This list is nostalgia bait too - not because I'm some 'Magic reached its platonic form in [year I started playing] and has been ruined every year since' boomer but because these cards are so cool, just look at them!
STE (it's DRC and STE, not Darcy and Steve) represents continuity and change at once. In 2005 this lil' guy was a cornerstone of Constructed - it was a dominant force in Block, Standard, and Extended when preteen Dom was scouring the internet for grainy PT Top 8 webcast footage despite barely understanding what he was watching - and when I began playing in earnest this was a workhorse in every deck I was drawn to, from Heartbeat Combo to 4c/5c Gifts piles (more on that later) across all formats. A decade later I'd be gamely casting STE on T2 in Titanshift; I've cast Green Sun's Zenith for STE in Modern in 2025 and felt great about it!
Many iconic old cards have been power crept and obsoleted many times over; others are so bonkers that they will never go near them again. STE sits in that perfect sweet spot: Rampant Growths writ large are above the curve for Magic today (which actually makes sense I think since every deck can use extra mana so well) and this is a unique, historically good Rampant Growth - but it doesn't feel broken at all and looks totally at home alongside the greatest hits of recent sets in a Cube.
He taught me a lot about manabases, rules tricks whose abolition ~ruined Magic~ ("with damage on the stack..."), arguing on the internet (I couldn't form arguments as coherently or maturely then but even I knew "STE is worse than Rampant Growth now because of Sudden Shock" was a crock of shit)
I really like the Suspend cards - the game has a different feel and rhythm as soon as Ancestral Vision or Lotus Bloom starts hovering over the board with dice on it - and Gargadon pushed the envelope on what those could do even in the most creative set so far. Back then sac outlets of any kind were hard to come by + the free ones were all somewhat narrow - if you wanted to enjoy silly Balance combos you had to ponder the Zuran Orb - and there were fewer weird build-arounds in general. This was a welcome free outlet for the Reveillark nonsense I gush about here but the 'manual' Gargadons where you play it + summon it in one turn or calculate things just right to bring in a lethal Gargadon are incredibly satisfying. It's aged beautifully too - the average game has so many more random rectangles to feed to it and there are lots of rewards for sacrificing (just look at current talk of the town
Obsessive Pursuit!) as well as explicit A + B combos like Titania - and in my Cubes these days it feels like a suitably Time Spiral-esque blend of old and new. Hopefully we get the Greatest Gargadon eventually...
An all-timer that's still tremendously deep and compelling after 20 years. Ravnica was my first 'real' set/block and the Extended PT LA was the first competitive tournament I was gripped by and Loam is a star of both. Dredge is a historic design mistake but Loam feels like the perfect Dredge design even if its own repetitiveness might offend some modern sensibilities. It spawned many decks across Extended/Modern/Legacy by itself and gives you a lot to care about - card quantity, recurring specific lands, self-mill, even just having a spell to cast on demand
No other card featured as much in my early days of Magic - the defining card of Kami Block, one of the coolest cards in Standard, the thing that got me learning about Vintage, and the centerpiece of my dodgiest Extended brews where the spells and mana were as sus as each other. When I finally tried to Get Good and picked up UG Heartbeat (one of my true loves), Gifts was there. One of the happiest things about flirting with a GY-centric Cube is getting to fully embrace Gifts again
That OG art is just ineffably alluring too!
It seems weird in an era of infinite modal spells/mechanics but the Commands were revolutionary in their time and Cryptic was/is by far the best. So many games came down to Cryptic and so many blue mirrors became wonky Cryptic fights; so often it's the only card in your deck that can buy you time or get you across the finish line. It was great in tempo (Faeries remains the scariest example of its kind to this day), control, and combo or prison too; even today I was daydreaming about
Chakra Meditation making it easier than ever to Cryptic lock in Cube! My set were so heavily played that they are barely tournament legal any more and I was glad to treat myself to a gorgeous Lorwyn foil that will have a place in my Cubes forever
HM: Reveillark, Pernicious Deed
