The 28 Best Johnny Cards in Magic Ranked

Johnny, Combo Player | Illustration by Kensuke Okabayashi

Mark Rosewater, MTG’s lead designer, often refers to players as Spike, Johnny, or Timmy. He says: “Johnny sees Magic as a way of expressing their identity through various means”. Johnny likes to win, but while doing their own unconventional stuff, like moving counters and tokens around or creating engines out of different cards.

MTG frequently designs open-ended cards that the Johnnys/Jennys of this world appreciate, and they try to build around them even if it doesn’t work. Johnny likes the challenge of exploring the unconventional.

Here are my picks for some of the best Johnny cards in Magic.

What Are Johnny Cards in MTG?

Battle of Wits | Illustration by Jason Chan

Johnny cards (or Jenny cards) appeal to the Johnny psychographics. In MTG, Johnny wants to accomplish something. They want to win, of course, but not in an easy way (typical and well-established strategies like attacking with big creatures, burn, or even control). These players tend to like weird win conditions, especially those that have many moving parts, or combos that take some weird cards and combine them in a novel way. Johnny likes to move counters around, to take long turns doing a lot of stuff… you get the idea.

If you read a card that basically says, “difficult, strange set-up, but you’ll win the game if you do,” it’s probably a Johnny card. Not every combo card is a Johnny card. Johnny wants difficult, out-of-the-box thinking and unconventional stuff. A card like Approach of the Second Sun just needs to be cast twice, so it’s not that much of a Johnny card.

Some cards appeal to Johnny and Spike, like Birthing Pod. Birthing Pod is essentially a Johnny card, but Spike likes to win, so if a Birthing Pod deck is competitive, they’ll play that as well. Laboratory Maniac was probably designed as a Johnny card, but these days, it’s fairly easy to get rid of your library, so Spike players play it a lot more.

Honorable Mention: Johnny, Combo Player

Johnny, Combo Player is a card that embodies the tutor aspect and combos that a Johnny player wants to run. If you read the card's flavor text, you'll understand which weird combo Johnny is trying to assemble. It's a silver-bordered Un-set card, but that doesn't stop savvy Johnny players from playing it or trying to convince their playgroups to let them play and do their crazy stuff.

#28. Gilder Bairn

Gilder Bairn is the engine card Johnny likes to make stuff work. There are many questions here, like what am I doubling, how do I tap Gilder Bairn, or where do I get 3 mana to untap it? Sometimes you’ll double the number of counters on a card like Everflowing Chalice to have more mana, or double the counters on planeswalkers so that they can ultimate.

#27. Barren Glory

To win with Barren Glory, you’ll probably need to exile it with something like an Oblivion Ring and then cast a mass destruction card like Apocalypse. Decree of Annihilation also works, while you have Barren Glory as your only enchantment and no cards in hand. It’s doable, but hard nevertheless.

#26. Near-Death Experience

To win with Near-Death Experience, you need to have exactly 1 life. Not only is it risky, especially against red/black, but you have to develop a life-spending engine. Bond of Agony or Necropotence can get you there.

#25. Hedron Alignment

Probably one of the harder alternate win conditions in MTG, Hedron Alignment needs you to have one of these in four different zones: hand, battlefield, graveyard, and exile. Intuition is a key card that helps set up the combo, as you’ll have one copy in your hand and two in your graveyard, then you can exile one of them by whatever means (delve). Then just cast the remaining one and tutor for the other.

#24. Biovisionary

To win with Biovisionary, you need to have four cards with its name in play. That means copies, Clones, or whatever you need. But it’s also hard and challenging. It doesn’t help that the card is a bad 2/3 vanilla creature. You can try Progenitor Mimic or Rite of Replication, or a commander that makes copies like Esix, Fractal Bloom.

#23. Holistic Wisdom

Holistic Wisdom is kind of a Tortured Existence that works with all kinds of permanents, but one that you can’t loop because you won’t discard the card but exile it instead. Still, some cards can be played from exile or need to be exiled, so this card has a place in the combo realm as well.

#22. Cloudstone Curio

Cloudstone Curio’s main role is to bounce stuff around so that you can get more enter triggers. With creatures like Dockside Extortionist, you’ll get more mana each time you do that. A creature enters, you bounce Dockside, cast it again, the other creature bounces, and so on, and you can win with Impact Tremors, for example. It works with lands and enchantments, too. This card has so many cool combos and interactions that Johnny always finds new applications for it.

#21. Phage the Untouchable

Phage the Untouchable is a complicated win condition. You don’t want to spend 8 mana to cast it, but at the same time, you can’t cheat it into play. Commander aggravates things, seeing as you can't cast it from the command zone without losing. Johnny likes the extra hoops it needs to jump through just to have its commander on the battlefield. You can also try to make an opponent reanimate it so that they lose.

#20. Sundial of the Infinite

Sundial of the Infinite is mainly used to avoid detrimental triggers you don’t want to resolve. It’s one of the main ways to avoid losing the game with Phage, the Untouchable, and it has a lot of cool applications to build around it. You don’t lose the game with Final Fortune, you don’t sacrifice your decayed tokens, your unearth creatures stay in play instead of being exiled, and so on.

