Scrappy Mechanic / Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering has got its share of Scrappy Mechanics over its over twenty-five years, many of which appear in a single set then never again due to unpopularity. In fact, Magic R&D termed a "storm scale" (named after the game-breaking mechanic) as a measure of likely a mechanic will see a reprint in future Standard sets, with a 1 being guaranteed to reappear, a 10 being basically impossible. There are a number of reasons mechanics end up with a high score, but common ones include being overpowered, confusing, tedious, un-fun (whether to use or play against), or underwhelming. Although some are high on the scale because "better" implementations of the mechanic have been made since (for example, Devotion is essentially an updated, more popular version of Chroma, meaning it's extremely unlikely Chroma will ever return). Notably, "bands with others" is rated an 11 on this scale, beating out even the Storm Mechanic.

Groups/Types of mechanics

• Players like to play their cards, and tend to react negatively to mechanics that encourage them not to do that, such as the "Wisdom" abilities that give you bonuses for having seven or more cards in your hand (which encourages you to let your cards sit in your hand instead of using them), Hellbent abilities giving you bonuses for having no cards in hand (which encourages you to get rid of your hand instead of using it), and Amplify creatures that make creatures stronger if you reveal creature cards in your hand that share a subtype with them (which encourages you to both let creatures sit in your hand and reveal them).
• "Chaos" cards, which have effects like replacing every permanent in play with random stuff, killing or sparing creatures based on the outcome of coin flips, or just stuff like "if heads, you draw a card, if tails, you take damage". There are players who enjoy this, but these effects are mostly disliked for making a mess out of the game, often adding an excessive amount of luck and unpredictability, and/or leading to overly-complicated board states. Their effects can also also be cumbersome — for instance, Scrambleverse requires to you take every nonland permanent in play and randomly select who gets to control it, which takes some time in and of itself and leads to hassle later (you have to make sure that destroyed permanents go into their original owner's graveyard, and that everyone gets their cards back at the end of the game). Some chaos effects also have the problem of largely invalidating what happened before they're used.
• In early Magic, enemy-colored cards were rare and support for enemy-colored decks was underwhelming. While this was a flavorful way to show that these colors don't work well together, it shut down a lot of cool deck ideas, and Wizards eventually went back on this design choice and provided many more options for players who wanted to run enemy colors.
• Color hosers are effects that penalize your opponent for using a specific color, which often leads to variance issues, as their effectiveness depends so much on the matchup. While color hosing is still around, Wizards has deliberately scaled back on it and strived to avoid making "you're using color X, and I have its hoser, so I win" effects. Problematic color-hosing mechanics that have been abandoned include:
  • Giving colors access to off-color effects as long as they target an enemy color. This did show the colors' opposition to each other, but led to gameplay problems and watered down the flavor of the colors, so it was abandoned relatively early on.
  • Landwalk prevents your opponent from blocking if they are using a specific type of basic land (or occasionally something else or something more specific). This ability either does nothing or makes the creature far more efficient than it should be, and which one you get is completely determined the moment your opponent chooses their deck, as most decks can't change their manabase to outright remove a type of basic land. As a result, landwalk as a whole has been obsoleted.
  • Fear and its successor Intimidate, which prevent opposing creatures who lack the desired colors from blocking your creature. While this has a little more room for counterplay (your opponent can bring in some artifact creatures, which can block the creature), the strength of the creature is still determined when the decks are paired, and there is no architecture to allow players to prepare for it because color changing is no longer a common mechanic. Neither mechanic is printed on new cards as of 2015, with the more universally useful Menace replacing them.
• The Self-Parody un-sets are intended to be light and fun, but some of their mechanics were the opposite:
  • The Gotcha mechanic penalized certain player actions, with seven of them penalizing you for saying certain common words and one penalizing you for laughing. The most efficient way to avoid getting Gotcha'd is to clam up and not talk or interact, which did not exactly lead to a light, fun and friendly format. Only appearing in Unhinged, this single mechanic is widely blamed for the set's commercial failure and the thirteen-year wait until the next silver-bordered set Unstable. Gotcha was so bad that it ended up naming the Gotcha Scale, a version of the Storm Scale specific to parody sets.
  • Two Unglued cards have to be torn "into pieces" during activation. Both were hated because players didn't want to physically destroy their cards just to use their effect once.
  • Denimwalk is most likely never coming back because it often encourages players to remove their pants.
