The 24 Worst Mythic Rares in Magic Ranked

Anyone can write a list for the best cards in Magic, and there are plenty out there for you to look at if you’re that mainstream. If you’re one of the cool kids, if you have class, you have style, you have taste… what you really want to look at is the worst cards in Magic. Not just the worst cards in general, but the worst mythics, which theoretically are meant to be the best cards!

That’s what I’m going to take you through today: These are the worst pieces of cardboard in Magic: The Gathering that could have been some of the finest designs ever to hold that mythic orange symbol.

What Are Bad Mythic Rares in MTG?

Ring of Three Wishes | Illustration by Mark Winters

Bad mythic rares are generally what you expect. They’re cards printed at mythic rarity that are… bad. I’m talking bad in every format, including Limited, so these are a real specialized subset of underpowered, over-costed, or overly niche designs. I’m also not going to be looking at cards that are arbitrarily mythic, like Planeswalker deck planeswalkers, which were very much meant to be big splashy cards that wouldn’t see play in Standard (and so were intentionally bad).

As mythics were only introduced in 2008, we dodge most of the issues from early card designs in the ‘90s, when designers were still figuring stuff out, but there’s still plenty of awful cards to sink our teeth into, even if they do leave behind a funny aftertaste….

(Dis)honorable Mention: Tree of Redemption

We’re starting off with Tree of Redemption as a dishonorable mention, not because it’s bad, but because it was a bad inclusion in a Masters set that some people are still sore about today. The card itself is perfectly reasonable. It’s an interesting, unique design that does something never seen before. Including it as the representative of the Innistrad set over plenty of other sweet options in Masters 25 was just heinous, though. It caused outrage at the time, and multiple people brought it up as an example (that didn’t really fit) when I was researching, so I needed to include it somewhere.

#24. Palladia-Mors, the Ruiner

You may be wondering why I’ve got Palladia-Mors, the Ruiner on this list. It’s an example of a card type that I generally haven’t included other examples of: mythics that at the end of the day are big, splashy creatures that can end the game if left unchecked. However, I did want to include at least one example of this, and Palladia is a great one for a variety of reasons.

It’s clearly the worst in the cycle of elder dragons included in Core Set 2019, and so far behind Nicol Bolas, the Ravager that it’s not funny. It’s also been recently “downshifted” to uncommon in Tarkir: Dragonstorm with Karakyk Guardian being virtually the same card (minus a point of toughness). It’s just sad, really!

Don’t worry, though, the rest of the cards on the list are objectively bad!

#23. General Tazri

Did I say objectively bad? There may be some subjectivity including General Tazri in this. My very first deck was an allies deck for Battle for Zendikar Standard, and I was tempted to build an Allies EDH deck after having some fun with it. At the time designs of legends for Commander were still relatively new, so you could forgive Tazri for not really being great. After all this time, we still don't have a better allies general, making Tazri just horrible to look at. Please, take it out of my sight!

#22. Hew the Entwood

Hew the Entwood looks like it could be a good Scapeshift type of card, or even Indomitable Creativity, but the more you look at it the worse it gets. You’re going to end up down on lands overall, and you’re limited by the ones on the top of your deck. Artifacts going into your hand aren’t going to do much there, either. Maybe you want it to storm off with cheap artifacts, but there’s just too many hoops to jump through here for no real payoff.

Of course, now that I’ve put this all down in words the next set is going to have a card that will break this red sorcery in half, but that’s just how life goes sometimes!

#21. Sphinx Sovereign

Sphinx Sovereign is another one of those big fliers, but this is 8 mana in three colors for a 6/6 flier. It’s got an ability that’s not nothing, but it really doesn’t do much for me here. Not only that, but it dies to artifact removal, too. Even in EDH, where you want to play your expensive splashy mythics, it’s super vulnerable. Too much downside and too clunky to escape the list!

#20. Harness Infinity

Harness Infinity at least has a halfway interesting design, it’s just that interesting doesn’t mean good. Swapping your graveyard for your hand sounds cool, but unless you have a Reliquary Tower effect you’re going to have to discard to hand size at the end of the turn. It doesn’t even have the good manners to be cheap. Just look at all those pips! Better players than me have tried and failed to get this to work, but the designers were just super cautious to make sure this card didn’t break the game.

#19. Kylox’s Voltstrider

Vehicles in Magic are notoriously hard to balance, but even given this, Kylox's Voltstrider should never have been given a mythic set symbol. It just doesn’t do anything. Sure, you can crew without creatures, but it’s still just a 3-mana 4/4. What’s that ability, though? You get to cast something for free on attack? Haha! Read again sucker. You still need to pay the cost.

