Overpowered Boros Saga Boasts Incredibly High Win Rate

Last updated on June 30, 2026

The Super Hero Civil War | Illustration by Serena Malyon

We’ve seen a lot of powerful cards get printed recently. Cards have warped formats like Commander, Legacy, Standard, Modern, even Pauper. But there’s a card that’s so good it just might be singlehandedly ruining one of magic’s quintessential formats.

The Super Hero Civil War

The Super Hero Civil War is not merely a good card. It’s perhaps one of the best cards in a format we’ve ever seen. Currently on 17lands, a website that compiles data on limited, it’s sitting at a 75.7% game in hand win rate. That means that across all games played with this card, when it’s drawn, three out of four times you’re winning that game. That is absurd. For context, currently the next best card in the format is Leader, Super-Genius at 72.6% game in hand win rate, 3% lower, and it’s still a massive bomb. Going back to the previous format of Secrets of Strixhaven, not a single card had a game in hand win rate above 69.5%. Make no mistakes, The Super Hero Civil War is much more than just a bomb, it’s a format warping mistake as evidenced by this insane win rate.

But what makes it so good? When this saga enters, its first chapter ability lets you gain control of up to two target creatures with total mana value six or less. In practice, this restriction of total mana value six or less does not feel like much of a restriction at all, as there will almost always be a way to take two of your opponents creatures, and there aren’t many individual creatures in the format with mana value of seven or greater. When you do this, you’re not only subtracting from your opponent’s board, but also adding to your own. This may seem obvious, but it means that you can go from being behind or on parity with your opponent to suddenly being in a winning position.

Its second chapter only adds to this, as it gives all of your creatures +1/+1 and vigilance, allowing you to attack with very little risk as you’ll still be able to block. If your opponent isn’t dead yet, you then get the final ability, which lets you have a creature you control fight another target creature. Usually you will want to do this on one of the creatures that you stole, and hopefully in the fighting it will die as the creature it fights. Alternatively, if your opponent doesn’t have any creatures, you can make the two creatures you stole from them fight each other, which will often kill them both. In any case, you’re never coming out behind when playing this card, and for five mana at rare, it’s pretty absurd that this card ever got printed in the first place.

Limited Balance

Elspeth, Storm Slayer | Illustration by Ekaterina Burmak

This is not the first card of this caliber we’ve seen recently. If you played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I’m sure that you’ll remember Sally Pride, Lioness Leader, which was an incredibly busted rare that warped the entire format. If you go back even further to Tarkir: Dragonstorm, there were a myriad of similarly powerful rares that stood far above what expect from a typical limited bomb: Elspeth, Storm Slayer, Jeskai Revelation, Ugin, Eye of the Storms, Ureni, the Song Unending. All of these cards had win rates above 70%. At least in the case of Tarkir: Dragonstorm these cards were mostly relegated to being mythic rares, meaning they appear less often in limited, but when they did appear, they had the potential to completely invalidate the rest of the game up until that point. The Super Hero Civil War feels no different, and that’s not good for limited. It’s one thing to have good cards, great cards even. It’s another thing to have a card so good that it makes the rest of the game feel inconsequential. That’s not a recipe for fun. And it’s not like they couldn’t have seen this coming. Most players clocked this card going into the set as the biggest potential bomb, and it turns out it was. 

Going Forward

Captain America, Super-Soldier | Illustration by Anna Podedworna

Generally, design and balance for limited sets released in the past few years has been good, but there has also been a steady increase in the power level of cards, with individual cards doing more and more things to stay competitive, you end up with cards that are completely absurd in an otherwise lower power level environment like draft or sealed. Hopefully they learn from their mistakes and do their best to reduce the number of outlier bombs we see in sets going forward.