This post assumes basic understanding of how to play Magic: The Gathering and uses common notation for the game in explaining card effects.

This is an expanded version of a rant I wrote to a friend one time I happened to see a clickbait thumbnail for a video promising to discuss the most hated cards in Magic. I didn't watch it, but I have a certain kind of dark appreciation for how demonic the card in question - Winter Orb - is. So I gave a friend way too many words. Now I'm giving them to you... just cleaned up a little. And with less swearing.

The original is reproduced below as well, for those who want to read that.

Depending on your standards, Magic: The Gathering peaked very early. If those standards are "making the most evil cards possible," perhaps it peaked as early as the very first set.

Winter Orb, an artifact from as far back as the first release (Alpha), and reproduced on the right, has a pretty foul reputation. Fully earned, of course. It's the one that makes me see red the most, too, and not just because I'm excruciatingly old and played this game millions of years ago. It's kind of impressive that it happened so early on, really. Let's talk about why this card angers me so much and why it should do the same to you.

But first, let's translate all that old text for modern Magic players who might not be used to 1993-era templating.

Winter Orb - 2
Artifact
As long as this artifact is untapped, players can’t untap more than one land during their untap steps.

Dirt simple. You probably picked up on this for the most part, but there is one big bit of weirdness that I'll talk about in a bit. Before I talk about my burning hatred, I have something I need to praise, unilaterally, with no weird attributes involved like "oh wow I love how demonic this is".

That, of course, is the artwork. Mark Tedin is already one of my favorite of Magic artists - I think I overall prefer Anson Maddocks, but he's quite good too, and one of many artists making the earliest Magic releases particularly nice to look at (even when the layouts were a bit scraggly-looking - those Alpha frames ain't winnin' no beauty pageants). And here, Tedin knocks it out of the park with a gruesome image with some polar bears. Not much orb, but a lot of winter. Unsurprisingly, it reminds me heavily of the painting Man Proposes, God Disposes by Sir Edwin Landseer.

Man Proposes, God Disposes depicts arctic wreckage being scavenged through by polar bears, inspired by the search for Sir John Franklin's "lost expedition" to the Arctic in the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror (which are probably not good names for ships you want to not go missing in a harsh place in the 19th Century). A haunting, disturbing painting that looks far gorier than it actually is, Man Proposes, God Disposes is subject to a variety of urban legends, rumors, and general stories of being haunted or cursed, and you can see why. It's horrifying! I want a print of it to hang over my desk. Maybe even as a talisman of some kind.

So, perhaps you can see the resemblance. That's cool! I love the look of this card. It's also appropriate because if you play this card, you should get mauled by polar bears.

(Actually, I take that back. It's mean to the polar bears.)

Our problems begin immediately with the fact that this card costs a mere two mana (generic, for that matter - this is a problem I'll discuss later in more detail). Playing this immediately on turn two is not necessarily ideal, but it will severely disrupt an opponent. Playing it later means you can do this late in the game and easily prevent your opponent playing a high-cost win condition without breaking a sweat. This is evil; gunking up the game this badly should probably be a bit pricier!

Our journey through this card's text begins with the phrase "As long as this artifact is untapped." This is a consequence of a quirk of early artifact design. In ye olden days of ... I think up until Revised Edition ... there were three classes of Artifacts: "Mono Artifacts" (activated by tapping and paying any other listed activation costs), "Poly Artifacts" (activated just by paying the activation costs), and "Continuous Artifacts". Continuous Artifacts, as you would guess, have continuous abilities. They just work. Unless they were tapped; for some reason, tapping a continuous artifact "turned it off," disabling its continuous effect. This makes sense sometimes, less so others. But since Wizards of the Coast likes to avoid functional errata where possible (provided they don't leave typoes on their cards), this weird rules handle has remained on Winter Orb for most if not all of its lifespan. It's on many other artifacts that make them feel weird - Howling Mine comes to mind - but it's the main thing that makes Winter Orb such a game-smashing monstrosity of a card as opposed to just a seriously aggravating control card.

If you can tap Winter Orb before you untap, you can untap all your lands freely. Obviously, you need some assistance with that. Enter Icy Manipulator (left). It's a very simple card:

Icy Manipulator - 4
Artifact
1, T: Tap target artifact, creature, or land.

Notably, both Icy Manipulator and Winter Orb are artifacts. Colored artifacts are a mainstay of the game nowadays, but at this point, artifacts were colorless (if not always 100% color-agnostic). You paid for them with any color of mana (or even colorless mana!), their effects cost mana of any color. You could quite fairly play them in any deck.

What this means is that this combo could appear in any deck you play and you would have no way to predict that. Oh, sure, some decks were better than others for this (black was a strong contender due to Dark Ritual, and of course green has been strong for anything that would love ramp (and this is a 7-mana combo to pull out of nowhere...). But nothing is stopping you playing this in a color that doesn't have the ability to go at such a breakneck pace. And of course, getting this working with no delay needs only 5 mana (or 4 if you are okay with having one "dump" turn due to just paying off Icy Manipulator). It's a natural fit for blue, being the control color, but anything could do it.

