Worse is better in Magic: The Gathering

As I am beginning the end of my professional sabbatical, I am increasingly dedicating my time to useless pursuits, specifically thinking about Magic: The Gathering.

I only really played Magic seriously for about four years—ages 13 to 17. I have continued to play the game since then, but off and on, and not particularly seriously. It may be that I am endlessly trying to recapture a certain feeling of my youth. I've written before on this subject and my suspicion toward nostalgia.

I have a lot to catch up on. Aside from the occasional Commander game, my exposure to Magic since the original Alara block has been a single prerelease and maybe a couple drafts. This is how I played Innistrad block, Return to Ravnica block, then much later, Throne of Eldraine. I've gone to most prereleases since Bloomburrow.

In high school, I spent quite a lot of time with Magic, traveling for tournaments, practically memorizing all the cards in each Standard-legal set. I no longer do this, and probably never will again. I'm mostly interested in Magic as a casual player and understanding its cultural history.

Magic feels very different today. I struggled to put this into words, or pinpoint a single time in which things changed, but I think, after learning a bit more about the modern game, I have a sense of a few trends.

First, there are far fewer "bad" cards. Let's pick one example from one of my favorite sets, Time Spiral. Plunder is severely underpowered. At the time, Magic was moving away from land destruction as a strategy. In Alpha, you could destroy a land for two mana with Sinkhole. Over time, land destruction mostly moved to red. The last card with unconditional land destruction at three mana was Stone Rain, printed in Ninth edition in 2005. The last time land destruction was printed at four mana was in 2019 with Rubble Reading. Plunder was an awkward move in the direction of phasing out land destruction: extremely underpowered and totally unplayable in any format, a terrible addition to any deck.

Land destruction is, broadly speaking, considered to be an unfun strategy. One of the most punishing Magic decks I've ever played against was called Magnivore. Here's an example from 2006 French Nationals.

The goal of this deck was to prevent you from playing the game. The ideal game for the Magnivore player consisted of them bouncing your land on turn two with Eye of Nowhere, then destroying it on turn three. The deck then played a big Magnivore and maybe finish things off with a Wildfire. When the deck won, it did so by almost completely preventing its opponent from playing Magic. The first time I played against this deck at a Friday Night Magic event, unaware of the archetype, I was completely stunned that the game could be so awful.

This is why Wizards of the Coast does not print land destruction at three mana or bounce spells that can target lands at two. In the era when I played the game, Magic was far less popular, and it was easy to create play patterns that were confusing, frustrating, or boring. Since then, Magic has pushed decks and formats in a specific direction, making sure games are balanced, interactive, and move toward a conclusion. In a word, "better." Play patterns where only one person plays the game, or where a single game grinds out to forty-five minutes are heavily discouraged.

I've certainly noticed the change when playing Limited. In the Time Spiral era, drafts probably just barely eked out enough playable cards to build a functional deck. Nowadays, it is much easier to fall into a powerful deck. Draft games tend to move quickly and do not tend to drag on in long-term wars of attrition. The design of cards encourages this: emphasis on creature-based strategies, interaction, and momentum ending games quickly. Constructed games are similar: decks tend to be much more creature-focused, and strategies generally center around creature combat. In both Limited and Constructed, decks are often "on rails," i.e., guided toward predictable strategies, rather than improvised out of an incidental mishmash of cards.

In most respects, these changes are good, and result in a more fun, beginner-friendly game. Magic is more popular than ever, and a lot of the design changes that have been made since Time Spiral era, such as reducing board complexity while increasing card complexity, printing fewer intentionally useless cards, and guiding the player toward the median game being fun, are, broadly speaking, improvements, and I'm impressed by the design of contemporary sets like Bloomburrow (which I thought was a 10/10 incredible set).