  • The stickers in Unfinity are an interesting case: they performed well in playtesting, but still ended up being disliked by a lot of players. The first issue is that they're legal in eternal formats, where many players feel that they're out of place, and one sticker card (__________ Goblin) has seen Legacy play despite Wizards' attempts to cost them so that they wouldn't show up in competitive Eternal events. The second issue is logistics — while stickers work fine for individual matches, the glue will wear off if you try to play a tournament, which can easily lead to players losing track of where a sticker is supposed to be, or even losing stickers between matches. The third issue is that between name stickers, art stickers, ability stickers and power/toughness stickers, Unfinity's use of the mechanic is too convoluted for its own good.
• Two mechanics from the game's Early Instalment Weirdness days caused so many issues that they were banned from all formats and relegated to the Self-Parody Un-sets:
  • Shahrazad is infamous for making the players play an entire subgame of Magic within the game they're already playing. Needless to say, this can make the game drag on, especially if the effect is copied or reused. You can even get subgames within subgames. The card had massive potential for abuse in tournaments — you could try to win the first game, then sideboard in four copies of Shahrazad and stall until you got the win. Thankfully, Shahrazad was banned before someone could try to pull that, and the Un-set variations learned from its mistakes by designing the subgames to be quick.
  • Chaos Orb and Falling Star add a strange Dexterity Challenge: you flip the card onto the battlefield from a height of at least one foot, and they only affect cards they touch. This led to a lot of rules issues and logistical issues: it wasn't clear whether players could move their cards when Orb/Star is activated to minimize the potential damage,^note Later, Slaying Mantis addresses this by explicitly disallowing it. The logistical issue doesn't really apply for casual play, since no one will want to make the game extremely unwieldy just to maybe gain a minor advantage. and if that's not allowed, the mere existence of these cards mean that it's optimal to spread your cards out as much as possible from the get go, making the game unwieldy. They also have the issue of making the game less accessible for disabled players. However, dexterity challenges still work in the informal environment of the Un-sets even if they turned out badly for serious play.
• There's a class of mechanics known as "Stax" or "prison" that are reviled by casual players, as shown by EDHREC's list of cards voted the most frustrating to play against. The goal of a Stax deck is to essentially make sure that your opponents can't play their cards, either by making spells cost more, limiting the number of spells that can be cast each turn, forcing permanents to be sacrificed, forcing permanents to stay tapped past the untap step... in a casual environment like commander, Stax just serves to prolong games and make them miserable for everyone who can't draw or play removal effectively.
  
  In Commander, few Stax cards will draw more ire than Drannith Magistrate. For 1 and a White mana, you get a 1/3 human wizard with the rules text saying "Your opponents can't cast spells from anywhere other than their hands"— i.e. unless you have very specific cards, you can't play your commander. While it dies to most forms of removal, it essentially means that, for as long as it's out on the board, one person is playing Commander, and at least three other players are playing Vintage with a 99-card deck.
• EDHREC's list of cards voted the most frustrating to play against has a lot of mass destruction effects on it. This mechanic is mostly reviled in casual play because of how much it sets players back and can extend games (especially if used poorly).
• Theft mechanics can draw the ire of players; some effects, like Act of Treason, only last for a turn and are generally considered not the worst thing in the world. But then you then have effects like Etali, Primal Storm or Pako, Arcane Retriever and Haldan, Avid Arcanist that force you to exile cards from your library for your opponents to play, and cards in exile are basically impossible to ever get back. Not only is seeing someone play your best game pieces or stealing your lands infuriating, but in paper Magic, there's a risk of your cards getting damaged by someone else using them.
• Werewolves have it rough in Magic, with both attempts at their signature transformation mechanic having significant issues:
  • The original Innistrad werewolves enter the battlefield as their weaker human form, and transform into their stronger werewolf form if a turn passes without anyone casting a spell. Unfortunately, this means that if you take a turn off to transform your werewolves, your opponent can simply cast an instant on your end step to prevent it, wasting your turn. Another issue is that each werewolf needs to be transformed after being cast, which is annoying if you need to cast more of them after transforming some (e.g. if the transformed ones die).
  • The Day/Night mechanic fixes the aforementioned issues: now it only checks if the active player cast any spells, and once it becomes Night, all your werewolves start in their stronger werewolf form (until someone casts two spells on their turn to change it back to Day). Unfortunately, this adds a new problem: as soon as someone casts one Day/Night card, it has to be tracked for the rest of the game. This is particularly annoying in multiplayer games (everyone has to track it if one player is using werewolves) and games where someone is only using a small number of Day/Night cards (for instance, some decks run Outland Liberator for the front side and don't even care about transforming it). This approach also means that the old werewolves are awkward to mix with the new ones, and it fails to fix the mechanic's core issue that passing a turn to transform werewolves doesn't work well in an aggro deck, where these creatures would otherwise fit in.

