Six Examples of Power Creep in Magic
Power creep is a fact of life. When I was an infant, I could not beat up a 12-year-old. Now, as an adult, I can. That's power creep. It's a natural progression toward optimization.
In terms of game design rhetoric, however, it's a more specific term. Generally, "power creep" is used to describe the phenomenon that occurs when an established game sees newer elements introduced that at their base level render existing elements of that game obsolete. It would be like when your grandpa buys into a microtransaction that inserts a "super-wildcard" into his Solitaire app.
For a game like Magic: The Gathering, that's existed for multiple decades, power creep is an inexorable tide that washes over us.. It's been a topic of conversation for nearly the entirety of the game's lifespan. In 2013, there was an article on Magic's main website concerning that very thing, in which former senior developer Sam Stoddard wrote that "some power creep in Magic is inevitable" due to the fact that expansions are meant to be played with the existing cards. He explains that with video games, a new expansion might raise your level cap or provide new abilities, examples of the game growing more "tall" in terms of your character's upper limits. "Magic, on the other hand, tends to expand its content 'wide,'" wrote Stoddard. "That is, the focus is on giving you new and different things to do that are of around the same power level of the previous cards."
Stoddard points out that technically, based on banned/restricted cards, Alpha is actually the most powerful set of all time, and every subsequent set is actually a reduction of power, comparatively. Even so, it can't be argued that in terms of individual cards, there is quantifiable power creep. While some cards might see strict upgrades in subsequent releases, others are "downshifted," said Mark Rosewater in 2021. "We call it the Escher Stairwell," he wrote. "We raise the power of certain things while lowering the power of other things. Rotation helps take things out of the system. Players focus on what's powerful, so it gives the impression it's always going up."
Because it's not an "exact science," Rosewater continued, and because many factors are at play during design, "there's a bit of wiggle" of how powerful any one set ends up. "New cards add new components which can raise or lower the power level depending on whether they enable or hose dominant strategies," he said.
As recently as a month ago, Rosewater again addressed the term, or more specifically, his assertion that power creep "doesn't exist," at least in the way that players might think. "Imagine there are ten sets, Set A through Set J," he said. "For power creep to be happening, each set has to be overall higher in power level than the set that comes before it. The practical effect of that is that Set B obsoletes Set A. Set C obsoletes Set B. By the time Set J comes out, none of the early sets have playable cards. That's just not true with Magic."
Rosewater said that the issue at hand is designing for a format creates more "churn" in that format. "Designing for Modern has sped up the speed at which relevant cards enter the system, and thus the pace at which the metagame shifts. Players are used to that in Standard, but it's a relatively new thing for Modern, because we didn't design sets for it until recently," he said. "Players are used to thinking of Modern as a slowly rotating format."
So, the way Rosewater sees it, Magic's design is not technically power creeping, "but we're increasing format flow by making more cards relevant for that format. From a game design standpoint, those are different things. This isn't to say that players aren't upset, or that increasing card flow (a.k.a. designing for Modern) isn't something players can be critical of. I'm just explaining what is technically happening."
Since Modern is, like Commander, an Eternal format, it's a good analogue for what we might see in our preferred 100-card playstyle. Once a card is made obsolete by another, the decision that you'll choose to play it becomes one not of power but of other aspects: nostalgia, theme, art, what-have-you. Commander being a singleton format does keep the door propped open for a lesser version of a card, but as power creep continues, that door inches nearer to closing for good. And that's just the name of the game, my friends.
If you're like me, you're more of a visual learner, so let's look at some examples of power creep. It's important not to get too carried away, so we're not going to compare a 30-year-old common to a modern day mythic rare just because they might have the same casting cost. The complexity and power variance across rarity is not power creep, necessarily. But if these cards share most attributes, then they're fair game.
So be sure to point and laugh at the old person in your playgroup still playing these long-ago irrelevant cards who refuses to accept that the future is now.
Craw Wurm to Yavimaya Wurm to Pathbreaker Wurm to Orchard Strider
While Alpha might be considered "the most powerful set of all time," that's not universally true when it comes to the cards contained within. Such is the curious case of the Craw Wurm, who for many years ruled the "green 6/4 for six" roost thanks to the fact that it was the only creature with those exact stats.
However, that changed in 2005, first with Nightsoil Kami from Saviors of Kamigawa. It's pretty much the same, except with an arguably more relevant creature type as well as soulshift 5. That ability, if you're not familiar, is basically Gravedigger for Spirits. Not super powerful, but it's still objectively better than flavor text.
It was probably Yavimaya Wurm, though, that really drove the nail in the Crawfin. It's the exact same thing, down to the creature type and everything, but now we get trample for free. Then, a year later, Pathbreaker Wurm showed up and not only did it have trample, but it gave something else trample as well.
With Modern Horizons 2 we gave up the Wurm type to welcome our new Treefolk friend, the Orchard Strider, meaning Craw Wurm's days of relevance are well and truly deceased.
Infernal Denizen to a bunch of gross creepy-crawlies
Back in Ice Age, Infernal Denizen was a really interesting card. There weren't many ways outside of Merieke Ri Berit to just tap and take a creature. However, while Merieke didn't have much of a downside, Infernal Denizen certainly did, and if you don't want to read all of that fine print, I'll summarize it for you: if you don't sacrifice two Swamps every upkeep, ID just up and s itself, and an opponent takes one of your creatures. Where Merieke was a stable job, Infernal Denizen was a highly predatory loan. It was also an eight-mana 5/7 with no keywords.
