But It Looked So Good On Paper!

How many times has this happened to you? A new set comes out and there’s a card in it that is beyond cool, beyond remarkable, beyond awesome, it has actually transcended to remarcoolsome. You barely even read the card, its very essence is already causing neurons in your brain to fire off like you just downed a crystal meth cocktail with a crack chaser. At that moment you’re not really thinking about whether the card is feasible to play, all you can see is just how freaking remacoolsome it is.



Shortly thereafter, though, reality sets in. You’ve built a deck around your new remarcoolsome card you got. You’ve tested it, tweaked it, tested some more, fine tuned it, tested it until you can’t see straight and then a single thought hits you…man, f@#$ this card! You’ve just had an epiphany, or what I like to call the ‘but it looked so good on paper’ moment.


Now all of you veteran players who cruise the tournament scene and draft like you have cancer and booster drafting is the cure are reading this and thinking that only a chump would fall for one of those cards. Keep in mind though that this site is predominantly for and about casual players. While your savvy eye knew that card for what it was the moment you laid eyes on it have a bit of mercy for those of us without your experience who went after it like a kid with ADD goes after something shiny.


Here now is my personal top five ‘but it looked good on paper” card list:


Darksteel Forge

For 9 mana your artifacts are indestructible. INDESTRUCTIBLE! OMG how cool is that? Remember that when this card debuted it was the first time that decks that were either completely, or very nearly, comprised of artifacts. That made the Forge particularly attractive. Its downfall…that cost. In a competitive game, by the time that anyone has nine mana to spend on a single card, the game is mostly likely over. This isn’t to say that Darksteel Forge never got played, it just meant that it wasn’t a reliable card, meaning that it was just as likely to never hit the battlefield as it was to see play.


Dark Depths

For Dark Depths it wasn’t the casting cost, seeing as it was land, it was the activation cost. For a cost of three you could remove one of the ten ice counters it came into play with. Once those counters were gone, then you got to put an Avatar into play with power and toughness of 20/20 into play. Great. Kick ass even. Unless your opponent bounced it for one. Now what? Thirty mana down the drain for a token that died when it got bounced. On top of that, Dark Depths didn’t even give you the option to tap it for mana. Not the deign department’s shining hour.




Grinding Station/Summoning Station/Salvaging Station


Okay, technically this is a combo not a card, but the appeal was in having all three to make something really cool happen. Problem was that it wasn’t so easy.  If you ever tried to make that combination of cards work then odds are you realized how hard it was to translate the concept into a reality.  If you did manage it then you are a rarity.  I only ever saw one person do it well and he was locally famous for making crazy, sick machine decks so he had a bit more practice than the rest of us coupled with a rain man like native ability.  I think it boils down to two issues,.  First there;s the sheer cost of getting them into play and working, and second is the odds of getting them all in hand, into play and doing those two things in a realistic time frame and with any kind of regularity.  Bottom line, awesome in theory, bulky and unwieldy in practice.


Tower of (Calamities, Champions, Eons, Fortunes, Murmurs)

Pick a tower, any tower, and you know what, it probably will never amount to shit.  Why?  Because no opponent is going to sit on his hands and let you use abilities like that.  You can get them in to play relatively quickly after all they only cost four mana, but the abilities don't come till you have eight to spend on them, and who the hell is going to just sit there and wait for you to start popping them for 12 damage at a time, or pumping creatures +6/+6, or milling them for eight for that matter.  Talk about a card that might as well have Naturalize me emblazoned on the card.  The truth is that its an end of game card that will probably never see the end of game.  Too expensive and too unreliable.


Howling Mine

On its surface Howling Mine looks like the ultimate card advantage play in the entire arsenal.  Its land so it plays for free and you get an extra draw every time, and on top of that you don't have to take the draw if its not in your interest.  Perfect right?  Wrong!  Here's why.  While it seems to give you card advantage, it actually gives it to your opponent instead.  Since he or she will be the first to benefit from Howling Mine, he or she will always have gotten at least one more card than you no matter how long its in play.  Here's another scenario, you play Howling Mine, your opponent gets a second draw on the next turn, then promptly uses some form of land destruction to take it out.  Your opponent got an extra card, you got nothing and to top it off you lost a valuable land drop possibly ceding mana advantage as well.  It can make a game interesting, but its no favor to yourself to play it.


You might be wondering how I came up with the list.  Simple, I spent just as much time trying to make something out of them as anyone else.  While I would like to say that it will make me wiser in the future, I am relatively certain that wish won't survive past the next time I see a new remarcoolsome card from a new set and say myself, only twelve mana...what a bargain!