Last week following a silly little community poll talking about worst sets ever, I went on a bit of a rant about just what makes a Magic set bad. While I wanted to explore that topic, I also wanted to take a look at what I think are some of the worst sets of all time and - in the process - break down exactly why.

Sadly, that article went pretty long and as a result, I couldn't include that discussion in that piece. However, it's a new week, and I'm still quite eager to jump in and talk about this topic because wow do I have a lot to say on the matter.

I'm going to look into ten of the worst sets of all time - plus a brief honorable mention - and talk about why these fail as harshly as they do. With many of these, there are some kernels of fun and/or interesting design, but by and large, we're hitting the dregs of what the game has to offer from a design perspective and overall play experience.

This is a very long topic with lots of ground to cover so let's dive right in with a (dis)honorable mention.

Honorable Mention: Unfinity

I briefly want to give a small shout-out to Unfinity. I love a good Un-set and have since I started playing. Unglued was one of the first sets I enjoyed as a kid and I enjoyed the energy in Unhinged as well despite some of its mechanical flaws. Unstable was even better with a fantastic Limited format and interesting design space exploration.

Unfinity by comparison was a disaster. Making it an Eternal-legal set on some of the cards was a respectable effort but wow did it backfire here. Stickers and Attractions were banned thanks to the logistical headaches they caused for actual competitive play. Worse still, the Limited environment itself didn't seem that great which felt like a notable step down from Unstable. Mark Rosewater has even noted reception was so poor, it's not looking good for Un-sets going forward, so it definitely has to get a shout-out here some way or another.

10. Dragon's Maze

(card pics: Reap Intellect, Runner's Bane, and Gruul Cluestone)

I waffled for some time on whether to include this or Ice Age here. While many people are nostalgic for Ice Age, it's really not a good set at all. A sea of hosers, poor-quality designs, and largely questionable mechanics make it exceptionally bad. The reason I let it be, though, was largely the innovation of slowtrips (cantrips that where you draw on next upkeep).

Dragon's Maze is also a notoriously rough set, though I honestly feel it's a bit better than many other sets by featuring several cards designed to play well with casual play. The problem is that just about everything else - save for the likes of Crypt Incursion and Wear // Tear - was utterly worthless. For a long time, the only cards worth anything were Ral Zarek, Voice of Resurgence and - thanks to Standard - Blood Baron of Vizkopa.

The inclusion of ten Cluestones in such a small set oversaturated the environment with middling mana rocks and most of the individual cards at lower rarities were awfully weak. Combine this with the fact that it made the full block draft format a really rough experience and you've got a set that missed the mark tremendously for players everywhere.

9. The Dark

I love The Dark and I know I'm not the only one. Take a look through the set without reading a single card and you'll see what I mean. It's a visual feast for the eyes and takes Magic in an artistic direction so dark and ferocious, nothing before or since even comes close to comparison. Cards like The Fallen, Blood of the Martyr, Season of the Witch, Mana Vortex, Banshee, and Maze of Ith really do a great job of visually depicting this grim world.

Now actually go through and read the cards. They are awful. About the only real standouts of the bunch are the likes of Ball Lightning and Elves of Deep Shadow as far as promoting fun and engaging gameplay. Cards like Blood Moon and Maze of Ith are strong, for sure, but their play patterns are miserable. Once you get past this handful of cards, it's all downhill from there.

The Dark marks a flavor high mark among the game's early days and is fondly remembered because of it. Unfortunately, it's so poorly designed on the whole that it kicks off the so-called dead zone era of Magic in spectacular fashion. As such, it deserves a spot on a list such as this in my opinion, despite the coolness factor.

8. Chronicles

Speaking of sets with a bit of a cool factor, I have a lot of love for Chronicles as well. It's why I have such a fondness for The Dark in the first place and introduced me to cards like the elder dragons, Dakkon Blackblade, Sol'kanar the Swamp King, Rubinia Soulsinger, and more.

I know I'm not the only one who had this experience as many players of a certain vintage discovered lots of sweet stuff from this set. However, this really only applies to a handful of cards in the set itself. The majority of cards reprinted for this set are quite bad, and more importantly ruined collectability in this early era of the game.

