Having a handful of cards is what gives you options in Magic the Gathering. If you don't have any cards in your hand, you can't do anything and your opponent can just wale on you while you sit there and take it.
This card removes those cards from your opponent's hand. Remove his ability to play or fight back and you've got the game all sewn up. Unless he's a blue player, in which case he'll probably screw you over instead :-/
Who says artists don't have a sense of humor? I mean, a literal mind bomb here? That just makes me laugh, while it also grosses me out completely.
Robert Louis Stevenson
In the other gardens
And all up in the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!
Pleasant summer over,
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.
Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!
All the oranges and reds in the picture really made me think of fire, hence this poem.
One of the rules in Magic is that if you can't draw a card from your deck, because there are no more cards, you lose the game. So there is a strategy where you force your opponent to discard cards from their deck and so they lose that way. The strategy is called "Milling" and takes its name from this particular card. It is a viable strategy but is hard to make work. You basically leave yourself open to your opponent's attack and pray your milling strategy works faster than them. It's also rather boring, so you have to want to win more than play a fun game.
Of course, if you don't like your opponent and want to make them suffer, this would be a good way to do that. Grind down their soul while you grind down their deck, mwahahaha...
This was a good card for its time. A flyer for cheap meant you could block some of the bigger flying creatures and while Mesa Pegasus was sure to die, it prevented all the damage to you, which is the point of a creatures' existence in the game. This was a staple in the White Weenie deck archetype. The WW was a deck consisting of a lot of small creatures that would over run your opponent, with an occasional card to help boost them. Your goal was to overwhelm and overrun your opponent before they could respond in time.
This was the only other Merfolk card in 4th Edition. The other was "Lord of Atlantis", which has been showcased already. I built a Merfolk deck, which meant that to get the prerequisite 60 cards, I had to go exploring other Magic the Gathering releases to find Merfolk card. I just looked at the official Magic the Gathering database and in 2026 there are only about 40 Merfolk cards. So you can imagine just how many there were in '95 :-D
But that kind of exploration, that was half the fun of Magic back then. There was no big internet database, so you had to comb through price guide magazines like Scrye OR go to your local game store and literally pick through their boxes of hundreds of unsorted cards. Which is great fun when you are a teenager and everything is new. Now, 30 years later, that kind of thing isn't fun for me. Scrye is now out of business, I don't really play Magic anymore and Doctor Who got his own set of Magic the Gathering cards.
Hmmmm. See, this is the problem with maundering thoughts. You never know where you are going to end up.
Another drawing by Mrs B. These are the Mokonas from the two manga series, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles and xxxHolic. They are psychically linked and provide a connection between the universes in those manga. They are cute and funny and have some attitude.
Mrs B was nice enough to do another drawing for me. I really like all the bright primary colors. It is one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of Superman. So long live the bright colors!
You are about to make a game winning move, about to cast the card that will win the game in one single turn and then BAAAAAM, that annoying blue player plays this card and just short circuits it all. Boooyahhhh. And that's why everybody hated Blue Players back in the 90's. And most blue players liked that infamy :-)
I love this card for how it looks. It captures that essence of so much power that it is literally bursting forth!
Sadly, once AGAIN (for about the 100th time) this is another card that I simply could not get to work for me, not even when I returned to Magic in 2013. I'd build a deck around it, have everything all lined up and then when I would play, my opponent would always benefit more from this card than I did and beat me to a pulp. And this time it wasn't a fun beating, but simply frustrating. I could see my path to victory, but so could my opponent and they always got there first. It didn't take very many games before I gave up the deck and using this card at all. But I do like looking at it, which is good :-)
The only reason you would play this card is if you truly like Chance in your Magic the Gathering games and were willing to lose. I don't like Chance in my MTG games and I don't like losing. So I'll give you one guess how many times I put this card in a deck.
The picture definitely looks like a Clash between Blue and Red. It doesn't have anything to do with how the card actually works, but it sure does fit the title really well.
Man, Red just wants to hurt people, even if it involved hurting themselves. I don't think I ever got this card to work for me and I'm not sure I even tried really. Imagine those things jabbing into your thigh? You'd be hooked like a slab of beef!
I get the Bluehate from a red card, but magnetic mountain, affecting creatures? I'd expect this to affect artifacts, not creatures. Red is famous for destroying or negating artifacts. Well, if all Magic cards made sense, we probably wouldn't have the game at all. Go figure!
:-D
A Summer Day
I:
The dawn laughs out on orient hills
And dances with the diamond rills;
The ambrosial wind but faintly stirs
The silken, beaded gossamers;
In the wide valleys, lone and fair,
Lyrics are piped from limpid air,
And, far above, the pine trees free
Voice ancient lore of sky and sea.
Come, let us fill our hearts straightway
With hope and courage of the day.
II:
Noon, hiving sweets of sun and flower,
Has fallen on dreams in wayside bower,
Where bees hold honeyed fellowship
With the ripe blossom of her lip;
All silent are her poppied vales
And all her long Arcadian dales,
Where idleness is gathered up
A magic draught in summer’s cup.
Come, let us give ourselves to dreams
By lisping margins of her streams.
III:
Adown the golden sunset way
The evening comes in wimple gray;
By burnished shore and silver lake
Cool winds of ministration wake;
O’er occidental meadows far
There shines the light of moon and star,
And sweet, low-tinkling music rings
About the lips of haunted springs.
In quietude of earth and air
‘Tis meet we yield our souls to prayer.
~by Lucy Maude Montgomery
Trying to find a poem about Summer that fit my expectations of this drawing was pretty hard. I think Stanza II of this fits best, but I liked the symmetry of Dawn to Dusk and so included the whole thing.
This guy's work would go a lot faster if he used a computer. What a schlub! Of course, maybe I could hire this guy to destroy AI data centers across the world. About time Magic does something useful.
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