I made it before they rotated out of Standard, so it's finally time for:

The Twenty Worst Legends Of Kamigawa.

I just want to get this out of the way first: I actually enjoyed Kamigawa block. I liked the flavor, I liked splice, I liked the flip cards, and I liked the legends theme. Drafting it wasn't my favorite, but I still like Kamigawa Limited better than Odyssey Limited - let the hate mail commence!

I'm no Kamigawa basher; it brought us some great cards and an interesting (if highly illogical) world. I think it was a good block after the craziness of Mirrodin.

That said, with a whole block jam-packed with legends, some were bound to be bad. And I must say, it even shocked me how many knee-bashingly excruciatingly terrible legends there were. Paring a list of bad Kamigawa Legends down to twelve is like bringing a squirt gun to a forest fire.

(Aside: once again, when I say Legends, I mean Legendary Creatures — but hey, I opened five boxes of Legends back in '95, so I can damn well call them what I want.)

Ineligible cards for this list include Epic Spells and the Champions and Betrayers flip cards, as they are not Legends in the true sense. And while they're all pretty bad except for the rat guys, they're not as offensive as some of these cards anyway.

The Saviors flip cards, though... well, you'll see.

It took nine months of intensive study, playtesting, weighing, arguing, trips to the Bahamas, and watching every casual game on Magic Online. But I am confident that I have finally arrived at the scientifically worst twenty Legends of the block.

If you enjoy this trip through bad card land, please check out my previous five-part series - Bad Legends: The Reckoning.

20. Myojin of Life's Web (Champions)
I originally had more of the Myojin on the list, but only the Green Meanie here really bites the big one in that special way. Plus, Saviors was such a bounty of Swishy Legends Gone Bad™ that some room had to be made.

This card may as well be named “Myojin of Timmy's Wet Dream.” Any time Timmy gets to play big creatures for free, it causes some kind of strange orgiastic delight in his mind.... Except that even the Timmiest of Timmies comes quickly to realize that by the time you make it to nine mana, your hand is pretty much empty of all the six-, seven-, and eight-mana fatties you wanted to roll out there anyway.

And when I say “roll out some fatties,” I mean it in the non-illegal way. And also in the non-“overweight people playing Slip'n'Slide” way. Timmy rolls out the fatties, Spike smokes 'em as fast as possible, and Johnny sits in the corner and watches with glazed eyes and calloused palms, if you know what I mean.

I think I just redefined Magic for all time there.

And Elvish Piper - he may be a non-fatty, (although he has those cute little chubby cheeks in the 8th Edition version) but Timmies everywhere understand that he can let you play out your fatties sooner. This is key, because our friend the Myojin lets you play your fatties later than you normally would. Wow, that's a great design. And it's virtually impossible to cheat the Myojin into play with a counter because of the stupid “comes into play from your hand” clause. (This is always R&D speak for “we totally broke this card in development, so instead we're going to make it totally useless by adding this clause.”)

And if you can't cheat her into play or use her to cheat with other fatties (don't think about that too hard), what good is she? If even Timmy won't touch her... well, that's an unattractive fatty.

19. Kentaro, the Smiling Cat (Betrayers)
I know someone's going to say it, so I'll just head it off at the pass: Yes, some people played him in some decks. At the Pro Tour, even. This is because he's a two-mana 2/1 Legendary Samurai with Bushido, which sort of worked with that Day of Destiny card and the Honor-Worn Shaku. Don't worry; the deck won a negative amount of matches and was heartily laughed at by everyone.

The fact he was in a deck at all has zero to do with his ability, which is truly one of the most useless in modern Magic history. Chimney Imp has a good ability; he just happens to cost five mana. Kentaro costs two mana for better stats, but has one of the stupidest lines of text ever written on a Magic card. I bet the ink is embarrassed to be printed on this card. I was sure embarrassed when I woke up in a ditch wearing cardboard underpants made of this guy.

“You may pay X rather than pay the cost of Samurai spells you play, where X is that spell's converted mana cost.”

If you really want to build a three-color Samurai deck, would you rather, say, run Ravnica duals and Ninth Edition painlands... Or be stuck with this schmuck? His ability is not only one of the narrowest in existence, it was obsolete the moment Ravnica was conceived in Mark Rosewater's churning temporal lobe.

Here's Kentaro's reason for living:

Number of non-White Samurai who cost two or more colored mana in all existence: Five.

• Hand of Cruelty
• Toshiro Umezawa
• Fumiko the Lowblood
• Ronin Cliffrider
• Iizuka the Ruthless

Number that any person has ever actually considered in a dedicated White Samurai deck: Zero.

I rest my case.

18. Kuon, Ogre Ascendant (Saviors)
So apparently, Kuon is not the kind of dude you want to help you fix your car on a deserted road in the middle of the night... Or even at the Midas Muffler shop at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon. He's just one of those guys you meet that's just not happy unless every living thing within sight has been killed, dismembered, burned to ashes, he spits on the ashes, and then stomps on them a bit before feeding them to an ill-tempered fish. One of those, you know... Nihilist death-cultists. Yeah, that's it.

