Staple or Stinker with Joshua Schmidt

Below you can find our long-form video of the week. If you still crave more content, make sure to check out our shorts on YouTube!

The Cards in Question

, , , , and .

The Stinkiest Planeswalker

The two-mana Tibalt has been much-maligned as possibly the worst planeswalker in all of Magic. But it wouldn't be Magic if players weren't able to find a use for just about anything. Indeed, even the Fiend-Blooded was once an important element in a competitive endeavor. Granted, this didn't happen in Standard, Modern, or any other mainstream format. But Tibalt did prove quite useful in "Penny Dreadful"—a format where the only deck-building restriction is that every card needs to go for no more than 0.02 tix on Magic Online. So it was precisely the fact that Tibalt was so bad elsewhere that made him eligible for Penny Dreadful, where he showed up in various madness and/or graveyard decks.

Staples Stapled Together

The term "hatebear"—for a creature with both mana value and power 2 that disrupts the opponent's game plan—didn't originate with . But the card quickly became the posterchild of the archetype after its release and remains its most common representative across a variety of formats to this day. Few cards deserve it more to be called a staple.

But is (or was) such a card. The companion mechanic turned out to be so ridiculously overpowered that it had to be amended with an extra cost of three mana, and Lurrus in particular had to be banned from almost all formats even then.

While the Cat Nightmare had been legal, it actually showed up in several decks alongside Thalia. (See example below.) In fact, it still shows up alongside Thalia from time to time in Vintage, essentially the only format that allows Lurrus nowadays. (You can find an example of such a deck below as well.)