Blog / Why, MTG Cardsmith?

MTG Cardsmith is a site for making custom Magic: The Gathering cards. The blog Why, MTG Cardsmith? was created to highlight and poke fun at user-created cards deemed flawed.

There was also a Hearthstone spin-off named Oh God Hearthcards. It was active from February 2016 to March 2017. Someone else made a similar Yu-Gi-Oh! blog named Why Yugico Card Creator?, which has since been deleted.

This blog provides examples of:

• Author Avatar: The blog has poked fun at some bad self-insert cards.
• Comically Missing the Point: The commentary will sometimes miss the point on purpose. For instance, a card with one Game-Breakerinvoked ability and one kind of pathetic ability may get commentary like "they need to Nerf [pathetic ability]".
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • Nord Warchief has both "can't be blocked" and "cannot be blocked" in its textbox.
  • A common mistake on the featured cards is redundant abilities, e.g. both flying and reach, both first strike and double strike, both shroud and hexproof, evasion on a creature that's always unblockable anyway, or just giving the creature the same ability multiple times.
  • Spawn of Darkness has vigilance as long as you control a Wizard, and trample as long as you control a Dragon. The creature is a Wizard Dragon, so the conditions only matter if the creature somehow loses a creature type or two without also losing its original abilities.
  • For whatever reason, Imminent Death exiles everyone's hand twice.
• Game-Breaker:invoked Conversed. The blog frequently calls out cards that would break Magic if they were official cards. Typical examples include lands that produce a lot of mana with negligible or non-existent drawbacks, cards that give you powerful effects for cheap (or free), and cards that just let you win instantly.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • A few posts mock cards that clearly portray winged creatues, but lack the flying keyword.
  • Mox Sun is flavored as the "most infinite source of mana in the whole Multiverse". In gameplay, it can only tap for two mana. (The card is still broken, though, as it's a 0-mana artifact that can tap for any two colors with no drawback.)
  • This card suggests that universes are about as powerful as some random bears.
• Highly Specific Counterplay:
  • This card has an ability that flat-out makes your opponents lose the game if they happen to control the specific creature Mesmeric Fiend.
  • Blue Haste Shield hoses blue creatures with haste, of which there are only a small handful.^note The blog claims that there are only two blue creatures with haste, which doesn't take into account that there are a few blue/red creatures with haste, and "blue creatures" does not exclude multicolored creatures whose colors include blue.
• Joke Character: While most of the power level issues come from overpowered cards, a few of the featured creatures are unintentional joke creatures.
  • Vorgyn of the Blue Moon's ability makes blue cards less mana intensive. Unfortunately, she has three blue mana in her casting cost, so if you really need that ability, you can't cast her in the first place. To cement her as useless, this is her only ability, and her stats are terrible for her cost.
  • Doctor Doom is a 7-mana planeswalker. For that cost you'd expect some impressive abilities, but all he can really do is deal damage. His +1 deals 2 damage to an opponent, which is underwhelming, and even if you get to use his ultimate (which under normal conditions requires you to wait three turns and hope you survive and Doctor Doom doesn't take damage or get removed), your payoff is an underwhelming 8 damage to one opponent. He can also heal you, but this ability is even worse than the damage-dealing ones.
• Luck-Based Mission: Taken to extremes with The Luck of Death, which turns games of Magic into literal coin flips.
• Mascot: Foegod, a creature with a silly name and ridiculous abilities, was the first card featured on the blog and became its mascot. He's featured in the logo and in the background.
• MST: The blog posts bad custom cards and adds commentary that pokes fun at them.
• Narm:invoked
  • The card Cherious, Eater of worlds was clearly intended to be intimidating, but the blog couldn't take it seriously because the name was too similar to "Cheerios". Dryass, World destroyer is also a victim of a goofy name ruining any attempt to be intimidating.
  • Night Crawler's flavor text is supposed to represent one of its victims being Laughing Mad, but the laughter is too goofy to be scary.
    HIIIIHII!
• Rouge Angles of Satin: Many, many of the featured cards have misspellings, including "rouge" (rogue) and "angle" (angel) have appeared. There was even a post that called out the large number of "rouge" cards.
• Scrappy Mechanic:invoked Discussed.
  • The post on Blissful Dreams points out that the card combines the storm mechanic with extra turns, both of which tend to attract hate, and mentions that using the card will probably make everyone hate you.
  • Portal Through the Eternities has the ability to create a subgame and give you the ability to switch back and forth between the main game and the subgame. The blog points that this is not a fun mechanic, highlighting that it's bad for the multiplayer format Commander in particular.
  • This post criticizes a land that can let you repeatedly tap your opponent's creatures and keep them from doing much and getting to have fun.
• Smurfing: The blog has featured a Gideon card where almost every word in the text has been replaced with "Gideon".
• Stealth Parody: The blog has occcasionally featured stealth parodies of bad cards, but they tend to be deleted if the creators find out — the blog is intended for unintentionally bad cards.
• Unfortunate Names:invoked
  • This post points out that "Dryass" is not a great name for a monster that's supposed to be an intimidating world destroyer.
  • Cherious, Eater of worlds was intended to be intimidating, but the blog mocks the creator for choosing a name that's way too close to "Cheerios".
  • The blog admitted to "giggling like a small child" at the name Rigescunt, Cave of Ice due to Country Matters.
• Useless Item: Some of the cards end up being completely useless due to a design flaw:
  • Hammer of Defeat, which is supposed to destroy indestructible creatures. Unfortunately, the creator forgot that "indestructible" means that a permament can't be destroyed, and the Hammer can't target stuff that doesn't have indestructible.
  • Safe Deposit Box can indeed keep your stuff safe, but since it won't let you get it back, it's not much better than just allowing your opponent to destroy it.
• Useless Useful Spell: Some of the card effects end up being weak or useless:
  • Zong, the Planet Eater's third ability lets you choose a color and return all lands of that color to their owners' hands. Too bad lands are considered colorless even when they can make colored mana. There are technically ways to force lands to become colored, but these cards tend to be clunky and not worth it. Magic has better ways of getting rid of lands.
  • The last ability of Ajani, Pride Enraged permanently sets your opponent's life to 1... which means that you can't bring it down to 0 and finish them off.
  • Sansa Stark has an ability that lets her untap herself, which might have been useful if you didn't have to tap her to use it.
  • Jabbran's Foresight lets you stack part of your library... and then it shuffles itself back into your library, making the "stacking" part pointless.
  • Vengeful Reclaimer's ability lets you regain control of all permanents you already control, which does nothing.
  • Gizza, Bloodmage's second ability creates a token with defender and haste. However, the haste ends up being useless because it has defender and no tap abilities.
  • Several cards have useless abilities that let you search your library for a card, but forget to actually let you do something with it. Similarly, this card actually makes you do something with the card... but it's just putting it back into your library.
  • Ares, God of War has a loyalty ability that can destroy attacking or blocking creatures. Unfortunately, barring unusual circumstances, you can't activate loyalty abilities during combat.
• Wall of Text: A somewhat common issue is cards that have too much text on them.
  If your text starts running off the card it’s time to stop.