Welcome to a heroic quest. This is not for the faint of heart, nor for those with a nervous disposition. This epic quest will take us through more than a decade of Magical spoilers, and you may find yourself by turns angry, disappointed, terrified, tearful, morally bankrupt, irritated, scared, bitter, and lots of other emotions that modern-day psychologists tell us may not be altogether good for the soul. So don’t come running to me with a nosebleed when it all goes wrong.
Our quest is this: to Find Miserable.
Miserable is not a Keyword like Flying or Trample or Bushwhack. (Some of you are wondering whether bushwhack is in Shards of Alara. I know who you are. Monkeys.) Miserable is not a term you will find in the Beginner’s Guide to Magic, nor in the Comp Rules, nor even in the Actual Rules Of Magic For Level 4 & 5 Judges, the only copy of which resides in a steel-lined vault burrowed into the Seattle mountains, accessible only via the secret passage beneath the God of the DCI Scott Larabee’s desk. (And those same people are wondering how true that one is too. Fie for shame. How can you doubt it?)
Nevertheless, Miserable is one of the most important parts of the game of Magic. As you’ll see, actually defining Miserable is going to take us on a journey encompassing more than one hundred and fifty cards, each in turn illuminating, re-inforcing, and in some cases contradicting a series of Rules. Each Rule will bring us a little teetering footstep closer to the Most Miserable Cards in Magic. Before we get to the cards, I’m going to kick off with a couple of really important Rules, because these set the table for the banquet of disaster that awaits us.
Rule #1: When I say something is Miserable, I don’t mean it.
Rule #2: When I say something isn’t Miserable, I don’t mean it.
So what do I mean? Simply, that the Rule I’m demonstrating contributes to an overall score of ‘Miserableness’ or detracts from its ‘Miserableness.’ But you can trust me when I tell you that it’s much easier for you if I just say things like ‘Bad isn’t Miserable’ than ‘Bad doesn’t necessarily contribute to the overall Miserableness of the card, although in certain circumstances it can do.’ Told ya.
Rule #3: Bad is not Miserable.
Magic is littered with thousands of cards that are generally defined as Bad. That might be because they’re inefficient, or only serve a niche role that is executed better elsewhere. They might be cards that go late in Draft, or never see Constructed play, or a common that you have 78 copies of and will never get played by you in a deck ever. That isn’t Miserable. That’s Magic. Without the Bad, we can’t have the Good, without the Good there is no Better, and no Best. We need Dross, and not just Crocodiles and Golems either.
Rule #4: Good is not Miserable.
It stands to reason that you’re going to lose an awful lot of Magic duels. Even if you’re the best player in the world, you’re only winning 2 out of 3 matches lifetime average, and plenty of those wins will have been 2-1. Good cards are not inherently Miserable. They are of course going to make you lose games more often than bad cards, which might make you feel a bit miserable, but just as we need workaday Bad cards, we need plenty of run-of-the-mill Good cards. Generally speaking, winning with Bad cards is just fine, but winning with Good cards is sort of, well, easier to achieve, and most of us seem to like winning. Plus, there’s every likelihood that for every game you lose to a Good card, you’ll win one with that same Good card. So, Good cards are our friends, and are therefore not Miserable.
Rule #5: Miserable will frequently be responsible for the end of the game.
Although there’s nothing wrong with Good cards, or even Great cards, the chances are that Miserable cards are going to feature in your tales of woe more often than not. As we’ll see from many Rules, there are plenty of ways to lose a game of Magic that aren’t Miserable. However, many Miserable cards will indeed be the culprits in your going down. Round about now, I’d draw a little diagram for you using one of those fancy chemical two-way arrow signs, showing how A leads to B but it isn’t necessarily the case that B leads to A. This has a clever scientific name, but I don’t know what it is because I was reading Playboy at the time.
Rule #6: Miserable is Great for Magic.
