Have you ever wondered why there is a four copies per deck rule in effect, and further why there is a Restricted List. Perhaps you don’t think having 16 Morphlings in your deck would be all that bad. May be you don’t think having 32 Lighting Bolts at your disposal would be that harmful. In this article, I will explain why having too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

Imagine a scenario where there was not a rule of four copies per deck. Why would you even play basic lands? Why even play Dual Lands? The Moxen were essentially basic lands that broke the one land per turn rule. I envision a deck with 20 Mox Rubies, 20 Forks, and 20 Lightning Bolts. Well, why not sprinkle in a few Black Lotus? Why not add five or six Mox Sapphire and Time Walks, Timetwisters, and Wheel of Fortunes.

That should paint a pretty good picture for you of why the 4 copies rule came to be. It would stink to shuffle up, offer a cut, and then get Lightning Bolted 7 times and then shuffle again.

When I began my Magic career, back when I was a wee lad, there was not a true Restricted list. It was more or a less an understood courtesy not to play four Lotus’ in your deck, and also, most people did not own four copies. Most Players just played the cards they could get a hold of. Since the Moxen and Lotus were truly a rare find, the card print basically limited you to a few cards anyway.

One of the few exceptions to this, of cards printed in those days, was not considered to be broken. In fact, when all the muscle cards were removed by Revised (3rd Edition), this card continued to be printed. It was not until 5th Edition that it finally did not get re-printed.

The card I speak of is, in my opinion, the most broken card ever made in Magic.

Balance.

How ironic that the most broken card ever made would be called Balance. There is noting ‘Balancing’ about it. Sure, it equalizes the game state, but how many Wrath of God effects are out there that cause a discard? How many Mind Twist cards produce a land destruction effect? How many Armageddon cards produce a creature destruction effect?

Of all the cards ever made, not too many have ever done two of those things, let alone all three. This is why Balance defines what a Restricted List is meant to be. It is supposed to allow the dominant cards to be played, but limit them to being hard to find in your deck, and then cast.

I can remember a time when Balance was not restricted. Balance, having been re-printed so many times, was not a tough rare to get your hands on. So the first time I played a guy who cast his second copy of Balance, I about cried. There was nothing ‘Balanced’ about that. My poor Merfolk never stood a chance.

The main thing that defines why a card should be Restricted, is that if you cast this spell, and it resolves, do you win or your opponent lose as a result of the spell resolving? Of course you might think to yourself, ‘but a Fireball will make your opponent lose the game.’ This is true, but I can prevent 1 damage and be ‘alright.’ When these cards resolve, the game is heading towards an end, and there is not much that can be done to prevent that end. A Fireball can be countered, deflected, prevented, or taken. When Balance resolves, a lot of cards go to the graveyard and, typically, the opponent will not recover.

Another thing to look at is card advantage. A normal card will destroy one other card, one for one. A good card might take two cards with it. A strong card, Wrath of God, Mind Twist, Armageddon, etc., will take three or four cards to the grave with it. A dominant card, a broken card, will not only take a fist full of cards with it to the grave, but its effect will sit on the table for a few additional turns. Someone who did not see the play will walk by the table, and have a good idea what happened. A couple examples of this would be Timetwister, Memory Jar, and Balance. These cards all change the way the game looks to spectators. If someone looked away for one turn, then looked back, the game would have changed a lot in that one turn, if it did not end while he looked away.

So often, I would hear someone talking about a card, and inevitably, they would say how ‘broken’ a card was. The one that stands out in my mind is how ‘broken’ Upheaval is/was. When these younger players would say something like this, all I could do was shake my head. He simply did not know. Arcbound Ravager is not broken. The artifact lands are not broken. Neither is Upheaval broken. These are solid good cards. These should be the standard cards used in a tournament setting that will win you a game or two. In combinations, these cards can upset the balance of an environment, and sometimes are removed from Standard play, but these cards would not even get a sniff of a deck in a Vintage tournament. This is because they are not broken cards. Someone might argue, Arcbound Ravager is broken because its not a combo kill card. I would counter that statement by offering to let you play the Ravager in a Mono-green deck with no artifacts and see how dominant the Ravager is then. Put Balance in that deck, and a source of white mana, and you still see that deck perform well.

Stepping back and focusing on only one card on the list, Balance, we can analyze what makes this card tick. What makes this innocent little card so broken? The answer is that it’s broad game changing effect single handily debilitates a player. Casting this spell alone, in a non-lethal setting, is a tough thing for an opponent to deal with.

