The strongest Magic cards ever: Early era green

Whereas Channel is meant for decks that win in one swift action, Fastbond exists as the rampiest ramp card that ever ramped, for decks that want to win by consistently having way more mana than they should. Just as with Channel, the life payment might as well not even exist on Fastbond since no one playing with it cares about it; it's hard to worry about the size of your life total when you have a dozen lands on the battlefield on turn four or something.This is an oft-overlooked card, but the fact of the matter is it's instant-speed green reanimation for three mana. Perhaps this never was the heart of a traditional reanimator combo deck, but it's a hell of a way for an aggro deck to get its finisher up and running way earlier than it's supposed to. In other words: I'd play the heck out of this in Commander.Another early object lesson that green imparted via blunt force: Free stuff is also inevitably dangerous. Eureka is technically "fair" in that it affects everyone equally, but a player casting Eureka is only doing so because they have a lot of really good, expensive permanents in their hand that they want to get on the board for the one-time discount price of 2GG. When you've got a fistful of Forces of Nature and a Concordant Crossroads that you're itching to put down, everyone else is going to get left in the dust.View the list »
The granddaddy of combo decks as a whole was the Channel-Fireball deck, which won on the first turn with horrifying efficiency. It went something like this: Mountain, Black Lotus, sacrifice the Black Lotus for three green mana, spend two of the G on Channel, pay 19 life, spend the last green mana, the red from the Mountain, and all nineteen colorless mana from the Channel on a lethal Fireball to your opponent's face. This was the first time R&D learned the lesson that life is a dangerous resource to make use of since you have all of it available to you from the beginning of the game.

Card Games newsletter

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Magic, and it's incredible to think the game has survived as long as it has. Magic was the first trading card game to be created, and since its inception there have been countless other TCGs following its formula. Most of them haven't lasted. So what's the secret to Magic's lasting success? Part of it is that it's in a constant state of change in order to stay fresh and exciting, while also staying true to its roots. So while which cards are strong depends upon the metagame of the time, there are always overpowered or broken cards that become a part of Magic folklore and that are exciting to see come down on the board. Continuing from where I left off with some of the first red cards to make an impact on the game, here are the best of the early green cards.

Related topics

Advertisement

The color pie was not well-defined in the early days of Magic, but green, more so than the other colors, was really unsure about what it wanted to do as a color. Hence the kind of effects it got were all over the place, from the land destruction of Kudzu to the low-power-kill of Drop of Honey to small flyers like Killer Bees. Hence, green started out being able to do quite a few things well, which continue today; it definitely got a lot of good ramp and recursion, for example.

View the list
  • The granddaddy of combo decks as a whole was the Channel-Fireball deck, which won on the first turn with horrifying efficiency. It went something like this: Mountain, Black Lotus, sacrifice the Black Lotus for three green mana, spend two of the G on Channel, pay 19 life, spend the last green mana, the red from the Mountain, and all nineteen colorless mana from the Channel on a lethal Fireball to your opponent's face. This was the first time R&D learned the lesson that life is a dangerous resource to make use of since you have all of it available to you from the beginning of the game.
  • Another early object lesson that green imparted via blunt force: Free stuff is also inevitably dangerous. Eureka is technically "fair" in that it affects everyone equally, but a player casting Eureka is only doing so because they have a lot of really good, expensive permanents in their hand that they want to get on the board for the one-time discount price of 2GG. When you've got a fistful of Forces of Nature and a Concordant Crossroads that you're itching to put down, everyone else is going to get left in the dust.
  • This is an oft-overlooked card, but the fact of the matter is it's instant-speed green reanimation for three mana. Perhaps this never was the heart of a traditional reanimator combo deck, but it's a hell of a way for an aggro deck to get its finisher up and running way earlier than it's supposed to. In other words: I'd play the heck out of this in Commander.
  • Whereas Channel is meant for decks that win in one swift action, Fastbond exists as the rampiest ramp card that ever ramped, for decks that want to win by consistently having way more mana than they should. Just as with Channel, the life payment might as well not even exist on Fastbond since no one playing with it cares about it; it's hard to worry about the size of your life total when you have a dozen lands on the battlefield on turn four or something.
  • Reprinted as recently as Magic 2012, Birds of Paradise is consistently one of the most sought-after rares in every set it appears in, for the simple reason that  it pulls double duty as mana fixing and mana acceleration on turn one. Also, it can chump block flying creatures if it comes to that, which is just gravy.
  • Fun fact: When Alpha was being playtested - before it was even dubbed Alpha, in fact - the playtest card of Berserk had a picture of Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk for its artwork. The fact of the matter is this is an amazing pump spell; I can't think of any other similar cards that can get creatures to a comparable size for just one mana. The drawback - whatever you use it on gets destroyed at the end of the turn if it swings - is a small price to pay for the sheer damage output possible.
  • Another life payment card - it took a little bit of time before the designers designed that was really not in flavor for green. Sylvan Library does an obscenely good job at filling your hand. Even if you don't pay any life to keep a card it's, at the very least, allowing you to dig up to three cards deep in your library to get what you want on your draw step. If you've got the life to spare, well, you're drawing three cards per draw step.
  • Recollect and Nature's Spiral are both considered completely fair cards - but what a difference one mana less or the lack of a restriction can make. Getting back absolutely anything from the graveyard is one of green's most powerful tools, and costing that at only two mana was, in hindsight, something of a mistake. R&D seems pretty ambivalent about whether any single color can get that effect nowadays, so powerful is it, with green recurring permanents and blue and red splitting instant and sorcery recursion among themselves.
View the list

, 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...

Advertisement

Today's top buzz...