The 10 Weirdest Magic Cards from 1994
When we think about Magic: The Gathering booster boxes from the early days of the game, the focus is naturally on their rarity, as part of a limited and dwindling supply of sealed product. But they are also an important time capsule; one which can take MTG players back to a time when Magic was just another game starting out, rather than an institution.
Developers working on sets like Antiquities or The Dark couldn’t draw on years of experience playing Magic, or decades of previous examples to help them design new cards - their ideas were raw, improvisational, and sometimes well-off-the-mark. But since 1994 was Magic’s year of record expansion, rushing to build five new sets on a minimal staff, almost all of them got printed anyway!
At Mythic Markets, we were excited to offer fans a complete collection of sealed 1994 booster boxes to invest in together - and a chance to own a piece of this eccentric cultural history!
Here is a rogue’s gallery of the most confusing and mind-bending cards sealed away within those shrink-wrapped boosters. See if you can work out why these ones haven’t enjoyed the popularity of Giant Growth or Lightning Bolt…
10. Delif’s Cube (Fallen Empires
From its very first set, MTG has been defined by powerful artifacts and the wizards who create them. Stealing a trick from the Dungeons & Dragons playbook, designers would slap ad-libbed names onto these cards to create the sense of a larger fantasy world. It was left to awed players to come up with their own ideas as to the kind of person who would create Barl’s Cage, Jandor’s Saddlebags, or for the especially evil, Nevinyrral’s Disk.
Some of these throwaway characters would later be properly integrated into the Magic canon; others remain apocryphal. 25 years later, all we know of the mage Delif is that they liked shapes - Fallen Empires also features Delif’s Cone - and that they were some sort of pacifist. Though it’s a bit awkward that you can only recharge this magical healing cube by... punching a wizard? At least their heart was in the right place.
9. Glyph of Reincarnation (Legends)
Early MTG was played at a very different pace to today, and generally a much slower one. Creatures and damage dealing effects were usually weaker, there were fewer infinite combos, and Walls were a really big deal. A special type of creature which could only block, creative wizards could summon Walls not only of Stone, but also Swords, Dust, Heat, Bone, Brambles, Living OR Putrid Flesh, and even walls made of abstract concepts like Wonder or Opposition!
This obsession with summoning Walls was another concept inspired by D&D, where mages would also frequently enhance their barriers with Glyph spells, a form of magical booby-trap. The entire Legends set was inspired by a developer’s D&D game, so it made sense to try and add some Glyphs to Magic there. Most seem reasonable - the red Glyph buffs the Wall’s power, the blue one puts creatures in “stasis”, the black destroys them outright, while the white Glyph channels attacks against the wall into healing. Then there’s the green Glyph of Reincarnation, which… destroys attackers en masse, then reanimates any creatures of your choice from their controller’s graveyard as “reincarnations”? It’s a strikingly over-the-top effect, even if there are a few other green cards which do similar things. Why is this your method for deterring intruders, green? Who hurt you?
8. Takklemaggot (Legends)
There are plenty of famous “weird cards” in the deep annals of Magic. One such family of cards are simply designs from the game’s early years, when the fluent rules legalese specific to Magic had not yet been hammered out, and new cards had to try and explain how they worked ad hoc, the way you might try and explain to friends how a favourite song sounds.
Takklemaggot is a legendary example of this genre, and we’ve placed it here to represent its wordy brethren like Animate Dead and Wand of Ith. Like many of these cards, once you read it a few times the effect actually makes a sort of sense for what it represents - you’re literally infesting the enemy army with a parasitic maggot which slowly eats away its hosts one at a time. Once it’s done killing the opponent’s creatures, the evil bug begins munching on their life points! Such a shame they probably already expired from trying to comprehend the rules text.