As we go along, you’re going to find me talking about some cards that really elicit strong emotions from you. There will probably be some cards that you passionately wish had never seen the light of day. (At a guess, presumably it’ll be mostly Black creatures that you wish had never seen the Light Of Day, but moving on…) That’s fine. In fact, that’s pretty wonderful. If Magic was packed full of nothing but bland nonentities with marginal effect on the game, we’d soon stop playing. The fact that a simple card can cause perhaps millions of us to call for the head of whichever lab-crazed scientist came up with the damned thing is one of the things that places our game so far above the competition. I adore Monopoly, but rolling a seven and Going to Jail is about as Miserable as Monopoly gets. Any strong emotion is good for the game, so this is absolutely not a witch hunt in search of cards that ‘shouldn’t have been made’ or ‘made my play experience worse.’ This is a celebration of a certain type of card that we all know is out there, but find very hard to pin down. Until now.
Rule #7: Miserable should make you Tired All Over.
Having researched Miserable thoroughly over recent days, I have some clue how our definition is going to coalesce as we wander through the history of the game, but we have to start somewhere, and to me this is one of the most fundamental Principles of Miserable. When you watch Season Three of Prison Break, and realize that after the first two episodes, despite the Writer’s Guild of America strike, there are still eleven whole hours of irritatingly compulsive viewing before we can get the hell out of Panama, that’s Miserable. When you close your eyes for a short nap at 2pm, wake at 4.30pm, and you’re collecting your six year old daughter at 3.30pm, that’s Miserable. And when your car stops 17 miles from the nearest gas station at 3am on a Monday morning and your mobile phone battery ran out 5 minutes before while you were racking up a $200 bill on a premium rate Chat Line which you paid for with your wife’s credit card, that’s Miserable. I would like to point out that I have only experienced one of these three Miserables, and yes, Prison Break does take a serious nosedive in Season Three.
So one of the best guides, at least initially, to the awesomeness that is Miserable is a very simple test. When the card name first comes up in front of your eyes, does a shudder role through you? Do you think ‘urrghhh’ or ‘yuk’ or ‘bleugh’ or assorted other words that generally only exist inside comicbook speech bubbles? Do you find yourself leaning away from the screen, in case the very card name itself is contagious? Do you start to shake your head as you remember the psychological horrors inflicted on you by the card? Do you rub a despairing hand across your forehead at the mere mention? If you do, our quest is heading in the right direction. So enough flimflammery, it’s time to saddle up, and get ready to avert our gaze as we nobly go in search of Miserable.
Rule #8: Eternal Formats are Miserable.
Rule #9: Miserable cannot exist in the Abstract. Miserable must be Felt.
Rule #10: Eternal Formats are not Miserable.
To start with, I was quite happy with Rule #8. It has a ring of truth to it, is likely to ring a bell with the majority of the Magic population, and is confrontational enough to genuinely offend a portion of the community. Conveniently enough, it’s the exact portion of the community I want to offend because they all have beards, b*tch incessantly about everything that’s done and everything that isn’t done, have no sense of humor, all wear black and badly need to discover the power of deodorant. On top of that, Eternal Formats are simply bursting with insane packages of power, and indeed Power, from the vaunted Nine down. But I quickly realized that this is not enough to be Miserable. When Alpha and Beta and Gamma and all the other toxic radiation bits of Magic were being played in bus shelters across America, nobody understood about Miserable. Indeed, the idea that you might one day get a little hacked off with dropping 5 of your opening hand into play on Turn 1 before combining Channel and Fireball to riotous effect didn’t really dawn on some people until, ooh, a week last Thursday. This led me to Rule #9. It’s no good simply pontificating and saying that something is Miserable. It has to be Felt deep within the core of your being. As far as I can see, there were some people watching the final of the Magic Invitational last year (where Tiago Chan played Rich Hoaen at Vintage) who were vicariously Living the Dream (don’t look that up, it isn’t the name of a card, although it probably should be) when Chan simply revealed his opening Hulk-Flash hand and the two gentlemen proceeded onward into the even more exciting shuffle-for-three-minutes part of the final. Now although that probably gets Vintage well up my own Miserable list, the simple fact that so many of us/you/them (hmm, wait, yes, I think ‘them’ is the one to go with) get off on Turn Zero spectaculars is enough to make Rule #10. Plus, in all seriousness, I’m off to Chicago in a couple of weeks to be at Magic Weekend, and that includes some very tasty Eternal tournaments, so yes Vintage fans, I’m going to need all the help I can get. For two turns.
