General Monthly Fun Q: What is your favorite Magic card?

What is your favorite Magic card?

Mine is


Very difficult to pick the favorite one because I love so many. But you have to pick exactly one! :D
I also started last years's "We Make the Cube" thread with Treasure Map.

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Past Fun Q
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(14) Worst Card to Win With & Best to Lose to
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/monthly-fun-q-worst-card-to-win-with-best-to-lose-to.3640/

(13) Favorite Topic On Riptidelab
https://riptidelab.com/forum/thread...r-favorite-thing-or-topic-on-riptidelab.3625/

(12) Least Favorite Place to Live
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/monthly-fun-q-what-land-would-you-least-want-to-live-in.3617/

(11) Other Hobbies
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/monthly-fun-q-what-is-your-favorite-hobby-besides-magic.3598/

(10) Most expensive card
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/weekly-fun-q-what-is-your-most-expensive-card.3569/
 
This is so difficult! I'm going with a nostalgic choice:



This was one of the first cards I owned and I loved how it protected me from everything (yeah I was a noob)
 
This is so difficult! I'm going with a nostalgic choice:



This was one of the first cards I owned and I loved how it protected me from everything (yeah I was a noob)

When I was a kid I used to day dream about how much it would hurt if my opponents’ creature was ran into by this wall. Or flown into. It felt very powerful.
 
I'll go with an nostalgic choice, too:

I love the artwork and it took me till '98 to own one.
And I daydreamed a lot about using this on an unsuspecting opponent...
 
ThornElemental__65207.1653328705.jpg


I first played Magic way back in 5th grade with classmates during recess/lunch and also on the bus rides home. Prior to this I was waaaaay more into Pokemon, but mostly as a collectible and because the games and show were obviously the most important thing in any 7-10 year old boy's life at the time. Magic was the first actual trading card game that I understood enough to play (Yu-Gi-Oh wouldn't take off for another year or two).

We didn't really know much about the game aside from the basic phases per turn, the stack wasn't really a concept we understood, and we didn't really have a whole lot of cards. However, 7th Edition had come out the year prior and the cards just looked so cool. The art was all "adult" looking instead of just colorful monsters and they had all this formal language and they just felt way cooler. We'd mostly have decks in Jund colors if I remember correctly, lots of vanilla creatures, and most games came down to playing out creatures and just jamming away back and forth until someone won the damage race. Very little strategy, mostly just hoping you drew your bomb before the other guy. And those bombs were usually Vizzerdrix or Trained Orgg. Hell, I remember feeling invincible with a Heartwood Treefolk against any players that had a green deck.

However among all cards at the time among the various decks we had, Thorn Elemental was THE card to own. Awesome art that was super iconic, it was shiny unlike most cards (7ED Starter Decks all came with one), and it was damn powerful because you would just take 7 damage no matter what blocks be damned. Didn't even have Forestwalk; you just took all that damage. 3 hits before you're dead, insane! How do you stop it? As a 5th grader, you just didn't. All understanding of the game was hearsay through your little group of 10 year old friends and no one had time for the rules so we played a primitive version of Magic at the time across the board. I took up Yu-Gi-Oh once I hit middle school for a bit and basically forgot about Magic until college came around and a classmate in my Physics class reintroduced me to the game in 2013. I got super into it and have been playing again ever since.

Every time I see a Thorn Elemental I can't help but recall those times as a kid where we'd just play cards with eachother on the floor (what even are sleeves in the early 00s) and across the aisle on the bus ride back home. I actually recently found a NM copy while going through a ton of cards and you'd best believe I double-sleeved that bad boy, put it in a hard case toploarder, and pinned it on the wall in my work desk cubicle.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Like Chris, I've got two answers as well :)



This is the card that got me into brewing, and into Stephanie Pui-Mun's art. It's the card that taught me the value of synergy, and the power of playing something unexpected.