What not anything could do is counter it. At the time, artifact destruction was a thing that mostly red and white did, with green getting a bit, too. If you're playing black - a color which has so little artifact destruction that even its kill spells typically don't let you kill artifact creatures - and this crops up, you are probably going to be having a very bad time until the game ends.

There is one more super-infamous control card that slows the game to a crawl, too. Let's talk about that now, too.

!!! CHALLENGER APPROACHING !!!

Stasis - 1U
Enchantment
Players skip their untap steps.
At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice this enchantment unless you pay U.

Stasis is infamous for good reason. Stasis sucks to play against. Much like with Winter Orb, enchantment removal was not common. In these early reaches of the game's lifespan, you had it in white, with not as much in green (black enchantment destruction was not a thing yet). You could return it to hand in blue, but obviously, you do not want to bounce Stasis unless you do it at the end of its controller's turn and can win right after. This is not a common occurrence. However, I don't think Stasis is as bad, even if it's quite boring.

Stasis and Winter Orb both suck for the same reason: because they stop you from playing the game. However, Stasis has an upkeep cost. You have to keep feeding Stasis one blue mana per turn. As a rule, this means you have to play an island (or other blue source) every turn to maintain Stasis's grip on the game. There are a few things you can do to counteract this, but especially early on, these weren't all that common. Maintaining Stasis permanently is tough; you need a dedicated deck built around it, generally as your main combo... or a massive stack of lands that leaves you almost no space for a win condition, which would be a terrible way to build a deck! Winter Orb/Icy Manipulator lacks this constant resource drain and is a very compact, modular combo you can run in basically any deck.

And I do mean, once again, any deck. Crucially, Stasis requires your opponent to play blue. Especially back then, when the card pool was so small, you could see your opponent play an Island and immediately start preparing for how to deal with Stasis and how to play around it. With Orb-Manipulator, there is no tell. It could show up in a deck you think you have figured out out of the blue in the second round, and then you'd be caught with your pants down, trying to figure out how to escape the situation you've ended up in that you had no idea you would need to consider!

To make clear, it's not that there's no counterplay to Winter Orb. Things that aren't lands untap as normal (which is also a way a Winter Orb deck can be abusive). You can wait until you untap, as not-fun as that is. The point is that last part again. Winter Orb just sucks to play against. It is a bad (good) card; this is to say, it's extremely powerful. I'm not sure if Winter Orb is that toxic to the gameplay environment, until someone actually puts it on the table. It's awful, but there are plenty of toxic cards that are prevalent enough to hurt the entire game just by their having been printed. We no longer live in a world where Winter Orb is a plug-and-play solution where 99% of the counterplay is sitting on your thumbs; most decks can deal with it now due to the much larger card pool. But whenever I see Winter Orb hit a table, I immediately flash back to an era where - especially once they banned the things that could interfere with Winter Orb being playable (like Channel and the Power Nine) - it made everything worse just by being there.

Now, I'll be fair here: I don't know that Winter Orb made that many waves in tournament play. Probably because when tournaments existed and the combo could be played, Necropotence existed and dominated the tournament scene - something which I actually am completely fine with because it introduced one of Magic's major play philosophy points ("only one life point matters") in full. "Black Summer" also didn't result in the gameplay stopping, as a rule. But for those who are curious, Winter Orb stayed in the Standard/Type 2 format until 1999, and has never been banned aside from cases where it rotated out of formats (at least, according to the MTG wiki's page on the matter). They finally decided to stop printing it after Fifth Edition, causing the 1999 rotation. It was not reprinted in a format that was playable in paper until Eternal Masters, which did not introduce it to any new formats. Good. Okay, it's a thing to worry about in Eternal Masters sealed/draft, but I'm pretty sure that's the least of your worries there. Even if it was not a major tournament force, I have to imagine everyone was happy to finally see the back end of this piece of crap.

I hate playing against Winter Orb. I'd go so far as to call it dishonorable. But I also kind of respect it for being one of the most downright evil things the game has to offer. So, I propose a toast. To the most diabolical weapon in the realm of cardboard. Raise your glasses, my friends.

Then pour out their contents right on this fucking thing.

