker deck cards in these lists because they're not really in the main set and they're bad. However, this set brings with it another oddity: mechanically unique buy-a-box promos. These I am going to discuss because several of them have either serious tournament or Commander pedigree. Case in point Nexus of Fate.

This powerful Time Walk variant enabled players to take turns over and over again, enabling various decks in both Standard and Pioneer to loop it for the win. When doing so, you can utilize a Teferi, Hero of Dominaria emblem to exile your opponents' boards. The decks this spawned were so egregious, Nexus of Fate was banned in best of one Standard on MTG Arena and eventually also banned in Pioneer, where it remains banned to this day. That's not even touching on the fact that at major tournaments, players often needed to go to judges to make official proxies for their foil-only cards. A truly infamous card well deserving of being at the top of this list.

Paige Smith

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