#19. Burning Wish

With a card like Burning Wish or others from the Wish cycle, your win conditions don’t even need to be in your deck. Your wincon becomes impervious to cards like Necromentia, and you avoid the problem of drawing your win condition ahead of time. Of course, Johnny likes toolboxes, so it’s an interesting addition to their arsenal.

#18. Lithoform Engine

Lithoform Engine is a typical open-ended card that can copy a bunch of different effects, or you can make little untap engines around it. Sometimes you build an EDH deck around your commander’s powerful activated ability, or maybe you have cascade synergies. Copying random triggers can be part of your combo too, or you can even artifact tutors to search up your Lithoform Engine.

#17. Tortured Existence

Tortured Existence allows you to mess with your graveyard, looping creatures from your hand to your graveyard and back. This enchantment triggers madness and sets up dredge, and there are many combos you can enable like using Spore Frog to avoid damage or cards like Golgari Brownscale to gain life. Looping Grave Scrabblers also gives you interesting results.

#16. Necrotic Ooze

Decks built around Necrotic Ooze try to assemble a combo with cards in their graveyard with activated abilities for Necrotic Ooze to copy. Mill or discard an Asmodeus the Archfiend, and 3 mana gets you seven cards. A card like Pili-Pala can make you untap, while Palladium Myr is the payoff for tapping and generating mana. There are many lines Johnny likes to explore when this card is involved, which creates satisfactory gameplay.

#15. Pyromancer Ascension

For a long time, Modern Storm decks were powered by Pyromancer Ascension. By casting multiple copies of the same card, you turn on this card’s second ability. After that, copying each instant and sorcery you cast for free is a winning effect. Johnny likes to turn cards on and copy spells, so the effects may vary.

#14. Second Sunrise

Second Sunrise’s main use is to combo with recursion loops. You’ll sacrifice a bunch of permanents for a given benefit, then you’ll cast this card to recover all the fodder you’ve just sacrificed to repeat it again. It’s banned in Modern, but not every Spike has the skill to put up good results with this card.

#13. Gifts Ungiven

Although Gifts Ungiven is usually applied with the Unburial Rites combo to guarantee that you reanimate a powerful creature, just thinking about many different Gifts Ungiven piles makes Johhny’s senses tingle. You can build a deck in a toolbox form and fetch whatever is needed. Commander also allows you to cast this card and ask your “allies” which cards you should keep.

#12. Enigmatic Incarnation

Also considered a Birthing Pod for enchantments, Enigmatic Incarnation allows you to go through your deck, play powerful enchantments with good enter abilities, and sacrifice them to tutor for something more relevant. It’s also a good combo with an early Leyline Binding, so you can fetch a 7 mana value creature.

#11. Hive Mind

Hive Mind was designed as a very open-ended card to let players figure out what to do with it. In formats like Modern, the most used way is to cast cards like Summoner's Pact and make your opponent copy it and lose the turn after. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the card to create a chaos effect or a group hug effect, and try to figure out how to apply this better to your advantage.

#10. Battle of Wits

Not every card in MTG says that your deck needs to have more than 200 cards. Spike sees this as hard and inconsistent to make it work out. But Johnny thinks: “Challenge Accepted.”

To win with Battle of Wits, you need many tutors, sweepers, and cards that let you stay alive until you find the namesake card. 200+cards means it’s a no in EDH, too. It could probably be more doable in Pioneer, if the card were ever to become legal there.

#9. Ashnod’s Altar

With Ashnod's Altar, you can sacrifice however many creatures you want and generate 2 mana per creature in the process. Many black combos in MTG revolve around sacrificing creatures, getting some mana, casting some spells over and over, and winning from there. Phyrexian Altar can be a good substitute if you need colored mana instead.

#8. Myr Retriever

There are many combos involving Myr Retriever loops, and two Myr Retrievers go infinite with Krark-Clan Ironworks since you’re sacrificing one and getting 2 mana to cast the other. After that, you need something like a “whenever you cast an artifact” or “whenever an artifact dies” card to win.

#7. Zedruu the Greathearted

If Hive Mind creates chaos with instants and sorceries, Zedruu the Greathearted specializes in donate effects. With Zedruu, you actually want your opponents to have your cards, and you can give them cards that hurt them in the long run or just use cards like Homeward Path to recover them all. And of course, there are many different combos you can pull off, like with Transcendence.

#6. Karn, the Great Creator

Karn, the Great Creator appeals to Johnny’s senses by letting you build an artifact toolbox in your sideboard. The power level of the card is very high, though, so it’s banned/restricted in many formats. Cards like this tend to create repetitive gameplay, so it stops being creative and becomes oppressively strong.

#5. Doomsday

Although a powerful win condition, Doomsday requires a lot of thinking about how you make the pile. You have to put five cards in your library that guarantee you a win. Of course, it all depends on which decks you’re facing and the life and resources at your disposal. But the most common way is to choose Laboratory Maniac + four other cards that let you draw your entire deck.

