Natalie

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I GOT SICK OF BEATING THIS DECK OVER A YEAR AGO JUST LET IT DIE

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.