7. Mind Bomb (The Dark)
This card is just an incredible question mark on the history of MTG. The Dark came out four years before the release of Magic’s first “comedy set”, Unglued, so perhaps we just didn’t have a better place to put this very silly spell idea? Mark Tedin is one of the best-remembered early set artists, with amazingly vivid paintings like Sol Ring and Fireball to his name. This way-too-literal card art is unmistakably his style, with all the fierce color and energy of those other works - it’s just being used to show a giant, perfectly pink brain warhead dropping out of the sky in a barrage of crude copper missiles. It’s like getting Picasso to paint your dishwasher.
Misuse of artistic talent aside, there are still so many questions here. What sort of craft is up there dropping these bombs from above the frame? Where did their creator get such enormous, anatomy-model brains from? What on earth are these supposed to do on impact? Even the card effect will make Magic players squint; blue spells are not meant to recklessly deal direct damage or force discards, especially from their user. And the idea that discarding a card to prevent one damage is a reasonable trade was laughable even by late 1994! The fact that this made it into a rare slot is the real Mind Bomb, if you ask us.
6. Sunglasses of Urza (Revised)
Another day, another deeply weird rare card, which upon closer study and thought only reveals more questions. This time the title is what throws you immediately - “Sunglasses of Urza” just isn’t a fantasy concept! It sounds like this is a joke card from an Un-set, and in fact, the lazy habit of attributing random artifact cards to MTG’s main mage would later be mocked by actual joke cards like Urza’s Contact Lenses, Urza’s Hot Tub and Urza’s Science Fair Project.
Anachronistic name aside, the pointlessly-specific effect of Sunglasses raises some interesting questions about how mana works in the Magic canon. Does looking at some Plains through rose glasses really turn their mana red? Is mana made of light reflecting off your lands? Why can’t these work in reverse, and turn red mana into white? If this solution really does work why doesn’t every mage just have a set of five rotating colored lenses attached next to their eye like a DragonBall scouter? Whatever the answer, my hat is off to the designer of Sunglasses for creating a card that’s as wonderfully strange and pointless as real antiques.
5. Falling Star (Legends)
For a card game which has been in constant evolution for a quarter-century, spitting out tens of thousands of unique cards, it’s really an achievement that only three groups of spells have ended up permanently banned from all Magic competition. One is the small and quaint family of “manual dexterity cards” (we’ll see another group later). The iconic Chaos Orb is its most famous son (another card elevated by a Mark Tedin masterpiece) but that angry lava ball got phased out of the core set so fast it didn’t even show up in 1994’s Revised Edition. So instead, we have the less-impressive Falling Star.
Both of these banned “manual dexterity cards” are unique in asking the player resolving them to take a physical action outside the game - in this case, flipping the card like a coin so that it tumbles semi-randomly onto the field of play. This literal Falling Star would then damage or knock over (tap) any creatures it landed on. In a different world, or just a different tabletop game, this would be a tremendously fun and evocative way to handle this effect. But even in 1994, Magic was largely a serious game of skill and competition, and attempting to regulate tournament rules around flipping cards onto tables would be farcical. The nail in the coffin for Falling Star was accessibility - the procedure required is physically impossible for some Magic players with mobility issues, and sanctioning cards which disadvantage them would be a needlessly hurtful move on Wizards’ part.
4. Floral Spuzzem (Legends)
At this point we can safely acknowledge that Legends is perhaps the weirdest Magic set of all time, having filled roughly half this list by itself. Its designers, Steve Conard and Robin Herbert, were friends of the early Magic designers who picked up the game while it was still in playtesting. They happily admit that they barely understood the rules of Magic when they were coming up with these cards, and that they had no idea their design would eventually be published as Legends!
Floral Spuzzem is a terrific example of this amateur, semi-coherent design sense that runs throughout Legends. The rules language here doesn’t even feel like a real Magic card, insisting that “Floral Spuzzem may choose” whether to destroy an artifact - the only creature card ever to be attributed free will! Then we move onto the question of what kind of creature a “Spuzzem” is even meant to be. The card’s original typeline is quite insistent that Spuzzem is a category of creature to summon, and not a name or title. While Conard and Herbert have attributed most of the heroes and monsters in Legends to their D&D sessions, there is no Spuzzem in that game’s famous Monster Manual.
