A booster of Magic: The Gathering can be filled with cards that are more likely to help your opponent than the one playing them. It also contains many cards that would prove to be so much more powerful than their designers intended that they had to be banned from most formats.

This is a list of cards so ridiculously powerful that they completely dominated the game for a while, until they were banished to the Shadowrealm.

Skull clamp

Equipment cards are meant to give strength, defense, or additional abilities to the equipped creature—or so you’d think. The most powerful use of equipment in the history of the game is one that requires you to sacrifice your own creatures to draw more cards. Skullclamp’s negative toughness modifier kills any creature with one toughness and immediately gives the user two cards.

Skullclamp was an incredibly broken card, ironically much more powerful than if it gave +1/+1 to your creatures. It started showing up in far too many decks because as an artifact it didn’t require a specific type of mana to be playable. Skullclamp more than deserved its ban in Modern and Legacy formats.

Oko, Thief of Crowns

Planeswalker cards are meant to be incredibly strong, but there’s incredibly strong, and then there’s Oko strong. While he doesn’t have a clear game-ending ability that would make him a great card, he does have one. But first, let’s look at all the other elements that make him so great. He costs three mana and starts with four loyalty, which is a pretty low cost for a pretty high loyalty.

Oko is also very useful because he can create Food tokens while gaining two extra Loyalty points and can swap control of creatures between his owner and the opponent. However, Oko’s game-breaking ability is the one that turns any creature into a 3/3 Elk creature with no ability. That seems like something you can use to buff your 1/1 creatures into stronger Elks, but it’s even better at seriously debuffing the opponent’s best creatures.

Best of all, this extremely useful ability doesn’t cost him any loyalty points, but instead gives Oko an extra point. Oko naturally became one of the most dominant cards in the history of the game and had to be banned everywhere except Commander and Vintage.

Time walk

This sorcery is part of the famous “Power 9”, MTG Cards so ridiculously powerful that you could argue they were made at a time when Wizards of the Coast didn’t bother balancing things at all. Spoilers: There will be a lot of them on this list.

Time Walk is as simple as it gets: you play it, then you get a whole extra turn once it’s over, with no drawbacks. It would have been incredibly overpowered games even if it didn’t cost just two measly mana.

Balance

Plot twist: the one card called Balance is actually anything but fair and balanced.

Despite claims that Balance would even the game, it allowed the wily player holding it to dictate the pace of the game. If you held Balance, you could play slowly, wait for the player to get greedy and put all their power into play, and then destroy everything they had.

Worse, Balance is extremely cheap, meaning you don’t even need to keep track of much mana to use it. Balance taught us that there’s no such thing as neutrality when it comes to war — and then it was banned everywhere outside of Vintage, where it’s only limited.

Ancestral memory/treasure hunt

Buying cards is one of the best things you can do, both in and out of the game. Assignment: There are a lot of overpowered cards when it comes to player draw, but nothing comes close to Ancestral Recall. This member of the “Power 9” is an instant that, for just one blue mana, allows you to choose a player to draw three cards.

When Wizards later tried to come up with a successor to Ancestral Recall, they came up with Treasure Cruise. To help you realize just how powerful Ancestral Recall really was, Treasure Cruise costs you eight mana—unless you can banish seven cards from your graveyard, in which case it costs the same as Ancestral Recall. Unsurprisingly, Treasure Cruise was eventually banned in all formats except Vintage, where it is restricted. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Demonic teacher

Cards that let you draw are some of the most powerful cards in the game, as they speed up your play and increase the chances of you getting what you need to finish your opponent. Demonic Tutor takes this a step further by allowing you to search for the exact card you want and then put it into your hand. It’s like teleporting in a marathon.

Demonic Tutor was eventually banished and MTG He later released a similar card, Vampiric Tutor, which required players to pay two lives and only put the card in question at the top of the library, but it only cost one mana and was an Instant. Overall, Vampiric Tutor was nearly as overpowered as its originator and was also banned outside of Vintage, where it is restricted.

Necropotency

At first, many saw the drawbacks of skipping your draw phase and having to pay one life for every card they wanted to buy as absolute deal breakers. Then players started to realize that, combined with sorceries that would drain enemy life, getting cards primarily at your opponent’s expense was a great deal.

While Necropotence was great on its own, it became a godlike spell in many combos that completely dominated the game for a while. After its reign in the early 00s, it was inevitably banned everywhere except in Commander and Vintage, where its use is limited.

Tolaric Academy

Unlike Ice Age, the set that contained the awesome Necropotence and little else, Urza’s Saga is one of the best sets in the history of the game. Outside of sets that contain the “Power 9”, Urza’s Saga is hard to beat, as it contains top cards for virtually every color in the game.

Urza’s Saga is known for land cards like Gaea’s Cradle, which you can flip to give you one green mana for each creature you have in play. That’s cool, but instead of syncing with creatures, Tolarian Academy syncs with artifacts, and there are a lot of useful artifacts in play that only cost 0 mana to enter play.

It’s not entirely out of the question that Tolarian Academy will give you four blue manas on your very first turn, making it the most broken land in the history of the game. Tolarian Academy is so broken that it’s banned everywhere outside of Vintage, where it’s restricted.

Black Lotus

This is the most famous and expensive card in the history of the game. While much of that value may come from shady tricks to drive up the price, there is no denying that this is the best card in the history of the game. MTG.

Think about it. A card that, for the price of nothing, gives you three mana that you can use on anything. With one Black Lotus, you can cast Necropotence on your first turn, or Ancestral Recall plus Time Walk. How crazy is that? Well, it’s crazy enough to only be banned everywhere outside of Vintage, where it’s restricted.

Cards that play for ante

And what could be worse than a Black Lotus? Well, back in the day, MTG featured a mad mechanic named For. This mechanic didn’t really give players an advantage, but it did raise the stakes of the game to insurmountable levels. Ante cards allowed the losing player to pass IRL ownership of a card to their opponent.

While it certainly raised the stakes of the game –The Triple Triad of Final Fantasy VIII style — this mechanic made MTG going from a trading card game to a gambling card game, so these cards all had to go in all sizes.

If all the ante cards seem to have some sort of cursed aura, then they probably do.