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  • Accidental Aesop: Ask either Yawgmoth or Elesh Norn what happens when you let your egotism and past grievances get in the way of your work.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: During March of the Machine, Elesh Norn tells the harvesters to "let the traitor be" before they can kill the already mutilated Urabrask. Is she just mocking his past decree about letting the Mirrans be, thinking that Urabrask will die anyway due to his injuries? Is she having a last minute pang of conscience? Does she want to avoid Urabrask becoming part of a new life cycle, essentially negating him to become one with the rest of Phyrexia? Her own altered mental state doesn't help.
  • Aluminum Christmas Trees:
    • The universe represented in Theros is based on Greek mythology and history, filled with hydras, gorgons, and centaurs. With that in mind, players might be forgiven for thinking that Vulpine Goliath (an enormous fox) was an Ass Pull, but it's not.
    • Amonkhet has the Prowling Serpopard, a "Cat Snake" which looks and sounds like something out of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but is an actual Egyptian mythological animal.
    • The Machine Orthodoxy makes wide use of a biomechanical porcelain to cover the flayed skin of their ranks, one of the most horrifying examples of blending flesh and metal together. In reality, biocompatible ceramics are used in many fields of medicine, clearly not in such nightmarish ways.
  • And You Thought It Would Fail: The Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty set had a lot going against it. Firstly, it was a return to the plane of one of MTG's most infamous sets, and many within Wizards initially thought that they couldn't return to Kamigawa without both raising the ire of those who hated the original block while still appealing to its handful of fans. Secondly, it was a radical stylistic departure from every other Magic set before it, having sci-fi Magitek aesthetics influenced by both cyberpunk and anime, and neither Magic's classic high-fantasy look nor the original Kamigawa's Japanese-influenced art style. The sci-fi look alone caused a massive fan outcry, with many online fans declaring their intent to skip the set. It ended up being a smash success, in no small part because it still acknowledges the original block's storyline and doesn't completely reject feudal Japan aesthetics, both selling well and being well-reviewed by players, with head designer Mark Rosewater saying that its success gives them both a precedent and a template for how to "give a makeover" to poorly-received worlds.
  • Anticlimax Boss: New Phyrexia as a whole, despite being built up as a scarily efficient threat, performs so bad on any front in March of the Machine that it makes it look like the writers exceeded in trying to make up for its triumph in Phyrexia: All Will Be One. All of a sudden, countermeasures against compleation start popping up everywhere, cunning manipulators like Elesh Norn and Jin-Gitaxias start playing a very convenient game of Idiot Ball and their planeswalkers fail every task assigned to them. The whole invasion and the eventual defeat of New Phyrexia happens in one single expansion with more than ten planes involved. To make a comparison, the old Phyrexian invasion went through a whole block and was focused only on Dominaria. A little dismaying for a faction that in the past had shown to learn from Yawgmoth's flaws.
  • Anti-Metagame Character:
    • The metagaming nature of decks tends to fall into three "categories" - Dominant, Counter, and Rogue. Despite steps taken toward balance with each block, there always arises one or two dominant "tier 1" decks. As they become dominant, "counter" decks are created with the specific goal of defeating the dominant decks. As these two balance each other out, there then arises "rogue" decks which will be beaten by the dominant decks, but can defeat the counter decks which are so specialized for countering the dominant decks that they cannot adapt to the new threats posed by the rogue deck.
    • Due to "netdecking", it is extremely common in high-level tournament play that two extremely similar decks face off. Most players in these circumstances keep "silver bullet" cards strong against their own deck in their side-deck for just such matchups.
  • Awesome Art: Hell yes! Magic The Gathering’s card art is consistently detailed, vivid, and gorgeous, painting epic, vast worlds that are one of the game's main draws. Even simple cards like basic land cards may get eye-catching art that you wish you could expand and put it on your wall. In fact, many artists are so well known that they do sell larger prints on their personal websites. So you can put it on your wall. And this isn't even going into the beautiful alternate art cards like borderless art allowing you to see the entire piece as well as themed alternate frames complete with matching art.
  • Awesome Ego: Nicol Bolas is one of the most evil characters in the setting, but there's no denying his arrogance makes his dialogue a lot of fun.
  • Badass Decay:
    • Jace Beleren and the Gatewatch were agreed to have gotten less badass in Phyrexia: All Will Be One as they take increasingly contrived and major losses alongside making dumber decisions and overall being less "Interdimensional Justice League" and more "Multiversal recipients of The Worf Effect" to ensure New Phyrexia got their Near-Villain Victory.
    • New Phyrexia has been accused of making Phyrexia less badass the moment they got functioning Planeswalkers— despite this widely being agreed to be one of New Phyrexia's finest hours, things quickly went downhill as people realized that Phyrexia was invading personally and essentially allowing every dimension Plot Armor, whereas previous stories had said that a Planeswalking Phyrexia would be unstoppable. In March of the Machines, it was agreed that all of New Phyrexia— especially the Praetors— had gone from prime examples of Evil Is Cool to coming off as sorry invaders. Sheoldred and Vorinclex go down far more easily than expected, with Vorinclex falling to a random soldier. Meanwhile, Urabrask is dismembered and reduced to a minor character while Jin-Gitaxias, a known chessmaster and Evil Genius, makes a bad decision in the heat of battle and gets effortlessly taken down as well. The worst recipient, however, was widely agreed to be Elesh Norn, who goes from a stoic, brilliant and ominous religious leader and a potential Multiversal Conqueror to an emotional wreck who murders her own best supporters in a rage and basically brings her own side down through her incompetence.
  • Base-Breaking Character:
    • Jace Beleren. Some people are fine with his multiple appearances in both card form and plot form, while others remember the days where Jace the Mind Sculptor dominated every format and hate every incarnation of Jace since. It doesn't help that Jace — cerebral and socially awkward — was intended as an Audience Surrogate, and therefore has been a main character in several major storylines, causing many fans to feel like he has overstayed his welcome. This seems to have died down circa 2017-18 due to the changes to his personality that have surfaced as of the storyline of Ixalan block; his presence has been diminished recently, only appearing in two sets after War of the Spark in mid-2019.
    • Nicol Bolas. Some consider him a valid Big Bad and an interesting take on "Dominaria's most ancient evil". Others consider him a to be an overly powerful villain who gets shoehorned into every storyline and isn't as interesting as other villains, especially Yawgmoth or the Praetors.
    • Nahiri. The entire fanbase seems divided between those who think the writers screwed up extremely by turning her evil, "ruining" her character completely, and those who think she's a monster that deserves to die.
  • Better Off Sold:
    • The series has many "Junk Rares"; cards that are indeed rare but have no real competitive value. Their rarity means they can still be sold for a pretty penny, but they usually go to collectors looking to fill out their collection rather than competitive players seeking to actually use them.
    • In the Shandalar computer game, this is the only realistic source of early-game gold; always accept cards when winning a battle, then find the nearest town and sell the bad ones.
  • Broken Base:
    • Examples include "non-interactive" mechanics (cards that limit how other players can react to them). The "Hexproof" keyword ("this card can't be targeted by your opponents") in particular draws a lot of contention from both sides, as satirized in this comic strip.
    • The Companion mechanic from Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths is the subject of intense debate/loud arguments, touching on whether having a card that can be played from outside the deck is too strong, if Wizards balanced them adequately for any given format (particularly the eternal formats), whether the deckbuilding restrictions for them are properly verifiable, and so on. In the end, Zirda, the Dawnwalker and Lurrus of the Dream-Den were banned in Legacy, and the latter was also banned in Vintage, the first card to be banned from that format because of its power level since 1996! note 
    • The banning of potentially culturally insensitive cards from constructed formats was this to some players. While few people are opposed to bans that could make the game more inclusive, some concerns were raised over the precedent set for banning cards for non-gameplay reasons, especially when some were seemingly innocuous. That said the ban only affected seven cards in total, none of which were very good anyways, so the community at large moved on fairly quickly.
    • The Sixth Edition rules change created a permanent rift between those who preferred old Magic and those who preferred the new. The same happened with the 8th Edition border change.
    • The "Universes Beyond" program, a series of Crossovers with various other series and univereses. Both "Secret Lairs", usually containing 5-10 new cards, including crossovers with The Walking Dead and Stranger Things and larger products like Warhammer 40,000 Commander decks and a full fledged The Lord of the Rings set. Many fans of other series were excited to see their favorites ported over to Magic, as well as the prospect of getting new players not familiar the game being introduced via crossovers of series they loved. Others were upset at the concept of Magic no longer being a standalone universe, fearing how ridiculous the game will feel after years of crossovers and perhaps even Product Placement eventually.
    • The infect mechanic has been cited in official articles as very polarizing. It has many fans who like how it works with Proliferate and how you can pump an Infect creature for some pretty quick kills. However, it also has a lot of detractors who dislike it for reasons like being too insular (infect cards don't have much place outside of an infect deck) or not very interesting (due to the similarities with normal damage). In Commander in particular, it's also divisive because it still only needs 10 infect damage to kill despite the higher starting life total — one side thinks it's too easy to die to an infect player, while others argue that increasing the threshold will make it almost impossible for the infect player to win. The mechanic did not return for Phyrexia: All Will Be One; while its divisiveness was a strike against it, it was the insularity issue that got it replaced with toxic.
    • The Desparkening, an event at the end of March of the Machine where a majority of planeswalkers lost their sparks and became regular (albeit still powerful) individuals. Gameplay-wise this has been reflected by reintroducing many former planeswalkers as legendary creatures, and a mandate to only include one planeswalker per expansion. Those who are in favour agree with the designers that it opens up interesting new ways to tell stories, especially since the new Omenpaths allow more characters to travel through planes and now they don't need to be Planeswalkers in order to interact with each other. Those against, however, feel that the move runs counter to the previous fifteen years of storytelling where Planeswalkers have been the clear main characters and are now being demoted to legendaries (which themselves have gone through some Uniqueness Decay over time as only some of them get actual stories to show why they're legendary these days). There are also those who feel that this move was made specifically to shill to Commander players, since it introduces more potential commanders, and many already believe it's become a spotlight-stealing format.
