My Certain Random #OneMagicalCard (Or where I spend half the text talking about completely unrelated stuff)

A Certain Random Guy
7 min readOct 10, 2020

Our story begins in early 2004. Darksteel was still the newest kid in the block of Magic sets, bringing pain and suffering to standard players the world over as they had to grapple with Affinity and Skullclamps every week in their FNMs, with Fifth Dawn scheduled for release later that same year. The 7 (going on 8!) years old me had no idea what Magic the Gathering was beyond “that game some of the older kids play in the school library during break” (or maybe it was the Lord of the Rings card game? Well, doesn’t really matter) and probably would never have found out about it until much later if it weren’t for a small moment of serendipity.

The biennial São Paulo Book Fair is — or at least was — the biggest event for literature fans in Brazil and, as a very early reader, I cannot remember a time in my life where I didn’t schedule at least one day to go there, find new books and buy things on sale, and my parents were more than happy to take me and incentivize my reading habits. But if you have ever taken a small kid to a theme park (and this was certainly a good equivalent for me at the time) you know that they have far too much energy for their small bodies and, no matter how enthusiastic you might be about carrying them around, at some point you’ll just want to sit down, buy some overly-expensive beverage and snack, and rest for a bit. That’s where the Magic comes in.

Surrounded by booths full of shelves and books, there was this one stand that only had tables, and those tables were full of people playing. I’m not sure if I was the one that dragged my mother to see what it was or vice versa, but the end result was that I found myself sitting before a booth staff member who taught me the basics with… I want to say it was a starter deck, but I’m not sure if those were a thing at the time and I’m pretty sure I cast Land Leeches at some point? That certainly wasn’t an 8th Edition card, so who knows.

Doesn’t look like an 8th edition card, does it?

The end result was that I left the booth with a black 8th Edition Intro Pack and my first deck ever, the almighty Master Blaster Darksteel Theme Deck! Which I wouldn’t be able to really play with, because I didn’t know anyone who played Magic the Gathering. That didn’t stop me from buying more magic products, however, as I did buy at least one more Theme Deck from Mirrodin block (I think it was Nuts and Bolts? I remember owning a Skullclamp at that time) and at least 2 more from Kamigawa Block decks whose flavor and art I absolutely adored. Magic was the game I’d play with some of my cousins when they visited, matching theme deck against theme deck without much thought, until about a year later, when I changed to a different school where another kid happened to have cards of their own.

Now, I’m not sure if it was just a case of me being bad at the game (which I was) or the kid — whose name I do not remember, sorry about that random person I went to school with — having a larger card pool and actually mixing and matching with it to make a better deck, but I was absolutely trounced every time I played. No matter what bomb I drew, no matter what deck I brought to school that day, it always led to the same result. So I came up with a plan.

The best guild of all

I knew that a new set had been released, because the bookstore where I bought my decks had the theme decks, so I suggested that we both buy a deck each and play with them. Levelling the playing field, so to say. I checked the colors of the decks, saw that they were all two-colored, and suggested that each of us buy a deck of different colors. Shortly after, some of the other kids that had seen us playing decided to check it out as well and we expanded the rules to them: no picking a color combination that someone else had chosen.

That was how my school playground became a battlefield for the guilds of Magic’s then-newest plane, Ravnica. By the middle of the following year, we had a full set of 10 players each with one of the guild theme decks playing pseudo-EDH in multiplayer free for alls and it was one of the most fun experiences I had playing a game until I got back into magic (and officially into EDH) over 10 years later. But this is not about me learning about magic, so let’s talk about the guild I chose at the time and what that has to do with my favorite card of all time.

I don’t really remember why I picked the deck that I did at the time. Maybe it was just at random, or perhaps because I really like Champions of Kamigawa’s spirit Theme deck, which was full of big stompy spirits, or maybe it was just the fact that Golgari Guildmage is the coolest looking of all of the original guildmages (don’t @ me) and that was the art on the box. But whatever the case was, I was the kid with the Golgari Deathcreep Theme Deck and I fell in love with it.

You can’t be cooler than this, sorry

If you’ve never played with this Golgari theme deck, it is basically an aristocrats deck that happens to have a bunch of dredge creatures (including a singleton Golgari Grave-troll!) that you can keep bringing back until you either win through value or deck yourself. If you know what you’re doing, it’s very nice and fun and, if you’re a 9 years old kid who hasn’t quite understood the power of the graveyard, it’s a terrifying experience where you’re throwing away your cards for literally no reason!

To make matters more complicated, the deck has only 2 spells that can bring things back from the graveyard without some complicated drawback or condition, the first being Recollect, a more expensive Regrowth and the second being (finally) the reason I started writing this in the first place: Vigor Mortis.

Where we finally start talking about the card

Vigor Mortis is… not that good of a reanimation spell, if I go by every person who ever looked at my Jarad EDH and told me to replace it with a more efficient or versatile alternative. At 4 CMC, its cost is in the same range as Dread Return and Unburial Rites while not having their flashback keyword and with an upside that is mechanically very insignificant.

But there was nothing greater than saving my single Vigor Mortis for turn after turn until my deck had less than 5 cards in it and bringing back a gigantic Grave-troll or a (admittedly less impressive) Rotwurm. So much so that I was motivated to finally move on to buying boosters just hoping to find an extra copy of it — not smart, I know — and was instantly vindicated when my very first booster had both a Vigor Mortis in the uncommons and Sisters of Stone Death as the rare card. Who cares about Rotwurms now, am I right?!

All of this to say that I understand that one of the main reasons this forgotten uncommon from Ravnica is my favorite card after all these years might be irrational nostalgia from when I first got into the game, but it certainly isn’t the only reason.

For starters, I would argue that Vigor Mortis is the quintessential Golgari card in that its flavor is the perfect explanation of all that the Golgari stand for: as necromancers, they can make due with just the death aspects of black mana without a hitch — which is shown by the fact that you can still cast the spell even if you do not have any green source — but the addition of green mana brings them strength that they otherwise wouldn’t have. The art compliments this by showing a creature reforming itself through bone and flesh and vines to the point that they all blend together in a mix of nature and self that would make little sense in a spell that was exclusively black.

The fact that the art takes place in a sewer also calls back to the position of the Golgari on the plane, both as the people who make their living underground, managing the rotfarms that feed the surface dwellers and cleaning the sewers that run under the whole city-plane, but also as a guild that was molded by adversities (such as literally not having their entire body left) and embraced the cycle of life and death to overcome them.

This is all tied together with a flavor text that might as well be the motto of the Swarm as a whole and that perfectly balances the black (death and ruthlessness) and the green (life and strength) that form the identity of the guild.

However, now that I’m thinking about it, this is all irrelevant, isn’t it? Who cares about flavor text, or art, or mechanics telling a story, right? Nostalgia is also completely irrelevant when you get down to it! In the end, Vigor Mortis is just the best card of all time because it is both a reanimation spell (a.k.a. the best kind of spell) and a pun, and you can’t beat that.

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