Fix the most broken cards in magic, how would you do it.

[rufus]

No one would play TNN if it cost 3UU.

Yeah, but there's also the "just a bad idea" cards like Falling Star and Chaos Orb.

[Rascalyote]

Maybe make DRS castable with G only, and only produce G or B instead of any colour. That way those junk decks etc. still get a really strong card without it just being played in all the blue decks (except BUG). Could also make it an 0/2, they didn't want to make it an X/1 due to the obvious nonbo with Golgari Charm in the same set and guild.

Maybe make Abrupt decay only hit cmc 2 or less so it still hits CB but your deck would have to play actual artifact/enchantment hate if you want to beat a bridge or a moon or something.

Make miracles only castable on your draw step as the first card you draw, so you can't play your 1 mana Hallowed Burial on your poor elf opponent's combat step, or make 5 angels during their end step.

[Asthereal]

Abrupt Decay isn't overpowered. You can easily keep it as is.

Delver: either remove flying or make the abberation 2/2.
Counterbalance: when a player casts his or her first spell of the turn, ...
Top: (1), pay 1 life: look at top 3 and put back in any order.
Emrakul: remove the protection thing.
Griselbrand: use draw 7 only once per turn, remove lifelink. (Still obnoxiously stupid card like this, but ok.)
Show and Tell: add "this card cannot be uncounterable".

[Gheizen64]

Not about "broken" cards but card that i would've liked if they were printed in different colors for color balance purpose (aka not everything need to be blue boys):

Snapcaster at 1R

Delver at B that flip into a 3/2 menace

TNN at UWW or UUW or 1UW

[Dice_Box]

TNN:
As ~ enters the Battlefield name a Legendary Creature. ~ has protection from players who started the game with the named creature in their command zone.

[LarsLeif]

Healing Salvo - W, Instant, Choose 1 of the 3: Gain 3 life. Prevent 3 damage. Return a creature costing 3 or less mana from your graveyard to the battlefield.

I like this, but the modes are totally unbalanced. Gain/Prevent 3 is way worse than reanimating a 3-drop.

[LarsLeif]

Oh, and would it not be nice if DRS could only generate black or green mana? I think that would be a quite elegant card.

[Sloshthedark]

few legacy changes:

DRS - 1/1 - drain ability - drain 1 & gain 1

Griselbrand - no lifelink, CC 7

Thalia - no first strike

Delver - flip until EOT

Goyf - X/X

Terminus - Miracle for WW

Snapcaster - 1R

TNN - legendary

S&T - enable planeswalkers

TKS - Exile until leaves

Reality Smasher - remove 1 of abilities, 4/4

Leovold - 1st ability symmetrical

Batterskull - no germ, equip 3

Jitte - +1/+1


unban Survival and bring mana burn back...

[NeckBird]

Deathrite Shaman - So many ways to make this card fairer. One of the most poorly designed cards ever. Make it an 0/1 without changing its abilities. Make it a 1/1 and change it to gain one, drain one. Get rid of its hybrid mana cost so it costs G, make it a 1/1, and keep gain two, drain two. Make it a 1/1, keep its abilities, but only allow it to produce green and black mana.

Terminus - Make the Miracle cost 1W or WW.

True-Name Nemesis - Change its mana cost to 1WB or 1BB as blue doesn't deserve to have the best midrange creature ever printed. You can make it legendary (which might make it too good with Karakas). Or you can give it a drawback like, "Cast TNN only if you control a Merfolk" such that it's only playable in Merfolk.

Phyrexian Mana - Either never print this mechanic or make you pay 3 life for each Phyrexian mana symbol.

Leovold, Emissary of Trest - Make it a 3/2.

[apple713]

Survival doesn't need any changes to be unbannable. It was banned prematurely without giving the format a chance to fight it off, and in the current format with regular turn one Griselbrands, it's hardly broken. It along with Earthcraft, Goblin Recruiter and Mind Twist could get unbanned tomorrow without hurting the format. But I guess that's a separate topic.

