caravel

watch revue starlight

revue starlight megafan, queen of yuri, and cohost's foremost Alice Margatroid enjoyer. no doubles


In Magic: the Gathering, there exists a concept called the “storm scale”. The Storm scale is a metric for measuring the impact that a given ability in Magic has had on the health and quality of the formats in which it appeared. Every distinct ability that has been used in Magic over its thirty-plus year long history is, at this point, given a scale on 1 to 10, where 1 is an ability that is virtually guaranteed to exist in every format and a 10 is, well, “Storm”.

Storm is an insanely powerful ability that allowed a player to cast a spell and copy that spell a number of times equal to the number of spells that they’d cast previously. On their own, the cards with Storm were weak and inefficient – stuff like “Deal 1 damage to any target”, or “Create two 1/1 red Goblin creature tokens”, both costing more than you would normally want to pay for that effect. But when you cast them at the end of a long turn of casting spells and creating mana and casting more spells… it turns out that one damage times twenty is twenty damage. It’s hard to overstate how truly broken Storm is as a mechanic.

The Storm scale was originally created by long-time Magic lead designer (and minor nemesis) Mark Rosewater to answer questions about whether or not a given mechanic would ever return. A 10 is never coming back1. And it turns out, this format is useful for answering a lot of other types of questions! So there’s also the “Rabiah2 scale”, about how likely a given plane is to return. Once again, 1 is the lowest, 10 is never coming back7.


One day, I found myself thinking about the Magic card “Mental Misstep”. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a blue instant that costs either one blue mana or one “Phyrexian mana”, which you pay for with 2 life. It’s a simple effect: “Counter target spell with mana value 1.”8

Here’s the, uh, thing about that.

This card can stop your opponent from making turn one plays for only 2 life. And because you can just pay with life, you can run it in literally any deck. You could run it in a deck with no lands. The game pattern it creates is frustrating too! While counterspells are an important part of Magic, getting counterspelled repeatedly isn’t fun. And it’s definitely not fun when every single deck ever is playing a turn one counterspell. And what’s the best card to play against Mental Misstep? Well, it’s Mental Misstep. I genuinely believe that over the course of thirty years of design, Mental Misstep is the biggest mistake that Wizards of the Coast has ever made9. It’s astonishing that it was printed. It’s astonishing it didn’t get shot down immediately. And as such, it became the cornerstone of my own X scale: the Mental Misstep scale.

You might at first think that the Mental Misstep scale is a measure of a card’s power, but crucially, it’s not about that. Any card can be strong. A card with a high number on this scale is a card that fundamentally breaks the game that makes it less fun. It’s a measure, specifically, of how much of a mistake it was to print. Mental Misstep is not just format-warping, it’s not just very good, it never should have been printed.

I haven’t thought much about what a 1 on the scale is. Shock, maybe? I’m gonna go with Shock. Unless they started printing Lightning Bolt in standard again.

Anyway, every time I see a card in any card game that I find frustrating, I try to quantify that frustration with this scale, and I’ve found that it can help to just work through how bad the card that you’re mad at actually is for the game. I’ve mostly quit Magic at this point, but I use it a lot for Yu-Gi-Oh10, which is a game that prints a lot of Mental Missteps compared to Magic but is much more willing to ban them11.

It’s actually kind of funny comparing the two, because the patterns of play that both games encourage is based on a radically different philosophy. Magic: the Gathering is a complex, layered strategy game where things take time to build up. It's a game of long-term planning. Yu-Gi-Oh, meanwhile, is a card game that encourages being flashy and making big complicated combos and summoning cool dragons and robots and lesbians13. It’s pretty much a fighting game in the format of a turn-based card game.

Would Yu-Gi-Oh break if Mental Misstep was printed in it? Dog, we already have that. We have so many of them. The entire game is based around them. I… oh, sorry, I completely forgot what I was talking about. Scales, right.

Another scale I’ve been thinking about is one for cards that, when you see them, you know the game is about to go in a weird direction. Your opponent is in the kitchen and they’re about to cook, so enjoy the ride. In Yu-Gi-Oh, my first thought was… well, it was Phantasmal Lord Ultimitl Bishbaalkin14. But that card's way too hard to explain, so instead I’m going to talk about Genex Ally Birdman.

Birdman’s effect is, like Mental Misstep, very simple. You can return a monster you control to the hand, and then you can summon Birdman for free. That’s it15. It seems innocuous! But it turns out that a) getting a guy for free is basically always a good thing; b) he is a Tuner, allowing him to help extend various Synchro plays17; and c) “hey, what if I use this to bounce a card that I can use again, or one that gets value off of being returned to the hand?” When you see Genex Ally Birdman across the table, especially in the year 2024 CE18, you know for a fact that your opponent is up to shenanigans.

