The Most Broken Card from Every Year of Magic: the Gathering
Over the past 32 years, there have been some amazingly broken cards printed in Magic: the Gathering. Today, we're going to look at the most broken card from each year of the game!
1993: Black Lotus from Alpha
Well, Black Lotus pretty much had to be the pick here. In part because making three extra mana for free in any deck is incredibly broken. And in part because, 32 years later, it is still considered one of the most busted Magic cards ever made by pretty much everyone.
Yes, you did it. You did. Yes.
In reality, the race for most broken card of 1993 was closer than you probably think. Commander icon Sol Ring is in the conversation, at least. If you sit down to a cube draft and open both a Black Lotus and a Sol Ring in your pack, what do you take? Honestly, I usually take the Sol Ring. Plus, 1993 had some hilariously broken cards that either aren't legal or don't work the same anymore. Contract from Below will draw you a new hand for a single mana, which is absurd. But it's banned everywhere because of the ante mechanic, which quite literally made you gamble your cards and potentially lose them forever if you lost the game. Meanwhile, Rukh Egg was hilariously broken in 1993. If you read its wording closely, you'll notice that you'll make a 4/4 flyer whenever it goes to the graveyard. Well, Wizards intended for this ability to work only when Rukh Egg died and went to the graveyard from the battlefield. The rule at the time was you should play your cards as written, and as written, you could discard or mill a Rukh Egg and still get the 4/4 token, which led to the card being banned before Wizards eventually updated the wording. So yeah, Black Lotus is the most broken card from 1993, but it did have a surprising amount of competition.
1994: Mishra's Workshop from Antiquities
It turns out that cards that cost zero mana and make three extra mana tend to be pretty broken. Sure, Mishra's Workshop is more restrictive than Black Lotus, only making mana for artifacts and costing you a land drop. But even with this restriction, it is still the engine of one of the best decks in Vintage, Magic's most powerful format, and is banned pretty much everywhere else. The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale is also pretty broken as a land that can wrath away your opponent's board or at least heavily tax your opponent's mana each turn. But it's much more fringe than Mishra's Workshop. You could also probably argue that Strip Mine or even Blood Moon are even more broken because they can stop Mishra's Workshop, either by blowing it up or turning it into a Mountain. But the raw mana advantage Mishra's Workshop offers keeps it at the top of our list for 1994.
1995: Necropotence from Ice Age
Honestly, there's a pretty strong argument that Mana Crypt (originally printed as a book promo in a book released in 1995) is even more broken than Necro. But we're not just making a list of the best fast mana cards from every year. The absurd amount of card advantage that Necro offers, essentially allowing you to convert life into cards, makes it one of the strongest card-draw spells that has ever been made. Making things even funnier, when it was first printed, Necro wasn't considered to be very good. Actually, it infamously got a one-star review, the lowest possible ranking, from InQuest Magazine when it was first released. But, history has proven Necro to be one of the most broken cards ever made and InQuest Magazine to be just a slight bit off base with that one.
1996: Flash from Mirage
The year 1996 is super tough because two cards are incredibly broken. Neither of them is Balduvian Horde, which hilariously was the card that players back in 1996 thought was the most broken because a 5/5 for four mana was super far above the curve for creatures of the era, even with its "discard a card" drawback. But in the end, Balduvian Horde ended up falling flat. No, the most broken cards from the year were both from Mirage: Flash and Lion's Eye Diamond. Lion's Eye Diamond is basically 1993 winner Black Lotus, but it requires you to discard your entire hand to make three mana. When it was printed, the card was horrible. But over the years, more and more cards were printed that eventually turned it into a real Black Lotus in decks like Dredge or Storm. They had tricks for getting around the discarding-your-hand downside. It turns out that if you have something like Underworld Breach in play, there's not much difference between discarding your hand and keeping it. Flash has a similar story. When it was printed, you could use it to sneak a Balduvian Horde into play at instant speed, which wasn't super exciting. But a decade later, Wizards would print Protean Hulk, which turned Flash into a Turn 1 win thanks to a convoluted loop of creatures that you can tutor up by using Flash to not just cheat the Protean Hulk into play but immediately sacrifice it, which was oddly an upside due to Protean Hulk's death trigger. Honestly, either card would be a fine pick for most broken of 1996. I'm going to go with Flash, but if you're on team LED, I'm fine with that, too.
1997: Natural Order from Visions
The year 1997 gave us another broken fast mana card in Ancient Tomb, which is still a staple today and nearly $100 a copy, even though it was originally just a lowly uncommon. And Lotus Petal showed that even making a single extra mana for free is pretty bonkers. But neither card can match the absurdity of Natural Order, which, for the low, low cost of four mana and sacrificing a green creature, lets you put the best green creature from your deck directly on the battlefield, which often means your opponent staring down a Progenitus or a Craterhoof Behemoth as early as Turn 2 or 3, which is pretty wild. Also, an honorable mention goes to Abeyance, which doesn't look like much today, but its original wording basically made it a mono-blue Time Walk back in 1997. For two mana, the instant made it so target player couldn't cast instants, sorceries, or activated abilities requiring an activation cost. This last mode, as originally worded, kept your opponents from tapping their lands, which basically meant you could just cast Absorb during your opponent's upkeep step, and it would essentially force them to skip their entire turn for two mana. Today, the card has been errata'd to explicitly not include mana abilities, which makes it much less broken. But back in 1997, Abeyance was hilariously busted.