I think surgical extraction was printed after vengevine and would have solved any issue. Surgical is already run in so many decks it wouldn't have warped the format.

Reverse Dark Depths; instead of removing 10, you must add 10. Incidentally makes DD fun with proliferate.

Griselbrand: remove lifelink. Still good, but closer to "fair". Not as idiotic to play against.

Mana Drain is actually pretty solid if you apply the "add 2" rule.

Jitte: instead of target creature gets -1/-1, creature that is blocking/blocked by equipped creature get -1/-1. At least it makes more flavor sense, and is still funny with first strike.



...this experiment is fun.

reverse dark depths would make it unplayable, at least in legacy.

if you remove lifeline from griselbrand you could probably drop his CMC to 6 and he probably wouldn't be hardcast in legacy. Maybe in nic fit. 6 mana is a lot to not win the game on the spot.

The issue is so many cards have been "Fixed" with later printings, so the normal etb tapped or what not seems to easy a answer.

Bazaar:
Draw 2, exile 3.

Mental Misstep:
Make it cost one generic more.

bazaar would become unplayable.

mental misstep was never broken because it never provided any advantage. The reason it was banned is because it "warped the format" to the point where almost everyone was playing it to counteract other people playing it. Its merely an issue in vintage / legacy because of the low cmc of the format. It was never an issue in standard / modern.




Frantic search - casting cost = 3U - untap up to 4 lands (it becomes unplayable / not worth playing on t1)

Mana Drain - casting cost = UUU might still be too powerful in something like high tide and i think a 4cmc version of mana drain exists and doesn't see play.

Memory jar - At the beginning of EACH PLAYERS next end step, THAT player discards his or her hand and returns to his or her hand each card he or she exiled this way. - this way the opponent gets to use those cards drawn on their turn.

Oath of Druids - casting cost GGG - at 4 cmc it becomes somewhat worse than natural order. Forcing colored mana reduces the ability to splash colors and better protect a card. It forces a nonbasic manabase opening the deck to hate.

Tolarian Academy - add U to your mana pool for every two artifacts you control. Round down. It would still be really good in affinity but maybe not broken, idk. Affinity kinda sucks in legacy anyways.

Tinker - add, if the difference in cmc between the sacrificed artifact and the artifact put into play is > 4 exile the chosen artifact instead of putting it into play. I don't know if 4 is a restrictive enough or too restrictive but that mechanic could be useful.

[Spam]

The more ai read this fixes, the more I see them as just "make them unplayable because I hate them"
As for Survival, the fixed version is called Fauna Shaman and look how good is that card.

Enviado desde mi Moto G (4) mediante Tapatalk

[Dice_Box]

Mental Misstep was indeed broken. The design was fucking broken. The issue is it can counter itself, making it the best answer to itself. That's the failing. If that issue was fixed, I do not know if it would have eaten the banhammer.

[apple713]

Mental Misstep was indeed broken. The design was fucking broken. The issue is it can counter itself, making it the best answer to itself. That's the failing. If that issue was fixed, I do not know if it would have eaten the banhammer.

TLDR, the card was printed with the hope to create diversity in the format and if it didn't they could just ban it. Since it didn't create diversity like they hoped, they banned it. It had ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the power level.

Source

"Legacy

Mental Misstep is banned.

Force of Will has long been thought of as a card that helps keep combination decks in check in Legacy and Vintage. However, it doesn't directly help decks that aren't playing blue. One idea that was floated was creating a similar card that could be played in nonblue decks. When Phyrexian mana was designed, it was an opportunity to create such a card. R&D wanted a card that could help fight combination decks, and could also fight blue decks by countering cards such as Brainstorm. Clearly printing a card like this has a lot of risk, but there is also the potential for helping the format a lot. The risk is mitigated, because if it turns out poorly, the DCI can ban the card.

Unfortunately, it turned out poorly. Looking at high-level tournaments, instead of results having blue and nonblue decks playing Mental Misstep, there are more blue decks than ever. The DCI is banning Mental Misstep, with the hopes of restoring the more diverse metagame that existed prior to the printing of Mental Misstep."

