We've covered the best, so it's time to look back at the other end of the spectrum. Here are my picks for the worst Limited formats of the Arena era.

Through the Omenpaths

Dread it. Run from it. Legally distinct spider-bloke finds you just the same. You're probably sick to death of reading and hearing about this set, but it's not like an article with this title can just ignore it. Sorry. The unfinished bodge-job is here to ruin your fun and cancel your Youtube show. We have to talk about it.

Whatever your thoughts on Universes Beyond, standard release schedules and so on, we can all agree that the Limited format is one of the worst of all time, let alone the Arena era. Where to even start? How about the fact that Red is about as close to genuinely unplayable as any colour has ever been? Magic players love hyperbole, but in this case it's barely an exaggeration. How about the way the draft section is so uninteresting that it drags the idea of pick-two down with it. Honestly, I think pick-two isn't even a bad idea, but it does exacerbate the fact that OM1 drafts are already very on-rails. They end up playing out like the worst of tribal sets, where you just pick every card that says Merfolk on it.

What really drags OM1 down, though, is that the game play is just not very interesting. I won my first draft of the set and still have never gone back to do a second. The game play was so uninvolved - play my creatures on-curve and hope for the best - that even winning wasn't enjoyable. Awful stuff.

Ikoria

This might be a divisive one. I know some people love this set. I usually love it when build-around gold cards are strong, but in this set there was one in particular that was just too good. Sure, nowadays Zenith Flare is somewhat self-correcting thanks to Premier Draft. Sure, there were other things to do, and yeah this deck folded to a well-timed counterspell. Sure, the first few times you drafted it yourself, it felt very fun and cool to play an honest-to-god combo deck in Limited, but the joke got old real quick.

The other major mechanic of Ikoria was also kind of miserable. Flavourfully, Mutate is awesome. Mechanically it's kind of a mess, although Arena dealt with a lot of the issues that plagued paper. In limited it often played out a lot like Bestow: if the targeted creature got killed in response, you weren't totally blown-out, but you wouldn't get the trigger. If you got to chain multiple triggers over a few turns, however, it could quickly get out of hand. Watching an Auspicious Starrix untap on the other side of the battlefield was soul crushing. It was very feast-or-famine, which doesn't make for interesting play patterns.

Interestingly, Rakdos actually ended up being the best colour pair once the 17lands dust settled with Weaponize the Monsters having a better win rate than Zenith Flare. Still, though, Boros wasn't far behind, and at the end of the day this is a vibes article. The vibes of Zenith Flare absolutely sucked. It was the kind of game play experience that is fun one time for the novelty factor. Unfortunately, it stuck around for months and there wasn't enough other fun stuff in the set to counteract it.

Outlaws of Thunder Junction

Full disclosure: if you're reading this article thinking "you must have just sucked at those sets," well in this case you're right. I hated OTJ and some amount of my vitriol is because my win rate tanked while it was live. I never got a proper handle on the format. Even when I opened one of the many absurd bombs, it felt like I never drew it or it got countered or whatever other half-baked excuse you can think of for going 0-3 with a Bonny Pall in your deck.

Still, I think there are some more objective-ish reasons this set wasn't very good. Some of the cards on the bonus sheets were absolutely format-defining. The appropriately named Overwhelming Forces won almost two thirds of games when drawn, for example. I assume the remaining 35% were when it got countered because if it resolved, the game was just done. Oko, everyone knew about already, but what about Cube all-star, Fractured Identity? Cruel Ultimatum is one of my favourite cards of all time, but even that couldn't salvage OTJ for me.

Green was incredible, and the bombs were oppressive. Did you know that "Mono-Green + splash" was the best-performing deck in the format, and with a reasonable sample size, too? That is not a combination that makes for nuanced, interesting game play. It meant that Green mages got to play a must-answer threat a turn or two early, and the fixing was so abundant that it could be pretty much any of them. A lot of the time, you either had the answer immediately or you were just dead. Sometimes, even if you did have the answer, you'd die anyway. I'm looking at you Bonny Pall's pet Ox.

It didn't help that most of the set's mechanics fell flat. None of them were actively bad, but none of them inspired excitement. Plot, Mount and Spree are all functional mechanics, but none of them made you go "wow, I can't wait to draft that." Crime is exactly the kind of thing I love, but it rarely panned out.

There weren't even any interesting gold uncommons to build around. Most of the good ones were just powerful on their own merits: removal, or efficient creatures like Buried in the Garden or Honest Rutstein. OTJ had almost redeeming features as a Limited format, unless you really like ramping into big bombs. Your only real alternative was to win before that could happen, playing a White aggressive deck, but that made OTJ effectively a two-deck format. Not ideal.