Rule 10.2.5.: If you find you need a Rule that doesn’t follow the existing structure of the Rules, simply add incomprehensible appellations and attach it to a different Rule that nobody will ever read because it’s in the Actual Rules of Magic for Level 4 & 5 Judges, the only copy etc, etc.
Rule 10.2.5.i: Mostly, Miserable is Constructed.
We’ll see a few examples of cards that are Miserable within a Limited setting. That might be because they combine well in multiples within a Draft environment, or perhaps because a lack of removal leads to a particular creature being hard to deal with, but for the most part the cards we look at are going to feature in a Constructed Format. Apart from anything else, this is where we get to experience Miserable over and over, whereas, for the most part, getting beaten senseless by Rhox is something that should only happen to most of us very infrequently.
So, having established that the Good Old Days were simply packed full of astonishing power levels and Combos and sickness aplenty, I feel it’s appropriate to draw a veil over those feet-finding years, and recommence our quest at the Block it took a decade and more to complete (ahem), Ice Age.
Ice Age
Rule #11: Breaking the rules is Miserable.
Rule #12: Drawing a ton of cards is Miserable.
Step forward Necropotence. The rules of the game let you play one land a turn, attack once a turn, play creatures at sorcery speed during one of two main phases, see your lifetotal go from 20 down towards zero, and draw one card per turn. The further from these precepts the more Miserable a card might be, depending on quite how powerful the ultimate effect is. Well, nothing improves your chances of winning than more Card Advantage, and nothing demonstrates this better than this ultra-efficient card-drawing machine that simply crucified opponents.
Rule #13: Color matters to Miserable.
Rule #14: Cycles can have different kinds of Miserable.
Rule #15: The harder to deal with, the more the Miserable.
Circles of Protection had varying degrees of success in the game, so trying to lump them together for some kind of Corporate Miserableness score is inadvisable. The two clear winners in the Miserableness stakes were CoP: Red and CoP: Black, and that’s because those two colors had the hardest time dealing with enchantments once they hit play. Countless White mages sat behind CoP: Reds, watching scarlet mages fruitlessly barter 16 points of damage into three tapped Plains. Not the value, so I’ve heard.
Rule #16: If a sizeable part of the community likes it, it isn’t Miserable.
The next spell is going to seem pretty Miserable to a lot of you, especially those of you who think Hinder is a really Miserable card. It’s Counterspell, the God’s-honest no-messing put your spell in the bin counterspell that, erm, countered a spell. There are people of questionable sanity who believe that the entire game would be a much better place without the entire range of counter-magic, and even within R & D there lurk miscreants who would much rather see spells played than not played. As far as I can see, that’s the whole purpose of non-counterspells, so that Blue mages have something to counter. Whilst acknowledging that my view isn’t compulsory (although come the Revolution it will be, my friends, it will be), Rule #16 is a clear downside to achieving Miserable status.
Rule #17: Burn isn’t Miserable.
Rule #18: Excess isn’t Miserable.
Rule #19: A number can be Miserable.
Take Incinerate. Please. It’s a quality spell, and absolutely a staple of tournament Magic. It can’t be Miserable, because it’s just too ordinary. Yes, it kills creatures, and has a useful side ability that means it can kill a Troll Ascetic if your opponent forgets that his Troll can’t be targeted, and you feel like running the ‘you’re an idiot’ cheats. Yes, it kills opponents when they’re on 3 or less. But so what? Something has to knock off the last few lifepoints, and it isn’t as if 3 is a fundamentally big chunk of life. No, for Burn to be Miserable it’s going to have to be a lot better than Incinerate. And while we’re here, Rule #18 bears some examination. Here’s the old chestnut:
‘What life are you on?’
’14.’
‘Incinerate you, Incinerate you, Fireblast, Fireblast, good game.’
Intriguingly, this gives rise to Rule #19, because believe me when I say that if you were playing Standard against a Red Mage and you were at 14 life, you got that whole pit of the stomach feeling that meant it was time to reach for the sideboard. But simply combining a whopping great four cards to do a bunch of damage isn’t inherently Miserable. It’s just a bunch of non-Miserable in a row, and four wrongs don’t make a right.
Rule #20: Cheap is Miserable.
