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Part 0: Introduction
Part 1: (#1-12): Banhammerin'

Not nearly as cool as the banned cards, today's group of problem children allow Vintage players to get their immaculately clean fingers all over them.  At least, that's what they all wish, since not a single one has seen actual play since Homelands was the "awesome new set", which lasted for approximately 17 minutes on October 14th, 1995.

And I just want to clarify one point:  I'm not going to be building an exact 315-card Master's Edition 4 with the proper number of commons, uncommons, and rares - rather, I'm just going to identify cards that the magic populace in general wouldn't mind coming online instead of cards that are even worse.  Just see if there's any reason at all to consider each card for ME4 or beyond.  It's up to Erik Lauer and the boys at WotC to build ME4 in a fun way.

The expansion-symbol cards:
Kind of the inbred cousins of the ante cards, these cards are not banned.  You are free to play them in Vintage or Legacy all you want.  However, the people behind Magic really rather wish that you wouldn't.  Because they remind people that there is a downside to playing Arabian Nights and Antiquities versions of classic cards.  These are the anti-pimping your deck cards.  Rather than trying to make your deck all cool and black bordered, these encourage people to get the crappiest, white-bordered, core set versions of their cards possible.  They unfortunately also make that little expansion symbol matter in the rules to the point where they almost had to make Skirk Ridge Exhumer say he was creating a 9th Edition Festering Goblin.  Cause of these three never-played cards, Expansion Symbols are copiable values.  I bet Vesuvan Doppelganger is super pissed every time you turn her into something from Fallen Empires or Prophecy.  It must be kind of like dressing up as an IT guy for Halloween.

 

This mechanic is almost banable.  Or wait, is that spelled bannable?  Hmmm..... anyway, they're never going to do another card like this outside of silver border land, and it makes people care about something R&D really would rather not have them care about.  They fall into this sort of twilight realm of tournament legal cards that no one ever plays with that feature mechanics that they wish were never printed and will never ever come back.  Along with cards that care about graveyard order, licids, phasing, banding, and especially bands with other - mechanics that they told us they sent away to live at the "Island Sanctuary", but they really took out behind the woodshed and shot.  If they didn't even get a cameo in Time Spiral block, you can safely assume they're spending some time in an oil drum at the bottom of Lake Washington.  Heck, even Rampage got to show its face from the nursing home!

 

The theory behind them is semi-sound, in that they were looking to make sure that new expansions were kept in check and didn't dominate the format (back then there was only one format, and it was called 40 Plague Rats and 20 Black Lotuses).  Later they would discover technology like hosing the major mechanic of a set - you know, after sets started developing their own mechanics like a blossoming young lass poised on the edge of womanhood.  Now that we have like 60 expansions, it seems kind of ridiculous that just these three sets have this special expansion symbol vulnerability.  But back then they didn't know we'd have like 60 expansions, so maybe it seemed a good way to keep things in check at the time and stop people from playing with and enjoying new cards.  Wait, business model...

13.

City in a Bottle

Well, if you want to hose an expansion this is the way to do it.  All Arabian Nights cards sacrificed when it comes into play?  Check.  Continuous effect?  Check.  Two mana artifact?  Check.  You can't even PLAY other Arabian Nights cards?  Not even LANDS?  Check check.  Ye gods, leave some smoldering corpses for the fish.  This is probably the greatest hoser of all time, except that it's so narrow almost no decks have enough of these cards to be worth hosing.  Still, I've heard legends about savvy Vintage players siding it in against Manaless Ichorid.  Take that, stupid Bazaar of Baghdad!

VERDICT: NO.  Duh.  Since we don't have any cards with that symbol online... it's like the greatest dinosaur hunter ever.

14.

