The 20 Most Influential Card Designs of All Time

Title card for the panel

The 20 Most Influential Card Designs of All Time was a panel hosted by Mark Rosewater at MagicCon: Chicago in 2025. At the time of the panel, he had been Head Designer for Magic for 21 years, and worked on the game for nearly three decades. The twenty cards, or sometimes cycles of cards, were chosen for meeting three criteria: they were popular at the time of their release, they caught players' attention, and they inspired R&D to make further cards. The cards on the list are not necessarily the first cards to embody their effects, but they distinguished themselves by their popularity.

Summary

#	Card	Year	Set	Designer	Description
20	Mindslaver	2003	Mirrodin	Mark Rosewater	Rosewater had tried to print this effect earlier during Tempest, on the card Helm of Possession, before getting it approved for Mirrodin by Rules Manager Paul Barclay. It makes the list not for its specific effect, but for demonstrating the power of "cool text" that's "short, pithy, [and] exciting".
19	Form of the Dragon	2003	Scourge	Brian Tinsman	A successful example of "all-in top-down design".
18	Ajani's Pridemate	2010	Magic 2011	Matt Place	Combined two popular mechanics, gaining life and gaining counters, in a causal relationship. The triggered ability has become so widespread that "pridemate" is now R&D shorthand for the effect.
17	Gonti, Lord of Luxury	2016	Kaladesh	Ian Duke	While the "Gonti effect" allows a player to cast spells "stolen" from their opponent's library, "stealing" cards from any zone has been broadly popular.
16	Ball Lightning	1994	The Dark	Jesper Myrfors	Designed to blur the line between creatures and direct damage. Creatures that inherently last for a single turn have been a common red archetype, as have "Heat Shimmer" effects that create temporary copies of creatures. It was also the first of 400+ mono-red creatures (as of the time of the panel) to have haste.
15	Fact or Fiction	2000	Invasion	Collaboration between Rosewater, Bill Rose, and Mike Elliott	A card designed "for Spike", this is one of the first divvy spells. It's notable for being fun regardless of its controller's skill level, but scales dramatically with its controller's knowledge of both their own and their opponent's decks.
14	Mishra's Factory	1994	Antiquities	David Petty	The first creature land.
13	Akroma, Angel of Wrath	2003	Legions	Bill Rose	Proved the popularity of "kitchen sink design", which places large numbers of keywords onto creatures.
12	Watery Grave	2005	Ravnica: City of Guilds	Mark Rosewater	Initially excluded from Ravnica in favor of trying several other ideas. Shock lands demonstrated the value of paying a cost up front, and the viability of giving basic land types to dual and triple lands. They were also an example of card names chosen to be agnostic to the setting, so that they could be reprinted in sets elsewhere.
11	Panharmonicon	2016	Kaladesh	Mark Rosewater	Designed by Rosewater out of a conviction that each set should have an artifact that does something never seen before. It established the rules text "triggers an additional time".
10	Platinum Angel	2003	Mirrodin	Unknown	Similar to Panharmonicon, this card had completely novel rules text that "really spoke... to the cleanliness of an idea". It was the most popular card in Mirrodin. Rosewater could not determine which of the set's designers created the card, and in attempting to research it, discovered that he'd already lost track of that information shortly after Mirrodin's release.
9	Mistform Ultimus	2003	Legions	Mark Rosewater	Showed the "power in everything", and the value of having an ability that is defined even outside of the battlefield. It directly inspired changeling.
8	Doran, the Siege Tower	2007	Lorwyn	Devin Low	Created to solve the problem of using high toughness as a source of inertia, the quality of bringing the game closer to ending. Referred to as "backbone" in Arena, or simply the "Doran ability" in R&D.
7	Sun Titan	2010	Magic 2011	Aaron Forsythe	Part of a cycle; Improved on attack triggers by expanding their condition to "enters or attacks", ensuring a use on the creature's first turn.
6	Force of Will	1996	Alliances	Chris Page	The most famous of the first cycle of pitch spells. Broke the unspoken rule that being tapped out meant that you were unable to cast spells.
5	The Hive	1993	Alpha	Richard Garfield	The very first top-down design, to embody a hornet's nest. Introduced tokens to the game.
4	Ivory Charm	1996	Mirage	Bill Rose and the Mirage design team	A cycle to make use of various effects that were too weak to be worth a single mana, by combining them and using opportunity cost to justify the price. Inspired several later charm cycles, commands, split cards, and numerous other modal designs.
3	Figure of Destiny	2008	Eventide	Brian Tinsman	A design that mechanically represented the before and after of a character's growth. Inspired level up, double-faced cards, and Classes.
2	Plague Rats	1993	Alpha	Richard Garfield	The first example of superlinear growth. While Alpha's rules allowed for any number of copies of a card in a deck, later rules did not, which led to Relentless Rats and its "relentless" mechanic. It also inspired cards like Kindle, and the Sliver creature type: "what if we made Plague Rats, but it grants other things instead of +1/+1?" Slivers themselves inspired numerous later mechanics.
1	Doubling Season	2005	Ravnica: City of Guilds	Mark Rosewater	A very popular mechanic, which also inspired another card on this list (Panharmonicon). "Double" and "twice" now show up on many cards.

Trivia

• In retrospect, Roesewater admitted that he should have included Man-o'-War, Nekrataal and Uktabi Orangutan (all from Visions).

External links

• Mark Rosewater (Feb 27, 2025). "Mark Rosewater's Top 20 Most Influential Card Designs | MagicCon: Chicago". Magic: The Gathering.