Here are the original messages I posted on Discord:

oh wow i think i have for the first time seen one of those thumbnails for a video that's like "the most hated X" that has a thing in it that did actually make me extremely angry!

it's the thing with the polar bears on it! i can explain if you want because it's kind of bullshit
ok so
here i'll make things easier by posting the most recent version of polar bear card rules-text wise
[Winter Orb card render posted here]
first of all! that is very good artwork! i love it because it is very reminiscent of this painting ("Man Proposes, God Disposes")
[Man Proposes, God Disposes, which is reproduced above, posted here]
which i have talked about before
so i love this as a choice because this was E A R L Y magic where they basically just had names as prompts
funny story about this is that someone got a commission for a card referring to "lemures" in the name (a type of like... vengeful spirit or some shit of greco-roman origin) and they just painted fuckin lemurs because they thought it was a typo
lmao
anyway though
this art goes extremely hard for this which is great because playing against someone who plays winter orb will make you feel like you are getting mauled by bears too
for a start ok what is the first thing that stands out about how bullshit this card is
no wait don't answer i'll tell you what it is: it costs 2 mana
just two fucking mana
why
what fucking DEMON decided ...
ok so let's move on to the effect
first "as long as it's untapped" this has to do with a weird rule about old artifacts
so before they were unified as just "artifacts" in like. mid 1994. there were three types: mono artifacts, poly artifacts, and continuous artifacts
the first two are names concerned with activated abilities
mono artifacts required you to tap the artifact to use it, poly artifacts did not
this was silly but i guess they got tired of writing "Tap to" in rules text back when they didn't have a tap symbol (remember, this was printed in the original base set, which is also kind of angering)
the third one, and here's where relevancy happens, is continuous artifacts. they just have passive abilities
as you can "see" in the first printing of winter orb
[Here I posted the Alpha printing of Winter Orb, which is seen up there somewhere.]
so, this entire structure makes me extremely angry, but it has little to do with why playing against this card makes me want to peel my skin off and eat it to survive the lean months
it has something to do with it, though, because continuous artifacts had a special rule:
they turn off while tapped
all of them
which is why you get stupid dog shit on some old cards like recurring staple of every format where it's ever been legal Howling Mine (2 mana artifact, lets each player draw an additional card during their draw phase... as long as it's untapped) with stupid riders attached to them that they by no rights should actually have
until they did away with that a while later and they stopped having to put that shit on cards like null rod and shit
so
you look at this and you think "winter orb is a symmetrical effect"
"my opponent is having a bad time playing it too!"
and... they extremely are not
how 2 play winter orb:

• tap it at the end of your opponent's turn, during their end phase
• play as normal

this card also existed in the original basic set so every color could do this
[Icy Manipulator was posted here.]
completely color-agnostic control. fuckin imagine
any deck, any deck can play this shit and you just have to sit there with your thumbs up your ass hoping you draw artifact destruction
what's that? you're playing, say, black, which has no artifact destruction? or you have no artifact destruction in your main deck?

FUCK YOU!

enjoy THE BADDEST TIME
now at this time there was another fuck-your-untaps card, too
this one's pretty infamous as well, and it kinda sucks, but i don't think it's as bad
[Stasis was posted here.]
now, stasis is harder to get rid of by someone else's hand because only white and green had enchantment removal at the time (minus blue, which had return effects for most things, but you really don't want to do that for stasis for obvious reasons lol)
but
it actually is a symmetrical effect
it cannot be switched off the way ice cold polar bear balls can
and it times out eventually because you have to keep paying for it
and, unless your deck is 59 islands and a stasis (in which case, you have no win condition so there is no point to playing), you invariably will not draw mana one turn and you'll be up shit creek
you also might want to play other cards, which cuts its lifespan
meanwhile, coca-cola death squads' torture department doesn't remove the entire untap phase, just all-but-one land, but for anyone playing it, they are probably playing a deck that stops them being affected by it
and their own stuff doesn't make it last any less time even if they don't turtle until turn 5 for icy manipulator shenanigans
and again, need i remind you, winter orb and icy manipulator are both colorless
if your opponent plays a land that taps for blue, you can go "ok i might have to deal with stasis," or if they don't, you can go "ok i am significantly less likely to have to deal with stasis"
meanwhile a cbt team funded by a zionist corporation selling legal drugs (caffeine) to children can appear at any time and make time slow to a crawl until you inevitably feel like grabbing the card off the table and eating it, causing you to take the disqualification you would expect them to get for their deck not matching their submitted deck list
also importantly, compared to a lot of more modern cards that make people angry, old man winter's giant frosty alloy-clad nards do one very special thing: they prevent you from playing the game
like a lot of other infamously awful cards suck or have very difficult counterplay, but at least you're not just sitting there watching your opponent jack off in public
IT IS AWFUL DUDE
the last time it was legal in a rotating format or anything that's not "the entire card pool" was 1999 when it rotated out and everyone was happy
the only other tournament-legal printing since then was in the "eternal masters" set (serious art downgrade btw, looks like shit, which fits with how this card makes you feel) which was all about stuff that has been infamously good throughout the game's history but organized to be a draftable set. i assume anybody who played this in a limited format got murdered, but i don't feel like checking
that was in 2016. it hasn't received a print anyone can play with since and i think the entire player base has been happy to see the back side of this piece of shit

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