#4. Krark-Clan Ironworks

Krark-Clan Ironworks may be one of the most Johnny cards ever. It’s a sacrifice outlet for artifacts that generates more mana, and many times, you’ll want to sacrifice an artifact that does something when it dies (eggs), like drawing cards or generating even more mana.

#3. Food Chain

Food Chain is one of the main green engines in cEDH, allowing you to win on the spot with your commander and one or two pieces. The main thing that breaks Food Chain in Commander is that you exile the card, and your commander makes good exile fodder. It also goes infinite with many creatures that can be cast from exile. But of course, our guy Johnny will find new and exciting ways to do something unheard of with this card.

#2. Birthing Pod

Birthing Pod can turn your creature into any creature from your deck that costs 1 mana more to cast. The applications are endless: You can cheat out an expensive creature (e.g.: Allosaurus Rider) and sacrifice it to put an 8-drop into play. You can also have a combo that’s fetchable, like Devoted Druid + Vizier of Remedies, or have many different creatures with situational abilities. Birthing Pod is also a good sacrifice outlet to kill creatures with death triggers. Spike also loves the card: Birthing Pod led to one of the most powerful and consistent decks in Modern, to the point that it’s currently banned in the format.

#1. Lion’s Eye Diamond

You get 3 mana for zero investment, so it’s practically a Black Lotus. Yes, but you also need to discard your hand. So, what gives? For years, Johnny players tried to crack Lion's Eye Diamond (LED), until it found success in storm decks. LED is good with cards that let you cast other cards from the graveyard, like Yawgmoth's Will and Underworld Breach, or with cards like Infernal Tutor on the stack, because you’ll tutor a card and use the mana to cast it.

Best Johnny Commanders

Many legendary creatures have abilities that require you to do something unconventional to extract their true power. I could make a list of dozens of Johnny commanders, but I’m including just a few here.

Gimbal, Gremlin Prodigy

Gimbal, Gremlin Prodigy is a legendary creature that cares about having different artifact tokens on the battlefield. You can think about Thopter tokens, Myr tokens, Food, Treasure, Blood tokens, that kind of stuff. But Johnny will go a little bit further and think about all the kinds of cards that make unique artifact tokens, or ways to turn creature tokens into artifacts with Liquimetal Coating, or something weird like this. In the end, Gimbal is happy if it has 15+ differently named artifact tokens, even if the result it yields is not a killer one.

Riku of Two Reflections

Copying stuff is usually in the Johnny realm, and that opens up a lot of unconventional thinking and possibilities. Riku of Two Reflections is a commander that appeals to both Timmy and Johhny. Timmy likes to copy big stuff and have two big monsters instead of one on the battlefield. Johnny wants to copy cool stuff. You can copy Biovisionary to get closer to your win condition, or you can copy creatures that reduce your spells’ costs and storm off. Why not copy a Manamorphose or Jeska's Will and get double the cards and double the mana?

Tidus, Yuna’s Guardian

Tidus, Yuna's Guardian has a lot of Johnnyness going on. Moving counters, proliferating, drawing cards… all of these abilities point to an engine setting. You can get creative by meddling with the counters on your summon sagas or moving around indestructible counters or flying counters, or you can proliferate planeswalkers’ loyalty counters, sagas’ lore counters, charge counters, and more.

Experiment Kraj

+1/+1 counters? Check. Copying the abilities of creatures you control? Ditto. Experiment Kraj is a dream for players who want to manage complex board states. You can tap the Kraj to put +1/+1 counters on creatures and use their abilities to untap the Kraj itself. Plus, many creatures in MTG trigger when you put counters on them like Fathom Mage and Evolution Witness, so you can trigger those at will. Incubation Druid is another example, generating 3 mana after receiving a +1/+1 counter from the Kraj, and then your commander can do the same thing.

Ghave, Guru of Spores

Ghave, Guru of Spores is an Abzan commander () famous for comboing with almost anything. Johnny likes the fact that you can convert resources almost at will. You can take +1/+1 counters from creatures or from Ghave itself and create new tokens, at instant speed no less. Doubling Season helps everything you’re doing, and with some pieces, it becomes infinite. You can move counters in between creatures, too, and make combat a nightmare for everyone involved.

Wrap Up

Enigmatic Incarnation | Illustration by PINDURSKI

In the words of Mark Rosewater, to design Johnny cards is “to present a challenge to players so that a select few will rise to that challenge”.

Johnny cards are very open-ended, and many of them end up taking part in a Constructed meta due to the high win percentage or combo redundancy. Sometimes the card is an instant hit, but others take more time to shine, like Lion's Eye Diamond. Casual Johnny enjoys their counters and proliferate decks, while competitive Johnnys usually play combo cEDH deck, Legacy ANT decks, or what have you.

It’s a broad topic overall, so if you have good suggestions to add to this list, please leave a comment in our comments section or in our Draftsim Discord Server.

Thanks for reading guys, and stay safe out there.