#18. Council of the Absolute

Council of the Absolute is a card that suffers from a bit of an old design. Putting the prison effect on a creature just begs for it to be removed, and the creature itself is uninspiring overall. There’s not much to say other than this would be really annoying on an enchantment in the right meta, but it just doesn’t do enough for an uncommon as it is, never mind a mythic.

#17. Etched Monstrosity

Balancing artifacts can be tricky, and as good as card draw is, Etched Monstrosity is asking a lot for drawing three cards. I’ll forgive it a little for being designed in a time before Commander was supported at the design level, so the 5-color identity probably wouldn’t happen these days. Still, it’s hard to see what made this worth the mythic rarity even when it was first printed.

#16. Restore Balance

Suspend cards were ways to balance historically broken or powerful cards, but most of the time it took things too far, like with Restore Balance. This is a card you really need to resolve when you cast it, and knowing it’s coming just makes it pointless in all honesty. You can probably still find a use case for it, but you’re going to be looking for some pretty specific requirements if this makes your deck. Notably this was an upshift in Time Spiral Remastered from its original rare printing in OG Time Spiral, which felt totally unwarranted.

#15. Reap Intellect

Reap Intellect might look like a powerful hand-hate card, one suitable for Constructed, but that 4 mana upfront is an incredible amount, and means it costs 5 to remove one card, and 6 for two. It probably doesn’t matter much by that point in the game, as these are cards you want to be able to use early on. It’ll occasionally do what you want, of course, and you’re going to feel pretty amazing when you pull it off (because you love being the villain, don’t you?), but unfortunately you’re likely to have lost by the time this comes out more often than not.

#14. Hostile Hostel / Creeping Inn

Hostile Hostel feels like it should have been a complete slam dunk of a card. A mythic land that can transform into a creature is very reminiscent of a pet favorite of mine: Westvale Abbey. Unfortunately, it feels like a card designed by AI, with some mechanics that kind of work together but don’t quite do enough. And the phase out ability? Yes, I can see the flavor of a haunted hostel that disappears into the mists, but for 4 mana it just feels so tacked on. The worst thing is that it feels like a little nudge here or there and this card could have been a banger. Maybe it was the victim of a last-minute change because the original version was too powerful. Something's up here.

#13. Archangel of Strife

Archangel of Strife is a victim of early designs for Commander. Back then it was a cool design. Each player gets a benefit, and you get a big flier to get in with. It just doesn’t hold water these days, though, especially for 7 mana! Angels have been on a crash diet in recent years and are no longer huge chonkers mana-wise. These days you’d at least get both modes on this for yourself!

#12. Shorecrasher Elemental

Morph (and to a lesser extent megamorph) has been loved almost every time it has appeared in a set, but mythic morph creatures have always proven a bit of an issue. Take Shorecrasher Elemental for instance. The stats are all fine, but it doesn’t spark joy in me the way a mythic should. Sure, you don’t want your opponent to flip this up if you’re attacking into it, but the actual use case, even in Limited, is just… meh. On top of that, blinking it when you have counters on it from megamorph is pretty useless, really….

#11. Jace, the Living Guildpact

There aren’t many planeswalkers among the absolute worst mythic rares in Magic (although this isn’t the last one!), but Jace, the Living Guildpact deserves its spot. I may be a bit harsh, as it does have a form of removal attached to it (for a blue ‘walker, at least), and you can quickly get the loyalty up, but that’s it really. Coming not long after Jace, the Mind Sculptor, this would have been a huge disappointment (or relief for some, I guess), but this didn’t cut the mustard when it was printed and it certainly doesn’t now!

#10. Deploy the Gatewatch

Speaking of planeswalkers, we have Deploy the Gatewatch. Six mana isn’t a bad deal for a couple of planeswalkers, especially as some can cost more than that anyway, but it’s the not knowing what you’re going to hit (if anything) which really holds this one back. If it was reveal two planeswalkers, put them in your hand, then put two ‘walkers from your hand onto the battlefield, we might be talking about this card bit more. But there’s just too much risk in it without at least some guarantee of payoff.

#9. Ring of Three Wishes

Tutors are good, so clearly a colorless tutor is a solid playable in every deck, right? Well, get this. What if we made it 10 whole mana to get a card? OK, that might be dialing the power back a little far. Maybe allow you to get another two cards for 5 mana each? Yeah, I thought not. Ring of Three Wishes is another case of an artifact whose mechanics are problematic, so the solution is simply to make it unusable. I don’t see why this one was restricted so much while still be printed at the same rate as some of the most busted cards imaginable, but here we are!

