Your kneejerk reaction to being asked “what the best card in Magic is” might be Black Lotus. Black Lotus’s text hasn’t changed in 33 years, it’s an objectively powerful effect, and an iconic card in itself. But Magic as a whole has definitely changed in this time, and so has the most powerful card.

Today’s article is one I personally asked Drake Sasser to write. He breaks down the changes in the game, and thus, the best card.

Let’s get into it.

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Mana used to be the scarcest thing in the game. Five formats' worth of ban lists say it's something else now.

By Drake Sasser

What is the most powerful Magic: the Gathering card? It is a contested subject that always leads to one of the 9 most powerful cards labelled “The Power Nine”. If you Google search “the best card in magic the gathering” right now, you get shown a litany of AI overview nonsense explaining to you that context matters, but for the most part Black Lotus is the most “broken” and expensive card in the game’s history. This answer aligns with what most outsiders would perceive as well, and for many is a good enough answer for any normal conversations and intentions. It is a fortunate thing too! The card is very much directly associated with the iconography of the game like Pikachu is for Pokemon. Black Lotus being the most powerful card in Magic is, however, mostly an artifact of heuristics decades out of date and marketing.

While Black Lotus is certainly the most popular answer among the masses, there have been numerous debates about Ancestral Recall and whether it is actually the best or merely a close second. Many of these discussions ebb and flow with whether the highest value over replacement comes in the way of best-in-slot card advantage or mana burst. Way back in 2018, Channel Fireball produced a top 100 list with Black Lotus back on top and Ancestral Recall in a close second, which at the time was still very much a contested number 1 and 2 but there was no doubt it was one of those two cards.

While much of this list is almost comical to look at today in 2026 (when was the last time you played against a Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Tarmogoyf), the top 5 cards remain a fairly accurate reflection of the most broken cards of all time. Notably all were printed in Alpha and all but Sol Ring are banned in nearly every single format. The nature of these cards being so powerful and therefore banned from most common formats means that evaluating the most powerful card of all time is surprisingly challenging to do. There are, however, two formats played often enough and with enough competitive incentives to allow us to get at least some repetitions with all of these cards in context with each other: Vintage and Vintage Cube. Vintage allows 1 copy of each of the top 5 on Channel Fireball’s list and only bans cards that don’t function in the rules anymore. Vintage Cube works much the same way because the most popular Vintage Cube played, the one curated for MTGO, is singleton as well but the draft format does introduce some unique perspectives in the GOAT conversation.

While both formats yield some insights about playing with the best cards of all time, data from Vintage itself is a little less valuable because most decks that play the Power Nine just play all of them except Timetwister, so there is never really any decision to be made in the head-to-head comparison of the most powerful cards because you just play your allotment of all of them without much of a second thought. The nature of the draft format for Vintage Cube however means that it is possible you have to choose between Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus in your first pack and which of the two sets you up better for success for the rest of the draft.

Using the MTGO Vintage Cube as our best tool for evaluating the most powerful cards of all time in a context with the newest cards in print and the power crept FIRE design cards that have garnered a reputation for being “broken” in their own right, I noticed something very interesting happen over the decade or so of vintage cube pick order lists. They went from looking like this

To instead looking like this

And like this

A subtle shift at first glance among the top, but a fascinating and undeniable shift that indicates a new sheriff is in town: Time Walk. How did we get here? How did the conversation go from “Black Lotus Vs. Ancestral Recall” to the heuristic among the top Vintage Cubers being to take Time Walk as the undisputed pick 1 among all other options?

To investigate and understand how we got here, ironically the best thing to do to wrap your head around the progression that has been decades in the making is to take a trip back through time and study the ramp up in impact more expensive extra turn effects had on a variety of different formats. Time Walk itself was restricted on the very first iteration of such a list in 1994, and has never been allowed to compete as a full 4 of in any format sanctioned by Wizards of the Coast, but there have been precious few breaks in Standard formats with a version of an extra turn effect since then and we have seen a nearly perfect streak of every Standard format containing an extra turn effect from 2012 to today.

This is the approximate time period I wish to highlight, because as the amount of extra turn effects increased and the context around them changed, we got to witness in real time over the course of a decade or so a complete paradigm shift around extra turn effects. Below is a timeline of data points I believe illustrate the shift in power with extra turn effects in various formats:

2015: “Turns” becomes a breakout Modern deck. Filled with nearly every extra turn effect legal in the Modern format, the deck seeks to chain them together and eventually win with some by-product of taking game actions across every turn. You can find a breakdown of the early iterations of the deck here, and it lives on to this day. The deck was a bit exploitable and underpowered however, and it wouldn’t be until 3 years later that extra turn effects would hit the spotlight again

2018: Nexus of Fate released as Standard legal. Released on July 13, 2018, Nexus of Fate would go on to become a sobering reminder of what happens to games of Magic when extra turn effects are pushed too hard. Printed in foil exclusively as a buy-a-box promo, the 7 mana instant speed extra turn card would go on to become the face of Standard for years, receiving a ban in Bo1 Standard in Feb 2019, a ban in the eternal format Pioneer in Dec 2019, and rang in its 2 year release anniversary with a ban in Historic on July 13, 2020. Despite being 7 mana to cast, the repetitiveness of the card shuffling itself back in only to be found and cast once more proved to be as powerful as it is frustrating, and now remains only to terrorize Commander players in higher brackets.

