Chaos Orb: MTG Card of the Day #1

True chaotic energy.

Welcome to MTG Card of the Day, where I show off one rad-as-heck Magic: the Gathering card, explain what I think makes it so cool, and share some interesting facts. You don’t need to know anything about Magic! Just have an appreciation for cool fantasy art, nerd history, and potentially broken game mechanics.

Chaos Orb

Favorite Chaos Orb Community Quotes:

“From the rulings: ;If you have sleeves on cards, they count as the cards.’ So put your Chaos Orb deck in REALLY BIG SLEEVES!” - helluin

“According to an urban legend, a tournament player once tore his copy to pieces and spread the pieces over his opponent's cards, destroying all of them. His opponent promptly called a judge and had him disqualified for only having 59 cards left in his deck.” - Roxolan

What Makes Chaos Orb So Rad:

Back in the eaaarly ‘90s, in Magic: the Gathering’s earliest days, the game was much more wild and wooly. Magic has always had, and still maintains, a “rules are meant to be broken” ethos. You lose the game when you reach 0 life, obviously. Except when you don’t. You can only play with cards in your actual deck, of course. Except when you can literally go grab and use any card ever made right in the middle of a match. It’s awesome.

But in the very early days the game had a more chaotic, game-like energy about it, which was fairly quickly tamped-down as it became a multi-million dollar industry and eventually formed a pro sports league. And nowhere is this old school chaotic energy more evident, in my opinion, than in Chaos Orb.

It’s ridiculous! Since there're (basically) very few rules about how to set up your play area, you could defend against it by spreading out all your cards as far apart as you wanted. Could you put some of them “in play” under the table…? Who knows! An official rules clarification stated that the card had to flip over in the air and you couldn’t just…. flip it over in your hand. A further rules clarification specifically defined what a “flip” means. It’s the best and worst kind of ridiculous.

It’s the difference between “rules are meant to be broken” and “there basically are no rules.” I love that it exists. But I also think it is completely understandable that it’s banned in every official MTG play format, even in “almost anything goes” Vintage.

Have a hard you want to see appear in MTG Card of the Day? Leave a comment and lemme know!