The cheaper a spell is, the less likely someone’s going to come along and undercut you in order to get the best value, or greatest efficiency. Of course, there’s a trade-off in design terms for cheapness, because the whole game is predicated on the idea of getting what you paid for, and winning is often couched in terms of getting what you didn’t pay for, a.k.a. Efficiency. The cheaper spells have a better chance of being efficient, since they will often have smaller or at least narrower impacts on the game. That’s where Pyroblast comes along, and does naughty things to very big Blue flyers, or just makes sure very big Blue flyers don’t even hit the deck. Or do hit the deck, depending on your metaphorical inclinations.
Time to go to the ‘middle’ set of the Ice Age Block. I found some unusual references to something called Homelands, which coincidentally shares a name with a box that would contain 36 boosters of Magic cards that is used as a doorstop at my local store. On then to…
Alliances
Rule #21: A great name has Protection from Miserable.
Lots of things can make a name great, but popular culture references are a good start, and virtually guarantees that a card can’t be Miserable, just because people smile when they see it. Later in Ravnica we’ll find the overdue Blockbuster, but when Alliances was being named, they couldn’t have known that they had imbued a lowly Red instant with computer game Cool. The card — Burnout.
Rule #22: Alternate Casting Costs are a recipe for Miserable.
I know I warned you repeatedly at the start, but non-Blue fans…Wait, you could take that the wrong way. Presumably none of you are actually blue fans. You could be fans of the game, but unless you’re naked in Iceland you’re probably not blue. And if you’re a blue fan then you might be plugged into the wall and causing other people to get cold, and you wouldn’t have eyes and almost certainly wouldn’t be playing Magic. Let’s start over — wow, that was a Tangent. I know I warned you repeatedly at the start, but if you’re not a fan of countermagic you might want to look away now. Three words. Force Of Will. Yep, I can feel the house shudder as I type the words. Five mana for a counterspell is nothing to write home about, unlike informing your parents that you’re getting married, which is something to write home about. It’s the alternate casting cost that gets you. You’re on the play, against a Blue mage, and it’s turn 1. Surely, thank God, you have this guaranteed window of opportunity to at least get your first monster into play, or your killer one-drop hoser. No, actually you don’t, and for making people feel Tired All Over (Rule #6) Force Of Will is hard to beat. Incidentally, Rule #6 is used within R & D to decide whether cards get reprinted. Force of Will was removed from the initial list for 11th Edition at approximately the same time the decision was taken that the new card featuring my naked backside entitled Rear Of Destiny was probably not ideal for an entry-level set. [Now that’s a Split card… — Craig, amused.]
Rule #23: Lands are Miserable.
Sorry, no two ways about it, Lands are Miserable. If they’re basic land, you have 75000 of them under your bed at home, you never draw the right color ones in Sealed, you see too many of them in every format, you see too few of them in every format, you wish they were non-basic and did more in every format, and you wish they’d only printed Forests, Swamps, Plains, and Mountains in every format. If they’re non-basic, you wish they weren’t Rare, you wish they got you all five colors without a drawback, you wish they were Duals, you wish they couldn’t fall victim to Wasteland or Destructive Flow, and you wish you had the money to use the ones everybody else plays in Extended. Compelling reasoning, I’m sure you’ll agree. But there’s more. Lands are really hard to deal with. They aren’t spells, so can’t easily be prevented from coming into play. Cards that destroy lands don’t often do a lot else. Even the cards that destroy lands that do other stuff only work in a dedicated Land Destruction deck most of the time, and who wants to be the social pariah who plays like that? In Alliances, Kjeldoran Outpost proved the rule, but there are plenty more coming.
We’re going to leave Ice Age block in (flavorfully) suspended animation, sort of frozen in time you might say, while we wait for Coldsnap to occur sometime about 5,000 words into next week. Meantime it’s off to sunnier climes with….
Mirage
Rule #24: There’s nothing Miserable about Combo.
Rule #25: There’s nothing Miserable about Beatdown.
Rule #26: There’s nothing Miserable about Control.