I sometimes wonder how much was left up to Rob Alexander when it comes to defining the strange beast we see in the artwork; it’s hard to imagine that the acclaimed landscape artist came up with that unsettling form (and… whatever it’s doing to the obelisk there) all by himself.
3. Tempest Efreet (Revised)
In an early, classic example of how game developers rarely decide what final form their projects take, Richard Garfield had never expected Magic players to buy more than a few packs of cards each. Instead, improving one’s deck would require trading spells with other wizards who had the card you liked. And if they weren’t willing to trade it to you - well, you would have to take it by force!
No, Garfield wasn’t advocating for robbery, at least directly. The original rules of Magic included an “ante” - the top card of each player’s deck at the start of the game was set aside, and those cards became the stakes you played for, winner take all. The real twist was a set of “ante cards” which mostly did overpowered things at the cost of raising your stake by a card or two. Tempest Efreet doesn’t even bother with the gambling metaphor - you just put a gun to someone’s head and permanently steal their actual cards right out of their hand if they don’t agree to 10 direct damage!
For a multitude of reasons relating to balance, gambling laws, and general fun, all Ante cards were permanently banned early into Magic’s life. They have not been missed.
2. Divine Intervention (Legends)
Now this looks like a really quality bit of vintage MTG design, not sure why it’s ended up so high on the list here. It’s got a grandiose, evocative spell name and artwork, costs a ton of mana, but you can kind of see where this is going, it’ll be worth it. Wizards prints this kind of card all the time, ones which provide an alternate win condition at a premium price. People just really love to win in unusual ways, and starting from a card like Divine Intervention and working back is a great way to introduce people to focused, deliberate deckbuilding for the first time.
Wait, what’s that? Oh. This… isn’t a win condition. It’s a draw condition. The entire point of Divine Intervention - an eight mana rare enchantment which takes turns of strategizing to come to fruition - is that it draws the game.
Is that worthy of second place on this list, ahead of so many awkward and potentially felonious cards? Absolutely! Stop and think - what reason would anybody ever have to play this in a real match? Consider any other laughably poor card design in the dark corners of Magic history, and you can at least make the argument that somehow, someone might use it to win a game of cards. But not Divine Intervention, not ever. It is the inflatable dartboard of Magic - pointless from the moment of its design, fit only for cautionary tales and trivia questions.
1. Chains of Mephistopheles (Legends)
So, what kind of ghastly, mind-shredding card does it take to top the insultingly-defunct Divine Intervention on this list of weirdness? Only one of the most famously rare, argument-inducing, complicated - and valuable - cards of all time. It’s hard to deny a card which has become one of Magic’s longest-running memes, inspiring countless flowcharts, mnemonics, and instructionals to try and help players wrap their heads around it.
This part isn’t a joke at all; this is just an accurate, concise attempt to describe what Chains does in game.
While absolutely torturous in its wording (oooh, flavor win!) Chains has remained relevant for so long because it is a truly powerful and unique card. Essentially, this two-mana enchantment blocks all additional card draw your opponent might have, and can even be abused by effects which force them to try and draw, which results in them discarding their hand! This effect has been strong enough to dominate multiple formats on Narset, Parter of Veils. And in combination with other mighty black enchantments from back in the day, especially Mana Void and The Abyss, Chains could be used to build a prison deck long before mono red got the tools to do so!
In the end, card scarcity and limited legality means that for most players, Chains of Mephistopheles will remain a boogeyman, “that one black enchantment that messes up your draws somehow”. Heather Hudson’s grotesque, bug-eyed demon seems to taunt you as you struggle to comprehend the reprehensible word salad below. But if we had to choose between the text and the demonic chains for our eternal torment? Just go with the demon.
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