> Crucially, by design, no color is best
Except for blue of course.
Except for blue of course.
The white one, Healing Salve, is very weak, it has later been replaced by a strictly better card.
The red (Lightning Bolt), green (Giant Growth) and black (Dark Ritual) are very solid cards and were seen in most decks of their respective colors in the early days of Magic, would be a bit too powerful today.
The blue one, Ancestral Recall, is part of the "power 9": the 9 most famous, overpowered and expensive Magic cards. It didn't make it past the ironically called "unlimited" edition.
I don't think those three are super comparable; Dark Ritual is much stronger than Lighting Bolt, which is much stronger than Giant Growth. Dark Ritual has purposely not been printed in a "standard legal" set since 1999; it's not legal in the Modern format (cards printed in standard sets since 2003), only in formats that allow cards from any time period. Lighting Bolt is legal in Modern, with its last standard printing being in 2010, although the head designer has indicated that they wouldn't print it in a standard set now. Giant Growth was printed in a standard legal set just last year, meaning it's still currently legal to play in the Standard format (roughly speaking, cards printed in standard sets in the past two calendar years).
It's interesting to note that when the ability to produce a lot of quick mana with a sorcery was shifted to Red, two of them (Seething Song and Rite of Flame) also got banned (in Modern).
Interestingly even the third most powerful boon is powerful enough to be a multi-format all star.
The last two of course... are not.
But don't forget all of the other broken stuff blue had from the start: timewalk and timetwister, to name two.
We old people used to joke that the most powerful card printed of all item was "island".
Blue's color identity is just 'being really good at Magic' it seems
And that's a bit tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness blue is the color of mind tricks and the hacker mentality, so it makes sense blue prefers manipulating game state in ways other colors just won't think of doing, and unfortunately the game's designers grossly underestimated just how powerful "manipulating game state" is.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/game-info/gameplay/rules-and-fo...
Three of the six cards (still) banned in standard are Green and two of them (Oko and Once Upon a Time) are also banned in Modern.
Blue is still the strongest color in Legacy and Vintage I think, even if the last few sets had a huge impact.
Also, Oko and Uro are also blue.
True, and as you say UG is a powerful combination, which is also kind of a new thing for me.
Those bans are a pain in the ass. They do it to hamstring the OP decks, which I understand and applaud, because nothing sucks more than having to play 4 copies of the same deck in one event. But then, because a bunch of us are using the same cards in our goofy rogue decks, these decks are also screwed and that ends up reducing diversity also. E.g. the ban of Fires of Invention has just screwed up my RW Giants deck. I mean, it's a Giants deck. About the only thing that made it viable at all was Fires.
- Teferi