The blowback was so bad it created the reserved list, perhaps the single worst thing to happen to Magic that many players desperately wish could be done away with now. Not only that, but it caused Wizards to not produce another non-core set, non-preconstructed deck reprint only-release for almost 20 years with Modern Masters 2013. Oh, and all the cards worth talking about? The real love for those should go to the sets they originally came from, with most of the set's coolest offerings coming from Legends. Just a colossal misstep for the game as a whole.

7. Born of the Gods

I'm admittedly not the biggest fan of the original Theros block as a whole. I think the Limited environment isn't super fun and the majority of cards are rather weak. At least Theros proper had some fun Commander and Cube cards, but there wasn't much to latch onto past that or in the block's other sets in spite of the sweet setting. This only got tremendously worse when Born of the Gods came out.

To say this set was a disappointment when it came out is a huge understatement. Even at the time of release, roughly only four cards mattered to most players: Courser of Kruphix, Spirit of the Labyrinth, Brimaz, King of Oreskos; and Xenagos, God of Revels. That's it. Some cards like Chromanticore and Phenax, God of Deception offered some toys for casual players to mess with, but on the whole the individual designs proved extremely underwhelming and unexciting.

The one new mechanic - Tribute - was a disaster and made for deeply unfun gameplay. Theros Limited may not have been great, but following it up with a format that was Born-Born-Theros was substantially worse. What's more, this released only three sets after Dragon's Maze. At least that set had some fun to latch onto. Born of the Gods, sadly, was rather devoid of it.

6. Battle for Zendikar

Hey, speaking of devoid, let's talk about Battle for Zendikar! This is the set that Mark Rosewater often calls the biggest design falling of the modern era. Moreover, he has said he finds it to be worse than sets like Homelands and Fallen Empires thanks to being a set where they should've known better. With those earlier sets, they were still learning, so despite being markedly worse, they could be excused.

Not Battle for Zendikar, though. The mechanics like devoid and eldrazi processors were considered weak or - in the case of devoid - didn't really even do anything as a mechanic in the first place. Couple this with the fact that it failed to deliver on what players liked about the first Zendikar block most (hint: not the eldrazi), weak allies, and a bad Limited format where Green was unplayable led to this set being absolutely lambasted.

Oath of the Gatewatch is probably in the running for this list as well for not doing much to push past this set's core issues, not to mention breaking Modern for a time. That set at least offered some cool new innovations with Colorless mana so I give it a pass this time.

5. Fallen Empires

In some way, I feel like Fallen Empires gets a bad rap. Make no mistake: it is a really, really bad set for a lot of reasons. However, it feels aspirational and like it's trying new things. For example, it's the first set that tries to go deep with typal synergies (though these already existed somewhat in Alpha and The Dark). Additionally, it was the first set to push tokens as a major theme in the wake of The Hive in Alpha.

The problem is that the designs themselves were complicated and downright obtuse. Nothing about the cards made you want to play them for the most part. Thallids were probably the one real section among the token and typal themes that work well, and even then they hardly go far enough in an enjoyable space. That's to say nothing about the increased complexity caused by numerous types of counters and card images causing significant cognitive overload.

The few cards that were good in the set were lower rarity cards, were frequently unfun for players (see Hymn to Tourach, High Tide), or were too powerful (the uncommon sac for 2 mana lands). All of this led to a set that was deeply unfun and boring for the mass populous and languished on store shelves for years later. It laid the groundwork for a lot of things to come down the line, but boy what a miss it was when it landed.

4. Coldsnap

Hey, remember what I said about Ice Age just barely missing the mark? Don't worry, because a decade later it came back in style... or tried to anyway. Coldsnap took a stab at reviving the classic Ice Age mechanics as a throwback under the guise of "we found this old, unpublished card file." It was, in fact, all-new and was developed in only six weeks. It shows.

The mechanics it brings back are quite bad. No one likes cumulative upkeep, slowtrips were novel in Ice Age but are a huge miss here, and snow didn't do enough despite the innovations on the mechanic. Additionally, the new ones like ripple and recover played poorly in their own right as well. Limited was awful and it ultimately begs the question: who even wants any of this? A set like Ice Age can be forgiven somewhat for being an early set but by the time Coldsnap released? There's no excuse for them doing a set this bad.

