Game Breaker/Tabletop Games/Magic: The Gathering: Difference between revisions

::But there are far more. Bear in mind notes regarding bans and restrictions; Wizards have more recently taken a far more liberal stance on these, and many cards that were once restricted or even banned entirely have had their rulings relaxed from their previous status. In addition, most card errata that radically change a card's function (eg those formerly in place for Great Whale and Time Vault) have been removed in favour of simply clarifying the rules actually on the card.

* Probably the earliest broken combo in Magic was the combination of [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=194967 Channel] and [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=191076 Fireball], which allowed a first-turn kill to anyone who could get hold of one mana more than it took to cast the two spells. Legend has it an early tournament caused the modern limit of four non-land cards; both players had 20 copies of Channel, 20 copies of Fireball, and 20 copies of Black Lotus, with the match being eventually decided by one player failing to kill his opponent on the first turn. Channel was banned for a very long time, until it became clear the game had changed so much that paying 19 life to power a single easily-countered Sorcery was tantamount to suicide; as a testament to its ability to be used for terrible things, it remains restricted to one copy per deck even in formats where it's legal.

* Perhaps the most powerful card-drawing card ever printed is [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=1147 Contract From Below]. This references an old mechanic called "ante" where players set aside cards at the start of the game and the winner took them at the end, which was axed after falling foul of anti-gambling laws in some US states. The Contract is a ''ridiculous'' card; sure, you ante up an additional card and discard your hand (the latter of which could be ''beneficial'' in the right deck), but you get 7 cards for only one mana. Like all ante cards, it's illegal in all formats; even if this wasn't so, it's staggeringly overpowered and would likely ''still'' be banned.

* The first combo deck in the modern sense was called "[http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/deck/99 Prosbloom]," after the two cards that comprised it, [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=10816 Prosperity] and [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=3529 Cadaverous Bloom]. Rather than relying on creature combat, this deck was based around the "engine" created by these two cards; cards were discarded for mana from Cadaverous Bloom, which then fuelled a Prosperity; this pulled in more cards for the Bloom, with the eventual goal of creating a mega [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=26618 Drain Life] for the killing blow. This totally altered the way the game was played.