    • Most card bans across the formats are well-understood and justified, but there are some who feel that Prophet of Kruphix should be unbanned in Commander; it has the same mana value and a similar ability to Seedborn Muse, but the splash of blue restricts what decks it can be played in, it doesn't untap artifacts, and the fact that it's only three toughness means it can be killed by a Lightning Bolt.In short, several people don't think "Seedborn Muse but it gives creatures flash" is good enough to justify being banned in the curent Comannder environment.
  • Cliché Storm:
    • The Innistrad block (purposefully) plays every Gothic Horror trope to the hilt. Restless geists, zombie apocalypse, demon cults, vampire lineages, rampaging werewolves, cackling mad scientists, humankind besieged by unholy darkness... and then the return trip (The Shadows Over Innistrad block) plays every Cosmic Horror trope to the hilt, right up to Emrakul being the block's version of Cthulhu.
    • The Scheme cards from Archenemy are purposefully over-the-top. For example, Behold the Power of Destruction's flavor text:
      "I'd call that a successful first test. Golem! Rearm the Doom Citadel!"
    • Thrones of Eldraine is another purposeful Cliche Storm, this time built around Arthurian Legend mixed with fairy tale tropes. While Magic has touched on both themes before, they haven't been played up to this extent.
  • Common Knowledge: It's widely "known" that Crovax from the Weatherlight saga is of the Windgrace family, information that even appears on wikis and other popular storyline sites... but nobody who's looked has been able to find any source for this, only a line about Crovax admiring the planeswalker Lord Windgrace (who is also from Urborg, but otherwise unrelated, being Cat Folk).
  • Complete Monster: See here.
  • Creepy Awesome:
    • Old Phyrexia started the trend and now New Phyrexia is running on this. Not only they turned Mirrodin into a hive-minded world that runs on Uncanny Valley, they have managed to compleat angels. And we love them for it.
    • Innistrad runs on being creepy and awesome in equal measure. Whether it be cannibals, cults, evil vampires, or savage werewolves, the plane is centered around evoking every Gothic Horror trope in existence and making them cool.
  • Critic-Proof:
    • Even discounting the impact the COVID-19 Pandemic had on the game, 2020 was a rough year for Magic; Standard that year put out some of the most broken cards in recent memory— between half a dozen Game Breakers being printed in Throne of Eldraine alone, the Companion mechanic in Ikoria warping every single format in the game, and Zendikar Rising basically causing everyone to build a '4 color goodstuff' archetype thanks to Omnath, Locus of Creation being an incredible build-around, people were complaining that the design team had gone off the rails. Despite this, 2020 was said to be one of Magic's most sucessful years in terms of sales.
    • The Secret Lair product line is deried for its lack of quality control, capitalizing on FOMO to sell overpriced products, and willingness to tie into non-Magic intellectual property, but it is objectively one of the most profitable products Wizards puts out.
  • Designated Hero: With Magic spanning over at least three decades' worth of media and many writers, it's bound to happen. Here's some special examples:
    • Jace Beleren in Agents of Artifice. Through most of it, he is a Nominal Hero, being primarily selfishly motivated and doing pretty much the same sort of nasty shit the antagonists do, yet the narrative paints him as having the moral high ground. He is not outright unsympathetic — far from it — but he is quite a ruthless person and not really benevolent by any definition of the word.
    • Venser, just Venser. In his first appearence in the Time Spiral Cycle, he is obnoxious, quite vitriolic, and more interested in getting into Jhoira's pants than the larger stakes. When he reappears in the Scars of Mirrodin block, he is triumphantly depicted as a standard hero and a personal friend of Karn, a person whom at best he was ambivalent to and at worst outright aggressive towards. To make matters more hilarious, in the actual novel for the set, Quest For Karn (incidently the last proper novel for Magic as a whole), he is a belligerent drug addict who spends most of his time bickering with his companions (albeit not without reason). When he gives up his life to save Karn, the audience is expected to see it as a Heroic Sacrifice, but most are left with a sigh of relief.
    • Sarkhan Vol during the Khans Of Tarkir shenanigans. The narrative paints his endeavors to go back in time and save the dragons as a good thing... except that the end result is considered by many to be worse, since the clans have been subjugated by the dragons and degraded into shadows of their former selves. Though Creative maintains that this was the purpose, the narrative in the player guides and uncharted realms (as well as the land art) clearly suggest that this new Tarkir is meant to be better. Only one dissenting voice is heard, Yasova's, but she is shown as being in the wrong.
    • Teferi, at least in the Dominaria set. While not a bad guy, his card from that set declares him the "Hero of Dominaria", which isn't really deserved. During the Phyrexian Invasion, one of the greatest threats to Dominaria's existence, Teferi decided not to fight the Phyrexians, and instead phased his homeland of Zhalfir (as well as Shiv) out of existence before leaving, despite Urza pointing out that doing so would mean Dominaria losing powerful allies in their war against the Phyrexians. In essence, in one of Dominaria's most desperate times of need, rather than aid Dominaria, Teferi decided only to save the parts he cared about most before leaving the plane to its fate.
  • Diagnosed by the Audience: Despite Yawgmoth's clear lack of empathy and remorse, he shows traits like obsessive dedication and capability for long term planning, which would clash with the profile of a sociopath. His sense grandiosity and entitlement could be related to narcissism.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: It's not uncommon to see Urabrask portrayed as a sort of saint and/or revolutionary leader in the fandom. While he's surely working against Elesh Norn, nothing ensures that his vision of constant reforging would be any better and he just seems to care about reaching his own goal without considering who his potential allies are and what they need or want, which can be seen more as selfish than anything else.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • The pyromancer Jaya Ballard, whose funny quotes adorned many a burn spell (and who provided the page quote for Kill It with Fire). Finally printed in Time Spiral, and she was awesome. So awesome, in fact, that most believe that her card was the prototype for the Planeswalker type.
    • Yawgmoth, and Phyrexians in general. When they first appeared, they were barely a footnote in the flavor of the Antiquities expansion; eventually, they morphed into the main villain in Magic's Rogues Gallery.
    • The homunculus Fblthp, who is solely known from the art and flavor text of Totally Lost, became an unexpectedly adorable hit among fans. And finally, at the start of April 2019, Fblthp is revealed as a playable creature.
    • Riku of Two Reflections, one of the first official cards printed exclusively for the also unexpectedly popular Commander/Elder Dragon Highlander format. He's an attractive Bishōnen so nice, he exists twice. He quickly became popular with Magic's Estrogen Brigade; his Screw Yourself possibilities don't hurt.
    • Alesha may qualify, being Magic's first transgender character and getting an overwhelmingly positive response from the fanbase at her character (Doug Beyer himself thanked his readers on his Tumblr), but the real star has to be Jagun Wingmate, the nameless orc that gave Alesha her war name. Mark even acknowledged his popularity on his blog as well.
    • Halana and Alena swept the lore-loving Magic community by storm when they appeared in the story for the Shadows Over Innistrad block, because they're a pair of lesbian lovers who are resourceful, clever, and strong enough to survive the entire block, which is no small feat, considering the amount of Nightmare Fuel present. Avacyn didn't even survive it! Wizards eventually gave them cards in Commander Legends.
    • Similarly to Hal and Alena, another gay couple with a happy story are fan favorites, in the form of Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis, who head the "Stalwart Unity" Commander precon deck.
    • Ajani Goldmane has gained quite a following since the publication of a story from his point of view in the Kaladesh block, Release. People are arguing that, despite the fact that he's going to most likely be the Token Non-Human member of the Gatewatch (Nissa notwithstanding), this story made him seem more human than any of the current Gatewatch members. Helping this is the fact that Ajani has a fair bit of badass cred from essentially becoming the Batman of Kaladesh since his last appearance in Theros, complete with his own sidekick, who has taken the name Shadowblayde.
    • Slimefoot from the "Return to Dominaria" storyline was a fandom darling from the word go, being a Creepy Cute commander for the fungus creature type, itself something of a darkhorse. Then it appeared in story and we discovered that it was an adorably friendly Silent Snarker and the fandom just about exploded.
      • The only character that gave Slimefoot a run for its money? Yargle, a legendary frog with no abilities beyond a terrifying 9 Power and laughable 3 Toughness. Foil Yargle cards became as valuable as standard Karn and Teferi Planeswalker cards as Commander players bought Yargle up to make Yargle Decks, just to see if they could make winning strategies around him. Wizards, apparently Pandering to the Base, released a Secret Lair set surrounding him, issuing older cards with art that just happens to include him.
    • To hear a good portion of the fandom talk about it, the entire Second Phyrexian Invasion arc is the story of Urabrask's break with the other Praetors and subsequent Heel–Face Turn, with maybe some planeswalker shenanigans going on in the background. While all the Praetors are popular, Urabrask has generated enough fanart to give Elesh Norn a run for her money. Needless to say, his apparent death midway through the March of the Machine story was met with hew and cry by the fanbase.
    • Plane-wise, Xerex got a surprising number of fans in March of the Machine despite only receiving two new cards (one double-sided). Many people were intrigued by the Escher-like, reality-warping plane that was too alien for even Phyrexia to successfully compleat, and have stated their desire to see the rest of the world fleshed out.
    • The trailer for Thrones of Eldraine featured a pair of living gingerbread cookies literally literally baked together at the hands, who are deliriously happy until Garruk eats the gingerbread husband. The gingerbread wife then proceeds to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Garruk, attempting to take him down despite being a cookie. Fans loved her unexpected badassery so much that one of the first things revealed for Wilds of Eldraine is that she has since been knighted, becoming Syr Ginger, and that she would be receiving her own card.