Golgothian Sylex

Ok, after like 16 years, I finally looked up what "Sylex" means.  Turns out ... it's one of those made up Magic words.  That, or named after some guy on YouTube whose channel you definitely do not want to be subscribed to.  But in the Magic storyline, it did cause the Ice Age by sort of blowing up the world in one of those Urza/Mishra things.  So at least it's an actual made up thing with a story behind it.  What I think is hilarious is that Antiquities designers decided that their Apocalyptic Death Device(tm) would be - a bowl.  An old Etruscan-style bowl.  It has two sets of rather friendly-inclined men patting each other on the back and watching while a chick is either stabbing a guy or ripping off all his clothes.  Or maybe she's stabbing an ostrich.  Meanwhile, mysterious wagon wheels are rolling down the hill towards them.  I have to give it to the Magic creative writers in making it work as the whole impetus for Ice Age after getting saddled with something like this.  In the novels they are rather vague, however, on exactly how Mishra "activates" the bowl.  I know how the bowl in my house "activates" but I rather hope that's not how it works.

VERDICT: NO.  Not only has every good card from Antiquities save one (I'm looking at you, dear Workshop) been reprinted without the symbol, it's a much more expensive one-shot effect than the Bottle City of Awesomeness.

15.

Apocalypse Chime

"Mercy Me!  What's that?  You're going to destroy all my cards from the Homelands Expansion?  Lordy, lordy, whatever will I do without those Homelands cards?  Why, my deck has SO MANY Homelands cards in it.  Gee, I guess I won't get to play with my Dwarven Ponies anymore, har.  Oh No!  My Giant Albatross has flown the coop!  Not my Trade Caravan too!  How can I collect my currency counters?  Alas, poor Chandler.  Will the punishment never stop?"

 

This is pretty much what every single person thought every time they saw this card.  If you're going to hose something, you better make sure it's worth hosing.  Or worth printing in the first place.  Ice Age and snow-covered lands had this exact same problem - they had like 14 hosers and 7 cards that 'made snow lands worth playing', except that second number was really zero.  In modern Magic terms, it'd be like they had put a card into Saviors of Kamigawa that said "Search all players' hand, libraries, graveyards, and binders for cards with the "Sweep" ability word.  Burn them gleefully."

VERDICT:  NO.  There are situations in the universe where Pale Moon or Great Wall can be useful.  There are many fewer situations where Apocalypse Chime is more useful than having a tissue in your hand instead.  There are a similar number of quantum possibilities in the universe where the Sun turns into a giant magical fiery canoe and paddles off to make out with Venus.

The name problem cards:

This is a delicate subject that I hesitate to bring up.  But there were a few cards in Arabian Nights that rather... skirted the line of political correctness.  Not at the time, but the worlds a different place than it was in 1993.  I myself have no problems with these cards being reprinted online but WotC has lawyers and brand managers and all kinds of people who might care.  I'm no religious scholar (though I've seen some religion on TV), so I don't know, these may not be problematic at all.  But personally, I would rather doubt we'll ever see them online, or ever mentioned again.

16.

Army of Allah

Yeah.  So...  yeah.  It's that whole "don't show any concrete representations of our supreme deity" thing.  Now, this card is depicting his army, not the deity himself.  And I'm pretty sure it's ok even for heathens to write down his name electronically.  But a casual glance at this card from someone without a religious background definitely would say that that guy in the center is probably some general named "Allah", and this is his army.  Then this person would probably go on to think that he's probably that guy from that 300 movie.  And that could lead to, shall we say, something like the next card...

VERDICT: NO.  It's already been superseded online, Fortify is 100% better than it for everything except for "real" Two-Headed Giant multi-player games that we don't even have yet.  And trust me, there are plenty of bad white pump effects not online yet, as we'll see eventually.

17.

Jihad

Hmm.  A term that has been co-opted by a number of different groups to mean a number of different things.  Sacred, holy religious war with a card depicting a bunch of Saracen-looking guys going at it.  While that's not exactly ideal, with this name and no art descriptions back in the day, the artist could've drawn a guy with a white shirt and red cross impaling a bunch of guys in turbans, so we definitely should count our blessings that this is how the art turned out.  Someone did turn in a picture of Einstein for a card in Legends, you know.  And Hellfire did have a bunch of guys in white shirts with red crosses, but thankfully they're burning for their numerous sins.  It's an ok, although unspectacular card, much better in its day when the cardpool was 500ish than it would be today.

VERDICT: NO.  Not really worth any potential hassle. Divine Sacrament has different requirements and drawbacks, but does much the same thing.  Not to mention Honor of the Pure being pretty much better all around.