1998: Tolarian Academy from Urza's Saga
The year 1998 was one of the most broken times in Magic's history, an era known as Combo Winter where games were regularly ending on Turn 1. And while this led to several cards like Windfall and Stroke of Genius being banned in various formats, all of these shenanigans were made possible by one card, Tolarian Academy. Part of a cycle that features the almost-as-broken Gaea's Cradle and somehow the hilariously unbroken Shivan Gorge, Tolarian Academy taps to make a mana for each artifact you control, which led to decks that would dump their entire hand of cheap artifacts, make a ton of mana by tapping and maybe untapping Tolarian Academy, and then use big card-draw spells like Windfall and Stroke of Genius to refill before eventually milling the opponent out with Stroke of Genius, potentially all on Turn 1. Well, cards like Hermit Druid, which can mill your entire deck for a single mana if you avoid playing any basic lands, and the repeatable tutoring and graveyard-filling power of Survival of the Fittest are pretty busted, too. Neither of them comes especially close to the brokenness that Academy offered or the destructive impact it had on the game itself.
1999: Tinker from Urza's Legacy
The year 1999 was pretty wild for broken cards. Just when it looked like Combo Winter would finally come to an end due to a string of bannings, Wizards printed Memory Jar. The madness started all over again, and it required an emergency banning. It was also the year when Wizards decided to fix Necropotence by printing Yawgmoth's Bargain, which somehow ended up being even more broken than the original since you get the cards right away rather than having to wait until your end step. Food Chain has created some devastating combo loops in Eternal formats and, more recently, competitive Commander decks. But one card stands out in this sea of degeneracy: Tinker. For just three mana and sacrificing an artifact, Tinker lets you tutor any artifact in your deck directly onto the battlefield, which allows for things like a Turn 1 Blightsteel Colossus or God-Pharaoh's Statue or Bolas's Citadel, all of which are pretty close to unbeatable. It also can tutor up combo pieces like Time Vault or Voltaic Key. This combination of flexibility, efficiency, and raw power is more than enough for it to take home the title of most broken card of the year.
2000: Lin Sivvi, Defiant Hero from Nemesis
Magic entered the new millennium with Wizards consciously trying to power down the game after the unbridled degeneracy of 1998 and 1999, which makes picking the most broken card of the year kind of challenging. There's nothing even close to the level of Black Lotus or Flash or Tolarian Academy. Cards like Aura Shards and Fact or Fiction are strong but not exactly broken. Rhystic Study is incredibly annoying in Commander, but really, it's just a very good card-draw spell. Phyrexian Altar allows for some broken combo loops by letting you convert creatures into mana, yet it doesn't do much of anything by itself. As such, the only card from the year that actually feels broken to me is Lin Sivvi, which might not look like much today but was more or less a game-breaking card back in 2000. Rebels were the best deck around, and Lin Sivvi was the engine that made the deck run. But the real reason why Lin Sivvi was so broken was the legend rule at the time. Unlike today, when each player can have a copy of a legend on the battlefield, in 2000, only one copy of a legend could exist on the battlefield, period, between both players. In practice, this meant games were essentially a race to Lin Sivvi, and whoever would play their copy first would lock their opponent out of playing their Lin Sivvi, which allowed the first player to tutor up a bunch of Rebels and win the game. This eventually led to Lin Sivvi being banned in Block Constructed and to a change in the legend rule to avoid one player getting such a massive advantage from playing their copy of the legend first.
2001: Entomb from Odyssey
Well, back in 2001, players might have argued that some combination of Psychatog and Upheaval—which together formed the foundation of one of the era's dominant decks—might be even more broken. The long-lasting impact of the graveyard tutor Entomb puts it at the top of our list. Even today, 24 years later, players are actively discussing whether Intuition needs to be banned in Legacy, one of Magic's strongest formats. Being able to tutor anything you want into your graveyard for a single mana makes it pretty easy to reanimate something like Atraxa, Griselbrand, or Archon of Cruelty on Turn 1, which is incredibly hard to beat.
2002: Cabal Coffers from Torment
One of the most interesting aspects of Magic is how its power level tends to ebb and flow over time. After printing a bunch of super-busted cards in the late '90s, the early 2000s were pretty tame, to the point where I'm not sure I consider any card from 2002 broken. But we have to pick something. And Cabal Coffers is at least a very strong card, potentially adding a ton of mana, especially in conjunction with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth to make all of your lands into Swamps. This ability has turned the uncommon into a Commander staple and even let it break into Modern a bit, which I guess makes it the most broken card of the year, more or less by default, because there just aren't a ton of good options.