2021: Time Warp banned in Historic. Originally printed in Tempest, Time Warp was reprinted numerous times throughout the years and was largely considered under-powered and unproblematic. That is until the last 5 years or so. In the wake of the reign of Nexus of Fate people started to catch-on and push extra turn effects harder and harder with the help of modern day, power crept cards. Time Warp notably saw a reprint into Standard in 2009 and did an entire run in Standard uneventfully, but made its way onto Magic Arena by way of the Strixhaven Mystical Archives bonus sheet, where it began to wreak havoc on the “eternal” formats of the client. In 2021 Time Warp was deemed too powerful for Historic and caught a ban, an eye-raising move given its track record across decades of Magic sets, and signifying an important shift in incentives for new cards. In the June 2026 announcement, Time Warp caught a Brawl ban alongside its near-identical twin Temporal Manipulation.

2023: Top cEDH decks load up on Final Fortune effects. This is where the shift starts to shine the brightest and clearest to me. Competitive Commander has one of the highest densities of “broken” cards, largely kept in check by the multiplayer nature of the format. As the format was put under stress during the rise of high stakes tournaments and tournament series, it became evident that cards like Final Fortune, Warrior’s Oath, and Last Chance all were potent options available for setting up kills in back-to-back turns instead of trying to do it all on a single turn. To this day it is common for some of the best decks in cEDH to play at least 2 of the 3 Final Fortune effects, showing just how much downside you can tack onto a Time Walk equivalent and still justify its inclusion.

2023: A convergence around Time Walk as the undisputed best pack 1, pick 1 in Vintage Cube. Shown in screenshots above and confirmed through numerous discussions on forums, on social media, and beyond. Time Walk has established a new name for itself 30 years after it was printed and within a wildly different landscape than it was birthed into.

All of these events mentioned above more or less happened in isolation of each other. Each instance represents how extra turn effects have crept their way into every format from Standard through cEDH and to me signify a larger shift as Magic players both competitive and casual uncover some of the hidden power of extra turn effects that make spending 5+ mana for one not just worth the cost, but even being such a good rate as to justify the need for bans in various eternal formats.

At its core, putting a label on the most powerful magic card ever printed is largely just an exercise in determining the largest value over replacement for each best-in-class card. For years the conversation was around value over replacement in mana (Black Lotus) and value over replacement in card advantage (Ancestral Recall). In recent years, power crept cards mean that the value of mana is lower and the sheer amount of effects of new cards have meant that the value of raw card advantage is lower than ever. Just a few ban lists ago it was common to die on turn 3 in Standard! With cards more cheap and powerful than ever, and games ending faster than ever, there is a whole new emphasis on the now most-scarce resource in the game: time. Time, often referred to as “tempo”, loosely represents the amount of on-board advantage gained in a period of turns. The ability to give yourself more turns at a cheap rate is what has driven the demand for extra turn effects so high, as the advantage swing of just getting to play another turn with your cheap and powerful cards is worth more than ever. Extra turn effects, however, are coming in shorter and shorter supply. With the 5 mana effects finding their way onto more ban lists and therefore unacceptable for Standard, and the new bracket system for Commander pushing extra turn effects to only higher powered environments due to the extreme impact they have in that context, stock in extra turn effects is quite literally the highest it has ever been and is the clearest case for Time Walk as the most powerful card ever printed.

Discussing the most powerful card of all time is a fun thought exercise for a lot of neurodivergent individuals like myself, but holds more value than simply existing as a stimulating thought exercise. Identifying the trends for powerful Magic cards, and how the best of the bunch impact the context for the most powerful cards ever printed, illuminates opportunities to reinvestigate prior theory about deckbuilding in Magic formats across the spectrum of formats, and can help reconcile new and strange experiences where cards that read powerful underperform and vice versa. Understanding where the pendulum of value over replacement for cards currently lies provides actionable clarity for casual formats too, and can organically teach you how to design your cube such that the cards you want to be the most powerful actually are.

Ultimately, using the extremes to evaluate new contexts also offers a low stakes exercise in understanding Magic formats that scales to any format you find yourself playing, and directly translates to the skills required to optimize decks for brand new formats. The process of distilling decks for a new format often starts with directly identifying the most powerful cards and interactions in that format and then optimizing those cards and interactions to be more consistent and resilient. While it is unlikely you will ever be in a high stakes situation where it matters whether Black Lotus, Time Walk, or Ancestral Recall are the most powerful card ever printed, it is a fun thought experiment to think about, and does come up once every blood moon to create thought provoking screenshots like this

Then the cycle of discussing the Magic: the Gathering GOAT begins anew. For now, be like MattJC01 and take Time Walk.

Thanks for reading!

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