50 Magic Cards about Everything & Nothing

Our stories are atomized and fragmented, but through shared memories and experiences they become footnotes in a history and icons of a culture.

Mar 11, 2025

This episode is sponsored by Card Kingdom. Go to cardkingdom.com/studies to purchase all your favorite Magic cards of the deep-cut trivia variety. This video showcases 50 such cards – perhaps a few of them will catch your eye and inspire a new deck. Mishra is calling. Thanks Card Kingdom for the support!

I’m a proud member of team BASILISK, an e-sports organization on a mission to inspire scientists through the study and play of difficult games. By cultivating our curiosity in Magic, we learn and grown in our lives. That is the goal of our partnership. Thanks BASILISK for the support!

The Macro in the Micro

UFO 50 is a video game comprised of 50 smaller video games. It released on September 18, 2024, and it’s been on my mind as a paragon of scope. It is ambitious, yet contained, a micro vision of a macro space, like the 1:1200 scale panorama of the city of New York. Every game in the collection, like every building in the model miniature, is independent and individual, yet when assembled together, they become marvelous in their relationship to the whole.

In thinking and writing about Magic for the past 12 years, I’ve come across countless cards that represent full-length research projects all their own. I’ve gathered some of them here. For the moment, they will remain at flyover distance, suggestions of stories, synopses instead of chapters or books. In these trivial facts and anecdotes, we find glimmers of our history and our culture, windows into the game that is a hobby that is a lifestyle, and the elusive lifelong endeavor to know and understand it in its totality. Without further ceremony, here are 50 Magic cards about everything and nothing.

The Tarrasque

The Tarrasque is Magic’s take on the monster of the same name from Dungeons and Dragons, which itself is an homage to The Tarasque of French mythology. In the medieval era, a dragon-like beast was legend to stalk the river Rhône and destroy passing boats near the town of modern-day Tarascon. Over the centuries, the creature became an effigy of processionals and festivals in the town. Filip Burburan’s illustration reminds me of the colors and shapes of the architecture in southern France. Maybe that was intentional.

Aurelia’s Fury

Aurelia’s Fury was selling for $35 around the prerelease of Gatecrash. Within two months, it fell to less than $10 and has never demanded a double-digit price tag since. Aurelia’s Fury is testament to our inability to judge cards in a vacuum, no matter how flashy they may appear, and no matter how smart the writers and speculators and pro players may be who are singing their praises.

Giant Shark

Do you remember that one episode of Walking the Planes where Nate Holt interviewed the guy carrying around a binder full of Giant Sharks?

Do you remember the guy who was sent mystery mail from Troll and Toad containing 950 of the same card?

The anonymous package contained a single message.

Dryad Arbor

When Dryad Arbor was reprinted for the first time in From the Vault: Realms, it was reformatted from the Future Sight frame to the modern, 8th Edition frame. For all intents and purposes, it looked exactly like a basic Forest, especially in the text box, and was often treated as such in tournaments. UX design guides and encourages patterns of behavior, and this one brought out the worst in players looking for soft edges and gray areas to exploit in games. Dryad Arbor has never been reprinted with the giant mana symbol since.

Fblthp, the Lost

Fblthp, the Lost, by definition of his type line, is a homunculus, whose etymology leads to some deeply strange wiki articles.

Like this one on Preformationism.

and this one on Cartesian Theater.

and this one on Skarbnik.

Sometimes looking up Magic cards will leave you lost in some weird places indeed.

Experimental Frenzy

Experimental Frenzy confirmed the existence of coffee on Ravnica. Years later, Allison Lührs canonized the drinking of iced coffee topped with sweet cream on Tarkir. Delicacies always taste better in our imaginations through the wondrous medium of fiction.

Dandân

The original painting of Dandân was stolen from a collector’s parked car in Seattle, Washington on April 19, 2013. Its whereabouts remain unknown, if it still exists at all.

