Are Underplayed MTG Cards Bad or Misunderstood?

More than any other format, Commander challenges the deck-building skill and creativity of Magic players. With one hundred choices, what makes a card right for a deck? Furthermore, there are now more resources than ever to see how others have built a deck. If a sizable portion of players seem to agree that a card is good, or bad, playable or unplayable, that must mean it’s true, right? Not exactly. First, let’s dive into one specific example of an underplayed budget card that is a microcosm for a very large and common Commander topic. Then we’ll talk about the consequences of considering cards unplayable even when they are perfectly fine or even good in some cases.

Is This What an Unplayable Card Looks Like?

According to EDREC, this card is in only 1257 decks of the over one million registered on the site. That means it’s in less than one percent of decks and thus rates as a zero percent card. However, it’s a leap to consider a modest card as unplayable when there are more than enough example of cards that are purely terrible no matter how you use them. Consider one example:

The Worst of the Worst

This is Wood Elemental Wood Elemental As this creature enters, sacrifice any number of untapped Forests.
Wood Elemental's power and toughness are each equal to the number of Forests sacrificed as it entered. , one of the perennial favorites for worst Magic card ever printed. This card is bad on absolutely every level. It costs a ton of mana, in more ways than one, because you have to sacrifice Forest Forest ({T}: Add {G}.) for each power/toughness you want this to have. Oh, and those Forests must be untapped. So for a whopping four mana and sacrificing one Forest, you have a 1/1. Four mana and losing a land for a 1/1 with no abilities is really about the worst rate ever. But even if you wanted a 6/6, you would still have to pay four mana and have six untapped Forests to sacrifice. That’s effectively ten mana for a 6/6 with no abilities that kills your Forests.

On another note, Wood Elemental is a rare from the Legends set, so it’s also an expensive card considering just how terrible it is. This is literally pay to lose, and budget is always a consideration for multiple reasons.

There is an old creature from Magic’s history called Craw Wurm Craw Wurm that is a 6/4 with no abilities for six mana. Wood Elemental makes Craw Wurn look good. But, does that make Craw Wurm good merely by comparison? This is an important note when we talk about cards in the opposite direction. Just because other, generally better, cards exist does not mean a card does not have a purpose. This goes double for the Commander format, where having redundancy is important for consistency; you cannot count on always drawing any specific card.

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Bigger and Better…and More Expensive

Kodama’s Reach Kodama’s Reach Search your library for up to two basic land cards, reveal those cards, put one onto the battlefield tapped and the other into your hand, then shuffle. is a good example of a card that is significantly better than Gaea’s Bounty Gaea’s Bounty Search your library for up to two Forest cards, reveal those cards, put them into your hand, then shuffle. in a majority of situations. Well, K-reach is two dollars, and Bounty is at a market price of $0.17. I don’t think two dollars is going to make or break anyone’s budget, but what if you have ten decks? Twenty dollars versus two dollars starts to add up. Cultivate Cultivate Search your library for up to two basic land cards, reveal those cards, put one onto the battlefield tapped and the other into your hand, then shuffle. , which is a budget copy of K-reach, is three times as expensive as Bounty. Is the card three times as good? If you’re building multiple decks, will the amount of additional power of these cards win you enough games to make the “dollars per win” metric make sense?

The EDREC top 100 has several land ramp cards. However, having multiple Three Visits Three Visits Search your library for a Forest card, put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle. can get pretty expensive. So on a budget level, there are plenty of great reasons to consider other cards that might be fractionally less powerful but are definitely a lot less expensive.

Welcome to Highlander

This is Shadowborn Apostle Shadowborn Apostle A deck can have any number of cards named Shadowborn Apostle.
{B}, Sacrifice six creatures named Shadowborn Apostle: Search your library for a Demon creature card, put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle. , one of the few cards that explicitly gets around the singleton, one of each card limit of Commander. A much more common way to effectively get around that limit is to play many cards with roughly the same effect. Redundancy leads to consistency. Suppose we play the top ramp cards that’s seven cards currently. For a deck that really wants to hit land drops for effects like Landfall, as just one example, seven spells are not going to do.