  • Evil Is Cool: The Phyrexians (both old and new), the Eldrazi, and Nicol Bolas are generally perceived as being both interesting and complicated villains with their different flavors of Nightmare Fuel actions and art, their individual characterizations, and for being Purposefully Overpowered threats in card form that fans outright adore. Bolas and some of the Phyrexians having an Awesome Ego doesn't hurt, either.
  • Fan Nickname: Lots and lots of them.
  • Fashion-Victim Villain: Kamigawan garments are gorgeous, but wearing traditional pants and nothing else is something you would expect from Tibalt or Oko and not from Jin-Gitaxias.
  • First Installment Wins: Lorewise, the ending of "Apocalypse" is seen by many as the perfect conclusion for the Weatherlight saga, with many iconic moments and an overall solid narrative provided by J. Robert King's writing. None of the following big showdowns are compared favorably to it, with "War of the Spark: Forsaken" being probably the biggest offender.
  • Fountain of Memes: Elesh Norn has spawned more memes than the other Praetors combined. She's been compared to Lady Gaga, Pyramid Head, Lady Dimitrescu and many others. Her very recognizable figure, grandiose way of speaking and creepy ideology surely help.
  • Franchise Original Sin:
    • The conclusion of the 2021-23 Phyrexia storyline, with Elesh Norn being a Load-Bearing Boss for Phyrexia, causing the oil and compleated victims going inert after she's destroyed, was decried by many for being an Ass Pull... except the exact same thing happened in the original Phyrexia storyline when Yawgmoth was destroyed, with the Phyrexians "losing the will to live" and effectively ceasing to exist as a threat until what oil Karn had left on him slowly creeped into Mirrodin over the course of centuries. The problem however is that New Phyrexians know about their predecessors and strive to avoid Yawgmoth's mistakes, and Elesh Norn proved time and again to be an expert commander before the Invasion.
    • The push for "Universes Beyond" in The New '20s—crossovers with other IP ranging from The Walking Dead to Doctor Who—has been declared by some to be Magic's death knell, combined with people insisting that Wizards of the Coast should stick to their original IP in Magic. This ignores the fact that the second ever Magic set ever created was based off of the Arabian Nights and incorporated characters such as Aladdin into card design. To be fair, WotC would probably prefer you forget this set as well.
  • Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
  • Growing the Beard: The game's early installments had severe balance issues, but things started to get better with Fourth Edition and Ice Age. By the time Mirage debuted, Magic was relatively stable. Invasion created a design aesthetic that ran until Dragons of Tarkir, 14 years later.
  • High-Tier Scrappy: The most powerful cards and decks, as players grow tired of seeing the same cards at the top tables of every tournament. Victims have included:
    • Blue was infamously the most powerful color for much of the game's history, and arguably still is in Legacy and Vintage. This is because many of the color's core mechanics (card draw, counterspells, artifacts matter, etc.) are difficult to balance and can become Game Breakers if not thoroughly playtested, and early in the game's history the power of card draw and countering was frequently underestimated. In particular, of the Power Nine, six are artifacts and three are Blue, and the color has a significant number of high-profile bannings to its name. Thankfully, Blue's power level has been reined in over the years and is overall much more manageable, but its reputation haunts it to this day, and its effects are still useful enough that decks of other colors sometimes still splash Blue spells when they can.
    • The Storm keyword. It allows whatever spell with the keyword to be copied as many times as spells have been cast in a turn. It easily combos with itself and with any cheap spells or land untapping spells, allowing for ridiculous degenerate combos that cannot easily be stopped. Not even countermagic works, as most spells can only counter one of the spell copies. Storm is so powerful it named the Storm Scale, a scale that measured the power of a keyword and its likeliness to ever be reprinted in standard.note 
    • Psychatog decks were the bane of many players the moment Odyssey came out due to being not only one of the most efficent pumpers in the game but it's ablities enabling many, many hard to counter stratagies, the most basic of which is it's part of a two card kill combo with Upheavel and being the premiere discarder for Madness and flashback cards.
    • The Lorwyn-era Faeries deck.
    • Mirrodin's infamous Ravager Affinity deck, which was so overpowered that it resulted in multiple card bannings. Not only was it extremely powerful, but it could set up so quickly that it couldn't be countered.
    • The Jund deck that dominated Standard after the release of Alara Reborn.
    • Jace, the Mind Sculptor's unprecedented price tag (about $100 at its peak), combined with his status as a staple in multiple formats, has earned him a lot of unpopularity among some segments of the player base. It got to the point that Wizards had to ban Jace from decks.
    • Similar to Jace, Primeval Titan became a key card in the then-dominant Valakut Ramp (and to a lesser extent, Eldrazi Ramp) decks, leading for calls to ban the Titan and Valakut. Soon afterwards, however, ramp decks fell out of favor, mostly ending Primeval Titan's status until the Wolf Run Ramp deck brought it back.
    • Tempo-control decks built around Delver of Secrets and Snapcaster Mage after the release of Innistrad quickly became the bane of players, eclipsing Wolf Run Ramp's status as a High-Tier Scrappy even after attempts to depower such decks.
    • The so-called "Eldrazi winter" caused this for the Battle for Zendikar block. In a nutshell: the preponderance of cheaply-costed Eldrazi, a tribe that was previously known for being giant (and costly) Eldritch Abominations, broke a number of cards printed the last time the tribe was around. A land that passively reduces your Eldrazi mana costs by 2 doesn't look so bad when the cheapest tribe member costs 8 mana. But once Eldrazi of 2-3 mana started to show up, Modern quickly became Eldrazi.dec, the format.
    • The Kaladesh block had...problems. Many problems. This video does a good job explaining all the problems that lead to such a lopsided format, which included a number of bannings — including the game's second-ever emergency ban.
    • Throne of Eldraine brought a number of cards which achieved Scrappy status due to their ubiquity, but the chief of them was unquestionably Oko, Thief of Crowns, which distorted the majority of formats it came into contact with to a massive degree. In particular he provides very powerful effects for a very easily-achievable amount of mana while being able to accumulate enough loyalty and set up enough defence that you need very, very specific cards in order to take him out... and then your opponent will likely play another one, because he's just that good. After noting that they'd dropped the ball in playtesting because they hadn't considered that the "turn a creature into a 3/3 Elk with no abilities" would be used on opponents' creatures to interrupt their play, WotC bowed to the inevitable and banned him from Standard and several other formats.
    • Extra turn cards tend to be hated for shutting down player interaction and WotC constantly attempting to print new ones despite how format-warping they tend to be. Notorious examples include Nexus of Fate and Alrund's Epiphany, which both got banned in Standard.
    • Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer can generate a substantial mana advantage from turn 1 or 2, depending on the format, at the same time removing potentially good topdecks from the opponent's deck. With enough mana rocks and considering the low mana curves in many formats, you could snatch a vital piece of your opponent's strategy before they start their first turn. Even after being banned in Legacy and Centurion, it still gains a considerable hatred due to its constant exposure (four versions in less than two years, as of 2023) that doesn't prevent the price from skyrocketing anyway.
    • Sun Quan, Lord of Wu has rules text that simply reads "Creatures you control have horsemanship". What's Horsemanship, you ask? Flying, but better; creatures with Horsemanship can only be blocked by other creatures with Horsemanship, a mechanic that was printed in exactly one set from 1999, with a one-off card in the March of the Machine commander decks. Because it's such a rare keyword, Sun Quan, Lord of Wu essentially makes all of your creatures unblockable; while its high mana value makes it impractical in Vintage or Legacy, it's perfect for Commander, particularly Simic Go-Wide Decks. Sun Quan was worth over $200 because of how powerful the card was; it finally got down to a more reasonable amount when it was reprinted in Commander Masters.
    • Golos, Tireless Pilgrim was such an effective card that it had to be banned in Commander. Its enter-the-battlefield effect allows it to ramp, it's all colors despite being an artifact, and its ability of letting you pay seven mana to exile the top three cards of your library and just play them for free homogenized the format; everything from tribal strategies to competetive-tier combo decks benefited from having Golos at the helm.
    • Hullbreacher was another card that got banned in commander for being too effective; it neutered your opponent's ability to draw extra cards every turn and gave you a treasure token every time they tried to do so, at instant speed. Combine this with 'Wheel' effects (which force multiple players to discard their hands and draw multiple cards) and you can generate absurd amounts of mana while neutering your opponent's ability to cast spells.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In certain media that focuses on or parodies tabletop gaming, such as Yu-Gi-Oh!, the idea of rare or powerful game pieces being in short supply was simply a narrative trope that wasn't reflected in the physical cards (i.e. there's only one copy of each Egyptian God Card in the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime, but they were widely-printed in real life). In 2023, Magic printed a literally one-of-a-kind variant of The One Ring from Lord of the Rings, which had a two million dollar bounty put on it.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • The September 2016 promotional art for Saheeli's Artistry depicts Saheeli making several cat constructs. When Aether Revolt was released four months later, it introduced the Felidar Guardian, which strongly resembles the cats in the promo art and has an unintended combo letting Saheeli make infinite copies of it.
    • The method of assimilation Phyrexia uses is called "compleation". This is a book that was published in 1982. Now imagine Yawgmoth or the Praetors giving relationship advice.
    • On 2011 April Fools, Wizards announced a new product Duet Deck: Liliana with Gideon. At that point, the game's story arc portrayed the two as so utterly different that the idea of them being together is obviously laughable. Fast forward a few years later after the Amonkhet block, Liliana and Gideon do begin a more friendly relationship, even culminating in Gideon sacrificing his life to save Liliana, resulting in her Survivor's Guilt.
