Welcome back to “The most fun you can legally have with Kamigawa block.” Our contestants today come from a huge variety of colors and expansions... Well, okay, three colors and two expansions. They all have one thing in common though: an intense dedication to the skillful art of suckitude.
Do you agree with their ranking? Do you think others are more deserving of their honor? Well, you as the viewer get to write in to the boards and express your opinions, which will promptly be ignored (if not ridiculed) and passed on in other people's sig files for generations to come.
10. Yomiji, Who Bars the Way (Betrayers)
So he's kind of like a big antlered St. Peter, guarding the way into the afterlife.... Except he couldn't care less whether you've been good and saved several species from extinction, or bad and dined on Komodo Dragon twice a week. Yomiji only lets the unfamous people through, and sends everyone else back.
That's exactly what he does. He rewards obscurity. So once you get to heaven, you don't get to converse with Albert Einstein or Machiavelli — it's you and 30,000 Nascar fans and a cooler filled with Gatorade for all eternity. That just blows.
(Digression: Okay, I can't take it anymore. What is with all the frickin' antlers on every frickin' legend from this block? Do they even have frickin' deer in Japan?!?! I count twenty-three — Yomiji, Adamaro, ZoZu, Jaraku the Interloper, Shimatsu, all five Kirin, Horobi, Yukora, Kagemaro, Seizan, Fonzie, Ayumi, Keiga, Kyoki, Sormaro, Jugan, Nookie-Nookie, Oyobi, Sekki, Kuro, even frickin' Kiki-Jiki has these little flaming antlers.
(Kamigawa's new tagline — “Bambi's mom went to a frat party. Now it's a thousand years later.”)
Back to his ability. Hollywood could really use a guy like this to make sure Harrison Ford is still making action movies well into his second millennium. Magic, however, can really not use a guy like this. His ability = free raise dead for Legendary stuff. Let me hear a: woot. Adun Oakenshield is a terrible card, but even he doesn't cost seven and can get any creature back. That part is very important. I posit the following mathematical theorem:
Paying one for Raise Dead to get any creature back, one time
>>>>>>> (is much, much, much better than)
Paying seven for Yomiji to get a legendary creature back for you and your opponent, as many times as they die
Perhaps centuries from now, a card will be printed that invalidates this theorem, and future Magic scholars will look upon “The Yomiji Principle” as a quaint but disproven relic of early Magic theory suggested by a lunatic hobo. Somehow, though, I doubt it.
Well, except for the lunatic hobo part. That's... probably accurate.
9. Mannichi, the Fevered Dream (Betrayers)
I love this picture. I couldn't tell you what it is if you put a gun to my head, or a blowtorch to my Moxen, but I love it. It seems to be some kind of naked chick climbing out of a big tendony piece of liver, but that's as far as I can get.
Spirits can be wacky things, I understand. I wouldn't take Kami of the Painted Road to the prom or anything. I wouldn't take Kami of Twisted Reflection to a $10-an-hour motel. But at least they're supposed to be ... something.
Mannichi here, I'm fairly certain, does not actually appear anywhere on his card. I'm not sure if he's really a Legendary Infection or a Legendary Dream or what, but the flavor text seems to imply he isn't, whatever the hell that thing is. I've had some legendary dreams, let me tell you, but none of them involved liver. And although I can't share any details in public places, let me say that for those dreams, “switching my power and toughness” is not an altogether inaccurate description.
Now, it's a bad card that no one ever used, like pretty much all the others on this list. However, I question its fundamental existence. There are eight cards that switch Power/Toughness in all of Magic. A whopping eight. Yet they have their own special subset of the continuous effects just for these eight cards.
As a judge, I'm sort of glad they do these days, as trying to figure out a Phantasmal Fiend's P/T after it's been pumped four times and switched twice between was ultra-nightmarish. And now? It's slightly less so. But still, more than half of these effects are red, which sort of fits red's chaos theme. The real problem is that red already has more 6/1 and 5/2 creatures than it can choke a donkey with. When they redid the color pie, they once and for all took this mechanic and gave it to the color where no one would ever play it.
Who would love Mannichi and his ilk? White, that's who. Daru Spiritualist would write Mannichi endless love notes with big hearts dotting the “I”s. But this mechanic, which was rarely useful at best, is now firmly stuck in the color where people care the least.
P.S. for the Betrayers Design team: Out of the panoply of Magic cards you could have chosen to reprint with a twist, you choose.... Dwarven Thaumaturgist?!?!?! What? Same cost, same stats, 90% same ability. And then you make the card legendary.