Say your playing a speed goblin deck, your send in your first handful of goblins and get 5 or so points of damage in. You know that they can not cast a Wrath of God until around the 4th turn, so you can get in maximum damage for the first three turns. That is, until they play their second land and cast Balance (W1), more likely than not they know what your up to, and kill all your goblins since they did not cast a creature.

However, when used in a concentrated setting, Balance then shows its excessive power.

Let’s say your opponent is attacking you with a good number of creatures and you have zero in play. You draw a card and play it, Zuran Orb. You then cast as many spells as possible, emptying your hand, and then the last card out of your hand is Balance. You respond to your Balance by sacrificing all of your lands to the Zuran Orb, gaining 2 life per land sacrificed. Then, Balance resolves. It looks at your zero creatures, and sends all of your opponent’s creatures to the grave. Then Balance looks at your zero lands, and sends all of your opponent’s lands to the grave. Then Balance looks at your empty hand, and sends all of your opponent’s hand cards to the grave. All of this happened… for W and 1. Compared to the other three cards that could have accomplished this, Wrath of God (WW2), Armageddon (W3), Mind Twist (B4) (lets say to discard 4 cards), and doing the mathematics, we see that it becomes W1 vs. WWWB9.

My old friend used to have a Chains of Mephistopheles deck. Basically, the deck was designed to lock you down with zero cards in hand, not let you add a card to your hand, and then pull your limbs off with the Rack. The Chains itself is a crummy card. It makes you discard a card, before you can draw a card, but this only triggers on each draw after the first draw. So your first card drawn is safe, but after that, you must discard before you can draw.

Hi.  I am a very confusing card. 
~Chains of Mephistopheles~

The only real meat he had in this deck was The Rack, Chains of Mephistopheles, Howling Mine, Anvil of Bogardan, and Balance. The man would cast Moxen, Lotus, Tutors, etc., everything he could do to get to his Balance. Once he had a Chains, Rack, and Anvil of Bogardan in play, he would cast his Balance, and you lose. See, since you have no hand or creatures, due to Balance, the Anvil makes you draw an additional card then discard a card. Since you were drawing a second card, you needed to discard first, then draw and discard again. Worse yet, if you have no hand, and you are forced to draw, say as a result of an Ancestral Recall, instead of drawing, you ‘mill’ your top card into the graveyard for each card draw and then skip that draw of the card. Needless to say, Chains of Mephistopheles is a very confusing card.

Why did I just give you that headache of card rules? To say that none of that happens if the Balance does not resolve and wipe out your defenses first. The combo would whittle away at you alone slowly, but the power of Balance cast first, devastates the board state, and lets the little combo that follows kill you immediately.

A good way for you to get a good notion of why a broken card like Balance is restricted, try playing against a deck that has multiple copies of that broken card. Let your little brother use four Balances in his deck. Your little brother instantly stops playing the role of an auto-win for you and becomes a possible loss. Let your friend proxy up (make a fake copy of a card) four copies of Ancestral Recall and then you beat him. Then you will see the difference between the broken status of Balance versus the ‘broken’ status of Upheaval. Upheaval is a tough recovery, but can be done. Balance is not the same.

Along these lines, we can use the same principle to discover why Legendary cards are restricted to one in play at a time.

I can remember back to the release of Homelands, a truly sparkling day in the History of Magic. It was supposed to be full of good stuff, but it was crap, minus a select few cards. I was playing against a younger fellow who was playing a goblin rush deck with Eron the Relentless in it. At the time, I had not seen the card before, but I knew I could handle it with the defenses I had in play. So the kid casted him, and attacks with him, and then regenerates him as he kills a blocker. The following turn, he cast another copy of Eron, and begins the same pattern. I believe he had a Mana Flare in play, to fuel his mess of high demand red mana. One Eron is a reasonable task to deal with, but the second copy tore me up. I was not able to produce enough 6 toughness creatures to keep Eron at bay. I was shocked at the strength of the creature, and needed to get a few copies of the card. So I looked the card over, and discovered… Eron is a Legend. There could not be a second copy of him in play.

Mind you, Eron the Relentless is a weaker Legend, but two copies of him dominated the board. Try having two copies of Akroma, Visara, Multani, etc in play. These cards would be considered broken, if they did not already limit themselves.

In conclusion, I hope to have educated you as to the original reason for the restricted list, and to have given a strong case, in Balance, of why this list was needed.

The limitation of power is to keep a stable balance of the environment.

You can discuss this article in the MDV forums here.

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