The strongest Magic cards ever: Mirage-Urza's era blue

There were two periods of time in which Standard was entirely overrun by artifact-based decks. One of them was Mirrodin block, when affinity ruled the day (again with the free spells), and the other was during Urza's block, when we had, well, this. Yes, that's three mana and an artifact sacrifice as a pittance to pay for any game-breaking artifact you care to fetch from your deck.Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman! Morphling was a stupidly-difficult-to-kill, stupidly-versatile, and stupidly-fat beater in the color that was supposed to be lacking the most in terms of creatures at a time when combat damage stacking rules essentially allowed it to attack and block as a 5/5 with two activations each of its +1/-1 and -1/+1 abilities.An obnoxious jackass in both the storyline and on the board. Yes, he's fragile. Yes, he costs three mana. But he tosses around counterspells basically every turn. Ertai is, let's face it, something of a lock, especially if you have the means to repeatedly untap him. Removal does no good against him if you can just use his activated ability to counter it.View the list »
This was a relatively early expression of a timeworn theme in Magic development: Free spells are inherently dangerous and will be abused to the point of breaking formats. The fact that Dream Halls is symmetrical matters little when its controller is only going to cast it with a hand full of both finishers and chaff in the same color, and drop them all at once.

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This year is Magic: the Gathering's twentieth anniversary, and what a ride it's been. The past twenty years have seen an astounding number of strategies and decks arise, most of them buoyed by a few extremely strong cards each. And though Magic design, development, and playtesting have gotten much more sophisticated since Alpha, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Every time period of Magic has produced powerful cards that are remembered fondly or with malice by everyone who played with or against them. Moving on from the white cards from Mirage through Urza's block, here are the mightiest blue cards from the same era.

Blue continued to be the absolute master of card drawing and counterspells after the block system got off the ground, but gained a new emphasis on time manipulation effects. As Time Walk proved all the way back in Alpha, this sort of thing is usually absolutely bonkers. The undercosted fat creatures with phasing from Mirage block (whose drawback was only being there half the time) weren't terribly dangerous, but when Urza's block rolled around, the events on Tolaria were catastrophic for both the storyline and the metagame.

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  • This was a relatively early expression of a timeworn theme in Magic development: Free spells are inherently dangerous and will be abused to the point of breaking formats. The fact that Dream Halls is symmetrical matters little when its controller is only going to cast it with a hand full of both finishers and chaff in the same color, and drop them all at once.
  • An obnoxious jackass in both the storyline and on the board. Yes, he's fragile. Yes, he costs three mana. But he tosses around counterspells basically every turn. Ertai is, let's face it, something of a lock, especially if you have the means to repeatedly untap him. Removal does no good against him if you can just use his activated ability to counter it.
  • Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman! Morphling was a stupidly-difficult-to-kill, stupidly-versatile, and stupidly-fat beater in the color that was supposed to be lacking the most in terms of creatures at a time when combat damage stacking rules essentially allowed it to attack and block as a 5/5 with two activations each of its +1/-1 and -1/+1 abilities.
  • There were two periods of time in which Standard was entirely overrun by artifact-based decks. One of them was Mirrodin block, when affinity ruled the day (again with the free spells), and the other was during Urza's block, when we had, well, this. Yes, that's three mana and an artifact sacrifice as a pittance to pay for any game-breaking artifact you care to fetch from your deck.
  • Wheel of Fortune is widely considered one of the most broken cards of all time. This is very much like Wheel of Fortune, except in the color best suited to abuse it, and with the potential to net even more cards.
  • This sent a clear message to aggro and burn decks, and that message was YOU CAN'T HIT ME YOU CAN'T HIT ME YOU CAN'T HIT ME. The sacrifice condition on this card at first blush seems rather easy for your opponents to induce (heck, it triggers if you cast an instant or sorcery), but even a few turns of undamageability for two mana would be a massive boon to a lot of different kinds of control and aggro-control decks. Not to mention the fact that this is ultra-secure damage prevention to stop you dying while you combo out.
  • Ahh, the key to one of the most obnoxious and frankly strange combos of all time! The first tournament application of Donate involved handing off an Illusions of Grandeur, but it's given away many other unwanted gifts since.
  • Once upon a time, there was a Vintage/Legacy deck archetype that was capable of winning before its controller even took a turn. It was imaginatively called Hulk Flash, due to its abuse of Protean Hulk, Disciple of the Vault, and a hell of a lot of 0-mana-cost artifact creatures. This was only the most blatant abuse of Flash's free creatures; many others are possible.
  • Really, all of the Urza's block "free spells" could go here. The development team found out too late that untapping lands equal to a spell's converted mana cost could not only make those spells essentially cost zero mana, but also negative mana, since lands that produce more than one mana existed. Needless to say this caused no end of problems with format degeneracy once players figured this out.
  • Yet another example of the busted Mirage block tutor cycle, this was an object lesson to R&D about printing more or less unrestricted search-your-library cards for one mana and/or at instant speed. Even if they could only find cards of a certain type, that only meant they went into a certain deck and made it absurdly consistent rather than into every deck.
  • Speaking of consistency, there's a reason that Morality Shift cost what it did when it was printed in Judgment. There have always been a ton of ways to fill graveyards with very specific cards, and Paradigm Shift turns self-mill into the greatest library filtering of all time.
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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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