Seriously. You were that hard up for ideas? Champions already had one really crappy switching effect in Strange Inversion, but you decided to waste a rare slot on this anyway? Once per block wasn't enough for you? What about Ball Lightning? We haven't had a tweaked version of him in a couple of blocks. And people actually liked him. Anything, anything at all, but more Dwarven Thaumaturgist. I had enough trouble getting him to leave me alone the first time.
8. Sakiko, Mother of Summer (Betrayers)
Along with her marginally-better partner in crime, Shizuko, Caller of Autumn, this lady finally proved something definitively: Green Creature Mana can be really, really bad. He's not just unplayable in Constructed, a la Quirion Explorer or Nantuko Elder, but he's completely unplayable in Limited too.
I would never play a six-mana 3/3 with a useless ability. The fact that she's a legend is basically irrelevant because no one in any format uses her anyway. If you interviewed every single Magic player, I would bet $50 the sentence “Yeah, there was that time I had Sakiko out, and he had one too, and they both died!” has never been uttered in the history of the human race.
Unless Sakiko is a pair of psychic yet fragile Japanese twins. Who possibly live in some kind of clam shell and summon Mothra. That's actually a far more plausible scenario.
She is, without argument, the worst Green creature that has anything to do with mana ever made. I checked. Nomadic Elf's ability is terrible too, but he's a Grizzly Bear. Jungle Patrol burns 0/1 Plant Walls he has to make himself, but he's a 3/2 for four.
The fact that you have to deal combat damage to a player for her to not be the worst creature ever made is just insane. In the same set, Umezawa's Jitte gets to trigger off any combat damage — but this crapmeister? Not so much. Exactly how many twelve-mana cards have you got stuffed in your deck that you need her to accelerate you to, anyway? Green is famous for having the worst X spells of all the colors, so I doubt it's that.
Plus, if you're hitting your opponent with four-plus damage a turn on your turn 7, why isn't this game over three turns ago, and what thing are you possibly expecting to cast with all that mana that will make a difference in whether you win or lose at this point? They still refuse to print that “9GGG — Target player wins the next game” spell I've always been bugging them about.
Frankly, I think the whole set of “this special new fruity mana doesn't cause mana burn because its nice mana, and you can even take it with you, it's travel-sized, too!” cards were not at all worth the bother of making people in Magic Online program them. It had to have cost them at least a day or two, and for all the use this mechanic got, I would rather they had programmed some winter clothes for my avatar or something. Maybe some earrings for Phage, or some cool sunglasses for Platinum Angel. That would've been way better.
7. Ben-Ben, Akki Hermit (Champions)
Ben-Ben is a truly Godawful card with a truly Godawful ability that clearly belongs in White (if not the dumpster) — but his real reason for being on this list? It's all about the art, baby.
Okay, it's kind of hard not to notice right off the bat that he's got a starfish on top of his head. A starfish with one little cyclopean googly eye. Everyone else who thought “Starro the Conqueror” the moment you saw this card, raise your hand. I can't be the only one. For the rest of you, go get a liberal arts education or something.
Ben-Ben also hopes you noticed the collection of novelty oversized Pez Dispensers he keeps in little niches in his cave. He and his starfish fancy themselves quite the interior decorators.
I suddenly have a vision of an anime cartoon with “Ben-Ben and his super-lucky-decorative starfish Max-Max,” where they swoop in to fix terrible hors d'oeuvre displays and replace regular wooden serving spoons with Cherrywood ones right before the big dinner party.
Anyway...
Do I even need to point out that starfish aren't exactly native mountain dwellers? Did he have this thing imported so it could live on his head? Do they not understand the concept of “hats” in Kamigawa? And his name, Ben-Ben makes me think of the pet names people in prison give each other. Frankly, if my name were Ben-Ben, I'd be a hermit too. At least that part of his lifestyle I can understand.
I think more than any card ever printed in Magic, I'd love to see the art description for this one. “Show an Akki Goblin with some kind of seafood on his head and some giant candy dispensers in the background in some mountain cave. Please make certain we can clearly see his butt-crack.”
Yes, I spend my days looking for butt-cracks on fictional characters. Me, and the nation of Japan.
6. Shisato, Whispering Hunter (Champions)
“Aieeeee! Mommy, don't eat me, Mommy! I'll do better next time. No, leave my legs alone, no!!!!!! Ahhhhh!!!!”
*slurp*
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