    • In 1998, InQuest Magazine made fake Magic cards based off of iconic Dungeons & Dragons spells and characters as part of a feature, as seen here. In 2021 and 2022, Magic would get two D&D crossover sets; most of the cards in that magazine have actual Paper versions now, although all of them work very differently from the fan concepts.
    • The Gatewatch earned the Fan Nickname of "the Jacetice League" when it debuted, drawing some Creator Backlash from Mark Rosewater in the process. Come 2023, and Magic announced an official crossover with the Justice League's greatest enemy— Marvel Comics.
  • Ho Yay:
    • Nissa and Chandra have a number of close interactions, with Nissa opening up to Chandra more than to the rest of the Gatewatch and Chandra turning to Nissa for comfort and emotional stability. Furthermore, the Kaladesh storyline ends with Chandra sleeping with her head on Nissa's lap. This is fleshed more in Amonkhet story, where Nissa thanks Chandra for being with her, and even with the hiccups post Forsaken novel, the two become a couple at the end of the March of the Machine story.
    • Also Chandra and Liliana, especially when working together in Kaladesh (mostly Liliana encouraging Chandra to cut loose more). Especially blatant in the artwork for Diabolic Tutor and the flavor text for Furious Reprisal.
      Liliana: Now that’s the Chandra I’ve been waiting to see.
  • Hype Backlash
    • War of the Spark: Forsaken is infamous in the Magic fandom. The novel was advertised to be a capstone for the Nicol Bolas story arc, which had spanned the better part of two decades, and ended up being so poorly received that it caused the story of the Theros: Beyond Death set to never be released. Chief among the criticisms were the fact that, within the space of a paragraph, it said that the previous Love Confession between Nissa and Chandra in the previous installment was purely platonic.
    • "March of the Machine" storyline is gaining a bad reputation due to being hyped as the culmination of New Phyrexia storyline and failing to deliver it both in gameplay and especially in lore. Lorewise, most of the high stakes set by the previous expansion were solved in rushed and anticlimatic ways; gamewise the Incubate mechanics was seen by many as a stepdown from the more balanced Toxic, and the final iterations of the five Praetors can hardly compete with the previous two cycles.
  • Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: The Chandra/Nissa pairing is very frequently known in the fandom as Gruulfriends, a combination of "girlfriends" and "Gruul," the Fan Nickname for the combination of red and green mana (since Chandra is a red-aligned planeswalker and Nissa is a green-aligned one).
  • I Knew It!:
    • Emrakul being behind the craziness in the Shadows over Innistrad block was widely predicted as soon as the block began.
    • When people first saw Ixalan's Binding, they were quick to suspect that the Azorius and/or Ugin is behind Ixalan's anti-planeswalking lock. They were right.
    • In the lead up to the Dominaria block, many people were able to guess that Mother Luti, head of the Keral Keep Monastery, was actually Jaya Ballard.
  • It's Short, So It Sucks!:
    • Thanks to Magic switching from a two-set paradigm to most planes only getting one set, some feel that Magic's story has suffered and become more rushed. While Throne of Eldraine and Ikoria were helped by having novels released alongside them, Theros: Beyond Death had no fiction released at all when it was in rotation and only got a summary of events during Streets of New Capenna. For comparison, Zendikar Rising had a total of five chapters to flesh out its story, plus a handful of side stories. Battle for Zendikar got eleven... for the prologue alone. Later sets, such as The Brothers' War, have been giving the story more time to breathe, which the fandom is thankful for.
    • The story for "March of the Machine" has been reviled from its early days for cramming the whole multiplanar invasion into ten chapters and few side stories, and rushing even the few events made to stand out. The comparison to the Invasion Cycle is particularly jarring, as it took three expansions and books to cover the invasion of just one plane.
    • March of the Machine— The Aftermath introduced the concept of desparked planeswalkers, with all ten of the mythics in the micro-set being former Planeswalkers turned into legendary creatures. There were two installments of story released for the set, one focusing on Nissa and Chandra, the other on Nahiri and Ajani.
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A common critique levied at the new white planeswalker from Core Set 2021, Basri Ket, is that he is essentially Samut's backstory with Gideon's personality.
  • Like You Would Really Do It: In 2022, two planeswalkers were turned into Phyrexians, a process that is normally irreversible. However, many player suspected that they would be brought back somehow. These suspicions grew stronger once Phyrexia: All Will Be One had several major characters compleated, including the "face of the game" Jace. It doesn't help that factors like the existence of Halo (which offers some protection from phyresis), Melira's healing powers and the mechanisms of compleating planeswalkers (which specifically preserve the soul) were often read as foreshadowing that there might be a way to bring them back. Two of the victims were indeed brought back at the end of March of the Machine, but it's unclear if that feat can be repeated for the other three who weren't confirmed dead.
  • Low-Tier Letdown:
    • This applies to the Homelands expansion. Almost all of the cards were too weak to see any play, even outside of tournaments, giving it a reputation as a set consisting of nothing but useless junk (The Duelist once admitted the only worthwhile card in the set was an ok anti-weenie card, and people only played that when there were block rules that required decks to contain cards from every expansion in the current rotation; later, Merchant Scroll gained some popularity as well). Packs of Homelands cards were still available in stores for next-to-nothing long after it had "officially" gone out of print.
    • Fallen Empires, too, for about the same reasons. Although it did have several cards that saw tournament play, its best cards (such as Order of the Ebon Hand and Hymn to Tourach) were common, so players didn't need to open many packs to collect all the cards that they actually wanted. It was also massively over-printed, with almost six times as many cards printed as any expansion set before it (approximately 350 million cards, compared to the 62 million of the preceding set, The Dark) and almost as many as the then-current base set, Revised Edition (estimated at 500 million cards over its lifetime.) This imbalance between supply and demand kept the price of Fallen Empires packs very low for a very long time. Even today, booster packs are very inexpensive for a set that was released over twenty-five years ago, with packs running at around $3.50 for a pack of eight cards, comparable to the price of a booster pack of a current set.
    • After the overpowered Artifacts and Rath cycles, the Masquerade Cycle was deliberately underpowered to help re-balance the game. Unfortunately, the result was a weak block that did nothing to stop Rath and Urza from dominating competitive play, and its popularity dipped further after the premiere of the following Invasion cycle, a fan favorite that changed the metagame without being broken. Even worse, bland mechanics and character designs meant it just wasn't fun. One big problem with Mercadian Masques was all the reprints of weak cards. (Kyren Glider < Goblin Glider, Moment of Silence < Festival, the return of storage lands from Fallen Empires.)
    • Kamigawa block tried to do the same thing after the the insanity of Mirrodin, and fared about as well. It was followed by Ravnica to boot, a reasonably powerful set that's been a fan-favorite since printing (even the less powerful cards are considered fun). Kamigawa also had the problem of a lot of its archetypes being too block insular that over time suffered massive Power Creep, especially Samurai who didn't receive much support and until Neon Dynasty came out, and didn't have a multicolored Commander who could cover its three primary colors.
    • Gaining life (on its own, at least) is considered a weak mechanic. Wasting mana doing nothing but gaining life usually does nothing but prolong the inevitable, as you're not actually improving your situation on the board in any meaningful way, and many cards that do just that often show up on "worst ever" lists. Life gain is at its best when it's stapled to a creature via lifelink, an ability or an enter the battlefield effect, or when it's paired with payoffs that reward you for gaining life (like Heliod) or having a high enough life total (like Righteous Valkyrie). It's usually the power of these payoffs, as opposed to the power of the mechanic itself, that turns lifegain into a competitive deck archetype.
    • In Commander/EDH:
      • Red has generally been considered the weakest color, since its core strategy of gunning for quick wins with fast, cheap creatures and burn spells doesn't work as well in a format with more players and higher life totals resulting in longer games which encourage long-term strategies, politics and collusion. In addition, the few things Red could viably add, other colors usually did better. Later sets and commander decks did give Red more tools to succeed, such as more multicolored commanders with Red, giving it more of a presence in the metagame.
      • If you ask someone what the weakest color in Commander is, and they don't reply "Red", they're probably saying "White". The primary reason for this is the color's lack of reliable card draw and (to some extent) ramp, aspects in which it lags behind even Red (which can compensate for its lack of traditional draw and ramp with impulse draw and treasure tokens). While White has received some tools in that regard, they are either very restrictive, very rare (and thus in high demand and difficult to afford for casual players), or both. It doesn't help that White, due to its association with order, is inherently a color that seeks to level the playing field and cripple opponents in order to compensate for its own weaknesses, but its cards that do so, like Armageddon, are typically seen as contrary to the spirit of this social format, and running them is essentially a guarantee that your friends will never invite you to a game of Commander again.
  • Magnificent Bastard:
    • Urza is the most infamous planeswalker in the history of Dominaria whose millennia long crusade against Yawgmoth and Phyrexia forever shaped the world's history. The greatest artificer who ever lived, Urza spent his mortal life building advanced machines to wage war on his brother Mishra to control the legendary Mightstone and Weakstone only to ignite his spark when their final battle leveled a continent and started an early ice age. Discovering his brother was corrupted by the mechanical abominations of Phyrexia, Urza masterminded the Legacy Weapon to destroy them. After accidentally causing time rifts at his Tolarian Academy, Urza used them to advance his project in record time by creating the silver golem Karn to travel through time to find Phyrexia's weaknesses, the legendary Skyship Weatherlight to travel between planes, and the Bloodline Project to use eugenics over generations to create the perfect human. Urza formed a great army as well by uniting all the nations of Dominaria and fathering a race of magically enhanced super soldiers. When Yawgmoth's invasion finally occurred, Urza united eight other planeswalkers to decimate Phyrexia and anticipated one's betrayal to use him as a battery for a superweapon that destroyed the entire plane. Ultimately, Urza sacrificed himself to ignite his Legacy Weapon, obliterate Yawgmoth, and avert the apocalypse to save all Dominaria.
    • Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, is the most ancient planeswalker in the Multiverse who dedicates his existence to defend all against powerful threats like the Eldrazi and his twin Nicol Bolas. Ugin's youth was spent learning wisdom and patience while Bolas learned to manipulate and dominate humans, and ignited his spark when he discovered his brother never truly loved him and saw him as a pawn. Wandering the Multiverse, Ugin made the Meditation Realm his own and allowed Bolas to kill him there to become the Spirit Dragon. Later learning of the threat of the Eldrazi, Ugin allowed them to devour entire worlds to learn their weaknesses and finally enlisted the aid of fellow planeswalkers Nahiri and Sorin Markov to seal them away on Zendikar. Next planning his brother's defeat, Ugin is ambushed and killed by Bolas but ensures his own resurrection by guiding Sarkhan Vol to his corpse and presenting a piece of his soul. Spying on Bolas through the gem in his horns, Ugin guides other planeswalkers during Bolas' harvest on Ravnica to ensure his brother would lose his spark and his power. Spiriting a comatose Bolas to the Meditation Realm and fusing with it, Ugin explains that he has utterly defeated him by stripping him of all his power, leaving all his schemes in ruin, and Bolas himself trapped forever alone with his failure.
    • Nahiri is a master earth elementalist and Kor planeswalker from Zendikar who worked alongside Ugin and Sorin Markov to stop the eldritch Eldrazi from ravaging the Multiverse. Nahiri herself personally spent decades to craft the hedron network that served as the border of the Eldrazi's prison and stayed behind to maintain the seal and protect her home. Going to sleep for a time, she awakens to find the prison nearly undone and confronts Sorin on why he didn't return to help. Their confrontation leading to violence, Sorin seals Nahiri in the Helvault for a thousand years where she stays sane by plotting her revenge. Eventually freed by luck, Nahiri finds Zendikar being ravaged by the Eldrazi and gets her vengeance on Sorin by luring the titan Emrakul to his home plane of Innistrad. Also corrupting Sorin's angelic creation Avacyn, Nahiri hurts Sorin by forcing him to put down his creation, in the process allowing Emrakul to fully manifest and ravage Innistrad. Her vengeance consumated, Nahiri ultimately returns to Zendikar to use an ancient artifact to restore the damage the Eldrazi caused, only to be stopped at the last minute when it's revealed Zendikar would die from the massive change to its ecology.
    • Liliana Vess is the sultry yet vain planeswalker from Dominaria whose spark ignited when the enigmatic Raven Man tricked her into cursing her beloved brother Josu when she sought to cure him. Learning necromancy in her mortal life, Liliana gained godlike power which she lost in the Mending and brokered a contract with Nicol Bolas to serve four demons in exchange for her youth and lost power. After gaining the Chain Veil on the order of one demon and seeking her freedom, she used its power to kill him and later engineered the freedom of another from imprisonment in the Helvault to slay him as well. Seducing fellow planeswalker Jace and joining the Gatewatch, Liliana manipulated them into facing Bolas so that she could slay a demon serving him, and rebounded from their defeat at Bolas's hand to track down and slay the final demon and finally give her brother peace in the process. Now forced to serve Bolas as the contract holder, she helps to lead his harvest of all planeswalker sparks yet ultimately turns against him and helps to ensure his defeat. Ultimately seeking redemption, Liliana finally frees herself from the Chain Veil and the Raven Man to atone for her past.
    • Lazav is a shapeshifting telepath and the current Dimir guildmaster. Rebuilding Duskmantle after Szadek's downfall, Lazav linked his mind to that of the whole guild, gaining direct access to the whole web of spies in Ravnica and awakening sleeper agents infiltrated in the other guilds. Kidnapping Jace, Lazav extracted information from the living Guildpact about the Implicit Maze and tried to turn the champions against each others, failing only because of Jace's timely intervention. After finding and eliminating spies sent by Nicol Bolas, Lazav was willing to endorse Isperia's plan of collaboration between guilds in the face of a bigger threat and, during the War of the Spark, proved his loyalty to Ravnica by helping the Gatewatch deactivate The Immortal Sun. He also tricked Dovin Baan by impersonating Chandra, eventually blinding the planeswalker, and collaborated to Niv-Mizzet's resurrection, taking advantage of Bolas's defeat to further his plans of infiltration. Preferring mind alteration to outright murder when he has the chance, Lazav stands out in the nuanced world of Ravnica for his intelligence and pragmatism.
  • Memetic Badass:
    • As the main driver of the story during his time, Urza has a reputation among the fanbase as the most powerful planeswalker of all time. While he did have godlike powers, being a pre-Mending planeswalker, Urza's primary strength was not in feats of physical or magical might but cleverness, inventiveness, and extensive planning. Among his planeswalker peers he was nothing special, power-wise, and Urza has been known to have a tough time in fights against even non-planeswalkers like Gix and Gerrard.
    • For more comedic example, there's Skrelv, a Legendary Phyrexian Mite from All Will Be One with no story presence and only a small lore paragraph that describes him as being a mite that manages to barely avoid being recycled. The fanbase, on the other hand, glorifies Skrelv as an apex Phyrexian singlehandedly leading a rebellion against Elesh Norn's rule in her own faction, effectively acting as the Jerry to her Tom by outwitting her at every turn.
  • Memetic Molester: Despite being biologically asexual, the Praetors have a strange tendency to become this when targeting planeswalkers. Vorinclex in Kaldheim puts his own "seed" into Tibalt, Neon Dynasty infamously turned Jin-Gitaxias into a pervert weeb in the eyes of the fandom due to compleating Tamiyo and Dominaria United is continuing the trend with Sheoldred compleating Ajani and thus being considered a furry.
  • Memetic Mutation: See here.
  • Mis-blamed: Mark Rosewater is the head designer and is essentially the public face of Magic design and development. If something goes wrong, it's his fault. Even if he had nothing to do with it, it's always MaRo's fault. People often mistakenly call him the head of Magic R&D as a whole. The game's inventor, Richard Garfield, seems to have escaped this.
  • Moral Event Horizon: In over 20 years of media, Magic has as many pinnacles of atrocity as there are actual black holes in the universe:
    • During his exile, Yawgmoth visited several civilizations and ended up destroying them all with plagues he brewed up himself. In one case, he did it just to see what would happen.
    • Urza has many, many potential moments, but the destruction and genocide of Sardia in The Brothers' War cements him as willing to do anything it takes. Should you forgive anything else he has done since that, from betraying allies to eugenics programs, his unconditional surrender to Yawgmoth out of appreciation for his pneumagogs truly has been far gone.
    • Heliod's petty, spiteful, traitorous murder of Elspeth, his own champion, just because he was offended by the existence of planeswalkers. The sheer loathing he evokes means that getting to kill him will be incredibly satisfying.
    • Nicol Bolas and his corruption of Amonkhet. The people of an entire plane erased save for the infants; the corruption of its Gods; the perversion of the traditions of Amonkhet, all for the (so far known) purpose of creating an army of powerful undead to serve him on later conquests.
    • Nahiri might have been justified in feeling betrayed by Sorin. However, her revenge was ultimately the genocide of an entire plane by Eldrazi assimilation — part of which resulted in the angelic guardians of the plane turning into twisted monsters slaughtering those they once protected, a gravity that has had them described as the biggest victims of Shadows over Innistrad — just to get at one person. This moment was pivotal into turning her into a Fallen Hero.
    • Tezzeret has been an accomplice to many monsters throughout his history, but the thing that's put him completely beyond redemption is his actions in Neon Dynasty. Where he not only starts working for the Phyrexians, but kidnaps poor Tamiyo to be Compleated, and is implied to be the reason why the Praetors can suddenly go from Plane to Plane.
    • New Phyrexians aren't exactly subtle in their ways, but what makes Elesh Norn stand out is that she's been tampering with the glistening oil to subject the Machine Orthodoxy to her own will, and eventually maims or outright kills the other four Praetors for questioning her selfish rule.
  • Narm:
    • The titular Magic Story of the Oath of the Gatewatch set. Gideon, you can see two mountain-sized Eldritch Abominations from up here, is now really a good time to swear your fealty to protecting the multiverse?!
    • The Eldritch Moon spoiler story for June 20, 2016 has the people of Innistrad getting corrupted by Emrakul, which is scary and disturbing enough until they start tacking Emrakul's name onto every other word in their sentences. Kind of hard to take the situation entirely seriously when people are saying things like "I'mrakul! We are'mrakul!"...
    • While some Magic novels are actually good, most are infamous for being bad. Here's a tumblr documenting some of the worst excesses, which range from kor titty milk to poorly inserted muscle fetish.
    • Due to Magic restriction on firearms New Capenna had to resort to other means of portraying mobster weapons. Some use violins (fairly clever)... others point fingers. This looks especially ridiculous in the art of Ob Nixilis murdering Xander; a monstruous planeswalker killing an Affably Evil major antagonist shouldn't look like a kid's game where he's going all pew pew.
    • The March of the Machine story has one chapter dedicated to Atraxa leading the invasion of New Capenna, with the angel being disgusted by the plane in a true Knight Templar fashion. The perspective of such a terrifying creature would be very interesting to read... except that she spends most of the time destroying artworks in a museum, coming off more as an over-the-top Caustic Critic than anything else.
    • Still in March of the Machine, Vorinclex's death in the last chapter cannot be taken seriously. The biggest among the Praetors, whose size is at least twice that of a human, who has withstood several attack and planar travel, is decapitated by a mere Zhalfirin soldier armed with a flaming sword, with no indication that she was at the right height to perform the already hard to buy strike. If that wasn't enough, the story gives us the essential information that the soldier "often drank her comrades under the table", which leaves the door open for a hefty dose of Accidental Innuendo.