 

The programming problem cards:

Back in the early days of Magic, there were lots of mechanics that made perfect sense when you told someone what they did, but didn't really work if you thought about it too hard.  Things affecting the board and triggering long after they left the game, continuous effects continuing until end of turn after things had left play, cards in hand being the same object as when it was in play and in your graveyard - all kinds of wacky stuff.  Mark Gottlieb has done an amazing job with hammering, beating, and cramming these cards into neat little packages that actually work within the rules.  However, the Magic programming team has to deal with them on more than a purely theoretical rules standpoint - they actually have to interact correctly with every other card online.  Some of these cards mentioned below may be trivial, some may be impossible, but all of them are going to require some entirely new code to handle.  And frankly, many them may just not be worth the programmer's time.  Then again, if they can code Humility and Chains of Mephistopheles so they (almost) work correctly, I have a lot of faith that none of these cards are truly impossible.

 

18.

Camouflage

As far as I know, there has never been a card that lets you put multiple things into X piles, where X is some number it calculates.  MTGO may already be fine with creating X new zones, and it may already be fine at swapping things between new zones, but how you get the second defending creature re-assigned from zone 2 over to zone 6 is definitely something that's never been done and there's no current interface that can do it.  It may be trivial, or it may be quite complicated to handle multiple piles / labels.

 

Also, regarding the artwork: That guy isn't using actual camouflage at all; it seems he's made out of ghost instead.

VERDICT: YES (U, programming).  Overall, it's 100% useless in all forms of constructed, 90% useless in limited, but could be fun in casual and has some nostalgia factor.  Also arguably gets better in paper Two-Headed Giant than anywhere else, and maybe someday we'll have that.  And the programming challenges here probably aren't too bad.

19.

Cyclopean Tomb

One of the hackiest cards out there, even in modern rules speak, it comes down to having to explain in great detail every aspect of what this card does.  And what it does isn't pretty. Quicksilver Fountain does a similar sort of thing for less mana.  Heck, back in the day Gaea's Liege did a similar thing for less mana (at least after the first use).  The main ability is fine, but the leaves play clause would be kind of insane to program for the corner cases.  They'll need to make sure it interacts correctly with phasing and things that remove counters and other land change effects and other Cyclopean Tombs and probably several other things I'm forgetting.  Then it triggers during your upkeep for the rest of the game until it's "uh, maybe we shouldn't let it trigger for the rest of the game" hack clause comes into effect.  Still, the nostalgia factor on this one is quite high. It's one of those cards that we all thought was awesome way back when - just like Thundercats cartoons, it turns out it's actually not as cool as you think it was.  Now, the artwork's still bas-ass awesome, though.  Yes, I would like to order some tiny mummies to live inside my giant mummy's pupils.

VERDICT:  YES (R, programming).  I'm kind of on the fence about whether it's worth the hassle, but it may have a tiny bit of casual constructed value and definitely has some limited appeal with swampwalkers and color denial.  Also, as mentioned, rates highly on the nostalgia chart.

 

20.

Drain Power

So I wrote this whole thing about how Drain Power's ability is weird and doesn't appear online and forcing players to play some mana ability of lands they control is definitely something that would take some programming to handle and would be tricky with certain kinds of lands (Odyssey filter lands) and all those things that granted lands mana abilities (Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, Joiner Adept).  Turns out, this ability does already exist online as....  Pygmy Hippo!  So forget all that.  They did solve most of the problems with it.  I tested Pygmy Hippo and its interactions on the Beta (what, you think I want to shell out $0.80 for Pygmy Hippo?) and it seems to work fine with everything except Time Spiral storage lands (but that's because they're known to be programmed incorrectly).