#8. Aetherwind Basker

Energy was super broken when it was in Standard, and was again with Modern Horizons 3, but it’s generally the lower rarity stuff that’s caused the issues over the years. The mythics have been less of a big deal, and Aetherwind Basker is super safe. The most exciting part is making a bunch of energy when it swings, but at 7 mana it’s not even doing too much in Limited, never mind somewhere where decks do their thing more reliably. Maybe it’s for the best we don’t have ridiculous mythic cards that work with energy, but this could have been so much cooler.

#7. Begin the Invasion

Begin the Invasion does have every possibility of becoming a good card one day, but right now it doesn’t have the support and is ridiculously costed. There just aren’t enough battles around to make this worthwhile, as well as no commander suited to playing battles in five colors. Not only that, but it costs 6 mana to get a single battle out, 7 mana for two, and so on. Bearing in mind that getting a battle out doesn’t flip it, and you still need to put some work in to get the full effect out, this just doesn’t have a reason to see play anywhere right now.

#6. Soul of Ravnica

Soul of Ravnica is another notorious bad mythic, and you can see why. Yes, it’s a big flier that draws cards, but 7 mana to draw up to five cards is a laughably bad rate, even if you’re running all five colors. This card clearly wouldn’t be printed today, at least not at mythic, and it feels like a bit of a relic when looking at more modern designs.

#5. Expedited Inheritance

Expedited Inheritance has no business being printed in the year of our lord 2024. You can see why some of the cards on this list were designed, and some are just a feature of a bygone age of card design. Nothing here makes sense to me, though. Maybe someone just came up with the card, maybe nobody could see how to make use of it, and maybe they just threw it to the masses to let us figure it out. Maybe it was a last-minute design change. Who knows, but I can’t see a way to even play this, never mind break it. Can you?

#4. Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded

We all knew this guy was going to show up at some point, and a lot of you are probably surprised that it didn’t quite crack the top three! Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded was the first 2-mana planeswalker, and Wizards was definitely playing it safe with a card type they weren’t super experienced with, but this is laughably bad. Discarding a card at random is just too much risk, even if it’s very red, and taking so long to tick up to either of its other (questionable) modes just looks odd and makes me think it would have fit in quite well as an uncommon ‘walker from War of the Spark. Tibalt is infamous to those who were around at the time, and it would have made it to the top of some people's lists on that alone!

#3. Meeting of the Five

Sigh… Meeting of the Five… Possibly the most egregious card printed in the last five years. Yes, worse than Nadu, Winged Wisdom in some ways. The big question around this one is just: “Why?” Five-color spells are hard to cast, but there’s usually a great payoff, with some guaranteed effect even if there’s an element of randomness. This not only requires you to skew the build of your deck massively, but it can also do absolutely nothing. C’mon guys, I know this was a 3-color set, but what were you actually thinking? How is this meant to be used? The mind boggles.

#2. Mox Tantalite

Moxen are famously very broken, and almost every version is a way to get a lot of free and fast mana, at least when you build around it. That is, of course, with the exception of Mox Tantalite. This has stumped even the best brewers, despite being out for quite some time now. Will it stay this way forever? It’s hard to say, and that means that I could be made to look a bit of a fool if this does find the partner piece that lets you make infinite mana with it. Then we all get to laugh at how ridiculous this entry is, and we’ll all feel better for that.

#1. Archangel’s Light

One card that comes up again and again when you ask for bad cards is Archangel's Light. This isn’t quite pure card draw, and shuffling the graveyard back into your deck isn’t nothing, but just look at that mana cost! It reeks of early mythic design, when they were still trying to figure out which cards would be worthy of the new rarity. Of course, this was arguably a better time as mythics weren’t necessarily the best/most desirable cards in the set, but the splashiest, and a way to keep them from too many Limited events.

It’s difficult to decide which design really is the worst of the worst, but I went for this one simply due to how much it came up, along with it doing nothing of any great consequence. It just sums up all the reasons we’ve looked at these god-awful cards!

Wrap Up

Restore Balance | Illustration by Mark Poole

Many people write off bad cards as boring, useless, and irrelevant. They very much aren’t, though, as examining why they’re bad, why they didn’t work, or even what the designers were trying to achieve with the design gives valuable insights into the game. It’s not just learning from mistakes, although that’s another big positive. It gives a more rounded picture of the design process, it gives us a peek behind the curtain, and maybe above all, it gives us something to discuss during spoiler season and beyond.

One thing I found when researching is how passionate the community is about the bad cards. They give people… maybe not good memories, but certainly poignant ones. People seem to have their pet bad cards, just like they have their pet good cards, in a way I hadn’t appreciated before this.

What are your pet bad cards? Is there anything I’ve missed, or is there anything on this list that you think I’ve been unjustly mean to? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord. Now more than ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with and I’ll catch you in the next one!