2003: Mind's Desire from Scourge
Storm is arguably the most broken mechanic that Wizards of the Coast has ever made. It turns out that being able to copy a spell for every spell cast before it during the turn can do some pretty bonkers stuff. Mind's Desire is arguably the most broken of the Storm cards. In conjunction with fast mana, the card can literally let you play your entire deck, possibly as soon as Turn 1. Mind's Desire was so broken, in fact, that it was banned just six days after it was printed, making it the fastest banning in the game's history at the time.
2004: Skullclamp from Darksteel
Ah, Skullclamp. One of Magic's most infamous broken cards. Most often, when it comes to broken Magic cards, we know that the cards are broken from playing the game, but we don't know exactly why they were printed in such a broken manner in the first place. But Skullclamp is a rare exception. According to Aaron Forsythe, current VP of Wizards, the design of Skullclamp was changed at the last minute from giving the equipped creature +1/+1 to giving it +1/-1. But then the card wasn't tested after the change was made. Well, it turns out that giving the equipped creature -1 toughness ended up breaking the card since it allows you to kill your own one-toughness creatures to draw two cards. This, combined with other artifact synergies from artifact lands and cards like Arcbound Ravager, led to an unprecedented number of bannings in Standard to make sure that it was fully dead, which, in my book, is a huge testament to the brokenness of Skullclamp.
2005: Golgari Grave-Troll from Ravnica
The year 2005 is interesting. There are really two cards in the running for most broken. And which should win really depends on whether you value the impact back at the time or their longevity. First, we have Golgari Grave-Troll. The best version of one of Magic's most broken mechanics in Dredge. If your goal is to fill the graveyard as quickly as possible, Golgari Grave-Troll is one of the best ways to do it, allowing you to skip your draw step to instead mill six cards and put the Grave-Troll into your hand. As a result, Golgari Grave-Troll has been the engine of Dredge decks across formats and holds a record of being the only card to have been banned in Modern two different times, with it originally being on the first Modern ban list, only to be unbanned in January 2015 and then banned again two years later in January 2017. Meanwhile, back in 2005, there was no card more broken than Umezawa's Jitte, with the equipment dominating the battlefield in harshly punishing decks that were built around small creatures, which is why it remains banned in Modern to this day. Remember how 2000's winner Lin Sivvi dominated by abusing the legend rule at the time, when only one copy of a legend could be on the battlefield? Well, after the Lin Sivvi debacle, Wizards changed the legend rule and made it so that if two copies of a legend were on the battlefield at the same time, they would both immediately go to the graveyard. This infamously led to decks without creatures playing Umezawa's Jitte, an equipment that doesn't do anything without creatures, just to kill their opponent's copies of Umezawa's Jitte. And I'm not sure what could be considered more broken than that.
2006: Dread Return from Time Spiral
At first glance, Dark Depths seems like the easy pick for most broken card of 2006, considering its power in Legacy and its ability to make a 20/20 indestructible flying Marit Lage token as early as Turn 2. And they also brought us another batch of busted Storm cards, highlighted by Grapeshot. But on closer inspection, I think the actual most broken card of the year is the reanimation spell Dread Return. While Dread Return looks like a four-mana reanimation spell, the card's real power is its flashback ability, which allows you to cast it from your graveyard for free by sacrificing three creatures. This ability has made Dread Return a key finisher in some of the fastest and most degenerate combo decks in the game's history, like Oops! All Spells, by playing Narcomoeba in your deck, a two-drop that goes onto the battlefield if you mill it. You can mill your entire deck, put four Narcomoebas into play, use three of them to flash back Dread Return, and reanimate a finisher like Thassa's Oracle to win the game on the spot. No other card in Magic does what Dread Return does, and it's considered to be so broken that Wizards put it on the initial Modern ban list, where it remains to this day.
2007: Bridge from Below from Future Sight
Bridge from Below is one of the weirdest cards from one of the weirdest sets in all of Magic. On the battlefield, Bridge from Below is essentially just a blank piece of cardboard doing quite literally nothing. But if you can get Bridge from Below into your graveyard, it offers an insane amount of value for free, making a 2/2 Zombie token whenever one of your creatures dies, although you do have to exile Bridge from Below from your graveyard if one of your opponent's creatures dies. This ability has made the card into a staple in various Dredge-style decks and also a pseudo-combo piece with last year's winner Dread Return, where the Zombies from Bridge from Below give you flashback fodder to sacrifice for Dread Return. And if you sacrifice non-token creatures like Narcomoeba to Dread Return, you get a bunch of Bridge from Below tokens as a bonus. Infamously, when Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis took over Modern in 2019, Bridge from Below was the first card that Wizards banned, in an attempt to slow down the deck. And while this attempt failed miserably and Hogaak continued to dominate the format, there's never been a mass movement to unban Bridge from Below because everyone knows that the card is so broken that if it were unbanned, it would only be a matter of time before another deck came along to abuse its power.
