10 Magic Cards That Defined 2021

Sweet Serra, is it really December already? It feels like only yesterday I was putting together the 2020 edition of what’s becoming our traditional recap piece, and despite WotC printing more new cards than ever in Magic history, it feels like few of them were immediate standouts. 2019 has cast a very long shadow — Throne of Eldraine only rotated a few months ago — and we haven’t quite seen the ambitious pushing back of design space we got in 2020 with companions or the introduction of MDFCs. 

What we did get in 2021 was a range of uniquely powerful bombs to shake up the hierarchy in various formats, and some interesting hints that long-promised color pie shifts are beginning to take hold. Let’s walk through some of the highlights.

Faceless Haven (KHM)

If you make as many public predictions as I do, it’s worth taking time to acknowledge when you were wrong. I’ve always despised the Snow mechanic, mostly for what it does to my fancy collection of (non-Snow) basic lands. I was aghast the minute it was hinted the Snow lands might be coming back in Kaldheim, and appalled when it was confirmed as an overarching theme for the set. Say what you like about the draft experience, I just couldn’t shake the image of Arcum’s Astrolabe from my mind.

But, everything turned out fine. The Kaldheim Limited experience enjoyed the extra dimension of drafting around Snow lands. The universal banning of Astrolabe kept Snow from engulfing all Constructed formats. And in Standard, the mechanic finally realized its potential as a rare buff to monocolor decks – all thanks to Faceless Haven.

This overgrown Mutavault has landed at seemingly just the right power level. It offers a strong backup attack for aggro decks that get swept or flooded, not to mention bringing their clock forward on a critical turn with an extra “hasty” attacker. And by demanding a heavy commitment to Snow basics while itself counting against your available colored mana sources, Haven is essentially asking decks to play one fewer color in order to access it. Yes, it would be great if there were at least one dual land in Standard that enters untapped on turn one, to give aggro a bit more variety. But when that does inevitably happen, the Snow mechanic will still be a Haven for monocolor decks.

The MH2 Pitch Elementals (MH2)

If I had to pick just one of these, it feels like Solitude stands slightly above the rest. But you really do need to gauge the impact of having all five together in Modern and eternal formats.

Individually, these are the next evolution in the decades-long power shift toward from spells to creature cards. Evoke has some fun play to it, but upgrading these to zero-mana flash effects is already incredible before you factor in Ephemerate, reanimation, and all the other ways to abuse creature triggers.

Viewed together as a cycle, though, these have had the opposite effect as Faceless Haven – pushing the default deck building style closer to rainbow goodstuff. The pressure to fit in as many of these as possible means “Control” is now a four-color creature deck. And on a format-wide level, it’s one of several factors homogenizing card choices, as premium multicolor spells (already pushed to “balance” their mana requirement) gain even more value.

I love these fancy cards and their awesome artwork. I just hope they remain special rather than cementing a strict pool of tier cards throughout all Constructed.

Bloodthirsty Adversary (MID)

Midnight Hunt’s Adversary cycle is great. Not only do scaling effects of this sort help decks without card selection stay consistent in longer games, but they’re all novel effects for their colors at a solid power level. 

Bloodthirsty Adversary and Intrepid Adversary stand out the most, perhaps because those two colors are the most in the need of a solid two-drop with late game potential. But Bloodthirsty gets my nomination here, because it provides Standard red decks with a way out of the wilderness after years of being propped up by Embercleave. Within the same set as Adversary, Play with Fire and Light Up the Night mark a return to efficient burn that hits face. With that precedent set for 2022, I hope that we’ll soon be storming back to a world where the Red Deck Wins.

Lurrus and Yorion (IKO)

Wait, weren’t these critters printed last year?! They’re still going strong as ever? Oh. Okay then.

What is there to say about the companion mechanic — and especially these two — that hasn’t already been said? I’m not going to pretend I have some new hot take for this list, and that alone shows why they merited inclusion for the second year in a row. We just cannot avoid talking about these cards, and that’s the biggest problem. They’re here forever, and present almost all the time. 