Mishra, Artificer’s Prodigy

Way back when Elder Dragon Highlander was still a nascent sideshow at big tournaments and EDHRec a distant pipe-dream, Mishra, Artificer’s Prodigy was the ultimate anti-commander, a legendary creature whose only ability conflicted with the format’s singleton restriction. To put Mishra in your command zone was a fashion statement, a signal to the other players at the table that you had cracked the impossible code. As a nod to an era before homogenous deckbuilding, I invite anyone to brew a Mishra deck without looking up the combo pieces. It’s a cool challenge.

Oblation

The flavor text of Oblation reads, “A richer people could give more but they could never give as much.” I think this line has usurped Rancor and company as my favorite poetic insight in Magic. I think about it all the time.

Coiling Oracle

The original sketch of Coiling Oracle labeled the creature “Manaconda.” Maybe this was its playtest name, or maybe it was Mark Zug’s own interpretation, but either way – artists tend to leave breadcrumbs of insight into the creative process that is concepting Magic cards. Nowadays, you’ll occasionally find these clues in hyperlinks or in file names on websites.

Mask of Riddles

Mask of Riddles has been printed exactly twice – the first time was in Alara Reborn in 2009, and the second time was in the Obscura Operation precon in 2022. What’s remarkable is both cards feature the same illustration by Matt Cavotta. It depicts an artifact that could’ve been pulled straight from the New Capenna world guide, but was painted 13 years prior to the plane’s conception. Whomever collated cards for this deck had a keen eye for continuity and a deep visual memory.

Stomping Ground

If you’re building Goblin Charbelcher in Legacy, remember to include a single, foil copy of Stomping Ground in Russian to send a message. And that message is: Revised Taiga is $350, more than five times the cost that it used to be for this punchline to resonate.

Monarch Token

“At the beginning your end step, draw a card.” Conspiracy: Take the Crown’s The Monarch token shipped with the tiniest of typos, but one that was magnified and framed as a slipping standard of quality control. In retrospect, this error was a bellwether, a marker of the last time that all of us were reading every line of every card together with scrutiny. It would be four years until we received a second printing of The Monarch that would fix the omitted preposition.

Robot Chicken

At Pro Tour San Diego in February 2010, Wizards of the Coast gifted six, custom-made Magic cards to the writers of Robot Chicken who attended the event. Hugh Sterbakov confirmed the cards’ validity to the public, and in 2021, John Wray, a former show-writer for the TV series of Lilo and Stitch, auctioned a copy to the Misprints and Oddities Facebook group. In an FAQ Google doc, Wray stated that he was friends with some of the Robot Chicken guys himself and occasionally played Magic with them. He also showed off a second copy in his possession, leaving the locations of the remaining three up for question and their owners anonymous.

Dragonlord Silumgar

Every time I see Dragonlord Silumgar, I think of this hilarious back-and-forth between Ondrej Strasky and Shota Yasooka from the semifinals of Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir.

Dega Disciple

You know, before Tarkir, we made our own nicknames for the wedge trios. Most folks stuck to the color acronyms, with UWR and BUG being the most prolific. “Junk” became a derivative of “Jund” to describe decks with white instead of red. The real sickos, however, looked all the way back to Apocalypse for guidance. Dega Disciple is a point of reference for anyone who refused to learn that White-Black-Red was now being shorthanded to “Mardu.”

Chancellor of the Dross

Assuming the four-of limit didn’t exist, a deck with 60 Chancellors of the Dross and nothing else would win every single game before your opponent even took their turn. That is, unless your opponent also had the 60-Chancellor deck, in which case the upkeep triggers would go on the stack and those of the nonactive player would resolve first.

Serra Angel

There is a Spanish version of the Fourth Edition Foreign Black Border Serra Angel with Amy Weber’s illustration of Time Elemental in the blue card frame. It is among the most widespread misprints in Magic history. Some joke that this is the only biblically-accurate depiction of the character.

Hundred-Handed One

Hundred-Handed One provides the perfect measure of whimsy in Magic. The design is based on the Hecatoncheires of Greek Myth, giants with fifty heads and a hundred arms that helped Zeus overthrow the titans. The card takes itself seriously – it’s a clean idea with normal rules text. There’s just something so funny about giving a single creature the ability to block “an additional ninety-nine creatures each combat.” Oh, and it also gains “reach.” I don’t know – this a very subtle humor that I think we’ve lost touch with over the years.

