Most Complicated and Complex Magic: The Gathering Cards Ever!

Magic: The Gathering is known for being notoriously difficult, complex, and overall very hard to get into. While nowadays, the slope is much less steep, with a lot of products like preconstructed EDH decks and pre-release events to get your foot in the door.

However, regardless of your current experience, I'd like to show you some cards from Magic's history that are infamous for their complexity and how hard they are to play correctly, alongside straight-up confusing designs that, likewise, make it hard in a real setting, especially if either player had never encountered the card. 

While this list could just consist of super old cards with confusing wording, I do want to highlight the line between complicated and complex.

That said, let's start with the complicated cards!

Most Complicated Cards

Chains of Mephistopheles

Let's try to see if the revised and modernised oracle text helps:

'If a player would draw a card except the first one they draw in each of their draw steps, that player discards a card instead. If the player discards a card this way, they draw a card. If the player doesn’t discard a card this way, they mill a card.'

Now, the card is actually *relatively* simple once you understand it - which is, I guess, true for most things. The complexity mainly comes from a lot of actions and if conditions. 

However, in practice, it means that if you draw an extra card in your mainphase, say you play Reach Through Mists, you discard a card from your hand first and then resolve the draw. If you cast draw 3 like Harmonize, you will discard one, then draw, discard one, then draw, and discard one, then draw, resulting in you not generating card advantage. Last but not least, if you cast Harmonize with an empty hand, you mill 3 and draw 0.

Ice Cauldron

This card is also often cited as one of the most complicated cards ever. You can think of the Cauldron as your mana bank. You pay, say, four Black mana and exile Ob Nixilis, Unshackled. You note that you have 'prepaid' four black mana. Next turn, you can tap the Cauldron and add to your mana pool that pre-paid mana, pay the remaining 2 and cast Ob Nixilis. You're not generating anything but rather splitting the payment across turns.

Humility

In Magic, effects like 'losing abilities' or forcing specific base stats are always confusing rules-wise, as it typically involves a concept called layers. You will need to call a judge to clean up what affects what. 

This card, in my opinion, is truly complicated and is very hard to resolve without a judge present, because it will be affecting the game completely differently depending on which decks play against eath other. Some example questions one might encounter:

• Does Dryad of the Ilysian Grove lose all the abilities or just the second land drop one?
• Will Scourge of the Skyclaves die, because it doesn't have the ability and is a 0/0 or does it immediately becomes a 1/1 to stay alive?
• With Humility on the battlefield, if I playe a creature that's supposed to enter with counters like Walking Ballista, will it?
• And the classic - if I have Opalescence, are creatures 1/1s or as big as their mana cost? Which takes precedence?

There's such a plethora of spots like these and the fact that it's almost unresolvable without a Google search or a judge makes it a #1 complicated card in my book.

Panglacial Wurm

This card changes the way one thinks about casting spells completely. Normally, you announce a spell, pay costs, and you're done. 

However, Panglacial Wurm allows you to cast a spell while a different effect is being resolved.

Let's say you crack a fetchland like Arid Mesa and start searching. You then decide to play Panglacial Wurm - you can play it now mid-searching, but you cannot use the land you want to find with Mesa, since whatever the search effect was, has to resolve after you're done with Wurm shenanigans.

Dead Ringers

This is a particularly interesting case, because it's purely about semantics. The real question is how to interpret the 'unless either one is a color the other isn’t' linguistically.

So basically, for the creatures to be legal targets in the first place, both have to be nonblack. But what if

• Both are white
• One is white, one is green
• One is white, one is green-white
• Both are green-white

The answer?

• Both will die
• Neither will die
• Neither will die
• Both will die

The logic is simple - both creatures have to match the exact colour or exact colour combination. If there is any deviation, it won't work.

Sylvan Library

Sylvan Library in most cases will be a simple and powerful effect, essentially boiling down to you looking at the top three cards and choosing if you want just 1, 2 but pay 4 life, or all 3 and pay 8 - so far so good.

What's tricky is how it works with other draw replacements like Dredge or Abundance where you don't actually draw the card, and yet Library asks you to 'put the card on top' - which actually works to the advantage of the dredge player, as they won't have to put anything back or pay the life if they dredged thrice - as no extra cards was technically drawn.

Another mind bender regarding the 'drawn this turn' clause is if you preceed the Library trigger with a draw effect. What if on upkeep you drew two cards with Quick Study and then resolved Library trigger? Or, worse, what if that draw spell is Brainstorm? In such a case, unironically, I suggest inviting a judge over to oversee you draw cards and resolve Library to make sure that the cards you put back are some of those that you did in fact drew this turn.

Prisoner's Dilemma

This is a game theory thought experiment, going by the same name, the prisoner's dilemma, turned into a card. The idea is as follows. If you have people who are suspected of a crime but nobody confesses, they go off lightly. If they all admit openly to the crime, they get a more severe punishment. If some people stay silent, but some tell on others, the ones who stayed silent and got told on get a much more severe punishment than in other cases, and the one who was the snitch gets a free pass.

The dilemma lies in the fact that if everybody chooses to do the same thing (silence, snitching), you always get some kind of punishment. However, when you get tempted to be the one snitching while others stay silent, you *could* get no punishment - but that's exactly what everyone involved is thinking. And if everybody follows the logic and snitches, you all get bigger punishment than if you'd stayed silent.

