The strongest Magic cards ever: Early era red

Red's "crippling flaw" back in the day was conceived of as this: "Red burns through its cards in hand so fast it always winds up running out of spells."Ha.The fact of the matter is, red had a spell that refilled its hand just as effectively as Timetwister did for blue, at the same cost, and that allowed it to not have to shuffle its graveyard back in and manipulate the top cards of its library to get favorable draws. So much for that "weakness."How could I not include the best piece of one-mana removal ever printed? (Sorry, Swords to Plowshares - as good as you get in the late game, you also technically have a drawback that must be overcome and can't hit players.) The fact that after Bolt was reprinted in Magic 2010, creatures started being evaluated as playable according to whether they died to being the target of one, speaks volumes.Yes, in order for this card to be good, it depends on running the land type that produces another color (in this case, green). Here's the thing - there's such a thing as a Mountain Forest. Since this existed alongside Taiga, it was a 2/3 on turn one and singlehandedly made aggro a competitive archetype in Magic's first expansion. Years later it was one of the one-drops of the infamous metagame-smashing Zoo deck alongside Loam Lion and Wild Nacatl. The Ape, once banned itself, indirectly caused the banning of the supposedly-innocuous Nacatl.View the list »
For as maligned as The Dark is, it definitely had a few gems hidden among its terrible card designs. Blood Moon is assuredly one of them. Nonbasic lands have always been key in the manabases of competitive decks, and red having the capacity to make opposing nonbasics simply not work except for paying for red or colorless mana costs is enough to give it a huge leg up on dual-land-packing decks of all kinds.

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It's hard to believe the 20th anniversary of Magic is swiftly approaching. In celebration of that fact, we're getting From the Vault: Twenty, which is doubtless only one of many things Wizards of the Coast will be doing for the birthday bash. As we all look back on the past two decades of this game, it's hard not to think about the most iconic cards of those twenty years - game-breaking spells (and, yes, lands too) that are remembered with nostalgia or with scorn. Continuing on from the early black cards, here are what I consider the most broken or otherwise hyper-powerful red cards from the very first years of Magic design and gameplay.

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Red has this tendency to be underestimated and written off as a rather one-note, "dumb" color of pure aggro. It probably has the smallest slice of the color pie in terms of the number of different effects it tends to get, and it gets disparaged as a quote-unquote weak color to this day. But not treating red like a serious threat has just about always been a fatal mistake; sure, it does get a lot of good burn and always has, but red's fiery might has also always been much more varied than that.

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  • For as maligned as The Dark is, it definitely had a few gems hidden among its terrible card designs. Blood Moon is assuredly one of them. Nonbasic lands have always been key in the manabases of competitive decks, and red having the capacity to make opposing nonbasics simply not work except for paying for red or colorless mana costs is enough to give it a huge leg up on dual-land-packing decks of all kinds.
  • Yes, in order for this card to be good, it depends on running the land type that produces another color (in this case, green). Here's the thing - there's such a thing as a Mountain Forest. Since this existed alongside Taiga, it was a 2/3 on turn one and singlehandedly made aggro a competitive archetype in Magic's first expansion. Years later it was one of the one-drops of the infamous metagame-smashing Zoo deck alongside Loam Lion and Wild Nacatl. The Ape, once banned itself, indirectly caused the banning of the supposedly-innocuous Nacatl.
  • How could I not include the best piece of one-mana removal ever printed? (Sorry, Swords to Plowshares - as good as you get in the late game, you also technically have a drawback that must be overcome and can't hit players.) The fact that after Bolt was reprinted in Magic 2010, creatures started being evaluated as playable according to whether they died to being the target of one, speaks volumes.
  • Red's "crippling flaw" back in the day was conceived of as this: "Red burns through its cards in hand so fast it always winds up running out of spells."Ha.The fact of the matter is, red had a spell that refilled its hand just as effectively as Timetwister did for blue, at the same cost, and that allowed it to not have to shuffle its graveyard back in and manipulate the top cards of its library to get favorable draws. So much for that "weakness."
  • Alongside Elves, Goblins have been one of the creature types that have consistently had really good tribal aggro decks. Goblin King had a little to do with this initially - not that mountainwalk is useful on most occasions, but the mass pump was good to the small-but-cheap tribe - but much more of that was because of Goblin Grenade, the one-mana 5-damage burn spell that incidentally also cost a sacrificed Goblin. To put this in perspective - four of these (four red mana and four Goblins, not a hard cost to pay) are enough to kill a player.
  • Sure, white gets to deal with current threats by wiping them out with Wrath of God for 2WW, or prevent future ones by blowing up all the lands with Armageddon for 3W. Red gets to pay 4RR and do both at once, while also killing off artifacts as well as a kind of icing on the cake. If only there were some awesome red enchantments that could survive one of these and clinch a victory back in the day...
  • Infinite mana combos are all well and good, but what is there to do with them once you have an arbitrarily large amount of mana sitting in your mana pool? Well, X-mana spells have always been a good answer. Fireball was the first X-burn spell and hence the key to dealing fatal damage in dozens of different ramp decks back in the day, such as the venerable Channel-Fireball first turn win combo.
  • Sure, just like Kird Ape does, this little guy depends on having Forests on hand in order to use him. But he's capable of an insane amount of mana acceleration that would be unprintably efficient today - with dual lands and some untap effects you can get nine mana out of him on turn 3!
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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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