Summary
InMagic: The Gatheringthere are objectively bad cards. We’re not talking about boring cards that fill in draft decks and are almost immediately forgotten about, actually bad Magic: The Gathering cards. Cards that hinder you just for playing them or that just plain don’t do anything, thanks to either changes in game design or abandoned mechanics.
For the most part, they’re few and far between, especially considering the thousands of cards released every year. One card, one green creature from Magic’s distant past, takes the rare honor of being the worst card this game has ever seen.
Okay, So What Is The Worst Magic Card?
It’s A Wild One
Alright, so the objectively worst is a little-known rare from Magic’s 1994 set, Legends, Wood Elemental. While most players would have no reason to look at this old card, it hasbecome almost infamous in certain circles of Magic playersfor its actively bad design.
This four-mana Elemental creaturedoesn’t have a fixed power and toughness,it requires you to sacrifice untapped Forests when it enters the battlefieldto determine its power and toughness. So if you sacrifice three untapped Forests, you get a 3/3 creature.
It has no abilities either to justify the steep cost of sacrificing a bunch of lands, it just eats them up and gives you a vanilla creature in return. But just how bad is that?
So What’s The Problem?
There Are So Many
Let’s break down this card into its many, many issues. First up, you can only sacrifice untapped Forests as part of its enter the battlefield trigger. That means you have to have more than four lands in play when you cast it to get any use out of it sinceif you sacrifice nothing it’ll enter as a 0/0 creatureand state-based actions will have you sacrifice it immediately, setting you back four mana with nothing to show for it.
Also, those lands you sacrificehaveto be Forests, so you can’t mix and match lands you don’t need with it. Short of having a Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth out, you can find yourself very limited in what you can do. Plus when Wood Elemental was designed the card Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth was almost twenty years out of the design space.
But let’s say you have a healthy amount of lands out when you cast Wood Elemental, just to play devil’s advocate a little bit. to makeWood Elemental an average card for a four-mana vanilla green creature, you would need to make him a 4/4, meaning sacrificing four of your untapped Forests. If you want to make Wood Elemental better than the curve, you need to sacrifice at least five Forests to put it at a 5/5 or above.
That means committing four lands to cast Wood Elemental and then sacrificing another four or five to make it good.An eight-land commitment for just a 4/4 creature at best is abysmal. You could theoretically tap those Forests for mana before you sacrifice them to cast another spell, but it better be a good one to justify that loss.
Not to mention, you’re putting yourself in a massive deficit, going from eight or nine lands down to just four on your next turn. Even if you ramped up a bit, you’re goingto be turns behind your opponents for the rest of the game. That also means if you draw another Wood Elemental, because if you’re playing one of this bad card, why not run the whole set, you’re working with even less lands than before.
Another knock against this goofy creature, the power and toughness of Wood Elemental is a fixed value that is locked in when it enters. It doesn’t get +1/+1 counters equal to the number of Forests you sacrificed, so you may’t proliferate them up.
Is There Anything Good About Wood Elemental?
Get Ready For A Stretch
It is easy to say that Wood Elemental is a bad card,and that’s because it is, but if you’re bound and determined to jam this card in a deck, there are a few ways to make use of its staggeringly bad effect.
Let’s say you built yourself a mono-green Commander deck, one with lots of land synergies and big ol’ green baddies. You tap a Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx for a bunch of mana equal to your devotion to green to cast Wood Elemental. Now you sacrifice let’s say, 16 Forests, just to make this Magical Christmas scenario worthwhile. But now you’re down 16 lands, which you spent the past few turns ramping and playing.
That is where Splendid Reclamation comes in,returning all lands from your graveyard to the battlefield tapped. Sure, entering tapped isn’t great, but it’s better than losing them all for good.
You’ve now spent two cards and around, let’s be generous and say six mana, for a 16/16 Wood Elemental. Which isn’t too bad. Sure, it’ll be chump-blocked forever, butmaybe you can give it trampleor something to make it worthwhile.
Another scenario that might actually be good would be running some sort of combination of Titania, Protector of Argoth and Ashaya, Soul of the Wild. Titania gives you a 5/3 green Elemental creature anytime one of your lands is put into the graveyard from the battlefield, while Ashaya turns all your nontoken creatures into Forest as well as their other types.
This blending of abilities lets yousacrifice creatures instead of Forestsand then replaces each sacrificed card with another creature that is also a land. While it does require a few pieces out to be good, they’re all creatures which green decks are particularly good at tutoring up.