You can go two ways with Kuon. You can either:

a) Have lots of creatures yourself, or

b) Have no creatures except for Kuon.

There are problems with both approaches, not the least of which is that Kuon looks like some kind of blind mole-rat.

If you have lots of creatures, then you should be able to flip Kuon without too much trouble through use of Nantuko Husk and the like. The problem is that all of the creatures you put in the deck then become useless. You almost surely had to wipe your board to get him to flip, and you're going to be losing one a turn from then on out. And mono-black isn't exactly known for its token generation. (Marrow Gnawer can bite me. Er... if he doesn't have rabies or anything — you know, just forget it.)

And if you had five or more creatures out to begin with, why are you putzing around with Kuon and not winning this game instead?

If you have a creatureless deck, well, then you can play with all mass kill you want. Well, mass kill that doesn't kill Kuon, too. By which I mean Hideous Laughter and... Uh, Plague Wind.

You'd think it would be easy to flip him in multiplayer, with things like Innocent Blood and Barter in Blood and Blood de Blood Blood Blood. But it turns out that you have to sac Kuon to those effects before he can flip, so you need other creatures — which, once again, become blank pieces of cardboard when he's all flipped and is doing his death cult rave thing.

So there's just really no possible deck for Kuon. His flip condition rules out both creature-filled and creatureless decks — the cool thing about The Abyss, which he is a blatant B-movie rip-off of, is that you don't have to have any creatures, ever, it just keeps plugging away.

Hey, I just thought of what Kuon's tagline would be if he actually were a B-movie: “When genocide's just not fast enough, you need to call — Kuon!”

(I'd see that film — The Ferrett)

17. Chisei, Heart of Oceans (Betrayers)
So Chisei's a big shapeless pile of flying water that's continually refilling himself from his own dribble... Or something like that, I start to get a migraine every time I stare at this card too hard. It's like looking at the illegal love child of Salvador Dali and Pikachu. Or maybe his buddy, Squirtle the Turtle. No, I don't know crap about Pokemon, why do you ask?

I thought of something cool about him - I bet he can make his shape anything he wants, like some kind of bad Legend Wonder Twin. Form of: Water toboggan! Form of: Ice turkey! Stuff like that. That'd be cool at parties where everyone gets totally smashed.

Speaking of which, I wonder if he can get drunk. And then if you drink him, will you get drunk too? Can he stay drunk for days by refilling himself with his own alcohol-soaked dribble? And what if he vomits? What would that look like?

Despite all these cool party tricks, it still doesn't save him from the dreaded suckmonkey. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the suckmonkey humped the living beejeezus out of old Chisei.

He's a legendary 4/4 flyer for 2UU, maybe +1/+1 ahead of the curve. He's part of a long line of bad 4/4 flyers for this cost with a drawback, none of which ever saw play in any constructed format. And to top it off, he's completely useless in limited. He would have been almost playable in Mirrodin Limited, with every other card giving charge “counter this” or “drek counter” that. But in CBS? He's a fifteenth pick, completely unusable. Unless you want to be losing your Jitte counters to him.

And first person who sends me a cumulative upkeep deck with him gets the royal smackdown. I'm not even going to tell you what that is. Your proctologist will find out, though.

16. Iname, Life Aspect (Champions)
So for six mana in Green, you get a 4/4 Legend with no abilities until she goes to the graveyard. Nothing, nada, zip. Silverback Ape could use her head for monkey luggage and she wouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it. And hey, guess what shocking thing I'm about to reveal? Her ability doesn't quite make up for her stankiness.

If you could, say, return all spirits to play rather than to your hand, that might be okay. That might show up now and then, though even if she had that better ability, and if you Buried Alive for her and two Phantom Nishobas. But wouldn't you rather just, you know, reanimate the Nishoba, rather than reanimating her and then trying to make her throw her vanilla ass in front of a semi or something to maybe get two Nishobae back?

But, no, her ability returns a bunch of uncastable cards to your hand. Oh, I get it, she's very flavorful. She's chock-full of finger-lickin'-KFC flavor goodness. She's like Ultra-Soulshift chick! Part of R&D's continuing ludicrous attempts to take all new mechanics “TO DA EXTREME!!!!!! RAWR!!!!!!”

(See also: Borborygmos the Bloodthirst-iest, Autochthon Wurm the Convoke-iest, and Grozoth the Transmute-iest.)

And isn't it kinda weird that Iname Life Aspect is psychotically suicidal? She wants nothing more in the world than to leap off a tall building as fast as you can arrange it, to prove she's not just two-thirds of a Craw Wurm. It's not like she really returns anything to life, ever, since they go back to your hand. I guess you suddenly remember all these dead spirit guys you totally forgot about or something.

“Whatever happened to Nershintaniamai the Kami of Pork Rinds, anyway? I haven't thought about him in weeks.”

Whereas Iname Death Aspect gets to use her ability the moment she becomes alive, and is happy to stay alive for as long as possible. And since when are black fatties leagues better than Green ones, anyway?

P.S. Iname, Life Aspect can be rearranged to form the phrase “Capitalism Fee.” Also, “Peel Fanaticism.” I thought that was cool.