[rufus]

Mental Misstep was indeed broken. The design was fucking broken. The issue is it can counter itself, making it the best answer to itself. That's the failing....

IMO the issue is that it provides tempo advantage without risk, costing mana or card advantage, so pretty much every deck wants to play it. (WotC are also idiots for printing an "answer to blue decks" in blue.)

...

This would still be broken, but much better:

Mental Misdirection
R/Phyrexian
Instant
Exile a card from your hand at random. If you do, you gain control of target instant or sorcery spell with a converted casting cost of 1. You may chose new targets for that spell.

This would be OK, but might be too weak to be playable.

Moment of Respite
W/Phyrexian
Instant
Until end of turn, players can't play spells with converted mana cost 1 or 0.

[Dice_Box]

Play with this thing, either in No ban list Modern or Vintage. The card is busted. Legibility a mistake. The issue is that your forced to play with them. If the card was not free (cost a generic mana on top of the PU) I think it would be much better off. Also then it would not have the bonus of answering itself, the most insidious of mistakes with that card.

[Fox]

Counterbalance: when a player casts his or her first spell of the turn, ...
Top: (1), pay 1 life: look at top 3 and put back in any order.

The relevant cards in the big blue Ice Age card denial enchantment cycle are Zur's Weirding and Tidal Control. First and foremost CB should be symmetrical and require the payment of 2 life to deny a card. There is also the trend of cumulative upkeep as cmc drops, it doesn't need to have that cost set at or to be balanced, but flavor-wise it should have upkeep costs.

As for SDT, it is another bastardization of Ice Age in the form of Elemental Augury. Both the casting cost and activation cost are 3 mana there; setting even one half (activation or casting cost) back to 3 would have been a wiser design direction for SDT.

[Lord_Mcdonalds]

Tinker - add, if the difference in cmc between the sacrificed artifact and the artifact put into play is > 4 exile the chosen artifact instead of putting it into play. I don't know if 4 is a restrictive enough or too restrictive but that mechanic could be useful.

Basically Transmute Artifact?

[apple713]

Basically Transmute Artifact?

similar but instead of paying x for anything with a greater cmc than the sacrificed artifact you could get something slightly bigger without paying x.

Example, Tinker -> mox ruby -> get a lodestone golem without paying anything OR get a memory jar and pay 1.

[[SLAYER]chaos]

Griselbrand: Pay 7 Life: Exile your hand. Draw 7 cards.
TNN: Shroud. Name an opponent, creatures that opponent controls can't block TNN.
Sensei's D Top: ,Tap: Look at the top 3, put them back in any order.
Delver: End of turn, reveal the top card of your library. If it's not an instant or sorcery flip back to Delver of Secrets.
DRS: 0/1, only makes green or black mana.
Brainstorm: Make it a sorcery.
Terminus: Miracle: XW. If this is cast for it's miracle cost, each player puts X creatures they control on the bottom of their library in any order.
Emrakul: If this was put into play but wasn't cast exile it instead.

[TsumiBand]

It's been said in so many words before but a lot of the issues with some of the most enabling spells in the game are resolved by colorshifting them. It may not seem like it matters in Legacy since we have all the fetchlands and good duals but it redistributes the balance of power away from a centralized color and into other places where the potential exists to get more diversified use out of them. Delver in is a commonly discussed one; the other one I've heard and really liked was Treasure Cruise in (it could even have the standard "Draw X lose X life" clause that Black draw generally has but that's arguably *just* a nerf, not a fix). I'm still not sure why TNN isn't , I mean I read the official explanation but it's not historically sound and it's just bullshitty at the end of the day. I don't think Show and Tell is particularly Blue in nature; the color of card draw and permission isn't really the one that screams "let's all do a thing and see who has the bigger thing at the end", that's more of a Green-ish White-ish mechanic in my opinion? I think if SnT were it would still probably be super playable but wouldn't just slip easily into the typical Blue-draw-stuff package.

There are probably a lot more cards like this but my wife just showed up to my work and wants to buy me a burger, later suckers