Broadly speaking, there are four ways to win at Magic — smash face with monsters and burn; stop people smashing your face with monsters and burn, then win at leisure; or assemble assorted cards with monstrous synergies and win in a single splurge of insanity (and no, Splurge of Insanity isn’t a card name either.) During your Magic career, you may well dip your toe into Beatdown, Combo, and Control before discovering which one floats your boat the most, or which one seems to suit your limited set of playskills the best. Simply not liking one or both of the other main routes to victory does not Miserable make. So Rule #24 comes about because of one of the most famous Combo cards ever, Cadaverous Bloom. But look at it, it’s essentially rubbish. It costs a bundle, you lose card advantage up the wazzoo, and it does basically nothing whatsoever on its own. So like it or not, just being part of a Combo engine is not sufficient to attain Miserable status. Oh but wait, I said four ways to win didn’t I?
Rule #27: There’s nothing Miserable about Idiot Opponents.
Idiot Opponents aren’t Miserable… Idiot Opponents are Great!
Rule #28: X spells aren’t Miserable.
We’ve already established (Rule #17) that Burn isn’t Miserable, and now we welcome compadre to Cadaverous Bloom, the mighty Drain Life, to proceedings. Tapping a bunch of mana and sinking into one big explosive payoff is as old as the hills, and frankly most people consider getting beaten like that fair dinkum, or at least they do if they’re an Australian fictional stereotype. The number of mana doesn’t really matter, since it’s going to be Enough, the only number that ever truly counts, along with its alter ego, Not Enough.
Rule #29: Just the threat can be Miserable.
Sticking with Drain Life, not only is it possible to win against your 5 year old cousin Abigail by pretending to have one in your deck, it’s apparently possible to win a Pro Tour in exactly the same way. Just ask Mark Justice, by calling the totally incorrect phone number I was about to type here until I realized that some of you actually would dial the number, and Madame Fifi’s House of Pleasure would not be pleased with me, possibly even revoking my Gold Card membership privileges.
Rule #30: Doing it again is Miserable. Doing it again is Miserable. (Getting the message yet?) Doing it again is Miserable. Doing it again is Miserable. Doing it again is Miserable.
Rule #31: Long is Miserable.
Rule #32: Inevitable is Miserable.
These are three really crucial rules in our quest, since many of the most Miserable cards in the game share these three qualities. Let’s look at Hammer of Bogardan, which was a great spell, one of the best Blue burn spells ever printed, since CounterBurn was the deck it usually ended up in. It didn’t matter that it was going to take 4,000 mana and several intravenous drips supplying you with sustenance before your opponent actually died… what mattered is that they would die, and barring some miraculous graveyard removal nonsense, die is exactly what they did. And the best part of Miserable about the Hammer and cards like it is that your opponent could see their own demise sitting there on their own turn, every turn, innocuously hanging about the graveyard just waiting for an upkeep to come around, before continuing to kill by degrees. It’s a bit like being on death row, where the only thing to sit on is an Electric Chair, you sleep on a gurney, and your only exercise comes courtesy of a skipping rope. (If you can work out how to get gas and a gun into this powerful analogy, I’d be eternally grateful if you’d let me know, and put me out of your misery.)
Rule #33: See Rule #24.
Rule #34: If you can’t understand it, it’s probably more Miserable than you think.
Rule #35: If you can understand it, it’s probably less Miserable than you think.
Lion’s Eye Diamond looks at first glance to be a moderately hideous way to generate some mana, with a nasty cost that gets a bit more palatable the fewer the cards you have left in your hand. That it also turns out to be part of a monstrous Combo is neither here nor there. I must confess that when I first typed the words our mainstay Rule #6 well and truly washed over me, as I realized I was going to have to talk about all kinds of recurring nonsense. Then Rule #34 kicked in, as I discovered that my ability to wax lyrical about said zero cast artifact was itself zero. So I did what all self-respecting journalists do in this situation, I called Dave, a man who knows more about Magic than I do about grouting (which is illegal in Utah and nine other states, by the way). As soon as Dave started on about Pro Tour: Rome and Reap/Lace my eyes began to glaze over, and Rule #34 was looking truer and truer by the Miserable second. And then I started paying attention, just in time to hear Dave say, ‘Basically, you get it back from your graveyard for less than three mana.’ And the spell, though not the spell, was broken. Being omnipotent is great if you’re me, but even I occasionally hanker after a good dose of bamboozlement. Honestly, ‘get it back from your graveyard for less than three mana’ is so darned prosaic it can’t possibly be Miserable.
Rule #36: Don’t is Miserable.