2008: Ad Nauseam from Shards of Alara
The year 2008 was highlighted by two broken combo pieces in Shards of Alara's Ad Nauseam and Morningtide's Scapeshift, with either being a fine choice for most broken card of the year. Scapeshift is mostly known for its power alongside cards like Primeval Titan and Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle in Modern, where the ability to sacrifice any number of lands and then tutor up that many lands and put them directly on the battlefield often ends the game on the spot with a massive pile of Valakut triggers. On the other hand, Ad Nauseam was formerly a Modern staple, though power creep and the banning of Simian Spirit Guide—which offered Ad Nauseam the fast mana it needed to actually win the game—more or less killed the combo in the format. Today, though, it's still having a major impact as one of the strongest card-draw finishers in cEDH and low-to-the-ground decks overflowing with fast mana, where Ad Nauseam can often draw you a massive chunk of your deck, giving you the fuel you need to win the game.
Honorable mention goes to Painter's Servant. While broken and unique are not the same, Painter's Servant happens to be both. It's the only card in Magic that turns everything into a color of your choice, which is incredibly unique. And this enables some pretty strong combos, like a single Grindstone activation milling your opponent's entire library, which is pretty broken. While overshadowed by Scapeshift and Ad Nauseam, Painter's Servant deserves a quick shout-out, at the very least.
2009: Iona, Shield of Emeria from Zendikar
How broken is Iona? Well, it really depends on how many colors are in your deck. The nine-drop Angel's ability—letting you name a color and making it so your opponents can't play any spells of that color—is completely game-ending against monocolor decks. And even against some multicolored decks, it can still be incredibly brutal if you choose your color wisely. In the past, Iona was a legit constructed staple, as one of the best reanimation targets when it was first printed. But 16 years of power creep have led to it being left on the sidelines more and more often in recent years. But it is still hard-banned in Commander, which has become a rarity in the bracket era, because its ability to completely ruin the day of at least one player at the table is just too brutal for the format to handle.
2010: Emrakul, the Aeons Torn from Rise of the Eldrazi
The year 2010 was pretty broken, which makes picking the single most broken card from the year pretty tricky. Back in 2010, there is no doubt that players would have chosen Jace, the Mind Sculptor, which at the time was considered to be the greatest planeswalker ever made and one of the greatest cards of all time. Hall of Famer Patrick Chapin even wrote a rap song about it.
But the last 15 years haven't been especially kind to Jace, with its downfall being sealed when it was finally unbanned in Modern only to see essentially zero play in the format. Some of Jace's competition, on the other hand, has been more long-lasting—especially Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, which, a full 15 years after it was first released, is still the biggest, baddest, most broken creature that Magic has ever produced, as a 15/15 flyer that annihilates your opponent's board when it attacks and gives you an extra turn when you cast it. You could probably almost make an argument for Eye of Ugin. Remember all those fast-mana cards we talked about during the early '90s? Well, Wizards mostly stopped printing them unless they only make mana for Eldrazi. Eye of Ugin gives a static two-mana reduction on all of your Eldrazi, which wasn't super exciting at first when all Eldrazi cost seven or more mana. But once Oath of the Gatewatch came around a few years later and unleashed a bunch of still powerful but much cheaper Eldrazi, the card suddenly broke Modern during Eldrazi Winter, which only thawed once Eye was banned. Really, though, you can't go wrong with any of these three cards. But I'm going to pick Emrakul since the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the only one that is still regularly winning games today, although, at the time, Jace, the Mind Sculptor would have been an easy pick.
2011: Mental Misstep from New Phyrexia
So far, we've mostly talked about cards that were broken in the sense that they were much more powerful than your average card. But 2011's Mental Misstep was broken in a much more literal way, as it actually broke how decks were built in Magic's most powerful formats. At a glance, the card doesn't seem that powerful, countering a one-mana spell for one blue mana or, thanks to its Phyrexian mana cost, two life. But in a format like Legacy that's all about playing efficient threats and answers, it turns out that countering a one-drop for free is really good—so good that soon after the card was released, pretty much all blue decks were playing the card. And then this led to non-blue decks also playing Mental Misstep just so they could counter their opponent's Mental Misstep. And before long, decks devolved into being 56 cards plus four copies of Mental Misstep. The card was printed in March of 2011, and it only made it until September before it was banned in Legacy, thanks to breaking the format itself.
2012: Omniscience from Core Set 2013
This was a tough one. On the last day of spoilers for 2012's Return to Ravnica, a little one-drop randomly showed up in the card image gallery with no hype, no spoiler videos, and no fanfare, and this card was Deathrite Shaman. While not the most powerful Standard card in formats with fetch lands, Deathrite quickly became one of the most broken one-drops of all time, making mana and providing life gain, graveyard hate, and even a win condition by draining your opponent out of the game. This quickly led to Deathrite shooting to the top of Modern and Legacy and eventually being banned in both formats. So, it should be an easy pick for most broken card of the year, right?
Well, yeah. Except in Core Set 2013, Wizards made a 10-mana enchantment with what might be the most broken single line of text on any Magic card: "You may cast spells from your hand without paying their mana cost." The very foundation of the game of Magic is that your lands make one mana and you get one land per turn. Omniscience doesn't just break this rule; it obliterates it. Once it's on the battlefield, all of your stuff becomes free, which almost always leads to the game ending in short order. We've seen the card be broken from formats like current Standard, thanks to its Foundations reprinting, all the way back to Legacy, where it shows up alongside Show and Tell. And as busted as Deathrite Shaman is, it simply can't compete with the insanity that is Omniscience.