Individual mechanics

• Affinity for artifacts, although often acknowledged as a fair mechanic in a vacuum, gained infamy through its association with the "Ravager Affinity" deck that dominated the format at the time, so much so that its key cards were banned from tournament play. The backlash was strong enough that when Scars of Mirrodin revisited Mirrodin, the designers chose not to bring it back in fear that its new incarnation would inherit the Scrappy legacy of the mechanic. Other types of Affinity were eventually added, but most cards with Affinity aren't modern-legal, and the ones that are are either "Affinity for Equipment" (a specific type of artifact that's less useful in the context of Modern, the format where Affinity was the most oppressive) with a single creature, Junk Winder, having affinity for tokens.
• Ante was a mechanic that made each player put a random card from their deck into the Ante zone, with the winner permanently taking all the ante cards. The mechanic was heavily disliked (people didn't want to risk losing their favorite cards every time they played), potentially ran afoul of anti-gambling laws, and was not particularly well-balanced (with one such card, Contract From Below, being arguably the most powerful black-bordered card ever printed). While Ante was intended to be the default, "No Ante" games quickly became the primary way of playing, and any cards which reference Ante have never been legal in any competitive format, with only nine such cards ever created.
• Banding is somewhat infamous as probably the most over-complicated mechanic in all of Magic's history, with even many people claiming to understand it messing up the rules. According to Mark Rosewater, the point when the development team realized they had to stop using Banding was during an early World Championship, when the competitors, who were supposed to be the best players in the world, frequently had to get clarification on how exactly Banding worked in a given situation.
  • And even for people who actually do understand banding, there are so many things that can unintentionally make it far more complicated, like abilities that give or remove banding. There's also "bands with other legends", which is infamous because (1) it's a more restricted version of banding, and (2) before the 2010 rules changes, it had the hilariously counter-intuitive effect of only letting the creature band with other legends that also have the "bands with other legends" ability (instead of just other legends in general), which also hilariously lead to a creature with probably the most useless ability in Magic history, the ability to remove "bands with other" abilities from another creature. In short, banding got far too complicated far too quickly.
  • Another major issue banding ran into was when reminder text started being printed on cards and printed rulebooks in every starter became a thing of the past. Once you grok banding it's relatively understandable, at least at the level need to play a game, but actually trying to quickly explain it is very hard. Each card's text box has pretty limited space, and while most reminder text blocks were only a dozen or so words, while the Oracle reminder text for banding comes in at 56 words, enough to take up basically the entire textbox of a card. The worst part is that's supposed to be the "quick" reminder of how an ability works, an actual in depth explanation covering common situations and edge cases would be FAR longer.
• In the Storm Scale article discussing it, Cohort was named the lowest-rated mechanic in Magic's history since they began doing market research. Cohort abilities are characterized by requiring you to tap the creature and another Ally you control, which is clunky and overly restrictive — you need to run multiple creatures of an uncommon type, get out two of them, then wait until at least one of them doesn't have summoning sickness, and then tap both of them.
• Coin flips. Cards that require them have consistently been among the least popular cards in their respective sets, according to Wizards of the Coasts's market research.
• Companion. The original version of the mechanic let the player cast one Companion creature from their sideboard as long as their deck met a deckbuilding restriction, many of which weren't that to fulfill or had enough loopholes to work around them. This meant that from the start of the game, your opponent had guaranteed access to an extra card, which led to repetitive games, and worse, several of the Companions were Game Breakers in all sorts of formats. Companion drew so much ire from both casual and professional players that Wizards outright nerfed the entire mechanic, changing it to "you can pay 3 mana to put it into your hand from outside the game" (which made it more expensive to use and easier to interact with). Even then, it still attracts hate due to bad memories of its initial iteration, the impracticality of the rules change (as this means the reminder text on printed cards is no longer accurate) and the fact that some Companions are still strong after the nerf.
• Countering. A countered spell or ability simply fizzles. All the costs of it must still be paid (and sometimes, that's much worse than just mana), but the user gets nothing. This is very frustrating and the methods to get past it are rarely obvious to new players. This is a big reason scrubs say "no blue". In fact, countermagic is so unpopular that R&D has deliberately been reducing its effectiveness.