Urza’s Mine

Every time I see an Eighth Edition Urza’s Mine or Tower or Power Plant in white border, I think of the tiny way a single fingernail can crease the edge of a card sleeve for inconspicuous gain, and in effect, what it means to lose everything.

Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar

I speculated that Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar was secretly an anagram and spent two months untangling it into a somewhat incoherent sentence. In April 2023, usersaurus commented on my video with a solve of their own, one that makes much more poetic sense: “A dormant Dracula is Romania’s cicada.”

Snow-Covered Island

This Island from the Coldsnap Theme decks depicts the exact same illustration by Anson Maddocks as this Snow-Covered Island from Ice Age. As far as I know, this is the only case of Magic breaking its rule against reusing the same painting on two, mechanically-unique cards.

Spacegodzilla, Death Corona

Honestly, what are the odds that Spacegodzilla, Death Corona would arrive in conjunction with a global pandemic of partially the same name? Then again, imagine if it was printed three months earlier.

Necropotence

In classic EverQuest, the God of Fear Cazic Thule dropped an item called Amulet of Necropotence which, when clicked, instantly transformed its wielder into a skeleton, a nod to Mark Tedin’s iconic illustration. It’s been cited that many of EQ’s early devs played Magic in the studio and looked to their cards for design inspiration, or in this case, explicit reference.

Wasteland

The same is true for Hidetaka Miyazaki and his teams at FromSoftware. Of all the Magic cards that share DNA with the Souls games, I can’t help but think that Steven Belledin’s Wasteland was a guiding light in building The Lands Between. The cathedral crumbling into the edge of a cliff – the shape of which mimics a king’s crown sinking into the earth – matches Elden Ring’s melancholic atmosphere and central themes. Namely, the slow decay of order into entropy, and the self-destructive nature of hubris.

Stone-Tongue Basilisk

To date, there is exactly one card that has ever been printed in Arabic – Odyssey’s Stone-Tongue Basilisk. I wanted to hear the text read by a native speaker, and a couple of kind folks volunteered to help.

Archaeomancer

Sometimes I wonder how many spells Archaeomancer has recurred in its 12-odd years being a Magic card. I wonder how many times it’s won the game. I wonder how many total instants and sorceries we’ve brought back from the depths collectively as a community. I wonder if someone is casting Archaeomancer right now as I speak, and later as you watch. There will come a time that someone casts the last Archaeomancer ever, and what a thought.

Ashiok, Wicked Manipulator

Ashiok, Wicked Manipulator has too many fuckin’ words on it. I’m not reading all that. I will never read all that.

Séance

On April 9, 2015, reddit user jobs141910 requested that someone drive to Channel Fireball’s two brick-and-mortar stores in Santa Clara, California, buy out all their copies of Séance, and destroy them on camera. Two days later, the same user extended the offer to anyone willing to participate in the effort online. Eight months after that, they put up 90.5 Bitcoin – which is roughly 100,000 US dollars today – to any player willing to pilot a Séance deck at the Pro Tour. Although jobs141910, now nicknamed “Séance Guy,” was active in threads and even took a formal interview with Sam Tang on Kitchen Table Magic in 2017, they have never publicly stated their reasons for conducting this experiment. On January 4, 2023, a mysterious collection of 10,000+ Séances resurfaced for sale on Facebook marketplace in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, reigniting tales of the urban legend once more.

I contacted jobs141910 a while back to no response, but if you are watching, I want to talk to you.

Presence of the Master

“Remember when Magic made you feel like a wizard casting spells?”

“Yeah, I remember casting Albert Einstein.”