The Magic card embodies exactly that:

• Everybody is silent - each takes 4 damage
• Everybody snitches - each takes 8 damage
• Someone snitches - the snitch takes 0, the silent take 12 damage.

I think the secret cherry on top is the flashback, as you get to re-do the experiment again, knowing what everybody had done before!

Urza's Saga

This card is very new, relative to the others on the list. It has a ton of quirks that make it hard. While in practice it plays out pretty smoothly once everybody is aware of what happens when, there are numerous tricky aspects of it that I'd like to show you for each chapter

1. This land doesn't inherently have a mana ability - it gains it through the first chapter trigger. And as any trigger, it can be responded to! Therefore, when you play the Saga, the opponent has a window to destroy it before you ever have a chance to add colorless to your mana pool.
2. At the second chapter, Saga now has two possible abilities - both the mana one from the first chapter and the Construct one. However, if the first chapter trigger was in any way countered, like Stifle, it still has the second ability, as it gains all of those sequentially.
3. This tutor effect happens after you draw, so you know your hand perfectly. You can also hold priority and make a Construct before the ability resolves. It's also your mainphase so you can float mana from the first ability, search, and then use that mana to cast a spell. If that wasn't enough, the search specifies the cost exactly, not mana value, so you cannot find cards like Walking Ballista.

Moreover, because of its weird type being Enchantment Land, there are even more nuanced interactions with cards like Blood Moon.

Most Complex Cards

Now, I'd like to move on to cards that are not complicated in what they do, but what complex situations they create based on their effects.

I'll dive into four cards, legendary for their difficulty.

Gifts Ungiven

Instant speed quad-tutor but with two caveats - cards have to have different names, and the opponent can put two of them into the graveyard. There are so many ways you can go about this card.

• Find four similar cards to ensure you still get what you need - like four different removal spells or lands
• Put some copy or recursive effects into the mix to make sure you get the cards anyways - like two spells, Snapcaster Mage, and Torrential Gearhulk
• Find four completely different effects and the opponent has to be the one to figure out what you might need
• Find four cards where you don't mind any of them landing in the graveyard - they might have Flashback or Escape.
• Find two cards on purpose to put them into the graveyard - like the infamous Unburial Rites and a reanimation target.

All of the above and possible mixes between them make the card super exciting but also very hard to play correctly. The texture of your hand will also dictate the piles - you might have Snapcaster in hand already, so you're fine with them discarding the good spells. Maybe you have Tarmogoyf, so you're happy with the additional types in the graveyard. Or you have a discard outlet in hand, so you don't mind them giving you a big, expensive creature. And the onus is on the opponent to make the choice as well!

Brainstorm

Brainstorm is not only difficult but also straight-up very powerful as a card - arguably one of the strongest cards ever printed. Why is it so?

For a single blue mana, you get access to three fresh cards, all possibly usable. You can put two dead lands on top and now you can unload all the newly drawn goodness. If you combine it with a search effect like Polluted Delta, you can even get rid of those bad cards forever, and clear the top! That's the strength part. Where is the difficulty? Sounds pretty simple to keep the good cards and put bad ones back. It's all in the context.

The opponent is casting Duress. You might want to Brainstorm in response to put your key combo piece on top so that they cannot discard it.

You have a shuffle effect, but you want to shuffle just one card away, not both.

You like all the cards, so you sequence the top to line up with your turns.

You might have interactions with the top of your library like surveil, Terminus, or Selvala, Explorer Returned so you want to stack it precisely.

Maybe your hand is good enough now to wait on Brainstorm and cast it later.

And this last point is what often comes into play - the assessment of when and whether to cast it at all at a given point. 

I definitely recommend playing a Brainstorm deck for some time to feel how it plays out in practice.

Fact or Fiction

This card resembles the previously mentioned Gifts Ungiven, as you have a pile of cards and the opponent has to make a choice which one will go away - but only kind of.

The beauty in the card is that you show the top 5, and the full responsibility is on the opponent to split them in a way that you get the least value possible. In the end, you're the one deciding which one goes to hand. 

The game designer genius is that it's five cards so there is no way to split it evenly on raw cards, like you could with 4 or 6. The opponent has to make some game-relevant observations and assign some abstract value to each card to attempt to split it evenly. There will be spots where you just take whichever pile has more cards and call it a day - but sometimes you won't. The opponent might assume you're missing action when in fact you don't - and this asymmetry of information will affect the resolution of the spell.

In a multiplayer format like EDH, you can even choose which opponent is the one splitting. You can decide to give the decision to a person who's your ally to split 0-5 or to someone you trust least to make it hard for you.

Doomsday

The last card I want to talk about is Doomsday. It's three mana to tutor out the whole deck, and create a new library consisting of five cards of your choosing.

First, it sounds and is very busted. It's again one of the strongest cards ever. The complexity comes from the brilliant design - if you don't win in time, you'll lose to an empty library. Moreover, the order of cards is likely going to matter so you have to choose not only which cards you want but also which order they should be in.

Furthermore, do you want to account for the opponent having some weird tricks like Thought Scour to mess up your pile? 

Do you want to include reactive cards in the pile to break through opposing interaction? If so, which and how many - and where in the pile.

This card creates the ultimate tension, since the cost of getting it wrong is literally losing - contrary to Brainstorm or Gifts Ungiven where the punishment for not playing it correctly is substantially less severe.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this journey through the difficulty of the game of Magic - I know I did!

Magic is a hard game, but with it come longevity, replayability, and the excitement of all of us who participate in the game each and every day.

Cheers!