• Devoid is considered to be one of the larger missteps Magic Design has taken. The keyword makes certain Eldrazi-related cards colorless, despite still needing colored mana to be cast. While such cards can be noteworthy for some specific deck types, the set it was introduced in, Battle for Zendikar, had insufficient support for those sorts of interactions, so the keyword was seen as a mechanic that doesn't do anything. It has since become one of the go-to complaints about the block.
• Epic spells repeat themselves on each of your turns, with the massive downside that you can't cast anything else. As a result, players generally found them unfun to use. It didn't help that most of them were Awesome, but Impractical, and the one that was considered usable had the problem that if your opponent cast it, the outcome would be either "you have the answers for it and win" or "you lose because you don't have the answers for it".
• Flip cards are gimmicky 2-in-1 cards that can be rotated 180 degrees to switch between their two text boxes when something is triggered. These cards were considered ugly, and worse, they led to confusion about which version they were, especially when tapped. The last nail in their coffin was the introduction of transforming double-faced cards, which avoid both of these issues and are widely seen as a better take on the transformation concept even though those also have their share of detractors.
• Forecast lets you pay a cost and reveal a card from your hand to get an effect. This mechanic was disliked for leading to repetitive play patterns, and because it was hard to interact with — only black with its access to forced discard effects can really stop it.
• Graveyard order. While most formats don't have to worry about this, there are a few old cards that care about the order of the graveyard. This means that if you're playing a format that includes them, you have to make sure the cards go into the graveyard in the correct order just because they might come up. Not only is this annoying on its own (if you use a mass destruction spell, the spell itself may go above or below your destroyed stuff depending on exactly how it destroys stuff), it also means that you're not allowed to rearrange your graveyard for practical reasons like putting spells you can cast from the graveyard on top. All of that for the sake of a few old, underwhelming cards no one uses anyway.
• When a card with Haunt dies (if it's a permanent) or goes to the graveyard after resolving (if it's not), it's exiled "haunting" a creature, which will repeat the card's effect when the haunted creature dies. This mechanic was too complex and clunky for its own good, and players had trouble remembering what it even did.
• Inspired sounds simple: it's an effect that triggers whenever a creature gets untapped. Unfortunately, it didn't work out well in practice. It's surprisingly hard to track, as players are used to untapping and then quickly moving on to the draw step. It also suffers from slowness, as in most cases the creature has to be cast, survive the turn, attack on the next turn, survive the attack, and then make it through yet another turn before there's any payoff. Additionally, it's seen as flavorless (it's supposed to represent divine inspiration, which didn't really come across).
• Land destruction is often seen as frustrating to deal with because of how much it can set a player back, especially if it's cheap enough to leave them unable to even participate in the game because they can't produce enough mana to cast their spells. There's also mass land destruction, which is even more hated, especially when used to drag out games. As a result, R&D has depowered land destruction so that it can still be used to answer specific problematic lands, while not letting you outright lock your opponent out of the game.
• Landhome, which almost always showed up as the Islandhome variant, was an answer to the question of how Blue's iconic sea creatures were supposed to live and fight when there was no sea: if your opponent controls no Islands, they can't attack, and if you find yourself controlling no Islands, you lose the creatures. While this might be a flavorful solution, it turned out not to be very fun for players, with most future sea creatures released without these restrictions. Landhome was such a scrappy keyword that it eventually ended up losing its status as a keyword entirely, with its effects listed out as rules text on the cards that it was on.
• Licids can change back and forth between creatures and creature enchantments, which turned out to cause a bunch of rules headaches. Their concept was later revisited with the similar Reconfigure mechanic, which involves equipment instead of enchantments and went over better.
• Megamorph was once the lowest-scoring mechanic of all time since Magic began doing market research. It's seen as a completely unnecessary addition to the game, as it's identical to morph except that the creature gets a +1/+1 counter on it when it's turned face up.
• It's a major irk to many Commander players that the Nephilim, the first four-color creatures in Magic, are not legendary. While Awesome, but Impractical in every other format, their large color spreads and bizarre yet powerful effects would make them a perfect choice for a commander if only they were legendary. "Legalizing" them is one of the most ubiquitous house rules among groups, with many wishing that Wizards would simply say "screw it" and errata them already. Somewhat mitigated by the Commander 2016 supplemental set releasing five decks with four-colored legendary creatures.
• Radiance abilities affect a target creature and all creatures that share a color with it. The problem is that this is hard to process, especially considering the existence of multi-colored creatures and the mechanic's awkward property of being able to affect anyone's creatures as long as they have at least one of the required colors. It also had the issue of its flavor not working as a representation of the Boros Legion.