I actually quite enjoy the gameplay of each card in a vacuum. I’m genuinely excited to see Yorion forever alter the DNA of Death and Taxes, a deck I’m incredibly fond of. It’s harder to be kind to Lurrus, whose deck building restriction draws a huge line through the middle of the Modern card pool and says “only these are playable now.” Suddenly you have pro players wondering aloud why Shadowspear is a $20 card, and Engineered Explosives is the most played card in Modern. 

Nerfed or not, the companion mechanic is still an unmatchable source of guaranteed bonus value every game, all for playing cards that were good enough already. Is that enough to see them banned completely from all relevant formats? Check back here in another 12 months to find out…

Mascot Exhibition (STX)

The learn mechanic is another example of trade-offs between deck building flexibility and in-game consistency, and one I’m quite fond of. The ability to grab some reasonable utility effects from the sideboard has helped archetypes like Black Snow Control patch the holes in their plan and led to novel, interesting gameplay.

Environmental Sciences may be the most important Lesson, but Mascot Exhibition is the most impactful, ensuring that every deck in Standard has potential access to a couple more top-end haymakers. It’s a wonderful way to put control decks back in check after a last-second sweeper, and it gives a silver lining to that other feel-bad cloud — mana flood. At the same time, it’s easy to respond to or doesn’t overshadow the main win condition – except for when it’s triple-cast off Galvanic Iteration in the middle of an extra turns spree. But we’ll talk more about that later…

Urza’s Saga (MH2)

Once upon a time, loyal Enchantress fans (myself included) wondered if we’d ever get “enchantment lands” to balance out the infamous artifact lands of Mirrodin. Well, the monkey’s paw has curled back five fingers at once, and now we live in a world dominated by Urza’s Saga. This in-joke come to life has definitely done its part in centering Modern on a tight circle of Lurrus-delirium-artifact synergy. But it has also brought some very interesting play patterns along with it, and as a self-sacrificing land, there are at least some costs to rebuilding your deck around this new pillar of the format.

Stung though I was by our first enchantment land turning out to be an artifact deck enabler, I think history will be generous to Urza’s Saga as it settles into the permanent fabric of Magic. It’s certainly a more dynamic card than good old Mox Opal!

Goldspan Dragon (KHM)

Goldie has been the premier red card in Standard since the day it dropped, and my feelings on it are quite mixed. On the one hand, a 4/4 flying haste for five seemed like a de-escalation from Embercleave as red’s top end. And as one of the most powerful and consistent sources of Treasure tokens, this Dragon flew the flag for a mechanic I believe should feature in every Magic set. It has enabled a delightfully obtuse combo deck (briefly) and a healthy stream of RGx midrange piles (less briefly).

But while it’s not quite public enemy #1, I think Goldspan may go down as another card that does more than it has to — a distinct example of power creep changing norms. Just the idea that someone can tap out for Goldspan, then suddenly cast Negate or Disdainful Stroke off the Treasure it creates when targeted by removal, eliminates the sense of risk and reward that makes bombs like this exciting to cast. You win if they target your Dragon, you win if they don’t (by ramping out yet another threat or using the Treasure to counter their next play). In fact, the best answer to Goldspan Dragon is usually a Goldspan of your own, which has an obvious impact on format health. 

This style of mythic bomb has continued to crop up set after set, Oko to Korvold to Uro to Omnath to Goldspan. But, credit where it’s due, we haven’t really seen any since this one. More recent cards like Lolth, Iymrith, Lier, Avabruck Caretaker, Toxrill and even Hullbreaker Horror all allow opponents clear windows for interaction. May this unpredictable, explosive (and adorable?) monster go down as the very last of its kind.

Elite Spellbinder (STX)

First of all, a shout-out to Paulo Vitor Damo Da Rosa, as well as to the concept of Invitational/World Champion cards in general. It’s the coolest way to honor the history of pro Magic, and historically, it’s led to some very interesting effects! 

Elite Spellbinder is no exception. Even more than the dynamic duo of Skyclave Apparition and Brutal Cathar, Spellbinder has meaningfully and permanently expanded white’s portfolio of disruptive tempo effects.

