In the fantasy trading card game Magic: The Gathering, players assume the role of a planeswalker, an all-powerful wizard who can walk the realms of reality and summon creatures while casting powerful spells. Players have been enjoying this game since the summer of 1993, and the game is stronger than ever today.

Players can also enchant their creatures, lands, or artifacts to modify them and give them an extra boost. Creatures may grow magical wings or claws, or become huge and brawny. Lands might gain new abilities, or artifacts can be protected from harm. But in any category of Magic cards, there are some cards that really don’t go the distance. With that in mind, let’s now review the ten weakest, most obscure, or obsolete auras out there.

10 Tin Street Market

Many auras enchant creatures, but not all of them. Red sometimes likes to mess with lands, and this Gatecrash common wants you to get more value out of your basic lands during a Limited game.

This is the “rummaging” effect, where you discard cards to draw new ones. It’s a pretty “meh” effect at best, and this aura costs a hefty 4R to get started. That’s pretty steep for some humble rummaging! And if that land is destroyed, you lose two cards at once. Not good.

9 Coma Veil

A number auras are designed to strengthen a creature or an artifact and give them new powers, while others weaken whatever they are enchanting. So, cast some noxious auras on your opponent’s cards and make them suffer!

But don’t do it with Coma Veil. Like Tin Street Market, it costs far too much, and even if you have the dual options of creatures and artifacts, this is a bad deal. Pacifism or Arrest both do this effect much better, and for a much lower mana cost, too.

8 Primal Visitation

Now we get our first creature-based aura, and a multicolored one at that. The splintered Gruul guild of Ravnica favors hard-hitting creatures and an aggressive strategy, and mechanics such as Bloodrush and Riot are quite useful and fun.

The auras aren’t keeping up, though. Primal Visitation is not only expensive, but it contradicts itself! It grants haste, but with that huge mana cost, what’s leftover for the creature itself? Are you enchanting Llanowar Elves with this? Giving the enchanted creature menace or trample makes a lot more sense than haste when you’ve got a mana cost like that.

7 Lightning Diadem

A clear trend is emerging: these auras ask for a lot of mana, and we’re not willing to play ball. Do you have six mana lying around with nothing to do? Then Lightning Diadem is the one for you!

Just kidding. A built-in Shock is nice and can net you card advantage, and giving the enchanted creature +2/+2 is something, at least. But those two effects have little mechanical overlap, and seriously, that mana cost! The queen of Akros (the woman in the picture) can do better. We hope.

6 Skygames

Finally, we get a low-cost aura, and what a waste! That art is simply incredible, and the name is pretty cool, too, as is the flavor text. This aura can enchant a land and allow it to give creatures flying.

That’s a bit underwhelming, to be honest, and blue has plenty of fliers already. Skygames doesn’t even grant a modest power boost, either. Worst of all, you can only activate this at sorcery speed, for some bizarre reason. Flying works well on the defensive too, you know, but Skygames has other ideas. Shame.

5 Favor Of The Woods

The next three auras are all from the Innistrad block, and we begin the trio with Favor of the Woods. Humanity is desperate to fight off the monsters, so they turn to ancient nature rites to protect themselves.

At least, that’s what the flavor text says! Lifegain by itself is not worth a card, and this aura does you little good whether you enchant your own creature or your opponent’s blockers. Your opponent can zap your creature with a removal spell for that sweet 2-for-1 deal, or they block with an enchanted creature… and you gain 3 life. And nothing else.

4 Ghoulflesh

This aura is trying to go in two different directions, and it fails at both. Just what is going on here? This cheap enchantment will give an enchanted creature -1/-1, which is a pretty modest form of removal. Only X/1 creatures will die to this, and even a Limited deck should have access to better removal than that.

Or maybe you’re going for zombie tribal, so you use this on your own creature. But that’s not much of a perk, and your creature is getting shrunk in the meantime. That’s a ridiculous waste of a card slot, no matter the situation.

3 Grounded

Green isn’t known for its fliers. At most, it has a few insects, a few spirit dragons, and the ever-popular Birds of Paradise. For the most part, green would rather take down fliers, and it has many good cards for that effect.

Just don’t count Grounded among them! True to its name, this card will remove flying from an enchanted creature, but you have superior options. Why not use Plummet which, for the same cost, kills the flier outright? Or even Aerial Predation, from Return to Ravnica, which can kill a flier and give you 2 life in the process. Much better!

2 Defensive Stance

By now, we’re seeing some auras that are truly pitiful and irrelevant, and the penultimate bad aura is this blue one from New Phyrexia. Blue likes to play defensively until a win-con comes out, so blue often has counterspells, bounce effects, walls, etc.

And bad auras, it seems. It’s one thing to give an enchanted creature something like +0/+4 to maintain strong defenses in Limited, but -1/+1 makes no sense! Why reduce the power at all? And even without the power reduction, the toughness boost is laughably low. One extra toughness point? Are you sure that’s worth an entire card?

1 Farmstead

This has been pointed out before, and should be restated here: gaining life points should not be the only function of a card. Damaging your opponent is what gets you closer to winning, not gaining life for yourself. Lifelink is fine, though, since it’s tied into creatures dealing combat damage. Think Archangel of Thune or Blood Baron of Vizkopa.

This archaic text is awkward. Translation: at the beginning of your upkeep, you may pay two white mana, and you gain 1 life. That’s all you get when you enchant a land of yours with this aura! One life per turn? Even without dumping all that white mana into Farmstead each turn, that is laughable, and it’s strange to see such a white-heavy card carry out lifegain so incredibly inefficiently. While Angel’s Mercy is among the worst instant cards out there, it still manages to be more practical than this. Which is really saying something.

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