The power level of Magic cards is not static. This is because new cards are created all the time, creating a brand-new context for your cards every time that happens. This often leads to cards that were once viewed as useless or uninteresting suddenly getting a major upgrade, sometimes decades after originally being printed.
So, get out your shoe boxes of mediocre old cards, because some of those cards that have been in hiding have gone from trash to treasure. In this article, I’ll take a look at cards that were long considered duds, but then things suddenly changed – and now they just might be overpowered.
PARADIGM SHIFT
Every time new Magic cards get printed, the game’s paradigm shifts – so what better card to start with than this one? This effect was considered bad for a really long time. And let’s be honest, in a vacuum it is bad. Exchanging your deck and your library isn’t going to be useful most of the time. And for about two decades this was sitting around with no one even recalling its existence.
However, a few things have changed over the last several years that have led to Paradigm Shift actually seeing play in every format it’s legal in – the printing of two very good cards that have alternate win conditions tied to you shrinking your library or erasing it entirely.
The printing of these two cards really shifted the paradigm. While Paradigm Shift is by no means the primary way most decks using Jace and/or the Oracle empty their library, it is a way to do it and thus it has seen play in Legacy and Vintage, where the Oracle especially is a very common win condition.
Commander players haven’t started playing the Shift a ton, but it’s still recently received a major bump. It’s also the kind of card that will only get better with time, as we get more cards that pay us off for having a small library and cards that pay us off for exiling a ton of cards at once.
HELM OF OBEDIENCE
As with Paradigm Shift, Helm of Obedience has an effect that just seems like a waste of time. Milling cards is cool. Mind Control effects are cool too, and this combines both! But it does it in a super clunky way. That is, if you can even figure out what it does. It’s a card with only one printing, and it has some pretty archaic rules text.
Here’s how it works: When you activate it you start milling the opponent one card at a time, and the milling stops when either X cards are milled or a creature card gets milled. The Helm checks every single time an individual card is milled with it to see if either of those conditions are meant. When a creature gets milled, you sacrifice the Helm and put that creature on the battlefield under your control.
That’s incredibly slow, and won’t really feel worth it unless you get something incredible back, but you have very little control over that. So, for a very long time no one really cared about this card. However, over the years several cards have been printed that allow you to generate a fairly easy combo-win with the Helm, and at this point we’ve reached a critical mass.
Because Helm of Obedience’s ability only stops milling once it has either milled X cards or a creature, if you have a replacement effect in play that exiles cards when they go to the graveyard, the Helm never sees either of it’s conditions met, and it just mills the entire library. This makes it a two card combo that can annihilate a single library in one activation.
This has led to this once useless card seeing regular play in Legacy and Vintage and some modest play in Commander, but I think it deserves to see even more play in the format, especially if you have a Commander like Umbris who already likes it when cards go to exile
GOBLIN LORE
The Portal sets are weird. I mean, they were originally created as introductory Magic products but weren’t actually legal in tournament play. It was almost like it’s own simplified version of Magic. It took until 2005 for cards from the various Portal sets to became part of mainstream Magic.
This makes it extra easy to forget these cards even exist, and if you were a beginner back in the mid-to-late 1990s, there’s a good chance you have some hidden gems from these strange sets hiding out somewhere.
Goblin Lore is an example of this. Not only is it from an easily forgettable set, it also has an effect that doesn’t seem particularly good. Paying two mana to draw 4 is undoubtedly powerful, and a feat very few cards at that mana value can match. However, having to discard three cards at random can really hurt.
However, Magic only seems to be getting more and more payoffs for discarding cards, and in the right deck it doesn’t really matter what you discard to the Lore. In 60-card formats, Goblin Lore is often played alongside Hollow One, who can be cast for free off of it while creatures like Marauding Mako and Nethergoyf can feast off of all the discard. This all results in a quick death for your opponent.
There are also some Commanders who can make Goblin Lore feel pretty OP – like Eruth and Rielle, both of whom allow the card to generate even more value. Eruth effectively turns it into a two-mana draw eight, and Rielle makes sure you get value back when you discard.
ENERGY CHAMBER
Of all the cards in this article, Energy Chamber went from trash to treasure the most recently. For a long time, it wasn’t particularly good because it was very slow and restrictive about putting counters on things. It can only put +1/+1 counters on artifact creatures and it can only put charge counters on non-creature artifacts.
But with the release of Edge of Eternities charge counters got a whole lot better. Not only do spacecraft near charge counters to become creatures, there’s also an entire Commander precon that can go wild with charge counters.
Now, getting a charge counter every turn carries a whole lot more value than it used to, and as a result Energy Chamber is suddenly a very relevant card in any Commander deck looking to use these often-used counters.
LEGENDS COLOR SHIFTERS
The design of cycles in the early days of Magic wasn’t always very inspired. This cycle of Legends instants all have the same mana value and almost identical text, with the only difference between them the use of a different color word. Uninspired it may be, but these cards are actually sneaky strong.
While changing the colors of stuff is rarely worth it on its own, the major benefit these cards have is that they are capable of targeting every creature on the battlefield for only a single mana. They are quite literally the only cards in the game that are capable of that.
That makes these cards incredibly powerful, but you do need to have the right deck to really go off with them. The good news is, there are plenty of cards that pay you off for targeting multiple things at once, and we are only going to get more and more of them.
And there is already plenty of powerful stuff you can do with them. For example, if Horobi, Death’s Wail is your Commander, Touch of Darkness becomes a one-sided Wrath that only costs a single mana. Or, if you’re using King of the Oathbreakers, you can use the Black or White color shifters to phase out all of your creatures and then generate a bunch of tokens when they phase in.
We’re only going to get more cards that pay you off for targeting stuff too, and that’s going to lead these incredibly efficient Instants only getting better with time.
END STEP
I hope I brought some old cards to your attention that have become surprisingly useful in the intervening years since they were printed. What old cards do you think are surprisingly powerful? Let me know over on X or Bluesky.
Jacob has been playing Magic for the better part of 24 years, and he especially loves playing Magic’s Limited formats. He also holds a PhD in history from the University of Oklahoma. In 2015, he started his YouTube channel, “Nizzahon Magic,” where he combines his interests with many videos covering Magic’s competitive history. When he’s not playing Magic or making Magic content, he can be found teaching college-level history courses or caring for a menagerie of pets with his wife.