3. Saviors of Kamigawa

I like to think of Saviors of Kamigawa as the set I tried to like. I drafted this set multiple times with friends. Yeah, you read that right: triple Saviors drafts. One time was even memorably at a local taco place that we almost got kicked out of in the process! Lots of good memories, but even when I was making those memories, I knew that this set was bad.

The foundation mechanics of the set - bushido, soulshift, splice, and arcane - just weren't all that fun to begin with. There simply wasn't a lot to enjoy and that got even worse when you add on the new stuff that came with this set.

Want to play the same spell every turn and do nothing else? That's epic. How about stop yourself from playing cards period out of your hand? That's the unnamed "cards in hand" mechanic. Or how about sweep, a mechanic so bad it only shows up on four cards in the set and they all have the hideous drawback of bouncing tons of lands from your side of the battlefield to your hand. Only channel stands as a halfway decent mechanic and even that has its own issues.

The best card in this set was Pithing Needle.

That statement bears repeating.

The best card in this set was Pithing Needle.

The card was a revolution in card design and a huge step forward, but it's so hard to imagine now a card like Pithing Needle being the best a set has to offer. Now it's just a cool nuts and bolts card that shows up fairly often in sets. It often gets reprinted into Standard no problem. By this point, we're hitting the "Wizards really should've known better" but apparently not since they let this turd of a set out the door.

2. Homelands

With most early sets, I can give Wizards a bit of grace in a lot of areas. The design teams were still trying to figure out how to make sets and stumbling a ton along the way. When it comes to a set like Homelands, though, it becomes really hard to justify.

The two people on the design team for this one had never worked on a set before nor have they worked on one since - and it shows. The designs here are by and large weak, dull, and overall uninspired. The development team didn't even want it to be released and when it was pushed to happen by then CEO Peter Adkinson, they barely opted to put in the work for the set as a whole.

While there are some nuggets of fun or interesting design here (Baron Sengir, Autumn Willow, Merchant Scroll, Koskun Falls), it just fails at doing much of anything. The cards are all bad. Even the good ones have play issues about them, like Memory Lapse. What's more is that even if you consider that the lore behind the set and world of Ulgrotha was quite memorable - so much that players have clamored for a return - the set is still horrible.

I can forgive a lot, but wow was Homelands just awful. It really should've just not been released or at the very least the design team should've tried putting in some more work with it. Sadly, it didn't and we got stuck with this mess. Still, for as bad as this dull piece of trash is, I think there's one set that tops them all.

1. Prophecy

When Magic players, critics, and historians alike talk about the worst sets of all time, the handful usually mentioned are those in the bottom half of this list. More often than not, it's topped by many people as Fallen Empires and Homelands. This typically stems from both a historical understanding of those sets' impact on the game and people looking bafflingly through the set through a modern lens. However, after a lot of thought and exploration into each set on this list, I just have to give it to Prophecy.

Prophecy is a set that also frequently tops lists for many people as well, and for good reason. Do you like having a set whose entire mechanics rely on mana denial, sacrificing lands, and spells doing nothing if the opponent pays for them? Then boy do I have the set for you! All of these things are categorically unfun and don't lead to a fun game experience for just about anyone.

The problems were so bad that Mark Rosewater has gone on record as recently as a few weeks ago stating that three cycles were added to the set to make it have some degree of appeal. Those include the legendary spellshapers (ex. Jolrael, Empress of Beasts), the Wind cycle (ex. Plague Wind), and the Avatar cycle (ex. Avatar of Woe). Make no mistake, these all rule. However, the fact that they needed to be included as a safety valve to try ensuring the set did somewhat well and had some amount of fun just goes to show how disastrous the design of this set was.

Like many of the sets on this list, I actually have a certain amount of fondness for this set. Prophecy released roughly a year after I got into the game and I found it exciting despite its glaring shortcomings. Despite that, I can look back on it and remove the rose-tinted glasses enough to see just how bad the set is. Prophecy sucks, and is - for my money - the single worst set Wizards has ever released.

Paige Smith

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