• Regeneration, a way to save a creature from dying, suffers from being wonkier and more complicated than the name suggests^effectThe next time this creature would be destroyed this turn, it isn't. Instead tap it, remove all damage from it, and remove it from combat. — especially pre-Sixth Edition, when it was a confusing ability that could only be activated in the damage prevention step. Worse, before Ninth Edition, Regeneration was not explained on the cards, leaving players confused about what exactly it did: some thought it could save creature spells from being countered, save creatures from being sacrificed, bounced or exiled, or even revive long-dead creatures from the graveyard. It's also easy to forget that regenerating a creature taps it. In 2005, Vice President of Design Aaron Forsythe admitted that the mechanic would never have been greenlit at the time, and was only still around thanks to the Grandfather Clause. It was finally retired with 2016's Kaladesh, being replaced with the more intuitive "gain indestructible until end of turn".
  • For the same reasons, "Prevent the next x damage" that prevented only a certain amount of damage (and not just all damage) as an active ability (that is, requiring activation or casting) was slowly phased out for more streamlined and less frustrating abilities like indestructible, effects that prevent all damage, or effects that provide passive damage reduction.
• Cards with the Rhystic mechanic have the drawback that they do little or nothing if your opponent pays a cost. Players already tend to find countermagic frustrating, and these cards essentially come with built-in counterspells to be exploited by your opponent. It also leads to unfun play patterns, as it encourages you not to play your cards so you can afford to pay for your opponent's Rhystic spells. As a result, the mechanic was very poorly received by players. The few cards with the Rhystic mechanic that do see play are enchantments with triggers that occur so frequently that they will pay off at some point if not answered immediately... and those are disliked because the question, "Do you pay the one?" gets old fast.
• Sweep is a weird mechanic that lets you return lands to your hand as an additional cost, and the more you return, the stronger a spell's effect will be. It's basically using land destruction on yourself just to get an effect. This mechanic is only remembered for being a frequent sight on lists of the worst Magic mechanics.
• Transform cards are the first to have different backings. These cards need to be able to flip over during play, so they must be sleeved or else count as marked cards (and are thus illegal in tournaments and any casual group with a shred of common sense), but de-sleeving a card to flip it over can be a hassle and puts it at risk of more damage. The solution is to print placeholder cards that garbage up booster packs, with Transform cards held in a pile off to the side. Since all the Transform cards had to be printed on the placeholder, they are few in number—meaning your opponent has a pretty good idea what deck you're running when he sees you have a pile of Transform cards off to the side. They have also caught some flak for making the game more complicated, as the players have to keep track of what both sides do.
• Tribal was a card type with a major debut in the Lorwyn block, which focused on synergies within creature types. Tribal expanded on this design space to grant creature types to noncreature spells. The Tribal tag ultimately didn't amount to much, as some of the most popular Tribal cards like Bitterblossom were valued for factors that didn't include the Tribal tag. On top of that, other themed cards didn't get the Tribal tag — for instance, why is Goblin Cannon not a Goblin Tribal Artifact? Ultimately, while Tribal is not exactly frustrating in gameplay, it proved to be very frustrating for card design, and Wizards eventually retired the card type by the Innistrad block as it was too much legwork to re-label cards with a few words that don't do much. That said, the card type did get renamed for "cultural sensitivity"— going forward, the mechanic will be called "Kindred".
• Mutate is a unique case, as it's a Scrappy Mechanic for a particular population of Magic players: Judges. While normal players like the mechanic well enough, it is a nightmare from the perspective of the Comprehensive Rules, moreso than Banding ever was. Creatures that mutate onto each other are considered the same permanent, with the topmost permanent on the pile defining the name, card type and power/toughness of that creature and having the combined rules text of everything in that pile. But what if the mutated permanent isn't always a creature, like a Therosian God, whose animation status depends on your Devotion to a certain color? What if you mutate onto a face-down creature that then turns face-up, and that face-up creature is a human? What about mutate and Myriad? What about copying Mutate spells?
• Another former Scrappy Mechanic for not only Judges but the Designers as well as Trample, which infamously was excluded from core sets since Sixth Edition till Tenth. The reason being due to despite in a vacuum being simple, in practice it was a nightmare before damage rules were remade to remove it from the stack from the amount of things to consider wherever or not Trample damage goes though, including the above mentioned Regenerate and damage prevention, multiple blockers and other things. It got to the point where several times they were considering replacing Trample with the "When this creature is blocked, you may instead assign all combat damage as though it wasn't blocked" ability. Ultimately, redoing how combat damage and lethal damage worked in a clearer fashion made Trample less frustrating to explain and ultimately kept as an evergreen keyword.