2013: True-Name Nemesis from Commander 2013
True-Name Nemesis is a rare card that didn't just break the game of Magic but it also the Magic market. The three-drop was originally printed in the Mind Seize Commander precon deck, back during an era where we only got one set of Commander precons each year. Its ability gaining protection from an opponent of your choice is pretty middling in Commander, where you have three opponents. But in a 1v1 game, True-Name Nemesis is as close as you can get to having a Progenitus that costs just three mana. Legacy players pretty quickly realized that the card was super busted, but the only way to get the card was through Commander precons. This weird situation led to the price of a single True-Name Nemesis being more than the entire precon you could get the True-Name Nemesis in. So, if anyone ever stumbled on a copy of the Mind Seize precon deck, the correct thing to do was buy it, sell the True-Name Nemesis, make a profit, and keep the rest of your cards for yourself. This, of course, led to a shortage of the Mind Seize Commander precon because Wizards would only sell them to local game stores in sets. If you wanted to buy the Commander precons, you had to order one of each—you couldn't just buy copies of a single Commander precon. So before long, everyone was sold out of Mind Seize but still had a bunch of the other Commander 2013 precons on their shelves. So they couldn't really order more, or they'd have to buy more copies of the other decks that they were already overstocked with. True-Name Nemesis's price kept ticking up until eventually Wizards decided to change the rule and let stores just order more copies of the Mind Seize deck itself, which finally got the supply of True-Name Nemesis up to a reasonable place and dropped the price. But breaking not just one of Magic's strongest formats but also the Magic market itself easily makes True-Name Nemesis the most broken card of 2013.
2014: Treasure Cruise from Khans of Tarkir
As much as I'd like to pick my old friend Siege Rhino, which was a legitimately great Standard card at the time, it's hard to consider a good four-drop with a Lightning Helix–like enters trigger a truly broken card. You want to know what has a long history of being broken in Magic, though: drawing three cards for a single mana. Way back in 1993, Wizards made Ancestral Recall as part of the now iconic Power Nine. Khans of Tarkir's Treasure Cruise was very similar. Sure, it costs eight mana, but considering it has delve, which lets you exile cards from your graveyard to pay for its cost, if you could get seven cards in your graveyard, the reward is a sorcery-speed Ancestral Recall legal in formats like Standard and Modern. This, of course, was super broken. Blue-Red Delver quickly became the tier zero deck in Modern thanks to the card advantage that Treasure Cruise offered, and within a few months, the spell had to be banned in Modern and in Legacy and eventually restricted in Vintage as well. When you're too good for basically every eternal format, that's a pretty clear sign that you're a broken card.
2015: Ugin, the Spirit Dragon from Fate Reforged
The year 2015 is tough, mostly because nothing printed in the year actually seems all that broken. But don't worry, this isn't going to be a problem for much longer. Collected Company was a really good card, to the point where Wizards later admitted they probably would have banned it in Standard if they did bannings back in 2015 the way they would do them a few years later. And it even broke into Modern for a while. But is getting two three-drops for four mana at instant-speed broken? I don't really think so.
Monastery Mentor proved itself to be one of the best finishers in older formats like Vintage, where it's easy to chain together cheap spells and cantrips to potentially make a lethal army of prowess tokens in just a single turn, which is certainly strong but still doesn't really feel broken to me.
The closest thing I could come to as far as an actual broken card would be the eight-mana colorless planeswalker Ugin, the Spirit Dragon. Well, broken still doesn't exactly fit. Ugin is at least the most deflating card of the year, coming down to sweep away all the work you did building a board earlier in the game and likely leaving behind a massive high-loyalty planeswalker to boot. So, I guess Ugin's the winner, but like I said, 2015 wasn't an especially broken year in Magic.
2016: Partners from Commander 2016
Well, the most broken thing happening during 2016 was Eldrazi Winter in Modern. What made Eldrazi so broken were lands like Eldrazi Temple and Eye of Ugin, which were actually printed several years before. The Eldrazi themselves were mostly just really efficient creatures that worked with those lands, but they became supercharged by being the only deck in Modern to have access to lands that produced multiple mana. And Eldrazi actually had two of those lands, while no other deck got one.
Meanwhile, in Commander 2016, Wizards decided that having two commanders would be more fun than just having one commander. So, Wizards made the partner mechanic, which lets you have two legends in the command zone, as long as they both have partner. Today, if you look at the most competitive version of Commander, cEDH, the top decks are littered with these partner pairings, headlined by cards like Thrasios, Tymna, Kraum, and more. While none of the individual cards are truly broken on their own, the mechanic itself arguably broke the Commander format, at least on a competitive level. Why play just one commander when you could play two commanders? This not only allows your deck to have access to additional colors but also helps get around the command tax since each of your commanders gets its own command tax, helping ensure you always have something to play from the command zone if you have nothing better to do. Thankfully, over the past decade, even Wizards has realized that partners are pretty broken, and now they avoid printing more cards with the mechanic, instead relying on various partner-with-style mechanics that do something similar but with a much smaller pool of cards to choose from, like how you can partner a Doctor's companion with a Doctor from the Doctor Who set. But mistakes live forever in Magic, and especially in Commander, where there's no rotation. And today, almost a decade later, playing a pair of partners is still one of the most broken things you can do within the command zone in the Commander format.
