Awesome but Impractical/Tabletop Games/Magic: The Gathering

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • A lot of combos are like this: they'll win spectacularly, but only if you can play four different cards on the same turn that require three different colors and no counterspells from your opponent. Guess the odds on that actually happening.
  • Spawnsire of Ulamog's ability lets you play as many of the humongous Eldrazi cards as you want, right now, for no extra cost, and without even having to have them in your deck... if you can somehow get the whopping twenty mana it takes to activate it. It wouldn't be terrible, except that having all of your Eldrazi at once is almost always overkill--for just over half the mana cost as the Spawnsire of Ulamog, you could just cast Ulamog itself and skip the middleman. In tournaments this is further nerfed by a ruling that cards from outside the game can only come from your sideboard, which has a limited size.
    • For further impracticality you can pair this with a method to add those Eldrazi you summoned to your deck and Battle of Wits to win via Battle of Wits. Has no practical purpose for the simple reason that, short of long banned board wipes, you've already won the game if you can activate the 20 mana ability and have over a hundred Eldrazi cards. The only purpose this combo has is showing you can win via Battle of Wits in a format with a limited deck size.
  • The Elder Dragons (Arcades Sabboth, Chromium, Nicol Bolas, Palladia-Mors, and Vaevictis Asmadi), five cards with powerful stats and splashy effects but which were almost impossible to play thanks to their casting costs and which required a constant influx of mana every turn to keep them in play.
  • Any of the legends from Legends could be considered.
  • Much like the Elder Dragons, Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker. His Gain Loyalty ability is to utterly destroy any non-creature card in the game (in addition to providing an obscene boost to his Loyalty total), and his ultimate effectively left your opponent topdecking with very little resources. The catch? You need 8 mana, 4 of which were split into three different colors. That's never been an unattainable feat, but the same block had Cruel Ultimatum in the same colors for one less mana that would almost always win the game when it was cast; Nicol Bolas, while still a kitchen table favorite to this day, was left on the sidelines as all the competitive decks opted for the seven-mana sorcery instead.
  • Darksteel Reactor and Helix Pinnacle are big, flashy, nigh-unkillable instant-win spells, but most of the time, the game is already over long before they finish charging, and if it goes that long, you could probably win just as easily with any generic flying creature.
  • Most Instant Win Condition cards end up being impractical. They range from suffering enough damage to reduce yourself to exactly 1 life to winning ten coin flips. While it's incredibly satisfying to use these spells and actually have them go off, and Battle of Wits has even seen some high-level tournament play, it's much more practical to use conventional means. In particular, most of these shenanigans requires you to do things that would have won you the game anyways, like pumping a creature to 20 power [1]. Attacking the opponent directly with a creature with 20 power usually meant victory.
  • Triggering the ability of Door to Nothingness can be especially difficult. You have to have two mana of each of the five colors to trigger its ability, which is far from trivial to achieve. However, if you do succeed in this, the target player loses the game on the spot[2].
  • The Epic spells from Saviors of Kamigawa are five spells with awesome, flashy effects that repeat themselves every turn for the rest of the game after you cast them the first time. The drawback is that you can cast the Epic spell every turn, but nothing else--you can't cast any new spells. Enduring Ideal, the white one, did break out into the tournament scene for a short time, but the other four never caught on.
  • The card Chalice of Life can kill an opponent in four turns--assuming you can keep your life from going to zero AND keep the card on the field long enough to transform it, AND keep the opponent from gaining life, not to mention the fact that you have to wait for your life to get to THIRTY just to use it...
  1. ↑ Although that card has other effects that make it slightly more useful
  2. ↑ Unless it is countered, the target is changed, the target is (or becomes) immune to losing the game, or the target player does something in reponse to win the game
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Awesome_but_Impractical/Tabletop_Games/Magic:_The_Gathering?oldid=1959024"