Arabian Nights Mountain

Arabian Nights was never meant to have basic lands, and yet, this Mountain exists. From an article titled “Arabian Nightmare” written January 6th, 1994, we learn that Dave Howell, the production manager for Magic at the time, suffered setback after setback while finalizing the card files for the game’s first expansion. This saga lives up to its title – Arabian Nights was an absolute mess of development, and given the glacial communication technologies of the early 90’s, it’s a miracle the set shipped at all. In essence, the mountain slipped past Carta Mundi’s cross-checks in Belgium, landed on plate 1a, the only one that printed properly the first time, and was never removed despite Howell’s request. As an added bonus, the end of this article also details how that scimitar became Magic’s first expansion symbol by virtue of a fax machine that saved the entire operation in the eleventh hour.

Armor of Thorns

For a while, Armor of Thorns from Mirage had an invisible mechanic called “Substance” that effectively did nothing. Mark Gottlieb created Substance in 2005 to clarify the timing of delayed triggers in Magic Online, but it was rendered obsolete five years later with the Magic 2010 rules changes. For the full story, I invite you to watch Melvin’s wonderful video on the subject here.

Chromanticore

Chromanticore fuckin’ rules, man, what an awesome Magic card. Shoutout Jamie Parke for bringing this pile of shit Magic deck to the Pro Tour. You offered a king’s feast to one of my favorite creatures ever made.

Shriekmaw

The illustration on Shriekmaw was originally intended for Aethersnipe. It depicts an “elemental of undoing and forgetting.”

Aethersnipe

The illustration on Aethersnipe was originally intended for Ingot Chewer. It depicts an “elemental of brute force and destructiveness.”

Ingot Chewer

The illustration on Ingot Chewer was originally intended for Shriekmaw. It depicts an “elemental of decomposition and decay.”

Here are the three cards as they are and as they could have been.

Fireball

The Beatdown Box Set printing of Fireball from 2000 is the only Magic card ever printed with “Y” in its casting cost. Its textbox reads like a pop quiz from a middle school algebra class.

Puca’s Mischief

I don’t know exactly what led to PucaTrade’s demise, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss what the service promised. Maybe it was mischief, or maybe it was fate. I remember pretty vividly the night the millionth card was traded, and how we all celebrated the milestone.

Alchor’s Tomb

Peter Adkison, founder of Wizards of the Coast, played a character called Alchor in a D&D campaign that spanned nearly 20 years. As the story goes, WotC co-founder Steve Conard designed a Magic card called Alchor’s Tome as tribute to his friend’s powerful wizard. But a miscommunication error resulted in Alchor’s untimely death, and a Magic card that presented some serious mechanical dissonance.

Spell Crumple

There was a time early on in the format when Spell Crumple was a must-include in any EDH deck running blue mana. I was on a run in Superior, Colorado listening to one of the earliest episodes of The Command Zone podcast when the Tuck rule was banned. I remember feeling like the format had experienced its first real schism, a before and after event.

Szadek, Lord of Secrets

The original oil painting of Szadek, Lord of Secrets is listed as “destroyed” on Donato Giancola’s website. When pressed for further explanation, the painter told Mike Linnemann that he lost track of the image somewhere, that it likely exists beneath another painting, that someone out there has two illustrations in one without their knowing. Rather fitting for the former guild leader of the Dimir.

Wind Drake

If push came to shove and we had to elect a single card to represent Magic: the Gathering, the game and the cultural phenomenon in its totality, I’d vote for Wind Drake. I think Wind Drake is a perfect Magic card – the perfect Magic card. I’d put Wind Drake in a time capsule and send it to space.

Sword of Feast and Famine

“This card only exists as an artist proof, aside from a few escaped copies.”

“This print was originally used as a Grand Prix promo, but some Judge versions of the promo escaped into the wild anyway.”

“Sword of Feast and Famine was intended to be the 2016 GP Promo. Stoneforge Mystic was intended to be the 001/008 2016 Judge promo. [Both] were printed but not distributed.”

Due to these last-second decisions, artist Efrem Palacios still received a batch of artist proofs for his rendition of Sword of Feast and Famine. They have become coveted keepsakes of a mishandling of goods. The full prints with the Magic card back, which I assume were ordered to be destroyed, are now among the game’s rarest collectibles.