  • Narm Charm:
    • "Ach! Hans, run! It's the Lhurgoyf!" is redundant, goofy, out-of-the-blue, and offers absolutely no explanation about what a lhurgoyf is.
    • Ixalan as a whole. Yes, it is a plane designed for your inner twelve-year-old, with dinosaurs, pirates, merfolk, and vampire conquistadores duking it out in over-the-top ways. Yes, it's still awesome.
    • Jin-Gitaxias' traditional Japanese pants in Neon Dynasty look nothing short of ridiculous, particularly in the manga and anime-like trailer (which are arguably also Narm in a meta level). In spite of this his return is considered genuinely badass and his card is broken.
  • Never Live It Down: Some feel that Magic's storytelling was dragged down by War of the Spark: Forsaken in 2019, and it has yet to fully recover. The novel was almost universally panned by the fandom to the point where Wizards cancelled the release of the story for an entirely different set, and players are quick to point out the lesbian erasure in Forsaken (regarding Chandra and Nissa's relationship) whenever the subject of LGBTQ+ representation in the game comes up. The ending of the New Phyrexia arch in "March of the Machine" in April 2023 only seemed to cement this impression.
  • Older Than They Think: The Lord of the Rings crossover set has drawn flack for depicting hobbits without disproportionately large feet; however, Tolkein's original legendarium never made reference to hobbits having feet of unusual size. The idea originated with, of all places, a Tolkein calendar; the cards are actually accurate to the books in this regard.
  • Popular Game Variant: The game has had all sorts of popular fanmade rules:
    • Rules taken for granted today like the limit of 4 of each card and "play or draw" (the choice between going first or being able to draw an extra card) are Ascended House Rules.
    • Ante was a Scrappy Mechanic because players didn't want to risk losing their cards. Before it was officially removed, many players chose not to play for ante.
    • One particular unofficial multiplayer format that evolved for Magic is the Five Colour Format, which has massive 200 (or 500) -card decks that require all 5 colours to have at least a minor presence in the deck.
    • Elder Dragon Highlander was a particularly popular unofficial format, allowing for multiplayer and having its own official unofficial rules put together by people outside of Wizards of the Coast. It was later renamed Commander and promoted to an official WotC format that receives dedicated products.
    • While it didn't last, the fanmade format Oathbreaker was popular in 2019. It has parallels to Commander, but uses a Planeswalker and a "signature spell" instead of a legendary creature, has 20 life, and uses 60-card decks instead of 100-card decks.
    • With the release of the Lord of the Rings set, some people have been making commander decks with both Legolas, Counter of Kills and Gimli, Counter of Kills at the helm, as several people like the dynamic the characters had in both the novels and the films, and find it disappointing that they don't officially have a Partner ability.
  • Popular with Furries: Some characters became popular with the Furry Fandom, such as Ajani Goldmane (a Leonin Planeswalker), Kemba, Kha Regent (a Leonin member of The Mirran Resistance), Raksha (the first Leonin leader on Mirrodin), Nashi (a ridiculously adorable nezumi adopted by Tamiyo) and Ink-Eyes (a Nezumi ninja). Scaly fans also appreciate dragons, like Nicol Bolas and Ugin.
  • Replacement Scrappy: Magic 2010 replaced the old familiar Grizzly Bears with Runeclaw Bear. The ratings speak for themselves.
  • Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
    • Green was considered the weakest color for many years, due to being a creature-centric color in a metagame were creatures weren't too useful compared to the explosive spells of old. As the power of creature spells went up while spells were gradually nerfed, however, Green started making waves, and especially after Green in general was buffed, it ironically took Blue's place as the strongest color in Standard.
    • Atog was a scrappy thanks to being the most printed card other than basic lands for a few months after Revised, but by the time Mirage made atogs an iconic race, not only had the haters disappeared in a puff of apathy, but the people who liked the atogs' goofily-large toothy grins and power in decks built to feed them were more plentiful than ever.
      • The original Atog did see use in some experimental and not-very-effective decks based on cheap artifacts, graveyard recursion, and/or card-drawing. It gained some additional popularity thanks to Affinity before the much more efficient Arcbound Ravager stole its spotlight.
      • Chronatog - which allowed its controller to skip their own turns - ended up as a key component in Stasis/Kismet decks, where it was used to avoid paying the upkeep cost on Stasis while the opponent was unable to do anything productive on their infinite turns.
      • The most infamous of them all was Psychatog, which was combined with Upheaval to make the dominant deck type of the 2002 world championship.
    • On the character front, there's Jace himself. Originally, Jace was a Base-Breaking Character who was disliked by many fans for being a Spotlight-Stealing Squad with many obnoxiously strong cards, who showed up in all the game's tie-ins, and whose flavor text quotes depicted him as extremely smug and condescending. Though the official fiction tended to depict him as more vulnerable, a relatively small number of fans read the tie-in novels. However, once his cards started becoming more balanced and the fiction moved to the website where more fans were able to read it, many started liking him more. His rise in popularity was firmly cemented with the Ixalan storyline: Trapped on a desert island with no memory of who he was, Jace spent his time trying to improve and better himself as a person. When he ran into his former nemesis Vraska, not remembering her, he instead showed her kindness and even started showing hints of romantic feelings towards her—which fans accepted warmly. Even once regaining his memories, Jace and Vraska became an Official Couple (albiet one whose relationship is fraught with things trying to tear them apart), which many fans enjoyed and enjoy shipping.
  • Rooting for the Empire: One of the most prominent fansites used to be Phyrexia.com, and is themed around the plane of Phyrexia, complete with the forums being named after each of that plane's layers, users calling themselves "Phyrexians", and it being an unofficial rule not to write the name of Yawgmoth. For those unfamiliar with the setting, we would like to remind you that Phyrexia is a hellish biomechanical dystopia occupied by always lawful evil Body Horror monstrosities and ruled over by a Complete Monster Evilutionary Biologist turned Omnicidal Maniac God of Evil.
  • Salvaged Gameplay Mechanic:
    • "Bands with other", a variant of the banding mechanic, which was ridiculed for years due to being incredibly unintuitive. "Bands with other" would be followed by a quality, such as a color or a supertype, which most would reasonably assume means that a creature with that ability would be able to form a band with other creatures that had the listed quality. Except the way "bands with other" actually worked is that it only allowed the creature to band with other creatures with the same ability, regardless of whether or not they had the listed quality. This article explains the problem of "bands with other" in detail. The ability eventually received errata in Magic 2010 so it actually worked intuitively. Banding and "bands with other" are still scrappies, but at least after the errata, "bands with other" is no longer the notoriously unintuitive mess that it was previously.
    • Phasing, a former Scrappy Mechanic, became prominent enough to become deciduousnote  after the card Teferi's Protection was printed. Originally, Phasing was given to permanents as a named ability, which caused them to "phase in" and "phase out" every other turn—in effect, being usable on only half your turns, which was widely hated. (It was especially despised on creatures, as most creatures can't attack on the turn they're played—since creatures started phased in, you wouldn't be able to use them for TWO turns instead of one.) However, the designers realized that simply making things phase out was extremely useful—things "phased out" couldn't affect the battlefield, making it a good way for players to either protect their own cards from hazardous effects (what Teferi's Protection is meant to do) or to keep an opposing card from bothering them for a turn. However, things that phase in also don't trigger "enters the battlefield" effects—and given that many such effects can be extremely powerful and are known for having extremely strong synergies, making cards "phase out" is an excellent way to deal with cards with ETB effects without letting an opponent trigger them (or without making it too easy for the player to trigger their own.)
  • The Scrappy: Lukka. Wizards apparently didn't know what to do with him — while the cards made him seem like a fairly sympathetic character who raged against the Coppercoats for killing the winged tiger he bonded with on Ikoria, the written stories undermine this by making it clear that he has no care for said animal and even resents it due to the strain it's putting on his physical health. He then spends his following appearances acting like a Designated Hero and a Jerkass with an annoying habit of inserting himself into things and making them worse. It doesn't help that he came off as surprisingly stupid and incompetent for being a member of an elite military squad. While later fiction tried to give him a Freudian Excuse or two, few tears were shed when he was killed off in March of the Machine.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: Has its own page.
  • Scrub: As always, in contrast to the "Stop Having Fun" Guys: any card that the Scrub's deck can't deal with is "cheap", and anyone using it is trying to ruin the game for everyone who wants to play real Magic. It's common for people seeking casual games in Magic Online to put something similar to the following in the description:
    No blue, no land destruction, no goblins, no elves, no nonbasic lands...
  • Serial Escalation: The announcement that the War of the Spark set would have no less than thirty-six Planeswalkers, and every booster pack would contain one. For reference, each set is carefully balanced to have no more than 4-6 Planeswalkers (counting the ones that come in the premade decks).
  • Ship-to-Ship Combat: Between Chandra/Gideon shippers and Chandra/Nissa shippers, both pairings have gotten plenty of ship tease over the years, with the former starting up earlier with Gideon's introduction in The Purifying Fire and the latter starting with the formation of the Gatewatch in the Battle for Zendikar block. This was not helped by War of the Spark: Ravnica torpedoing the latter ship in a hamfisted manner to support the former while also killing off Gideon, leaving both sets of fans unsatisfied.
  • "Stop Having Fun" Guys: As strong a force as the scrubs. Usually found battling against anything perceived as making the game easier.
  • Stuck in Their Shadow:
    • The Red/White clans had the least amount of synergy and development until the first Ravnica block. One poll on Magic's website, which polled players' favorite two-color combinations, has Red/White as dead last. And to make it worse, "I'd rather play a monocolor deck" ranked just above it.