 

THEN I wrote this whole thing:

However, I feel Drain Power should still make this list because unlike Pygmy Hippo, all of the restrictions and limitations of the mana tapped in this way still applies when it is drained over to your side.  Their Boseiju, Who Shelters All mana (and yes, they are forced to tap it and spend the two life) can be used to make your spells uncounterable.  But their Mishra's Workshop mana can only be used to cast your artifacts, their (Ancient Zigguraut) mana can only be used for your creature spells, etc.  MTGO has a hard enough time with "special mana" right now.  It colors that number yellow in your mana pool to remind you that you have some.  What it doesn't tell you is how much of your 7 red mana is special, and what it can be spent on - like only the activated abilities of Elemental cards.  If you have multiple special mana of the same color (including colorless) there's no way to tell which one it's spending.  Thankfully, special mana is rare enough that it doesn't make a difference for 99.999% of all matches and MTGO is already smart enough to spend your special Elemental mana when you do something elementally without even being asked.  But I'm not sure how it would react to taking all of this special mana and adding it to someone else's pool, restrictions intact.

 

But THEN I found out that:

"The type of mana produced is only its colour or lack thereof.  Mana from Drain Power is not subject to restrictions from things like Mishra's Workshop, and does not carry any special properties like Boseiju."  So forget all that too!

 

Drain Power is awesome.  There are no programming problems with it, and it should definitely be it online and then everyone will play it in every deck.  Are you happy now, Drain Power?

VERDICT:  YES (R, programming).  Kind of like a combination of the sucky parts of Mana Drain and Mana Short, Drain Power is like a 43-year old barfly viewed through beer goggles - first glance makes it look much better than it actually is, but you can still get some use out of it.  Especially now that mana burn is gone.

 

21.

Word of Command

Normally, if you turned in this piece of "artwork" for a professional art job, you would be politely refused payment and if your boss was on a tight deadline, he would go and find some kid's refrigerator artwork, and use that instead.  This is like art from that French guy who signed the toilet and called it artwork, if Magic cards were made out of toilets.

 

Well, instead, Magic hired him to be their first art director.  True story.  'Nuff said.

 

Programming-wise, yes, we've done this effect before in Mindslaver. Or have we all done this before?  Because it's not as simple as taking over someone's turn.  You get to decide what spell to cast, what mode, what targets, etc, but your opponent still decides how to pay for it... or not pay for it.  Because he only has to use mana in his pool or from lands.  If he doesn't want to tap his Moxen or sac his Lotus to pay for it, he doesn't have to.

 

Now, what happens if playing the spell requires you to sacrifice, say, Tinder Farm to get enough mana?  Well, the clarifications say that the player casting Word of Command can indeed force you to use the sac ability, but how would that work online again?  You can't just randomly tap all their lands and tap them out - only exactly enough to pay for this spell.  Also, you can't choose to cast cards in their hand that they can't pay for in an obvious way, which is something MTGO hasn't done before.  Also, could you force them to reveal a card for Wren's Run Vanquisher?  Maybe?  I don't know? 

In the end, it's really not that much like Mindslaver.  In paper, this card is held together by Mark Gottlieb's actual spit and metaphorical bailing wire, and I have no idea if this would be super-simple or insanely difficult to program.  If people started playing it in paper tournaments again, with this wording they'd either need a list of clarifications as long as your arm or just have to ban it.

 

(And no offense to Jesper, almost all of his other artwork was good - this one just happens to be behind the curve.)

VERDICT:  YES (R, programming).  People would love to have it online, but I have a bad feeling that it just can't work within actual rules inside of a computer with the 1s and 0s well enough to make it in.  But give it a shot.

 

22.

Titania's Song

The original March of the Machines, in the totally-random-throw-a-dart-at-the-board color of Green, Titania's Song is totally fine except for the part where the ability continues until end of turn, even if it leaves play.  That's a weird, weird clause.  Where exactly is that effect coming from?  If someone puts it back into your library, is the card in your library still putting out this continuous effect?  If they exile it or destroy it, is the card in your graveyard or exile zone putting out this effect?  What if you then exile it from your graveyard and change zones again, does it still work?  It's not a trigger  - not even a delayed trigger - it's still a continuous ability, and that's just amazingly weird.  They added this ridiculous clause because they weren't sure at the time if the rules could handle artifacts not being creatures suddenly in the middle of combat.  Instead, the rules can't handle this card.

 

It also has one of Magic's first "loses all abilities" ability, but they've proven that they can handle that with Humility.  It just makes this card even MORE complex to program.  Now you have to program Phantom Artifact Humility abilities floating around in the nether space with no card linked to them.

