Mark - it's my 30th birthday tomorrow! if it isn't too presumptuous a day early I'd love some birthday trivia on Mahamoti Djinn to get me through this Friday afternoon.

Development uses the term “Mahamoti” to mean a card that helps you win limited games without being unstoppable. Happy Birthday!

Why are so many cards Limited fodder? Couldn't the power levels of commons be recalibrated so that all of them fit into some competitive strategy somewhere?

To answer this question, I’ll quote from a column I wrote many years ago about why R&D makes bad cards. (The link for the article called “When Cards Go Bad” is at the end of this write-up.)

1) All The Cards Cannot Be Good

This first point is the most important. Card power is relative. Ancestral Recall, as an example, is only a good card until we create a card that allows you to draw four cards for U. The thing that defines the power level of any one card is the other cards that exist with it in the same environment. One way to look at this phenomenon is to look at Volcanic Hammer. When Volcanic Hammer was reprinted in Seventh Edition (it first appeared in Portal), many players complained. Why did Wizards put such a “bad card” in the basic set? In the current Standard environment though, Volcanic Hammer is seeing play. How can a “bad card” be good enough to play? The answer rests in the card Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt is strictly better than Volcanic Hammer. It has the same effect but its one mana cheaper and is an instant rather than a sorcery. When players first saw Volcanic Hammer, they compared it to Lightning Bolt and, in comparison, Volcanic Hammer seemed pretty damn sucky. But, when Lightning Bolt is removed from the picture, such as in the current Standard environment, Volcanic Hammer looks a lot better. As an experiment, let’s say we got together a collection of the top three hundred pro players and had them select the 1500 most powerful cards in Magic’s history. I chose 1500 as that is roughly the size of a full Standard environment. We then ran a Pro Tour for these three hundred players where the format was decks built using only those 1500 cards and basic land. After the tournament, we count how many of each card was used. Any card used in any deck or sideboard (even if there’s only one in the entire tournament) is counted. Experience (as in: years of looking at outcomes of premier events like Pro Tours, Grand Prix and Nationals) tells us that only 300-400 unique cards would see play. Why? Because even among the best cards, some cards are just better than others. Mahamoti Djinn is a solid creature, but it’s no Morphling.Regrowth is an excellent spell but it’s not Yawgmoth’s Will. In this environment, some of the “good cards” become “bad cards.“ The phenomenon always holds true. No matter what 1500 cards you pick, the cards will rank in a power order. When a player goes to build a deck (assuming his goal is to build the most competitive deck), he will choose cards at the top of the list before cards at the bottom. If we can have 300-400 good cards, doesn’t that mean we can make a large expansion where all the cards see play? Yes, in theory, we could design a 330 card set where every card sees play. But what about the next set? Would anyone buy the next small expansion if none of the cards were tournament worthy? Of course not. The only way to then make the next set have tournament-worthy cards is to increase the power level. The new more powerful cards would then displace some of the cards from the first set. Unfortunately, this solution would ultimately destroy the game as the power level would keep increasing until it spun madly out of control. R&D long ago figured out the solution to this problem. Take the 300-400 good cards and spread them out over the seven sets legal (the two blocks and the base set) in any one Standard environment. But that leaves 1100+ cards that will never see Standard play. What do we do with them? To read the rest of the article: click here:  http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr5