When a Magic: the Gathering card becomes too strong it can be banned making it illegal to play in a format and over the course of the game's 30-year history some of the most powerful cards of all time from Black Lotus to Oko, Thief of Crowns and Lurrus of the Dream-Denhave found themselves banned in various formats but not every banned card is as strong. In fact there have been some pretty bad cards manned over the years! So today we're going to count down the least powerful Magic: the Gathering cards that, for one reason or another, have managed to end up banned! Number 10: Ivory Tower restricted in 1994. Today cards that only gain life or more or less memes and one of the first things that a new Magic player learns when they pick up the game is that life gain is usually overrated, but back in the mid-90's things were different with not just one but two life gain cards hitting the ban list with Ivory Tower being restricted in 1994. Back in the earliest days of Magic they didn't really ban cards instead if something was overpowered they would restrict it so you could only play a single copy of the card in your deck which is a tradition that is carried on in Vintage to this day and also as a bonus Zuran Orb which was banned in Standard in 1997. When you think about what these cards actually do - Tower gaining something like three life in turn and Zuran Orb letting you sack of land to gain two life the idea they could be bannably strong is almost laughable through the lens of 2023 Magic, but you have to remember that back in the early 90s creatures were dreadful. In a world where players were trying to to kill each other and close out games with Spectral Bears and Woolly Spiders and Deadly Insects (and here I'm not even being hyperbolic all those cards actually showed up in decks that top-8ed events like Pro Tours and Worlds) gaining a few extra life each turn with an Ivory Tower could keep you alive for a long, long time. And that's actually the official reason these cards were banned: it wasn't so much that they were too powerful they just made games take too long. Creatures were so bad that if both players managed to draw multiple copies of Ivory Tower it's possible that neither would be able to kill each other so for the sake of players time and sanity Wizards added both cards to the ban list. #9: Kird Ape Extended in 1997. It's not really fair to consider Kird Ape a bad creature. Two power and three toughness for one mana, assuming you have the correct land types, is actually a pretty solid deal. On the other hand Kird Ape is an incredibly fair card. It's just a creature that attacks and blocks which makes this addition to the Extended band list in 1997 super odd. Weirder still when Kird Ape was banned Necropotence was legal in the same format. Apparently an almost on curve creature is considered to be too good while one of the most notoriously broken degenerate combo pieces in the game's history was just fine. A lot about 90s Magic doesn't really make much sense. But the story gets even better! When Wizards release the banned card themed From The Vault Exiled in 2009 they included Kird Ape with a small write-up about the banning saying the card was considered to be too powerful a creature for the format so it was removed it's "quite rare that a creature built only to attack or block causes serious problems and that's why you no longer find things like Kird Ape or Tarmogoyf on their modern banned list" Okay, so Kird APe was considered too good in the 90s but Wizards realized they were wrong and they would no longer ban creatures that just to attack and block. Makes sense, right? Well not exactly because in 2013 Wizards decided that banning Kird Ape style cards was back on the menu as Wizards banned Wild Nacatl - essentially an updated take on Kird Ape - in Modern! The reasoning was pretty convoluted. At the time Zoo was the best aggro deck in Modern and Wizards was hoping that other aggro decks would emerge if they banned Wild Nacatl so they got rid of the Cat. But instead Zoo just disappeared from the meta and other aggro decks failed to emerge so a year later Wizards unbanned the Cat. Today in a world of Modern Horizons fueled power creep both Kird Ape and Wild Natacl are legal but mostly go unplayed. #8: 2020 culturally offensive cards in all formats. In 2020 Wizards banned seven cards from the earliest days of Magic in every format that were to quote Wizards "racist or culturally offensive." From an art and flavor perspective there's no doubt that many of the these cards didn't age very well, but purely from the perspective of gameplay and power level there's no doubt that these cards are among the worst cards that are currently residing on the ban list. Even before the banning none of the cards were really played anywhere simply because they were so underpowered. #7 Juggernaut an Extended in 1997. In all honesty I really can't figure out why Juggernaut was banned in Extended back in 1997 other than pretty much everyone agrees that it never should have been banned. As far as I can tell it's similar to Kird APe a 5/3 for four was considered to be pretty above the curve for a creature back in the mid-90s and Wizards with afraid that people might actually win by attacking with creatures rather than comboing off with Necropotence or blowing up all their opponents lands with Armageddon so they ban Juggernaut. In the years since Juggernaut has been reprinted several times and at this point it's so underpowered it doesn't even show up in Standard. It's that bad. #6: Sensei's Divining Top Extended in 2008 Modern in 2011 and Legacy in 2017. Sensei's Divining Top isn't a bad card. The ability to rearrange the top three cards of your deck for a single mana can actually be pretty powerful especially if you build around it with synergistic mechanics and cards like Counterbalance or miracles, but it's also a very fair card. Sowhy over, the course of a decade ,was it banned in essentially every competitive format? The reason Top is banned isn't that it's too good, it's that it's too slow. Top hits the battlefield in the game grinds to a halt because the correct way to play Top is to activate it every turn and sometimes multiple times a turn. A typical Sensei's Divining Top turn goes something like this: a player activates Top they spend three minutes figuring out how to stack the top three cards of their deck. Eventually they figure out that they don't like the cards so they put them back and then they crack a fetchland and shuffle their deck and then they activate Top again. They spend another three minutes rearranging the top of their deck and after they put the cards back their opponent goes to Lightning Bolt one of their creatures and in response the top player activates the sensei's divining top tanks for a while rearranges the top three cards of their library they finally put them back. And then the Lightning Bolt resolves. Finally the player plays their land for the tournament guess what it's another fetch land. Everyone groans. The player cracks their fetch, shuffles their library and activates Top again spends another three minutes staring at the top cards at their library before they finally put them back and passing the turn. At this point the janitor turns off the lights in the convention center because he's ready to finally go home... and in response they activate the Top. Basically Top ends up finding itself banned in every format for the sake of players sanitt. Games and tournaments took forever to finish with this card in the meta which eventually led to Wizards adding it to the ban list. As far as power level is concerned Sensei's Divining Top is just fine - it's not the kind of card that needs to be banned based on power level - but it's a miserable card to play with or against or even just have someone in the same tournament as you play because rounds takes so long to finish which is why it ended up getting banned everywhere. #5: Attune with Aether, Standard in 2018. Attune with Aether goes to show just how much context matters when it comes to the power of a Magic card. similar cards like Lay of the Land existed in Magic for decades and not only were they unbroken they weren't even played, not even a little bit, they were just super bad cards. Paying a mana for a basic land just isn't worth the cost. But in 2017 and 2018 Standard the parasitic energy mechanic was dominant. cards like Whirler Virtuso so when Aetherworks Marvel we're at the top of the format which made any card that generated energy pretty strong no matter how bad the effect on the card might be. First Wizards banned Emrakul, the Promised End, in part to try to power down Aetherworks Marvel, but energy remained at the top of the meta. Eventually they hesitantly banned Aetherworks Marvel itself but energy simply shifted to being a mid-range deck rather than a combo deck looking to cheat huge things into play and it still was the best deck in the format. A year after the Emrakul ban in six months after the Aetherworks Marvel plan players had simply had enough of playing with or against energy every other match of standard so Wizards banned Attune with Aether and also Rogue Refiner, two popular cards that just happened to make energy. Even after all this energy was still one of the best decks in the format! All this to say Attune with Aether isn't a good card - actually it's by far one of the least powerful cards to have ever been banned - the energy mechanic was just so much better than everything else in Kaladesh Standard that Wizards needed to ban any random card that happened to make energy in an attempt to keep the format playable, which is what eventually led to Attune with Aether getting the axe. #4: Rukh Egg, restricted in 1994. The 1994 restriction of Rukh Egg is a super weird one. If you read the original Arabian Nights printing of Rukh Egg closely you'll see that it says when Rukh Egg to the graveyard make a 4/4 red flying creature token. Wizards intended this ability to work only when Rukh Egg went to the graveyard from the battlefield, so essentially when Rukh Egg dies the egg cracks and you get the Rukh, but they accidentally left the words "from the battlefield" off the card. As such players realized that they could add Rukh Egg to their deck, pass their first turn discard Rukh Egg to hand size and make a 4/4 flyer! And remember this was happening during an era when Wizards was so afraid of creatures being good they were banning Kird Apes and Juggernauts a turn one 4/4 flyer is absurd actually it would still be absurd today even in 2023 Magic. Today Wizards would simply make an announcement admitting to their mistake and errating the card basically they just say "hey we left the word off the card, what this actually does is works when it dies, when it goes to the graveyard from the battlefield." But back in the early days of Magic Wizards had a rule that cards must be played as written and this was a rule that Wizards didn't want to break. So the idea of just errating Rukh Egg was off the table. As a result Wizards simply banned Rukh Egg to make up for their mistake. Oddly the same thing happened with a card called Orcish Orriflamme for the same reason. It was misprinted to have a mana value of two rather than four which led to Wizards just banning the whole thing as well. Eventually Wizards would soften their "you must play cards as written" rule which allowed them to unban these cards and errata them to work the way they were intended. #3: Divining Intervention banned in 1994. Normally cards end up on the Magic ban list because they win too many games which makes the banning of Divine Intervention in 1994 especially funny because enchantment literally can't win a game. If you manage to get to 8 mana and get the enchantment on the battlefield and keep it there a few turns your reward isn't winning the game it's the game ending in a draw. The problem is that players hated the card because it would slow down matches. To win a match of Magic you need to win two out of three games and games that end in a draw don't count towards the record so in 1994 there was an endemic of players playing Divine Intervention as a way to try to draw the game if they thought they were in a losing position which ended up greatly slowing down tournaments. You'd have a bunch of records that were like 1-1 and four draws or something and no one could actually finish their matches. As a result Wizards ended up Banning Divine Intervention just two months after it was printed in Legends making it, at the time, the fastest banning in the game history! #2: Beacon of Immortality in commander in 2004. Beacon of Immortality being banned in Commander in 2004 is hilarious for two reasons. First like Ivory Tower or Zuran Orb all Beacon of Immortality does is gain life. Sure it has potential to gain a lot of life in a format where players start with 40, if you don't take any damage and resolve a Beacon you'll double up to 80 life, but that's all the card does. While I couldn't find an actual explanation of the banning my guess is the logic is essentially the same as Ivory Tower: once someone gains 40-ish life it just takes too long for a game of Commander to end so Beacon of immortality ended up being banned. The second reason that the beacon of Immortality banning is just so funny to me is that as far as I can tell it was the second card to actually be banned in the Commander format. The first was Test of Endurance in 2002 and then in 2004 it was Beacon of Immortality and then about a year after that there was another Commander ban this update and that one had the literal Power Nine - Black Lotus, Time Walk, Ancestral Recall - the most broken cards in the history of Magic! So somehow in the eyes of 2004 Commander players apparently Beacon of Immortality was just better or more problematic than Black Lotus which absolutely blows my mind. And thus started the long-held Commander tradition of maintaining a ban list that makes absolutely zero sense which unfortunately continues to this day. Thankfully the RC or the pre-RC Commander banning group came to their senses in 2007 and removed Beacon of Immortality from the commander ban list so if you want to gain a bunch of life you can play it today. #1: Sword of the Ages restricted in 1994. We've finally reached the top card on our list the worst card to ever be banned in the history of Magic: the Gathering is Sword of the Ages and I would argue it's not even particularly close. The Legends rare is a six-man artifact that comes into play tapped and lets you exile it in any number of creatures you control to deal damage to something equal to the combined power of those creatures. Basically Sword of the Ages would let you Fling your entire team at your opponent which technically meant that if you could get 20 power of creatures on the battlefield resolve a six mana artifact survive a turn for it to untap and then sacrifice everything you would win the game. As Wizards put it in their ban announcement "it allows any creature heavy deck to do a huge amount of nearly unstoppable damage." Whiile this is technically true remember we're talking early 90s Magic. This is Kird APe banned Magic, Juggernaut banned Magic. Many decks at the time didn't have 20 total powers of creature in their entire deck list while cards like Counterspell and Disenchant that easily deal with Sword of the Agews were everywhere. In fact creatures were so useless and so little played in 1994 that it was literally (although maybe somewhat hyperbolically) known as the creatureless era of Magic basically no one played Sword of the Ages because not only is it a bad card but it simply didn't work with the other cards or the metagame at the time which makes banning it downright silly and immortalizes Sword of the Ages as the worst Magic" the Gathering card to ever be banned! Want even more Magic? Well check out the video about the most miraculous top deck in the history of Magic: the Gathering or maybe the one about the best reanimation targets the game has ever seen