Sideboards have always been an important part of the game, but perhaps they have become somewhat more subtle in recent years. Back when Visions was coming out, and the following Tempest Block, cards that went in sideboards packed one hell of a punch. Hosers these days tend to say things like ‘ask target Red player if he wouldn’t mind pointing that horrid burn spell at somebody else. Be really appreciative.’ Back in the day, men were men and hosers left you in no doubt who was wearing the trousers. ‘All Red spells cost your opponent 37 extra to play, plus they must give you a signed copy of Black Lotus.’ Here’s another that just failed to make the cut: ‘Destroy all Green creatures. Green creature spells cannot be played for the rest of the decade.’ And then there was City of Solitude, which, shorn of its legalese, reads something like, ‘Render utterly pointless every counterspell ever invented. Target Blue mage becomes a 0/1 Goldfish until end of game.’ If a single card neuters large portions of your deck, and I’m sighing as I type, that really is Miserable.
Fireblast: See Rule #22.
Here comes Alternate Casting Costs again, this time courtesy of Mountain-sacrificer Fireblast. With Lightning Bolt at 1, and Incinerate at 2, once Red mages had land in play and untapped it was hard to feel safe. Then to discover that the land could be tapped and you were still in danger appalled plenty, and led to serious burns as Red players rubbed their hands raw in glee at the way they were about to bend opponents over the table and
Rule #37: If there’s time to order a pizza, that’s Miserable.
Personally, I find interaction with my opponent a necessary evil that should be kept to the bare minimum. If I’m playing Beatdown that means I simply do three things: Attack repeatedly, burn blockers or my opponent, and enquire if they’re currently on Enough or Not Enough life. If I’m playing Control that means I simply do three things too: Say No to everything, draw many cards, and enquire if they’re currently on Enough or Not Enough life. Combo is even simpler, requiring the following two steps: Create the Combo, and inform my opponent that they are now dead. Still, while you may not want to interact with your opponent, chances are you want them to have to interact with you, and the moment when they kick off their turn with a two-mana White instant called Abeyance certainly counts as one of the more Miserable experiences in the game. Didn’t matter what your plans were, they cast Abeyance and it was time to open up the Sunday papers, find out what was going on in the world, and look up occasionally to find out if they’d killed you yet. They usually hadn’t, so sometimes you got all the way to the rubbish color supplement on 1960’s Fashion before it was time to shuffle up for game 2. Actually, genuinely Miserable.
Rule #38: Seeing them I F***ing Hate Snakes drive off into the sunset is Miserable.
In real life, I hate snakes, though not as much as I used to before aversion therapy meant I spent an entire evening in the I F***ing Hate Snakes company of a Boa Constrictor called, I kid you not, Billy. In Magic, I’m prepared to make an exception for the rather fine Ophidian, but my love for the little I F***ing Hate Snakes reptile doesn’t stop me recognising that Rule #38 applies. See, playing against Ophidian was a real uphill battle of diminishing returns. To start with, the Blue player had to invest three mana. That might leave them with only enough for a lone counterspell, giving you the sniff of a chance of blowing it up or neutering it somehow (how does one neuter a snake?). But once Ophidian bared its little fangs, the card-drawing horror (Rule #12) commenced, and your chances of getting back into the game got smaller and smaller and smaller as the Blue player hand size grew commensurately. Did I mention that I F***ing Hate Snakes?
Rule #39: ‘Look how long it took me to kill him’ isn’t Miserable.
Rule #40: 14 is the Number of Lifegain Miserable.
Some people find lifegain funny. Then again, some people find me funny, so I guess there’s no accounting for taste, or lack thereof. Personally, I like serious lifegain like a hole in the head, but Rule #39 shows us that having a bit of patience is frequently all that’s required. At the end of the Shandalar computer game, Azkeron or whatever he was called started on some notionally invincible lifetotal, that was, if memory serves, considerably higher than 12. More like 2,000. Turned out that wasn’t a problem, as you countered anything that merited it, and made fat monster after fat monster, turning them sideways for 50 or so damage per turn, polishing him off shortly before your deck ran out of cards, and saving the people of Shandalar for millennia to come. Huzzah! However, where 2,000 life wasn’t Miserable, it turns out that 14 can be. I owe my dislike of George Michael, lifegain, and beards in general to an English Regionals tournament which I won. My only defeat came in the final round when (who knew?) I couldn’t be caught, but that doesn’t alter the fact that watching my smug opponent cast Gerrard’s Wisdom every single turn was right up there in the Miserable comfort zone. If someone wants to spend a card on gaining 5 life, that’s absolutely peachy. A big old Stream Of Life is my idea of good times, as long as it’s my opponent who’s playing it. But gaining 14 life and then shuffling the stupid thing back in with Gaea’s Irritating Green Recursion Spell (oh alright then, Gaea’s Blessing) nails Miserable right on the head.