W3S0gvb.jpg


This is my favorite custom design of mine. I'm in love with how it interacts with itself, with white's game plan in general, and how it cements prowess a bit better in white, by adding another powerful option besides Seeker of the Way and Monastery Mentor. Also, it's simply a blast to play :)
 
Oh man depends on so many things but it's probably some janky build-around enchantment that I played at FNM. Astral Slide, Harness the Storm, something like that.

Best stories definitely came from ramping into this bad boy in 2013 standard



Bullying UW/Esper Control before Theros came in and decimated the cardpool was funny as hell, when X-cost spells like Sphinx's Revelation and Bonfire of the Damned was -the- way to end games, and Thragtusk was the scariest thing a green deck was doing to you. You just got to turn all of those things -off-.
Sure Junk Rites was an iffy matchup thanks to Acidic Slime and Angel of Serenity in the mainboard, but even they just had to roll the wheel and hope they didn't hit one of their 8 dorks instead. Aristocrats and Humans were the scary matchups, but a good Turn//Burn was usually enough to buy the time you needed.
- Sphinx's Rev into Syncopate for 0. Syncopate the Syncopate out of desperation, hitting a Think Twice. Realize the entire deck is CA and x-cost spells. Commit suicide by Drownyard in despair.
- How much are you paying for that miracle'd Bonfire? Everything? It's a Farseek dude, I think you got overexcited.
- Oh, you have the Slime - wait no it's a Avacyn's Pilgrim, oh well.
- Were you hoping to flicker your swagtusk and stabilize? Well you're paying 4 mana for a scooze and I'm spending {R}{R} for a Nicol Bolas.
It was a local challenge to win an FMN with Tibalt in the maindeck, which only two decks managed for the entire time AVR was in the format - a Varolz, the Scar-Striped deck that scavenged Slumbering Dragon and Vexing Devil onto hasty attackers and used Tibalt as a joke discard outlet, and this absolute pile which was basically just going for highrolls off this and/or Unexpected Results. So much of my fond memories of this card comes from the people I was playing with at the time, mind - one of the few times I've had a robust group of really good magic players with very little ego invested into their skill at the game.
 
1664731008421.png

This specific version of Order of Midnight. It's the perfect mix of:
1. Incredible looks, artwork and frame.
2. Elegance and simplicity in design.
3. High Angency, both in modes and targets, and not being able to block makes it even more skill testing.
4. It's not only value, but graveyard value, the sweetest kind of value.

This card is so incredible, it beats out all my nostalgia favorites like Nightmare or Dimir Guildmage.
 
I don't think they'll top the Eldraine showcase frame for a very, very long time. I cant think of another frame treatment they've done that was so evocative, legible, and consistently appealing across cards.

I agree. Maybe the nee stained glass from Dominaria United. Or Strixhaven's Mystical Archive.

This might be an idea for a ‘Monthly Fun Q’ in a year or two when Wizards have had time to give us quite the selection to favor and hate.
 
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These were my favorite cards when I first started playing. Rumbling Slum was the rare of the first booster pack I opened and even as a Magic noob I salivated at efficiently-costed beaters. Greater Gargadon ignited my imagination by its art, its size, and its ability to trade my resources for time, a consideration I hadn't imagined would be possible in a turn-based card game. Dust Elemental was also endlessly evocative and cool to a young Miles and sent me down the rabbit hole of the Gatherer for hours upon hours to figure out the best way to turn the downside into all-upside. I landed, at the time, on a Soul Sisters-styled shell, which was able to hold its own with Extended Zoo decks!

Now days, I just shortcut to saying Greater Gargadon is my favorite card, half because of nostalgia but also because any deck I'm playing in my cube that includes the 'Don is guaranteed to be a fun time. But were I truly honest with myself, I would say Faithless Looting. There's just nothing more I want to be doing in Magic than filling up my graveyard; except, of course, drawing cards. And Faithless Looting gets me there.

pidw-2-faithless-looting.jpg

Shoutout to the IDW comic promo art for this card too, so that I can shout that I'm the "greatest thief in the multiverse!!" every time I loot. RIP Dack :(
 
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