Imperial Seal Imperial Seal Search your library for a card, then shuffle and put that card on top. You lose 2 life. is not the best tutor card. However, it appears often as a fifth or sixth in some deck lists. It essentially does the same thing as the other, better, tutors but is just a little bit weaker. Sure, putting two Forests to hand is not commonly a game ending effect but for the right deck it is exactly what the deck seeks to do.

The Myth of Strictly Better

The idea of “strictly better” has been around Magic for a very long time. Lightning Bolt Lightning Bolt Lightning Bolt deals 3 damage to any target. is strictly better than Shock Shock Shock deals 2 damage to any target. . That’s one concrete example, but most card comparisons are not that simple and direct. It’s folly to only consider a card in a vacuum. It makes far greater sense in Commander to consider a card as part of the entirety of the deck. If you don’t have enough ways to search up Lands in this current deck, you need to add another card that does it. Gaea’s Bounty could be that card even if other, better, cards are ahead of it.

Also, take Borborygmos Enraged Borborygmos Enraged Trample
Whenever Borborygmos Enraged deals combat damage to a player, reveal the top three cards of your library. Put all land cards revealed this way into your hand and the rest into your graveyard.
Discard a land card: Borborygmos Enraged deals 3 damage to any target. with the aforementioned Gaea’s Bounty Gaea’s Bounty Search your library for up to two Forest cards, reveal those cards, put them into your hand, then shuffle. . Now your spell tutors up two Lightning Bolts whereas Cultivate and Kodama’s Reach only get you one. There are more than a few other cards like Borborygmos or Land’s Edge Land’s Edge Discard a card: If the discarded card was a land card, this enchantment deals 2 damage to target player or planeswalker. Any player may activate this ability. that care about getting Lands directly into your hand. Any number of other cards, in red particularly, that want you to discard to draw have a greater synergy with Bounty than other close cards.

The Meta and the Future

Magic is a dynamic game. Nothing is more dynamic than a local metagame. What if your local meta features mass land destruction or repeated discard effects? A case can be made in these situations that a card like Gaea’s Bounty has a special purpose that can be considerably better within this meta than the other cards that work better in other metas. The important part here is that you, the player, are not making this true. It’s the entire game environment and the other players that make this true. So to ever consider a card truly unplayable, or bad, it has to be so limited that the potential upsides never exists… in your meta.

Outside of a particular meta, there is the future. Snag Snag You may discard a Forest card rather than pay this spell's mana cost.
Prevent all combat damage that would be dealt by unblocked creatures this turn. is the only card in Magic that says “discard a forest,” and then the spell is free. However, does that mean that will be the only card to ever say that? Nope, no chance. Eventually, they will print more free spells with this type of interaction. When that happens, players that are more open to the possible potential of particular picks will innovate.

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Follow the Pack or Lead

Not everyone playing Magic today was playing when Alliances released in 1996. The stratospheric rise of Nature’s Chosen Nature’s Chosen Enchant creature you control
{0}: Untap enchanted creature. Activate only during your turn and only once each turn.
Tap enchanted creature: Untap target artifact, creature, or land. Activate only if enchanted creature is white and untapped and only once each turn. might seem like it came out of nowhere, but this card has been completely playable that entire time. Anyone can see that a card like Instill Energy Instill Energy Enchant creature
Enchanted creature can attack as though it had haste.
{0}: Untap enchanted creature. Activate only during your turn and only once each turn. is better a lot of the time, but if you’re running white with your green, sometimes Nature’s Chosen is incredibly powerful. So powerful that it has cEDH credibility.

Does Gaea’s Bounty Gaea’s Bounty Search your library for up to two Forest cards, reveal those cards, put them into your hand, then shuffle. have cEDH credibility? No. But does the card have a use, is it worth running? Yes, it’s a perfectly functional card, a good budget option and even performs very well in specific decks. Outside of that, it will function only slightly worse than some of the more commonly played cards. But even then it has potential advantages against certain strategies that you cannot be aware of until you’re in a game.

The fact of the matter is that there are a lot more cards like Nature’s Chosen and Gaea’s Bounty out there waiting to be utilized in the right deck, in the right meta, and at the right time. Sure, on the surface, it seems like many cards are not very good. Don’t only listen to the crowd, make your own judgement and playtest, playtest, playtest!

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