And finally for this first instalment…
Rule #41: If you can Sit Back and Watch It Go, that’s Miserable.
At the afore-mentioned English Regionals, I was given a deck by a circuitous route from one of the most successful English players ever, John Ormerod. Just ahead of the Metagame curve, this was a White Weenie deck that relied on Shadow creatures like Soltari Priest to murderise a largely Red-dominated field. Many of my games that day went the same way, and consisted of me utilising a sum total of five permanents : Plains, Plains, Wasteland, Soltari Priest, and Empyrial Armor. I attacked for eight on turn 3, nine on turn 4, and ten on turn 5. I discovered that this curve was somewhat quicker than my Red opponents. Riding a one-trick pony to victory may be stylish, but it’s still Miserable.
And, with astonishing timing, we’ve reached my personal entry point into the world of MTG, with the wonders of Tempest lurking at the beginning of our next episode, marking my very first Pre-Release. Suffice to say that the Tempest Block is veritably festering with more Rules of Miserable. But for now, it’s time to down our trusty swords of truth, justice, and the American Way (a great burger joint in Cheam, South London incidentally) and recap the first 41 Rules of Miserable, a test on which will follow shortly.
Rule #1: When I say something is Miserable, I don’t mean it.
Rule #2: When I say something isn’t Miserable, I don’t mean it.
Rule #3: Bad is not Miserable.
Rule #4: Good is not Miserable.
Rule #5: Miserable will frequently be responsible for the end of the game.
Rule #6: Miserable is Great for Magic.
Rule #7: Miserable should make you Tired All Over.
Rule #8: Eternal Formats are Miserable.
Rule #9: Miserable cannot exist in the Abstract. Miserable must be Felt.
Rule #10: Eternal Formats are not Miserable.
Rule 10.2.5.i: Mostly, Miserable is Constructed.
Rule #11: Breaking the rules is Miserable.
Rule #12: Drawing a ton of cards is Miserable.
Rule #13: Color matters to Miserable.
Rule #14: Cycles can have different kinds of Miserable.
Rule #15: The harder to deal with, the more the Miserable.
Rule #16: If a sizeable part of the community likes it, it isn’t Miserable.
Rule #17: Burn isn’t Miserable.
Rule #18: Excess isn’t Miserable.
Rule #19: A number can be Miserable.
Rule #20: Cheap is Miserable.
Rule #21: A great name has Protection from Miserable.
Rule #22: Alternate Casting Costs are a recipe for Miserable.
Rule #23: Lands are Miserable.
Rule #24: There’s nothing Miserable about Combo.
Rule #25: There’s nothing Miserable about Beatdown.
Rule #26: There’s nothing Miserable about Control.
Rule #27: There’s nothing Miserable about Idiot Opponents.
Rule #28: X spells aren’t Miserable.
Rule #29: Just the threat can be Miserable.
Rule #30: Doing it again is Miserable. Doing it again is Miserable.
Rule #31: Long is Miserable.
Rule #32: Inevitable is Miserable.
Rule #33: See Rule #24.
Rule #34: If you can’t understand it, it’s probably more Miserable than you think.
Rule #35: If you can understand it, it’s probably less Miserable than you think.
Rule #36: Don’t is Miserable.
Rule #37: If there’s time to order a pizza, that’s Miserable.
Rule #38: Seeing them drive off into the sunset is Miserable.
Rule #39: ‘Look how long it took me to kill him’ isn’t Miserable.
Rule #40: 14 is the Number of Lifegain Miserable.
Rule #41: If you can Sit Back and Watch It Go, that’s Miserable.
Until next time, as ever, thanks for reading.
R.