I don’t have a finishing statement. I just wanted to ramble about Mental Misstep and the ways that its misguided creation can help us understand the card games we play and why we get frustrated by certain types of card – if Mental Misstep had a different effect, would it have been as bad as it was? I also wanted to think about cards like Genex Ally Birdman, a card that probably wasn’t thought through at its creation but is almost a happy accident in the way it fills a specific niche to help you break the game in interesting ways.

I guess the lesson is: if you’re going to have a broken card, ones that let your opponent play the game are better.

That’s it.


1Except for like, random one-offs and stuff? Storm’s flashy, people love it. It’s truly a mechanic that makes you feel like an actual wizard.

2So back in 1993 they made Magic, and then when they decided to make another set, they based it on what we in the English-speaking world refer to as the Arabian Nights stories and named the set accordingly. The set takes place, indeed, primarily3 in Arabia, a real place from the real world, something that Magic has fully moved away from. So now the set takes places in Rabiah, a plane that is not Arabia stop asking. It’s totally different. It starts with an “R”. Please don’t put an “A” in front of it.

3Aladdin’s lamp and ring appear in the set, which makes this tricky. As any good pedant will be willing to tell you, the original story of Aladdin4 is actually set in China5.

4First adapted from an old folktale by Syrian writer Hanna Diyab and then used by Antoine Galland in his French-language collection of tales Les mille et une nuits, which combines a number of traditional Arabian stories with other various tales from the Near East.

5It’s now thought that the story takes place specifically in the Turkestan region of Asia. This includes the modern Chinese6-controlled Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the status of which is far too complicated to describe in a footnote and would likely get both tankies and people who read too much theory angry at me, and I would really rather not deal with them for an article about the trading card game Magic: the Gathering that has already rapidly spiraled out of control. It also might just be that China was being used as a generic name for a faraway land in the dialect of the time.

6Tricked you, huh? You thought I was going to add an additional footnote about the relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China, the latter of which is often referred to in parlance as either Taiwan (after the island it controls) or Chinese Taipei (referring to the state’s Chinese origins and its primary city of Taipei), didn’t you? Well, I’m not going to do it. Go back to reading the article.

7Welcome back to the footnotes. Unlike with the Storm scale’s namesake, we’re pretty sure about this one.

8The original card actually reads “Counter target spell with converted mana cost 1.”, but “converted mana cost” is a dumb and clunky phrase and “mana value” is far better.

9In terms of game design, at least. Oko and companions were pretty bad too. Incidentally, they’re both 10s.

10I’m not sure what the Yu-Gi-Oh equivalent would be. I’m thinking Maxx “C”.

11Except for the Horrible Insect, and even then, it’s banned in the Western format12.

12Yes, East Asia has a separate format from the rest of the world. It’s referred to as the OCG, which stands for Official Card Game, while the global format is the TCG, for Trading Card Game. There’s also Master Duel, the official online simulator, which has its own special banlist separate from the other two. Wait come back I promise this is a good card game!!

13These are the primary categories of Yu-Gi-Oh! card, though some cards fall into multiple categories, such as Centur-Ion Legatia XII or the Dragonmaids.

14No, “Ultimitl” is not a typo on my part. We think it’s a combination of “Ultimaya” from “Ultimaya Tzolkin”, which is a card that this card is a form of, and Xibalba, the ninth level of the underworld in Mayan mythology, which is called Mitnal in the language of the K’iche’ people of Central America. The nation of Guatemala is named after the K’iche’ via Nahuatl and Spanish. Anyway, people have found so many ways to do stupid shit with this card that they banned it on Master Duel.

15Well, pretty much. He also gets 500 ATK if you monster you returned to your hand was WIND-attribute, but this is irrelevant. Oh, and if you’re curious what the actual card text is, it’s “You can return 1 face-up monster you control to the hand; Special Summon this card from your hand, but banish it when it leaves the field, also it gains 500 ATK if the returned monster was WIND on the field.” There’s a reason I summarized16.

16I’ve been writing this under the (possibly misguided) notion that it will be read by more Magic players than Yu-Gi-Oh! players for a bunch of complicated reasons. If you want to learn more, I recommend starting with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

17I literally just said I was writing this assuming that it would be Magic players reading it, and then I put in this sentence. However, I’ve been refusing to cut all sorts of dumb bullshit I wrote, so why should this be any different? And so it stays.

18You might think that this footnote is about my use of “CE” here, but even I can’t bring myself to care about that. Instead, I just wanted to ask anyone reading this in not-2024 – do people still play Genex Ally Birdman?


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @caravel's post:

I would personally put Field of the Dead above Mental Misstep on my "how did this get printed" scale, mostly because I'm grading on a curve of how obvious it should have been that the card was a mistake. Then again I've never played in a format with Misstep. Anyway real good post.