Claws of Gix

Claws of Gix famously showcases not a painting but a photograph of a neo-primitive sculpture by H.G. Higginbotham. Prior to 2021, this commission and its companion pieces were somewhat of a rarity, but Wizards has incorporated more and more mixed-media pieces into the game as of late. Laura Plansker’s photo illustrations are particularly charming, and I hope she continues to see more work for Magic. It’s long overdue we open the doors to those who paint without brushes.

Griselbrand

Following complaints about the printing of Griselbrand in Avacyn Restored, R&D has made concerted efforts to draw symmetry between stats, abilities, and mana cost. The real irony of Griselbrand is not that it is a 7/7 that lets you pay 7 to draw 7 for eight mana – it’s that Griselbrand has never, in practice, cost more than 2.

Cartographer

It is impossible to fully prove, and endlessly fun to argue – “what is Magic’s greatest painting?” – but Cartographer from Odyssey in 2001 tends to remain the point of comparison for every potential candidate.

Foil

In an era defined by Search Engine Optimization and online shopping, it is remarkably difficult to find articles or posts discussing the card Foil. The same is true for purchasing the card Foil in foil. I anticipate the eventual Un-set printing of Non-foil, an anti-counterspell of sorts; my ribs ache from all the preemptive jabs.

Triumph of Ferocity

Cary Thomas’ zine “Players Just Like You” explores the highlights and low points of Gatherer throughout the years of its tenure on the Mothership. Reading through Triumph of Ferocity’s comments is a sobering reminder of how weird certain subsets of Magic players can be, a group afflicted by some perverse Peter Pan complex where you never outgrow the perspective of the average suburban fifteen-year-old boy; losers, in other words.

Prophet of Kruphix

Prophet of Kruphix really is the type of Magic card that says, “I don’t give a shit about the other players in this Commander pod.”

Rakdos’s Return

How do you end a jagged story told in mosaic fragments? The same way we live our stories – through incongruent cards shuffled into decks and drawn one at a time. You end the story with an exclamation point off the top of the library.

“Rakdos’s return!”

Foil Armor

I’m thrilled to work with a new sponsor this year in Foil Armor by Integra Products, the safest and most effective way to flatten your curled cards. If you watched my video on the history of foils, you’ll know that holographic trading cards warp due to differences in humidity between where they were manufactured and where they are now. These two-way humidity control packs fix that – they’ve been specifically engineered to reset convex and concave cards. The Breena I cured in my previous video is still flat as a pancake, so I repeated the process on this heavily-curved Prismatic Piper in my binder. After just a couple days in an airtight jar, this card returned to playable form like magic.

Do your collection a favor – go to flattenmycards.com and purchase some 8-gram Foil Armor packs for individual use and some bigger, 33-gram packs for long-term storage. Use code “STUDIES” at checkout for 15% off. Thanks Foil Armor for the support!

Sources

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/5ays62/what_is_the_most_obscure_useless_magic_trivia/ - Obscure Magic Trivia (Reddit 2016)

https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-general/322931-card-art-mismatches-that-were-not-print-mistakes - Magic Art Mismatches

https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_card_art_descriptions/Lorwyn_and_Shadowmoor - Art Descriptions for Lorwyn and Shadowmoor

https://www.coolstuffinc.com/a/mikelinnemann-050714-bad-art-beats - Bad Art Beats - Mike Linnemann (May 2014)

https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/173640974413/where-is-substance-on-the-storm-scale - Substance Storm Scale

https://scryfall.com/search?q=art%3Aphotograph-medium&unique=art - Magic Cards that are Photographs - Scryfall

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/4c96au/if_mtgs_rules_allowed_for_60_of_any_card_to_be_in/ - No 60 card limit

https://web.archive.org/web/20150709222033/http://howell.seattle.wa.us/games/MtG/ArabianNightmare.html - Arabian Nightmare - Dave Howell (1994)

https://www.magiclibrarities.net/798-rarities-special-guest-gift-cards-english-cards-index.html - Robot Chicken cards

https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_illustrators - List of Magic illustrators Wiki

https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_real-world_people_depicted_on_Magic_cards - List of Real World People on Magic Cards Wiki