However, as a result, Magic has also sanded off some of its rough edges. There are fewer cards that you look at and wonder, "Huh, I wonder what I could do with that?" A Ninth edition rare, designed by Richard Garfield, is Jester's Cap. Jester's Cap is not a creature, does not affect the board at all. For six mana, it makes your opponent's library slightly worse. If you opened a pack of Ninth edition, this might have been your rare: a card that does not fit in probably 99 percent of decks, and certainly not in any contemporary decks. But it still had an occasional home, such as in the 1996 German Nationals top eight, where it fit inside a four-color "prison" deck.

Richard Garfield was far more comfortable making cards like this, cards whose purpose was not necessarily abundantly clear, cards that you had to fit together in novel ways. In the more recent era, he designed, for example, Mirror-Mad Phantasm, which has the charming "wall of text" style of many early Magic cards. What does this do? You can pay two mana to shuffle it into your library, mill until you find it again, then return it to the battlefield. Why? Well, it saves your 5/1, but at the cost of possibly milling yourself. It also mills yourself a basically random amount, which in some contexts could be quite powerful. It is a card that doesn't really make its purpose abundantly clear at first blush, a card where the onus is on you to make it work.

A deck like Magnivore was made out of cards like this: it was a set of extremely simple cards, unexceptional on their own, that when combined together created a highly oppressive deck. Eight out of the ten nonland cards were from Ninth edition, a "beginner's" set. But without Eye of Nowhere, a functionally "worse" version of Boomerang, the deck would not work at all. It just so happened that all the exact pieces lined up at the right time and someone combined them together to make the deck work, and everything fits together: Wildfire and Pyroclasm become extremely powerful when they avoid killing your one creature, Magnivore. Compulsive Research allows you to filter and pump Magnivore. Sleight of Hand makes a turn two Eye of Nowhere more likely, again, while pumping Magnivore. None of these strategies were intended from the cards themselves, and no deck in Magic history has really looked quite like this. Like I said, Magnivore was an unfun, awful deck, but it was a memorable one. It wasn't necessarily unfun in a boring way, like slow control decks or intricate combo decks that grind your sanity over forty-five minutes. It is unfun in a bewildering way—being on the losing end of it makes it so you might as well have never sat down to play.

Despite this, Magnivore wasn't the best deck in the format—you saw it on occasion, and it sometimes did well, but it was a beatable strategy. Magnivore taught me how to build in response to it, and learning to beat it became all that much more satisfying, like defeating a villain.

This brings me to another deck from this era, one somewhat similar to Magnivore that brought a mishmash of simple cards into another one-of-a-kind strategy. But first, a diversion.

One with Nothing is described by some as "the best worst card," even more iconic in that it was printed in one of the worst sets of all time. Why on earth would a card have this text? A one-mana instant that does nothing but severely hurt its caster. One with Nothing is a beautiful, iconic Magic card. Much how Magnivore is so unpleasant that it sticks in your head and inspires you to react to it, One with Nothing is so staggeringly, unimaginably bad that generations of players have tried to make something useful out of it.

The irony is that, unbelievably, One with Nothing actually was useful. Enter: Owling Mine. For a brief moment in 2006, this deck was quite powerful, making top four at Pro Tour: Honolulu. Owling Mine did something paradoxical. Usually, drawing cards is a good thing, but Owling Mine made its opponent draw too many cards, faster than they can play them, then punished them for it with Ebony Owl Netsuke and Sudden Impact. If someone is losing because they are drawing too many cards, is there any way to get rid of them quickly? Hmmmm....

Unlike other "bad" cards, even cards far better than One with Nothing, this card has the honor of being played at the highest level of play, a Pro Tour. It turns out, for a few decks, in this specific matchup, One with Nothing was a good enough card to include in their sideboard.

If Magnivore is the evil version of this kind of novel deck, Owling Mine is the good one, a deck so strange that it is hard to imagine it existing. Playing against Magnivore, your first game is barely a game at all. Against Owling Mine, your first game is extremely confusing: why is my opponent playing all these truly awful cards (Gigadrowse?) and letting me draw so many cards? A few Exhaustions later and you realize that you have lost to one of the strangest cards, a card that at first blush looks absolutely terrible, a card that is a fat unplayable F in nearly every single deck, an unassuming bronze owl. It turns out a great counter to this F is an F-, one of the worst cards ever printed, One with Nothing.

