The strongest Magic cards ever: Early era black

Some colors deal with fast aggro decks with mass removal, lifegain, or by attempting to aggro out even faster. Black, once upon a time, decided to obviate the life total itself and turn every lifegain spell into a ridiculously efficient card draw engine. Lich is an incredibly iconic card for its spot-on flavor of placing a player in zombified limbo between life and death, for its quadruple-black mana cost, and, oh yes, for how powerful it is, too.An obviously-undercosted 5/5 beater in black needs a drawback. Preferably, that drawback would be enough for players to actually think twice about plopping it down on the board and smashing face with it. Dealing 1 damage to its controller at the beginning of his or her upkeep was not nearly enough to dissuade anyone from playing Juzam Djinn, the single best midrange creature ever printed for many, many years.The black member of the "boon" cycle - Alpha's one-mana instants that had effects measured in the number three - is easily the best combo enabler among them, and indeed one of the best combo enablers of all time. Having two of these in your opening hand ensured you started with five mana, a ridiculous advantage that almost no other card or combination of cards could produce (green happened to have the couple of cards that could beat it in terms of sheer efficiency, but I'll get to those later).View the list »
This was black's answer to Time Walk. A two-mana sorcery with an extremely simple effect, it was not long before the cost of this card turned out to be far, far too cheap for the game's good. Its twice-as-expensive equivalent Diabolic Tutor is still played today, and this card launched the tradition of putting "Tutor" in the name of search-your-library cards.

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The past twenty years of Magic have seen some gradual but inexorable changes and some wild fluctuations in the environment of the game. Different strategies have come and gone, but the stories of broken cards of the past remain. Each color has always had its overpowered cards, but the identities of those cards have changed from era to era of Magic design and gameplay. In celebration of the upcoming twentieth anniversary of Magic, I'll be going through each color's strongest cards in chronological order, following up the early blue cards with the black cards of the same time period.

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It's hard to overstate how brutally nihilistic and destructive black once was. It certainly has always had aspects of mutual destruction, life payment for advantage, and other similar elements in its design principles and continues to do so today. But in the first days of Magic it truly behaved as a tyrannical dark lord.

View the list
  • This was black's answer to Time Walk. A two-mana sorcery with an extremely simple effect, it was not long before the cost of this card turned out to be far, far too cheap for the game's good. Its twice-as-expensive equivalent Diabolic Tutor is still played today, and this card launched the tradition of putting "Tutor" in the name of search-your-library cards.
  • The black member of the "boon" cycle - Alpha's one-mana instants that had effects measured in the number three - is easily the best combo enabler among them, and indeed one of the best combo enablers of all time. Having two of these in your opening hand ensured you started with five mana, a ridiculous advantage that almost no other card or combination of cards could produce (green happened to have the couple of cards that could beat it in terms of sheer efficiency, but I'll get to those later).
  • An obviously-undercosted 5/5 beater in black needs a drawback. Preferably, that drawback would be enough for players to actually think twice about plopping it down on the board and smashing face with it. Dealing 1 damage to its controller at the beginning of his or her upkeep was not nearly enough to dissuade anyone from playing Juzam Djinn, the single best midrange creature ever printed for many, many years.
  • Some colors deal with fast aggro decks with mass removal, lifegain, or by attempting to aggro out even faster. Black, once upon a time, decided to obviate the life total itself and turn every lifegain spell into a ridiculously efficient card draw engine. Lich is an incredibly iconic card for its spot-on flavor of placing a player in zombified limbo between life and death, for its quadruple-black mana cost, and, oh yes, for how powerful it is, too.
  • When Ice Age was designed, one of the early design mistakes R&D wanted to fix was Demonic Tutor. They decided to create a card that was a cheaper, instant-speed version of that card, but, in exchange, was much harder to use. Needless to say not all went as planned, and Demonic Consultation is considered just as broken as its older sibling.
  • Nowadays, Stone Rain is considered undercosted and unfun for locking players out of their third or fourth turns. Imagine what it was like when it cost one mana less. Sinkhole was one of many Alpha cards that was an experiment with a simple effect that could be redesigned and tweaked in many iterations, but that the first design team made the mistake of grossly undercosting.
  • What Sinkhole was to lands, Hymn to Tourach was to cards in hand. This was a seemingly-innocuous and fair-on-paper sorcery (it only provided one card of card advantage, after all, with a ratio of two cards randomly discarded to one Hymn spent), but actual play situations proved it to be far, far too efficient.
  • The enchant worlds (later errataed to enchantments with the world supertype)  were an innovation of Legends - enchantments with massive and symmetrical global effects, only one of which could be on the battlefield at a time, since they represented literally different worlds that the players were battling in. Some of these places, all told, were fun to visit (Concordant Crossroads comes to mind). Nether Void was an utter hell of drudgery that set the game back three turns, allowing lockdown-happy control decks ample time to grief even harder.
  • The Skull-'n'-Runes! It's almost inconceivable now, but Necropotence, a card that today often comes up in discussions of the most broken card of all time, was considered a crap rare when it was released. No one, it seemed, wanted to spend BBB to skip their draw steps and then have to wait until the turn ended to draw cards from the activated ability. In practice, this card tends to work out as a slightly-delayed "draw your whole library" and has very well earned its Vintage restriction and Legacy ban for its place in the very first "combo winter."
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, Newark Magic the Gathering Examiner

Alex Silady has been playing Magic casually since the age of 13, and has recently taken up the exciting path of the DCI tournament scrub. He studies journalism and politics at NYU and somehow finds the time for Magic in between classes, essays, and writing for the campus newspaper. He likes green...

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