    • White in general has gained a reputation of being drastically underpowered compared to the other colours of the pie. While White is a powerful support colour, it is often held back by lack of access to card draw and being limited to dealing combat damage to kill a player, while the other colours have gained steady access to card draw, acceleration, and alternate means of winning the game over the years.
  • So Bad, It's Good: A handful of cards, particularly from early sets such as Legends, are so thoroughly useless that they're regarded with a degree of affection by players. Chimney Imp, for example, is a particularly iconic one, attaining a status of Memetic Badass on the official forums.
  • Squick:
    • Uktabi Kong, a card (tap two apes to produce an ape token) which invokes a number of sex tropes, but especially:
    • Living Wall, which was actually banned for its disturbing cover art.
    • Kor cheese. No, seriously.
    • The members of Machine Orthodoxy are flayed, with their muscle tissue (and wiring?) only partially covered by porcelain.
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel:
    • Neon Dynasty is this to the original Kamigawa block. The latter had popularity in the fandom thanks to its setting, but the cards from the set were highly maligned from a design standpoint and it was not nearly as successful as Wizards hoped. For the longest time many fans thought the closest they'd get to a return was the presence of Tamiyo, a planeswalker from Kamigawa. Then Neon Dynasty was announced, with the conceit being one that combined elements of Cyberpunk, tradition vs innovation, and more modern tropes from Japanese works. While the science-fiction setting is still debated on, there's a large number of players surprised by how much they like the set on both a flavor and mechanical level, and Mark Rosewater has even said that the positive reception means a return is much more feasible now than it was before.
    • The Universes Beyond series made a bad first impression with its The Walking Dead set, which was lambasted for featuring mechanically unique cards in a highly time-limited set, and many Magic players hated the idea of seeing cards from The Walking Dead in their game because it was widely seen to clash with the Magic aesthetic (and TWD was past its prime anyway). It didn't help that the card designs themselves were not that interesting either. However, the later crossovers with Warhammer 40,000, The Lord of the Rings and Doctor Who were much more positively received thanks to dropping the tiny release window, making better choices of source material, as well as the clear effort Wizards put into the cards and decks.
  • Tainted by the Preview:
    • March of the Machines Aftermath, the "epilogue set" following March of the Machine. It was meant to show the, well, aftermath of the set and how the various planes and characters have been effected. However a plethora of events caused people to turn against it.
      • First was the announcement that, even though it was only a 50-card set, it would still be sold in booster packs and not a single product. A lot of people thought this was silly since it was clearly made to encourage people buying multiple packs and ending up with multiple copies of the same card while they dug for rares, ultimately feeling like a cash grab compared to the larger sets.
      • Then, about a week before the previews were meant to begin, almost the entire set was leaked by a youtuber who received the product from their gamestore by accident (the store had mistaken the packaging for the preceeding set). Wizards of the Coast's response was to send Pinkertons to the man's house and harass him and his wife until he returned the product. Many fans were outraged by this, as they felt it was a huge overstep by WotC considering no one was at fault. Some players were even shocked that the Pinkertons were still around, and this was how they found out.
      • From a gameplay standpoint, many felt the cards themselves weren't even that good - while some of the desparked planeswalkers could be good in Commander, nothing was very eye-catching in the opinion of many players.
      • And from a flavour standpoint, most of the cards didn't even have flavour text. This was highly mocked since the entire point of the set was purported to be a flavour-focused epilogue to the highly impactful March of the Machine.
    • Commander Masters, July 2023's almost-all reprintnote  Commander-focused set previewed to an almighty fizzle of hype; Redditors branded the set "bulk masters" before the first day of spoilers was completed, cancelling preorders in part due to the fact that several of the cards spoiled had been reprinted as recently as six months prior. Not even the reprints of the "free if you control your commander" spells from Commander 2020, nor the Planeswalker commanders from Commander 2014, both at rare, were enough to revive the hype for the set; Wizards chose a frankly bizarre selection of cards to showcase in their debut stream, on top of the divisive art style for its showcase cards (profiles of certain legendary creatures before a mono-colored background) drove people away from the set en masse. The price point also didn't help; the preconstructed commander decks retailed for over $100 with mana bases that ranged from mediocre but usable to a complete travesty, while regular booster packs retailed for over $15 USD; you can buy three packs of a non-premier set for about that much.
  • That One Disadvantage: "Freezing", a primarily blue mechanic that prevents permanents from untapping; probably the most hated card with this mechanic, Stasis, just reads "Players skip their untap steps"; the only thing balancing the card out is that it requires its controller to play one blue mana at their upkeep or sacrifice it.
  • That One Rule:
    • "Banding" and "Bands With Other" were so complex that they are among only a stark few keywords that they simply stopped printing entirely. It's quite telling that on the Storm Scale, which rates mechanics on how problematic and unlikely to be reprinted they are with Storm being the definitive 10, "Bands With Other" is rated 11.
    • "Phasing" as well, due to the unusual and unintuitive ways that it works (permanents phase in or out on each of their controller's untap steps, and the rules have changed multiple times as to whether this triggers "enters/leaves the battlefield" effects or not. Currently not.) Eventually they managed to work out how it worked to being treated as though it didn't existed while it's phased out and began showing up more often.
    • There's also the rules about continuous effects and layers, which are relevant in every format and even more complicated.
    • To a certain extent, regeneration. In the Limited through Fifth Edition versions of the rules, it worked exactly the way you expected it to: a creature died, you regenerated it, it came back to life. Then Sixth Edition rules came along and regeneration had to be implemented via a Rube Goldberg machine involving forcefields and replacement effects. Eventaully it was retired in favor of Indestructible until the end of turn or returning the creature back to the battlefield if it went to the graveyard that turn.
    • "Protection from X" was originally described as just "cannot be affected by X", which caused a HUGE amount of confusion over what "affected by" meant. This definition was replaced with a more detailed and specific one sometime around Revised Edition, and everyone has been happy ever since.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Several times.
    • Too many times to count. Examples include the rules changes introduced here, but the game has to tweak itself a little every year, and each year brings a plethora of complaining, along with the beeping of cash registers to drown them out.
    • The major rules overhaul with Sixth Edition caused a massive outcry among players at the time.
    • Planeswalkers as playable cards. When first released in Lorwyn, it wasn't obvious how the cards worked due to the lack of reminder text, and it certainly wasn't obvious that they could be directly attacked as if they were a player. It got more complicated with the release of Elspeth, Knight-Errant in Shards of Alara, with her last ability adding an effect "For the rest of the game" with no built-in way to keep track of it. On top of that, a rule called the "Planeswalker uniqueness rule" was instituted, meanining that no two Planeswalkers of the same type could be on the battlefield; while this didn't affect Standard too much, other formats like Modern or Commander were SOL if they wanted to play two different Jaces or Garruks. Most of these problems were eventually fixed; Emblems were created in order to track effects like Elspeth's, and the "Planeswalker uniqueness rule" was replaced by making Planeswalkers legendary permenants, meaning you could now control as many Planeswalkers of the same type as you wanted to, but they all had to have unique names.
    • As of the M14 core set, both players may have a copy of a legendary creature. Cue cries of how this cripples clone decks.
    • The crossover with The Walking Dead (and most subsequent Universes Beyond crossovers) received a lot of complaints from people who didn't like the idea of Magic's flavour and identity being weakened by the addition of elements from other franchises, and even some who were okay with crossovers felt that The Walking Dead was a poor match for Magic. Concerns over the cards being mechanically unique only added fuel to the fire. Wizards only said they'd reprint the Walking Dead cards in the Magic universe following the backlash.
    • Un-cards, sillier and more light-hearted cards intended to be enjoyed in casual play and kept out of formal play, used to be silver-bordered and released in silver-border only sets. Unfinity changes this by not only featuring both un-cards and cards legal in eternal formats, but removing the silver border in favour of giving un-cards an acorn stamp. This move was criticized by players who felt that the eternal legal cards were too silly to belong in eternal formats (while they were intended to avoid impacting on these formats, Wizards have misjudged power levels before), and because the small acorn stamp makes it harder to tell at a glance whether a card is eternal legal. There are also people who just think the silver border was cool and iconic, and are sad to see it go.
    • One of the ways Set Boosters are different from Draft Boosters is the fact that they have access to "The List", reprints of cards that are thematically associated with the set they're printed alongside, but can't be found in draft boosters. When Streets of New Capenna announced that it was eliminating all commons and uncommons from The List for its Set Boosters, people rejoiced, not in the least because it was announced that in-canon "Universes Within" reprints of "Universes Beyond" cards (in this case, the Stranger Things crossover) would be reprinted in this manner, with an expected pull rate of one in every four packs. However, this is the only set this pattern applied to, and come the announcement of the controversial The Walking Dead crossover that started all of this getting reprinted in Wilds of Eldraine, it was announced that players had a chance "slightly under 5%" of pulling any of the Universes Within cards.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Calix, a Therosian planeswalker. Created by Klothys to persue Elspeth, he willed himself to have a spark so that he could continue to chase her after the events of Theros: Beyond Death. Two problems: firstly, the actual story for Theros: Beyond Death has yet to release, and likely never will at this point, beyond a summary to go along with Elspeth's return in Streets of New Capenna. Secondly: he was one of the planeswalkers that got desparked by the events of March of the Machine, meaning that he'll only ever appear as a legendary creature from now on.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • The Reveal that the force pulling the strings in Innistrad (which was 'hinted' at all throughout Shadows over Innistrad) was, in fact, the Eldrazi. This was a complete non-surprise, as the previous block was all about fighting the Eldrazi and they went out of their way to mention that one of the Titans was missing. If the return to Innistrad had happened before the return to Zendikar, this would have been an incredible surprise.