2017: Edgar Markov from Commander 2017
I promise we're not just going to talk about Commander cards for the rest of this video, but somehow, Wizards managed to follow up the incredibly broken partner mechanic from 2016 with an even more broken Commander mechanic in 2017 in Eminence. Eminence is an ability that allows your commander to do something while in the command zone, with the most broken examples being Edgar Markov, which makes a 1/1 Vampire whenever you cast a Vampire, and The Ur-Dragon, which makes all your dragons cost one less. What makes Eminence and all of these cards so broken is that there's quite literally no way to interact with the Eminence ability since there's no way to interact with cards in the command zone, which means the Eminence decks have a massive advantage from the very first turn of the game. And there's no way to ever stop that advantage. Not only is Eminence broken in gameplay, but it also broke the Commander format a bit, at least for tribes that ended up with an Eminence commander. Vampires, for example, have a ton of super-cool legends that players can build around, but almost no one plays them because Edgar Markov is so broken. In large part due to its Eminence ability, the mid-2010s were a weird time in Commander design. Wizards had only officially started supporting the format a few years before and didn't really know how to design for the format, which led to a string of super-overpowered mechanics and cards. Thankfully, it seems that Wizards has mostly learned from these mistakes and has been much more cautious about printing mechanics like partner and Eminence that mess with the command zone since 2018.
2018: Nexus of Fate from Core Set 2019
The year 2018 was the calm before the storm, with 2019 bringing with it the first Modern Horizons set and also the start of the Fire Design era, which has led to an almost unbelievable streak of broken cards. But we do have a clear winner for 2018 in Nexus of Fate. The story of Nexus of Fate is as funny as it is broken. Printed as a buy-a-box promo for Core Set 2019, the card wasn't actually in the set itself. So the only copies that existed were the foil buy-a-box promos. After years of swearing that they wouldn't make mechanically unique promos, going back to the disastrous release of the Nalathni Dragon promo in the early '90s, Wizards somehow forgot this lesson and declared that they were once again going to make mechanically unique promos. They were just going to make sure that those cards were bad enough that it wouldn't be a big deal, right? Well, oops.
It turns out that Nexus of Fate was a very big deal and also very broken in multiple ways. First, the card lacked supply because it was only printed as a buy-a-box promo, which caused its price to spike to absurd levels, especially on Magic Online. Second, the card wasn't just good, it was very good, like best deck in Standard good alongside Wilderness Reclamation to generate the extra mana to cast it. This led to the card showing up in competitive decks at Pro Tours and GPs, which in turn led to another problem: Wizards' infamously curling foils. Since the only real version of Nexus of Fate that existed was foil, and foils curl so much, it was actually illegal to play the real copies of Nexus of Fate in some competitive events since the curling made it possible to cut your deck to the copies of Nexus. This made them illegal marked cards, which caused judges to make some hilariously janky proxies to replace the real cards that were kind of somehow illegal to play.
But it got even worse, or maybe better, depending on your perspective. The card was also literally broken on the newly launched Magic Arena. Since Nexus of Fate shuffles back into your library once it goes to your graveyard, Nexus of Fate decks won by drawing their entire deck, getting some finisher on the battlefield, and then repeatedly casting Nexus of Fate to take infinite turns. The problem is that not everyone got the message that you needed to have a finisher for this plan to work. And there was an infamous match on stream where a Magic pro played for hours against an opponent who just kept looping Nexus of Fate with no finisher and no possible way to end the game. The match only came to an end when Chris Clay—the former head designer, I believe, of Magic Arena—actually banned the player after nearly 2 hours, or 107 minutes to be exact, stating that it was pretty clearly against the terms of service to just keep looping Nexus of Fate forever without being able to win the game. As a result of the match, Wizards ended up banning Nexus of Fate in Best-of-One Standard on Magic Arena. So, while a seven-mana extra-turn spell might not seem that broken, especially considering that the Power Nine version of the effect costs just two mana, the way that Nexus was released, the janky Pro Tour proxies because of the curling originals, and the card quite literally breaking digital play easily make it the most broken card of 2018.
2019: Oko, Thief of Crowns from Throne of Eldraine
It's hard to not pick Oko as the most broken card of the year just for its endless Elk memes and that one time that someone won an Eternal Weekend by turning a Black Lotus into an Elk, plus the fact that it was swiftly banned in every format and sort of broke Wizards' brains when they admitted they didn't actually test the +1 on their opponent's stuff and mostly just Elked their own things, for some reason.