It's that last part that has been significantly power crept over the years, with creatures that are objectively better stats-wise that don't make you sacrifice two lands each and every turn. First was Rise of the Eldrazi's Skeletal Wurm, which is nothing to write home about on its own as a simple 7/6 with regenerate for one lowly . But again, no drawbacks. Following the bony boy were three straight eight-mana black creatures with built-in cost reduction, starting with Shambling Attendants from Khans of Tarkir.
And with upcoming Bloomburrow, we get arguably the best of the bunch with Huskburster Swarm, which makes that cost reduction even easier to enjoy, and raises the keyword count from one to two.
Storm Crow to (checks notes) 20 better versions
Technically, Storm Crow debuted in 1996's Alliances, but I tagged the Portal version from a year later because it's the more iconic version, and if you're of a certain age, you know that before it was cool to meme all over that green Dinosaur, Storm Crow was the hip thing to mention out-of-context. In other words, the youths are frightening and their culture is alarming.
A two-mana, blue, 1/2 flyer is not exciting, so after Storm Crow, Wizards has been trying to soup it up a bit ever since. It received a functional reprint in Portal Second Age with Talas Scout, and it can be argued that while it's almost literally the same card, the minor difference is actually an example of power creep itself. While Storm Crow's creature type is simply "Bird," Talas Scout's is Human Pirate Scout, two much more relevant subtypes, and also Scout.
After that, though, things got wacky, with designers slapping all kinds of keywords and abilities onto the Storm Crow template. Floodbringer had an activated ability, albeit a pretty dumb one. You could kick the Tempest Owl. Metropolis Sprite could kill itself for , Aether Swooper provided energy, and perhaps the most powerful of the bunch, Oaken Siren from Lost Caverns of Ixalan, just pantsed the Storm Crow in every conceivable metric.
And I didn't even mention Vexing Radgull.
Pour one out for Mons's Goblin Raiders
To date, there are 95 cards that are A) common rarity, B) 1/1 creatures, C) red, and D) cost . Mons's Goblin Raiders was the first. And yes, it's actually "Mons's," not "Mons" or Mon's."
Of those 95 cards, there's Mons's Goblin Raiders of course, which is completely vanilla in every aspect, meaning it has no abilities or keywords whatsoever. In that class, there's also Dwarven Trader from Homelands. Every other creature that satisfies the requirements of A-D, all 93 of them, are objectively better, simply because they all actually do something.
Granted, we're talking common, one-mana 1/1s, so they're not going to be game-breaking, but since Alpha hit shelves in '93, we've seen nearly 100 versions of Mons's Goblin Raiders that are objectively better... or power crept, in other words. Hell, even Kird Ape not even a year later is a prime example.
Leeching out of control
I know I said earlier that we're not going to compare cards across different rarities, but what I should have said is we're not going to do that going up. In the case of Invasion's Leech cycle, it's perfectly acceptable to compare them to lower rarities. Mainly because they were terrible.
To expedite this a bit, let me just present you with four uncommons and one common: Resolute Watchdog, Quickling, Veiled Shade, Village Ironsmith, and Imperiosaur.
In a vacuum, all five of these creatures are objectively better than their corresponding leech, and if we were to compare them to other rares, the power creep is even more pronounced. I mean, would you rather play Ruby Leech or Ash Zealot? And just look at all the words on Evolved Spinoderm. I stopped reading after the second paragraph, so I assume it's all upside.
We're talking about these leeches because it illustrates a phenomenon we've seen in recent years where drawbacks are all but vanished from Magic design. Today, the drawbacks are largely the absence of upside. And speaking of the absence of upside (or downside, or everything else, really), we can't discuss this topic without a chat about the white two-mana 2/2.
A chat about the white two-mana 2/2
There are 150 white, two-mana 2/2s throughout the history of Magic. The four shown above are all vanilla. The rest of them all have words.
There are plenty of examples of power creep among various levels of rarity, even. Those four vanilla creatures are all commons, but then again so are 76 other examples. And since the start of 2023, we've added 11 more common, white two-mana 2/2s to our list. Compare something like Glory Seeker to Nyxborn Unicorn or Attentive Sunscribe. Sure, in today's terms these are 15th picks in draft. But compared to their predecessors, they might as well be mythic rares.
At uncommon, what's your thought on the power level difference between Thraben Heretic from 2012 and this dumb little Prairie Dog from Outlaws of Thunder Junction?
And at rare, how about Leonin Shikari giving all your equip costs flash versus Kemba, Kha Enduring basically doing that, but better? As for mythic rare, there's only one: Soulfire Grand Master. We'll have to wait and see if it gets competition in the future.
Don't forget, this is specifically about 2/2s. We could have just as easily used this section to talk about how the once-mighty rare Savannah Lions are objectively outclassed by a Cheeky House-Mouse, a card I didn't even know existed until today.
Angels guide me while I wake, and I will watch for evil's creep
You've probably noticed that we've stuck primarily to creatures for the sake of this discussion. That's by design, as it's easier to evaluate the presence of power creep with all other things being equal among creatures. But there are many, many examples of power creep among other card types as well, and perhaps we'll talk about them in the future.
There are plenty of examples just in the upcoming Bloomburrow, like how Fell is a strict upgrade over Defeat, Impale, and Eviscerate. That's a bit of a cherry-picked example, as draft environments also play a part in this, but as Rosewater himself told us at the top of this article, "players focus on what's powerful, so it gives the impression [power] is always going up."
But with power creep, perception might be reality.
Hit me with your power creep main offenders below, and maybe we'll do another one of these lists.
