When you sit back and survey the sheer range of interactions they allow for, it’s incredible that the rules of Magic: The Gathering function at all. The streamlined design of modern sets makes it easy to forget how fundamentally complex this game is. While the designers at Wizards have done an admirable job of wrangling everything into a functional shape, some problem cards inevitably wriggle through the nets. One such card is Panglacial Wurm, a Coldsnap classic that introduces a whole host of MTG rules issues.
Thanks to recent discussion on Blogatog, this card is back in the limelight in a big way. For many players, the reasoning behind this card’s problematic nature is unclear. For others, this is a bizarre rules anomaly that Wizards is right to keep confined to the past. Whichever side you’re on, it’s hard to deny that Panglacial Wurm represents a wide vista of design possibilities; unexplored, for better or worse.
The Issues With Panglacial Wurm In MTG
- Mana Value: 5GG
- Type: Creature – Wurm
- Rarity: Rare
- Card Text: Trample.
While you’re searching your library, you may cast this card from your library.- Stats: 9/5
The issues with Panglacial Wurm, while not clear to every MTG player, are myriad. This card does something that no other card, before or since, has done: it interacts with searching your own library. This is a problem because searching is always an action you take in the middle of an effect, not at the end of one. In order to cast Panglacial Wurm, then, you need to break a fundamental principle of how Magic: The Gathering works.
In general, once a card effect in Magic has started resolving, nothing else happens until it’s done. This is why cards like Come Back Wrong can steal opposing Commanders: because your opponent doesn’t have the chance to put their destroyed Commander in the command zone before the card finishes resolving. Every other card in the game is designed around this principle, but Panglacial Wurm deliberately ignores it. In order to cast this while searching your library, you have to interrupt the effect that made you search in the first place.
Because of this, Panglacial Wurm has very poor interactions with specific other cards, such as Millikin. If you want to use Millikin’s colorless mana to pay for Wurm, you need to make sure you keep the rest of your library in order, since it’s suddenly very relevant.
An even worse situation arises with Selvala, Explorer Returned. Not only is library order relevant here, both for Selvala’s reveal and its draw, but the fact that Selvala makes an unknown amount of mana on tap can actually lead to illegal game states. If you try to cast Wurm but then Selvala doesn’t produce the mana you need, you land in a weird dead zone rules-wise.
Good Riddance?
Over the past few days on Blogatog, Mark Rosewater has answered a couple of questions about Panglacial Wurm. In the most recent answer, he outright admits that the card isn’t fully functional within the game’s rules. He also notes that, for that reason, it’s very unlikely Wizards will pursue this kind of design space in the future.
Interestingly, the community discussion around this topic is pretty much aligned with Wizards for once. Most players agree that Panglacial Wurm is more trouble than it’s worth, and the kind of rules nightmare card that shouldn’t exist at all. Izzet-always-r-versus-u, for example, said “The more cards that play in that space, the more likely the points of rules friction are to be encountered in actual games of Magic.”
Many others echoed this point. Flooeyflooey noted that “It’s basically a giant pile of corner cases, which is not the kind of thing Wizards wants to print more of.” A few players were interested in seeing more design in this space, but they were very much in the minority. Others like Jozogozo pushed back, adding, “When it’s only one card, it’s a lot easier to push it off to the side and hope it doesn’t end up getting any tournament play where you have to really figure out how to make it work.”
There’s a lot of merit to these arguments. When faced with the choice between pursuing an unpopular, clunky design and keeping Magic relatively streamlined, there’s not much of a dilemma for Wizards. As unique and interesting as Panglacial Wurm is, we’ll probably never see its like again.
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