But there is an absurd amount of competition, to the point where 2019 might be the most broken year in the modern era of Magic. Alongside Oko, Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis was released in the original Modern Horizons, got our 2007 winner Bridge from Below banned for fun, and then continued to destroy the Modern format post-banning until eventually it was banned itself. From the same set, there was the two-mana planeswalker Wrenn and Six that broke Legacy by returning Wasteland to your hand every turn, an experience that Magic Arena players have recently gotten on steroids when Wizards released both Wrenn and Six and Strip Mine onto the client over the summer. And this doesn't even include the free dig spell Once Upon a Time, the endless Zombies from Field of the Dead, or the annoying loops generated by Mystic Sanctuary. Even the random Brawl precons from 2019 unleashed hilariously overpowered commanders like Chulane and Korvold into the Multiverse. Seriously, it would probably be quicker to name the cards from 2019 that weren't broken than to name the ones that were. That's how absurd the year was for broken cards.
2020: Lurrus of the Dream-Den from Ikoria
On one hand, there's no way we can't choose Lurrus and the companion mechanic as the most broken card of the year. Released in Ikoria, the mechanic absolutely destroyed Magic by giving players a free and super-powerful 15th card to start the game, assuming they met what was often a fairly meaningless deck-building restriction. Lurrus specifically and companions in general almost immediately broke the game, dominating quite literally every format in existence until Wizards was forced to take the unprecedented step of errata'ing the entire mechanic by essentially adding a three-mana tax to companions. And even after this change, they still needed to ban several of them, including Lurrus itself in multiple formats. I still sometimes find myself wondering how Wizards could have ever thought the mechanic was a good idea or expected it to work out fine. But I guess at this point, we'll probably never know.
Even though Lurrus is a clear winner, Underworld Breach is at least deserving of a shout-out. It turns out that being able to play the same card from your graveyard again and again and again is super broken, which led to the card being banned in both Modern and Legacy thanks to the loops it enabled. And oh yeah, they also made Winota and Urza that year too, just for a little bonus brokenness.
2021: Grief from Modern Horizons 2
The year 2021 is tricky. Technically, the most broken card of the year is probably Tibalt's Trickery. It was banned just days after it was printed, after all, thanks to its ability to counter your own spell and spin into something like Emrakul or Ulamog for free, usually on Turn 1 or 2. But I already made an entire video about how broken Tibalt's Trickery was.
So, rather than repeating myself again here, I'm going to give the award to the equally deserving Grief. The evoke Elementals from Modern Horizons 2 were very strong, but Grief specifically was especially broken due to its interaction with reanimation spells. The idea was that on Turn 1, you could exile a card to evoke Grief, Thoughtseize your opponent, and then, before sacrificing Grief to its evoke ability, play the reanimation spell on it. So when you sacrificed it, it would come back into play, and you could Thoughtseize your opponent again. If you added white to your deck, you could do the same thing but with Ephemerate and get a third Thoughtseize for free at the start of your second turn. If this sounds miserable, good lord, it was. It turns out it is really difficult to play a fun or even a functional game of Magic when you start the game down two or three of the best cards in your opening hand. With Grief's evoke Elemental buddy Fury to clear the board, the resulting Reanimator Scam deck became a dominant and soul-crushing force until Wizards eventually had to ban both cards, making it possible to play something resembling a real game of Magic in Modern once again.
2022: Blank Goblin from Unfinity
As far as power level is concerned, 2022 was a bit calmer than the year or two before, probably in part because no Modern Horizons set was released that year. Well, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker ended up being too strong for Standard alongside Invoke Despair and Reckoner Bankbuster. And White Plume Adventurer was the honorary Commander card that broke Legacy thanks to its turbo dungeon gameplay pattern.
The most broken card of the year broke the game in a more literal way. The sticker mechanic from Unfinity is highlighted by Blank Goblin. Wizards had printed Un-sets (silver-bordered sets that are not tournament legal) multiple times in the past before Unfinity, but Unfinity was different for two reasons. First, Wizards declared that some, but not all, of the cards from the set would be tournament legal this time, which was the first red flag. Second, one of the primary mechanics from the set was stickers—like, literal stickers that you're supposed to peel off and stick onto your expensive pieces of cardboard. Wizards promised that the stickers were reusable and wouldn't hurt your cards and would be wonderful for everyone, but players pretty quickly realized that this wasn't the case. The stickers were really hard to use, constantly falling off cards and getting lost on the floor, and they were pretty much one-use only. If Unfinity were just another not-tournament-legal set, all of this would have been fine. It would just be some weird quirk in Magic's history. But for some reason, Wizards decided to make the sticker mechanic legal in tournament formats. Thankfully, most of the sticker cards weren't that good. But Blank Goblin was actually playable. And the end result was that pretty much any serious Legacy player needed to carry around a bunch of stickers with them to tournaments, even if they weren't playing the sticker cards themselves, just in case they might end up reanimating or copying their opponent's Blank Goblin. It was an absolute disaster. And while it took two years, in May 2024, Wizards announced that they might have made a little huge mistake and that they would be banning all sticker cards from Legacy, with Andrew Brown stating, "We think that this is not a healthy or fun dynamic to happen in paper or digital play. So, we have decided to ban every card that creates a sticker and, for a bonus, every attraction card, too."