Only two players brought One with Nothing to Pro Tour: Honolulu, and it's unclear whether it was ever cast, so its impact may be slightly exaggerated. But it was not a joke, some of the best Magic players in the world legitimately employed this card as part of their strategy at the highest level of play. Had they done a bit better and the winds shifted, it's easy to imagine a Pro Tour where this card could have determined the fate of the tournament.

The story of Owling Mine, One with Nothing, and its Pro Tour inclusion is one of my favorites in Magic. It is staggeringly improbable.

In 2005, head Magic designer Mark Rosewater defended this card on these exact grounds:

The real wastes of cardboard aren't the ones that get noticed or evoke emotional responses (of any kind). They are the cards that no one remembers. The cards that didn't add anything to the metagame (and I'm talking both about the tournament scene and the larger community). One With Nothing is not going to be one of those cards. Yes, many people are going to hate the card. People are going to write horrible things about it. But the card is going to be memorable and it's going to add something to the overall Magic experience.

Many players agree. One with Nothing is totally iconic. A foil in good condition will run you about 90 dollars. Almost no one is playing it at this point (except as a meme in a handful of Commander decks)—the narrow Standard metagame that made it plausible is long gone. They are collecting a rare and special piece of Magic history.

Since then, Magic has changed its approach to bad cards. In 2024, Rosewater said that R&D almost never prints intentionally bad cards anymore, due to a number of constraints (getting new players into the game, making Limited more fun, and supporting many different formats). The era of One with Nothing is over, and Magic is probably a better game for it. Many of the other example cards and strategies I mentioned have been killed off in favor of the overall health of the game.

There is a phrase I like from software engineering philosophy, "worse is better." Or as Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morals, "All good things were formerly bad things." It is true that Magic cards and sets were "worse" by various measure in 2005 than they are today. But that "badness" also gave the game a certain distinct flavor, it was out of the "badness" of old sets, the unintentional, ugly, and awkward parts, that unorthodox decks like Owling Mine emerged, and the story of One with Nothing got to be told. It was the "badness" of scarce online play, a slow event and release schedule, and only a small number of major tournaments, that caused interesting and novel decks to briefly catch people by surprise at a major event like Pro Tour: Honolulu.

I am not saying that Magic should try to return to how things used to be—such a thing is impossible. If I were running the show, I may make decisions differently, but there are many decisions over the past twenty years that have, by any objective measure, improved the game. I just mean to say that these improvements smoothed off some of the rough edges that gave Magic a different character in 2006, a character that has now been lost.

What interests me most about Magic history is our ability to capture these lost eras. Back in 2006, major events were rare, and coverage was limited and mostly text-only. A lot of it has been lost, or is only available on the Internet Archive. Unlike a game like chess, which has a comprehensive document of every game played at even the lowest competitive levels, most Magic games are not preserved. Did anyone actually cast One with Nothing at Pro Tour: Honolulu? What was the game like? To answer this question would require an oral history project, tracking down one of the players and having them tell their story, twenty years later. These players are probably in their 40s now.

Personally, I don't actually play a lot of Magic these days, but I love reading about it, especially about that particular time and place that made me fall in love with the game, the era that will always be what Magic, essentially is to me. Magic is not one game, it is many games. But that also means that the game that it is changes over time, that I will never really get to play the game that I played in 2005. I could bring back the cards and play with the decks, but could never return to that point in time, when these cards were new and a vibrant player base was inventing novel strategies to play with them, without the statistical tools they have today. All one can do is freeze the past as if in amber and study its details looking backwards. To me, this is still an enjoyable pursuit, and I love going back and understanding more about the Magic that I played.

One with Nothing comes out of a set inspired by Japanese culture, and it is a clear reference to the Buddhist concept of emptiness. The flavor text is a combination of pseudo-Buddhist wisdom and a tongue-in-cheek reference to the card's functionality and awfulness: "When nothing remains, everything is equally possible."