    • The previous set featuring the Kenrith twins before Strixhaven, Throne of Eldraine, ended with Garruk making a Heel–Face Turn and swearing to protect the twins as they travelled the multiverse. Strixhaven itself features the twins meeting and learning under Liliana Vess, the person who was almost directly responsible for Garruk's initial Face–Heel Turn by cursing him with the Chain Veil and has since also made a Heel–Face Turn. And to top it off, she's teaching under Witherbloom, Green/Black, which would match her with Garruk's colors. Despite all of this, Garruk is instead completely written out of Strixhaven and never appears, nor do the Kenrith's mention him to Liliana.
    • Edgar Markov has long been The Ghost on Innistrad — never appearing directly despite his massive influence on the Plane as the progenitor of all vampires and Sorin's grandfather — to the point where some assumed he was dead. That is until Crimson Vow, when he finally has a role to play in the story... as Olivia Voldaren's mind-controlled puppet. More than a few fans, particularly fans of Sorin, were disappointed that such a long-awaited appearence has him as basically a Living Macguffin.
    • One of the many criticisms directed at the War of the Spark story was that characters who had actual personal history with Bolas, like Ajani and Sarkhan, were sidelined in favour of the already-divisive Gatewatch, leaving arcs feeling unresolved at best. Particularly egregious was Vivien, who was literally introduced to the story as an archenemy for Bolas and whose entire purpose for existing as a character was to hunt him down in vengeance for destroying her home plane, and yet she contributed basically nothing to his defeat.
    • Ajani had an entire story dedicated to mourning Elspeth in the Kaladesh block. When they briefly reunite during the story of Streets of New Capenna, it feels incredibly rushed, and barely any emotion is conveyed from Ajani's point of view.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: While not universal, this can occasionally happen in the backstory due to a fumbling of the Morality Kitchen Sink of the factions. While white is traditionally the color of "good" and black is traditionally he color of "evil", no color is entirely good or evil. Unfortunately, some writers put too much focus on showing that white has an evil side, while forgetting to then make the "Bad" colors (like Black) more sympathetic to compensate — creating a setting where Light Is Not Good, and Dark Is STILL Evil.
    • The overarching story arcs can also feel like this. The multiverse is always doomed, and in every big storyline, there's always at least one beloved character who gets killed off. Meanwhile, on the antagonist side, any villain that isn't specific to one plane won't. Freaking. Stay. Dead. No matter how crushing a defeat they may suffer in one story, they'll be right back at it another 8 years or so of real time later, seemingly no worse for wear, while the fallen heroes are never seen again (unless they're lucky enough to die on a plane with an explicit afterlife). The general Crapsack World-ness of most planes does not help matters.
    • The Phyrexia storyline from 2021-23 has also gotten this. Previously, Wizards of the Coast has specifically said that Phyrexia would never be able to travel between planes because that would simply make them take over the entire multiverse. Then they started compleating planeswalkers, and then they created the Realmbreaker, rendering that limitation null and void and leaving readers wondering why they don't simply spray every plane with glistening oil and let it run its course, other than that it would violate the Theory of Narrative Causality. Only the Author Can Save Them Now. (The numerous Idiot Ball and Too Dumb to Live moments in the Phyrexia: All Will Be One story have not helped the criticism in the least.)
    • Some feel that the plane of Thunder Junction being uninhabited before the Omenpaths opened the way to it is a waste of a setting; given the fact that it's heavily inspired by Wild West Tropes, some people feel that the absence of any Natives, and the conflict that's inherent with the colonialism of western expansion, would have been ripe for storytelling potential. Not helping matters is the fact that a faction coded after the Diné, known as the Atiin, exist, but aren't natives to Thunder Junction, which some fans have just called plain confusing.
  • Too Cool to Live: Venser and Elspeth, among others. Though Elspeth doesn't count anymore....
  • Too Dumb to Live:
    • The writers of the Guildpact, for deliberately creating a tenth guild whose legally stated purpose is to oppose the Guildpact. As a bonus, the Guildpact also bans everyone from acknowledging that the group dedicated to destroying them even exists. This means that when the leader of House Dimir was arrested for trying to destroy the other guilds and take over, it shattered the Guildpact's spell and threw the entire plane into bloody chaos. Dimir was supposed to oppose the Guildpact, so trying to destroy the other guilds was perfectly legal - but admitting that they even exist by arresting the leader wasn't.
    • In the Ixalan saga Azor himself appears, being revealed as a Planeswalker, and it is indeed confirmed that the various systems of law he makes for each Plane he visits, while seeming good at first, inevitably break down as soon as he's no longer there to personally oversee them, frequently leaving whole Planes in anarchy and destruction.
    • Lukka, an Ikorian planeswalker with the ability to bond with the various beasts throughout Magic's multiverse, knows that Planeswalkers can be compleated as of Phyrexia: All Will Be One. So naturally, when cornered by a Phrexyian beast alongside Nissa, he decides to Bond with it. Not only does he end up getting compleated for his troubles, he's the only one of the five planeswalkers compleated in All Will Be One to be confirmed dead in March of the Machine's story.
  • Trapped by Mountain Lions: In the Innistrad block story, Sorin Markov is waylaid by Tibalt. This occupies him for the entire arc, thus contributing nothing to the situations around Avacyn's disappearance (which is very bad news for Innistradi humans) and her subsequent release from the Helvault.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: In the original document for Ulgrotha Baron Sengir is described as "though he has dark tendencies, he is not evil - just practical and rather direct". However, considering his actions range from a hostile takeover to feeding his horsemen to his horses, most audiences consider him a bit on the pro-evil side. For what's worth, modern Creative seems to have embraced him as one of Magics's signature villains.
  • Underused Game Mechanic:
    • Transformation and double-faced cards, originally introduced in the Innistrad block - essentially, cards that transform have rules text and art on both sides, and have certain conditions to change into these forms, and possibly change back, in the case of werewolves. It's a distinctive mechanic that brought a lot of identity to Innistrad - the lack of it in Avacyn Restored is often cited as to why it's considered disappointing. It's since become a commonplace mechanic, with several cards from 2020 onwards having the ability to either transform or be 'modal double-faced cards', essentially letting you play either the front half or the back, but not both.
    • Landfall is a fan-favorite mechanic simply because it rewards players for playing lands, one of the core mechanics in basically every deck in the game. Abilities that acted like Landfall but weren't keyworded as such eventually became eratted to just have the Landfall keyword in 2022, prior to The Brothers War releasing.
  • Unexpected Character: When adapting Lord of the Rings to a Magic set, several characters were expected to appear on the cards— not among them was Glóin, who only appears during the Council of Elrond in Fellowship of the Ring.
  • Vindicated by History:
    • When the Odyssey cycle first came out, many players complained that it was underpowered and too focused on the graveyard. Since then, several of its cards have become staples in Legacy, and it's appreciated for introducing the idea of the graveyard as a resource.
    • The Kamigawa block was much maligned at launch for being underpowered compared to Mirrodin, as mentioned above. However, it has more legendary creatures than literally any cycle in Magic history, and with the rise in popularity of the Commander/EDH format (which requires a legendary creature to be your deck's commander), its legends are being looked towards as viable in this format. The Japanese folklore- and mythology- inspired flavor has also gotten praise. Nowadays, while opinions on the cards themselves vary, the setting is one of the more popular ones, and was brought up as a candidate for being revisited enough that eventually it return for Neon Dynasty.
  • What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: While Magic is marketed as a kids/family game, it all but crosses the boundaries that come with it perpetually, with violence - often involving blood - being frequent, as well as quite a few flavors of horror and complex and thought-provoking themes that a majority of kids wouldn't understand. Combine that with a long list of intricate gameplay rules, with each block only introducing more complex mechanics to follow, and an equally-elaborate story and lore in-universe, and you've got a game that, realistically, should be targeted more at teens and adults than most children.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Jace's compleation and turn to the Phyrexians is all but forgotten about by the time March of the Machines rolls around. He plays no major part in the assault on the multiverse and his status is still uncertain even after New Phyrexia is defeated.
  • Win Back the Crowd: A number of intensely unpopular sets have laid a heavy burden on the sets that followed... some of which have risen to the occasion. Some examples:
    • Urza's block stood for 20 years as the most powerful block of all time, resulting in unprecedented bans. The following block, Masques, overcompensated and created a low power, low fun environment. But Masques was followed by Invasion, a block that was so well-received that it became the template for future block design (to whit: a unifying theme for the whole block that the first set introduced, the second refined, and the third twisted and keyword mechanics that all intersected with the theme).
    • Mirrodin and Kamigawa followed the same overpowered/underpowered dynamic a few years later. As before the crowd was won back by Ravnica block. Interestingly, Ravnica was structured with similar themes to Invasion, but deliberately reinterpreted to feel different.
    • Throne of Eldraine may have displaced Urza's block as the most overpowered release of all time; special mention goes to Oko, Thief of Crowns, the first card to ever be simultaneously banned in the Standard, Historic, Pioneer, Modern, and Legacy formats. The next two sets, Theros Beyond Death and Ikoria, Lair of Behemoths, weren't as blanket powerful as Throne, but had standout cards that hit the same heights. The following year led to a conscious desire to power down Standard (and the above mentioned formats as well, since Standard cards kept getting banned in them). The reception to Zendikar Rising and especially Innistrad: Midnight Hunt has gathered praise across the board for cards that are powerful and fun without eclipsing all previous Magic design.
    • The joke set Unhinged has long been derided as the game's most unfun set of all time (mostly focusing on the set's emphasis on mechanics that interact with player speech, motivating players to play in complete silence). It was so unpopular that unsold booster boxes were destroyed and there were no new silver bordered (i.e. joke) sets for thirteen years. Unstable broke that streak, and was so well-loved that it's led to Unsets becoming part of Magic's regular rotation, appearing roughly every other year since.

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