2023: Up the Beanstalk from Wilds of Eldraine
There are really two cards in the running for most broken of 2023. Both are insanely broken card-advantage engines. One is The One Ring from Lord of the Rings, a card intentionally printed to be incredibly powerful that probably went a bit too far because it's the best card-draw spell in Commander. It broke Modern and eventually needed to be banned. The second card was Up the Beanstalk, a throwaway uncommon from Wilds of Eldraine that was intended to support a limited archetype about casting expensive stuff but ended up being hilariously broken in just about every format it was legal in. In large part, this was due to how many cards cheat on mana cost these days.
Just in terms of raw power, The One Ring is likely a better card, right? It's colorless, so any deck can play it. And along with drawing cards, it offers a turn of protection, which became super devastating once it was looped. But The One Ring was designed to be broken. It's the One Ring from the most iconic fantasy IP of all time. Post Malone paid two million dollars for the serialized version. Basically, Wizards knew that The One Ring was broken, or at least very strong. There's no way they couldn't have and released it anyway, seemingly for promotional purposes.
I think Up the Beanstalk is actually more deserving of the title just because no one saw it coming. It wasn't supposed to be a good card. It was supposed to be a random limited card that saw little constructed play, but it ended up breaking several formats. I still remember the first time I played the Modern Up the Beanstalk deck with the evoke Elementals and just how absurd it felt being able to chain together free spells while drawing your entire deck, disrupting your opponent, and killing their board. I'd never played anything like it in Modern before. So, if you think The One Ring is a better choice, that's fine, Frodo. I won't fight you on it. But to me, the fact that a throwaway uncommon came anywhere close to being as broken as the two-million-dollar Ring is enough for me to make Up the Beanstalk the most broken card of 2023.
2024: Nadu, Winged Wisdom from Modern Horizons 3
For 2024, there's really no debate. The most broken card—and one of the most broken cards of all time—was easily Nadu, Winged Wisdom, which was printed to be an exciting Commander, according to Wizards. Wizards accidentally printed not only one of the most broken combo engines ever but also one of the most miserable. If you've never seen Nadu in action, its ability (revealing the top card of your library whenever one of your creatures becomes a target of a spell or ability, then putting it into play untapped if it's a land or putting it into your hand if it's not, twice each turn for each creature) creates not infinite but sort of functionally infinite loops with an equipment that equips for free, like Skullclamp or Lightning Greaves. If you could get something on the battlefield, it makes a token whenever a land enters the battlefield, like a Scute Swarm or a Springheart Nantuko. You just keep moving your equipment around, either drawing a card or putting lands into play each time you do, until you eventually win with a convoluted loop that involves sacrificing your lands to Sylvan Safekeeper, shuffling everything back into your library with Endurance, and then eventually blowing up all your opponent stuff with the Zur or bouncing all their permanents with a Teferi while also creating like a million tokens along the way. Making things even worse, a lot of players didn't really know how the deck won the game because most of the time their opponents would just scoop once Nadu was played with an equipment and a few creatures on the battlefield. There's a hilarious game where pro player Brian Braun-Duin was playing Nadu at a Nerd Rage Games event and presented the combo, but his opponent was just like, "All right, combo off and kill me." And BBD proceeded to spend the next hour seemingly aimlessly looping through his deck. At one point, his opponent actually just left the match mid-combo. That's how long it was taking. About an hour into the turn, with no progress in sight, the opponent finally just conceded out of boredom, which is probably a good thing because otherwise, BBD might still be there comboing off today.
All jokes aside, this is what made Nadu so broken. The deck wasn't just broken on power level (and it was broken on power level). It also broke the game's tracking system, with players needing a weird conveyor belt to try to remember which creatures they had already targeted and which ones they didn't. And it broke the game's clock system since in tournaments, when a round goes to time, players get five more turns to finish the match, which doesn't work very well if one of those turns can be an hour-long Nadu loop. Thankfully, the card only lasted a few months before it was banned, with Wizards promising to use the lessons learned by Nadu to hopefully avoid making the same mistake in the future.
2025: Vivi Ornitier from Final Fantasy
Well, we're not quite all the way through 2025 yet, but we currently have an easy frontrunner for most broken card of the year in Vivi Ornitier. The Final Fantasy mythic has a jaw-dropping text box, giving a counter whenever you cast a noncreature spell while also dealing a damage to your opponent and then, once each turn, letting you make mana equal to its power for free. Even played fairly in a spellslinger-style deck, Vivi is super broken. But once players realized they could give any creature Vivi's text box with the help of Agatha's Soul Cauldron, things really went off the rails, with the Soul Cauldron deck posting a dominant run of finishes, which, according to Wizards themselves, is likely to end with Vivi's banning on November 10th. Well, there's probably some argument for Cori-Steel Cutter, which dominated Pro Tour Final Fantasy earlier this year before its banning and is still a top-tier card in Pioneer and Modern. The sheer absurdity of the words written on Vivi Ornitier makes it an easy leader for most broken card of 2025.
Conclusion
Anyway, those are my picks for the most broken card from every year of the game. But what do you think? What did I get right? What did I get wrong? Let me know in the comments. And if you want even more Magic, you can check out the video about the most hated card from every year of the game here. Or maybe the one about the deck that literally bored people to death on the Pro Tour.