For years, I’ve been begging for more colors to gain access to hand or stack interaction; combo and control decks essentially get to ignore the board, and the Naya colors are stuck playing to it. If white isn’t going to fight back against these decks by destroying their mana, then disrupting their plans Spellbinder-style is the next best thing. Plus, the design itself is wonderfully executed with tons of unexpected ways to interact, from flickering the Spellbinder, to Drannith Magistrate, to Stonebinder’s Familiar. 

My dream is to see this effect become an evergreen white mechanic. It’s an encapsulation of everything white loves to do with temporary exile — offensive and defensive — balanced out by a variable tax on playing the card. Imagine templating Spellbinder’s effect as “Capture 3 – Target opponent reveals their hand. Elite Spellbinder captures a nonland card revealed this way.” You could easily have cards capture the top card of your own library as white’s (expensive) draw mechanic. You could capture a card in play as a soft O-ring, or capture all creatures as a soft Wrath. 

Still, whether or not WotC runs with this idea, Spellbinder is an excellent omen for white’s future card design.

Alrund’s Epiphany (KHM)

Another year, another extra turns spell running roughshod over Standard (and beyond!). 

Nobody is very surprised by this anymore. Players had their eye on Epiphany from day 1, first slapping it into the dominant Temur Adventures shell, then Izzet Dragons once the Eldraine gang (and Shark Typhoon) finally rotated. And then, Galvanic Iteration arrived. Now we are once again facing down a metagame warped around a turns deck — a deck with plenty of slots to adapt against any opposing deck, and against which little adaptation is possible.

This is exactly the kind of deck that cuts three or more colors out of the pie, demanding you play hand disruption or countermagic — or the most linear possible aggro plan. But when one combo piece (Epiphany) has foretell and the other (Iteration) has flashback, hand disruption is much less effective. And thanks to Lier, Hullbreaker Horror and other “can’t be countered” effects, there’s no countermagic defense, either.

I know it’s a drastic measure, but maybe we should just stop printing extra turn spells, at least in Standard? In the past, WotC stopped the supply of new Armageddon effects because players had come to loathe the games they created. To me, it seems clear we’ve now reached that same point with Time Warp and friends. But even if that is the case, we all still have some long, Bird-token-filled months ahead of us.

Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer (MH2)

Well, turns out we should all have believed the hype – and then some. Red’s Deathrite Shaman? The best one-drop in history? It’s close enough that it doesn’t really matter. Kari Zev’s fetching little pet has rapidly ascended to the peak of Constructed dominance, subjugating Vintage as easily as it has Modern and Legacy. Ragavan once again has us asking, “How much should one Magic card do?” and also, with the Ragavan-Bonobo Index, “How much should one Magic card cost?”

The answers are still unclear, but at the very least, Ragavan creates a lot of interesting lines, fits in a variety of decks, and promotes interaction from the start of the game. We could have worse monarchs than this macaque. Just make sure to reprint it in the next Commander Legends set, for the sake of wallets everywhere!

BEYOND THE HORIZONS

And those are your Cards that Defined 2021! To be honest, this sort of list is hard to judge objectively; I chose to give equal space to both Standard and eternal headliners where I could. But if I wanted to, I could easily have made a whole list with just Modern Horizons 2 cards – and I think that’s my biggest lasting sentiment on the year.

It’s cool that we’ve broken the ice on printing new cards straight to Modern and Legacy without disrupting the balance of Standard. But if we’re going to deliberately design and print guaranteed format dominators, we need to balance out the source and scarcity of their distribution. 

Ragavan is incredibly pricey for a card so broadly played and difficult to replace; don’t even get me started on Mason Clark’s beautiful 4c Yorion deck for Modern. I’d love to see more initiatives like The List to try and get faster reprint rounds of new staples into circulation, or at least a commitment to reprint them in Commander precons or other products 6-12 months after release. Especially if we continue to push back the power barrier and new staples replace the old, there will come a point where a majority of players in these “non-rotating” formats lose the will or ability to keep up. But there’s still plenty of time to prevent that, and plenty of effective ways to go about it.

And to all you readers — have yourselves some merry holidays, and a Magic-al New Year!