VERDICT:  NO.  Though there is some nostalgia for it, March does everything it does, only better and in a much better color for this effect.

 

23.

Equinox

I love this card to death, art and ability.  However, it's one of the very, very few Magic cards that considers what's going to happen in the future.  Considering what happened in the past is fine, it happens all the time with "put into a graveyard from play" triggered abilities and such.  But Magic is not some carnival fortune teller machine where you can wish to grow up faster ala Tom Hanks.  Some other CCG card games do allow effects like that (future effects, not Tom Hanks effects), and frankly, their rules are a mess.

 

The official rules for this card are that as this ability resolves, you check whether the targeted spell, if it would resolve right then as you're resolving this ability, would destroy a land.  This is already an odd thing to do, rules-wise, and is tricky when just considering land destruction, but now consider your land is a creature.  What about Dark Banishing?  (Yes, destroy effect)  What about Lightning Bolt? (No, damage is what destroys it, so the game rules are responsible)  What if the land has a regeneration shield on it?  (Um...) What if it's made indestructible in response?  (Uh....) What about spells like Catastrophe that may only sometimes destroy lands on resolution? (Gee, uh....)  Yeah, it sounds fine to say on the printed card "counter a spell that destroys a land" but in practice, it's like trying to predict when Earthquakes and their Aftershocks will stop.  7th edition and Tempest, as it turns out.

VERDICT:  NO.  It's maybe 1%-playable in casual "I hate LD" constructed, and it's still one of my favorite pieces of classic Magic art.  But I think you would have to individually program it's interaction with 27 different kinds of destroy effects as well as several different kinds of "saving" effects to get it right.  Plus, normally people just concede, block you, and tell their clan to block you if you bring even the slightest whiff of LD into the casual room anyway.

 

24.

Imprison

I'm sure that they could program this card.  It's not impossible  But it does like seven different things that all are a little wonky in the rules.  It allows blocked creatures to become unblocked and removes blockers from combat, it stops attacking creatures from being attackers, it counters any activated abilities of the creature but only those with tap symbols in their costs, and all of it is contingent on a mana payment or this cancelling and tapping effect doesn't happen.  Frankly, that sounds like a lot of work for not much result. 

 

Also, the printed card says "destroy enchantment", while the oracle version says "sacrifice Imprison". When they said "discarded from play", that usually meant sacrifice, but I think destroy just means destroy.  Sounds like a Mark Gottlieb thing to me!  UPDATE: Hey, I wrote him about it a few months ago and he updated it.  Nice!  Santa Claus does read my letters!

VERDICT: YES (C, programming).  A small consideration if you need it for limited.  It's entirely useless in constructed because White has infinitely better options, and black has Paralyze, which does 98% of what this does except it makes THEM pay mana instead of you.  But for limited, it's not the worst Black kill spell ever, and pool of not-online black "kill-esque" spells is getting real shallow.  It's kind of like a cheapened Melancholy (the card, not the emotion).  Also, we need to add "I Gimp your creature" to magic lingo.

 

25.

Chaos Lord

 

26.

Chaos Moon

Programming these two cards themselves would be a breeze.  The problem is the same that it is in paper magic - it's actually really, really annoying to continuously count the total number of permanents in play.  Each player wants to do it individually and probably will every round because then they can decide whether to put a token into play, or sacrifice something, etc., in response to the ability on the stack.  In multiplayer it becomes downright nightmarish.  I imagine often 2-3 minutes to resolve this ability on the stack EVERY TURN.  It could be easily solved by having an optional "permanents in play" counter, but it hardly seems worth it for just these two cards.  Heck, they haven't even implemented an optional online "storm" counter that counts the number of spells played each turn, and there's like 30 cards that could use that to save everyone the hassle of scrolling through the chat log and adding everything up.

Ability-wise, Chaos Moon is like a super sucky Gauntlet of Might (hopefully coming eventually!), and Chaos Lord would be semi-awesome except for that anti-fun line about losing haste his first turn.  That means about half the time you just spent seven mana to have Chaos Lord immediately bash you in the face for seven.  For seven power in red, Thunderblust costs two less, DOES have haste, tramples, and comes back from the dead instead of immediately switching sides.

VERDICT: NO.  Unless they want to spend the time to program an optional digital counter to keep track of this for us in a corner of the screen, I definitely don't want to see them around online.  Even then it seems rather pointless, as both are quite bad by today's standards.

 

27.

Vodalian War Machine

I'm not quite sure if this one is difficult to program or not, but keeping track of what things were tapped to pay the costs of some other thing's abilities after that thing has left play seems like something that's never been done before online.  And it seems pretty stupid as well.  The flavor is great and that's where the early cards always had issues - when they'd turn flavorful things into rules-speak.  The merfolk are helping to run the Vodalian War Machine!  Of course they should be sacrificed if it leaves play!  They're being ground up into a fine fishy paste as it collapses all around them!  Yeah, but it just turns out that as Magic rules developed, this sort of thing didn't really work like they wanted it to.

VERDICT: NO.  I have enough nightmares about fish paste.

28.

Piracy

Ah, Piracy.  Probably the most problematic card ever printed in terms of it's actual wording.  Again, it says something super simple.  Just tap other people's lands to pay for your spells.  What could be simpler than that?  How one the most complex and rule-breaking cards ever developed ended up in Portal 2: Electric Bluegaloo I'll never know, but I'm sure the story involves an axe and someone who Mark Gottlieb has buried in the empty field behind Wizards (you know, the old location).  On quiet nights it's said you can hear his ghost whispering "I was only trying to dumb down Drain Poooooooooower."

This card was originally a yes to come online before Mana Burn was eliminated, because it was a great card for multi-player environments.  Like... it was one of the top multiplayer cards ever printed. It still has minor uses in team games and as a bad Mana Short, but in general it went from Hero to Zero and is now about as useful as a left-handed hobo, because people can just tap all their lands in response and then you get nothing.  And they don't get burned.

VERDICT: NO.  No other card, not even Pulse of the Forge, was as devastated by Mana Burn's sudden disappearance as this one.  Which may be for the best, as this card was probably a programming nightmare.  Also a shame that it's snappy name was wasted on something that has nothing to do with actual Piracy.

 

29.

Goblin Artisans

They could probably do this card online, but it's silly "prevent me from being even slightly useful" clause asks something unique in Magic - it wants you to check the Name of the Source of Every Other Single Ability that's currently Targeting Target (Artifact) Spell.  And all that has to happen BEFORE you can even activate this ability.  It definitely would require some programming muscle to get that right.  And it's such a dumb case too.  It's kind of amazing anyone in proto-R&D thought that anyone would want to use multiples of a coinflip card that has a 50% chance of countering your own spells.  But I've heard they were very worried about the degenerate "TurboArtisan" deck back then in the proto-FutureFutureLeague when the "combo" with Ornithopter was discovered, and now we have to live with it.  Forever.

VERDICT: NO.  Probably the worst coin flip card of all time, and considering coin flip cards from the early days, that's really saying something.  This card is also the origin of the "Goblins think they're smart but end up destroying your artifacts instead!" motif that's been going on for like 16 years.  So, uh, thank them for that.  Without them we may not have had Goblin Welder, who instead somehow makes all of your artifacts better while he's destroying them.

 

SUMMARY:

• 13. City in a Bottle NO
• 14. Golgothian Sylex NO
• 15. Apocalypse Chime NO
• 16. Army of Allah NO
• 17. Jihad NO
• 18. Camouflage YES (U, programming).
• 19. Cyclopean Tomb YES (R, programming).
• 20. Drain Power YES (R, programming).
• 21. Word of Command YES (R, programming). 
• 22. Titania's Song NO
• 23. Equinox NO
• 24. Imprison YES (C, programming).
• 25. Chaos Lord NO
• 26. Chaos Moon NO
• 27. Vodalian War Machine NO
• 28. Piracy NO
• 29. Goblin Artisans NO

NEXT WEEK: We get into the ones you're waiting for, the Vintage Restricted cards and the Legacy Banned cards (the good ones, not the short bus ante kids we did last week).