That’s a Clown Card, Bro

February 18, 2020

inutile – adjective : useless; pointless

Silent Submersible is a bobo rare. It may be the best example of one from the past several years. It’s a failure in every conceivable way. Not only is it a rotten card, but it’s a flavor disaster.

A silence submarine that, within the gameplay itself, has no form of evasion to help me draw that card? This thing can be blocked by a zombie, or a drake, or a squirrel token? Oof.

Not every bobo rare reaches this level of atrociousness, and many of them are oozing with flavor. Flavor fails are just icing slathered atop a steaming heap of cardboard chunder.

So how do you identify a bobo in the wild? Below are my own personal criteria for identifying a bobo rare:

Bobo rares have no financial value

I don’t mean these cards are literally worth nothing. Even the worst rares can fetch a few pennies from someone who doesn’t have a copy, or finds something to like about the card (even if they just enjoy the card’s terribleness.) I simply mean the card isn’t something you’d ever try to sell on eBay or at your local card shop. Oh, I suppose people put up playsets of just about anything on eBay, but hoping someone will give you a buck for four copies of Hazoret’s Favor doesn’t alter my underlying point: these cards have no appreciable financial value and no one’s madly scouring for one in your trade binder.

At the most basic level, Magic cards earn financial value through play value, scarcity, or some combination of the two. Now, this is where things can get a little complicated (well, crap…)

Sorrow’s Path, released in The Dark in 1994, is universally known as one of the worst rare Magic cards ever printed – surely a bobo then, right? Let’s take a look.

It’s a card that people want to own just because it’s awful. I have one. I don’t remember how it came to rest in my collection many years ago – I never got to open a pack of The Dark – but I know I got it cheap and I know I bought it based on its putrid reputation. Who doesn’t want to own the cardboard equivalent of cat vomit?

But you know what? A near-mint copy might net you $4 or $5 today. That’s not because of play value, folks. There just aren’t that many of these things. Granted, $4 isn’t a lot, but it’s not nothing. And while its infamy has likely propped up its value a bit, it’s also quite old and therefore not especially plentiful. It has a little financial value.

There a number of crummy rares from The Dark that, were they to be released in a new set, no one would pay 25 cents for. That’s true of all Magic’s early sets. Have you seen how really, truly, supremely awful some of the rare legends are from the original Legends set? And have you seen how much you’d have to part with to buy an original version of some of them? That’s the Reserved List for you. I’m going to avoid the topic of the Reserved List, except to say a number of old cards that have never been reprinted have value simply because they are old cards that have never been reprinted (and never will be, unless the Reserved List is abolished.)

So where does that leave Sorrow’s Path and other old rares?

A lot of them undoubtedly were bobos when their respective sets were released. Who was happy to open Wood Elemental, a creature that annihilates your lands in order to be played, in 1994?

I have no doubt players were slower to recognize atrocious cards back then, but I doubt Wood Elemental was ever anything but junk. It was a perfect bobo rare in 1994 (yes, I know, I’m not done defining them; we’re getting there) – and yet a near-mint copy is currently valued at $12. So because it has financial value, is it disqualified as a bobo rare?

Well…no.

Do you know how much sealed English Legends packs go for? I don’t know the floor, since I’ve seen sold packs on eBay that were listed as “$140 or best offer” that went for some unlisted best offer. Assuming nothing lower than $125 will get you a Legends booster, how would you feel if you idiotically decided to open it, and the last card in that pack is a Wood Elemental grimacing at you? There are a decent number of Legends rares worth less than $12. Would you smile at the good fortune of seeing Wood Elemental and think “at least it’s not a $6 Voodoo Doll?”

Based on ROI, Wood Elemental is a bobo. If you’d paid the going price of a Legends pack in 1994, opened Wood Elemental, and then discovered 26 years later that you could theoretically get $12 for it…well, that’s not the worst thing in the world, I guess. But I guarantee Wood Elemental is, was, and always will be one of the least valuable rares from Legends. That its scarcity allowed it to appreciate after several decades doesn’t sway me. It is, was, and always will be a bobo rare.

On the flip side, you have Lion’s Eye Diamond, which I mentioned in a previous post. LED was a terrible card in 1996 – a definite bobo rare. It took years before people found a good use for it, and once they did, the card’s scarcity caused a huge price hike. Lion’s Eye Diamond was pulled from the pit of bobocity by usefulness. While the average player would have no idea what to do with it were it to be reprinted in a new set (which is impossible since it’s on the Reserved List), it would NOT be a bobo were that to happen.

So what was the point of all that babbling?

I, for one, am not willing to wait years to see which cards deserve the bobo label based on how much or little they’ve been played over time. Therefore, I want to establish that a card’s bobocity is not static. If I open a 50 cent rare in 2020, it is definitely a candidate for bobo rare status. Due to modern print runs, such a card is never going to be scarce, so any value it ever has will be based solely on playability. If someday that card is worth $10, that’s because it found some play value. And you’ll be able to argue that it has shed its bobo status and evolved. But it was a bobo when it was opened.

So are all cheap rares automatically bobos? Not necessarily. So what else do we look at when passing judgment?

Bobo rares have minimal play value

Let’s be clear: every card has some play value. In limited formats (sealed deck, draft, etc.) almost every card ever printed is “playable.” Many would still be awful, but you could play them and maybe even get value from them. Once the limited games are over, though…useless card. Thus, minimal play value.

So what about constructed play? Google any bad rare, and chances are good that people – probably many peoples, actually – have tried to build a deck around it. Some of those people even enjoyed the exercise of doing this (masochists, every last one of them.) In casual play groups, there are surely decks designed around terrible rares that can pull out victory with something more than total irregularity.

However, finding a not-lame use for a bad rare doesn’t automatically elevate that rare above bobo status.

If it takes serious effort to make a rare only slightly viable, then it’s probably a bobo.

Really, it comes down to general playability. Opportunistic Dragon is a fairly-costed 4/3 flyer for 4 mana, with a sometimes-relevant ability. And no one plays it in Standard, because this is just not what most decks with red in them want from a 4-drop creature (if they even want a 4-drop creature.) The card is among the cheapest rares in Throne of Eldraine, but I wouldn’t rate it’s bobocity level all that high, since it has some amount of general usefulness. And it’s a dragon, and dragons are cool.

Just as a card’s status as a bobo is not fixed, nor is the level of bobocity cards can have. A card like Opportunistic Dragon has a neato creature type and some generic play value as a creature with evasion. You can put it in any deck capable of casting it and it might provide value, regardless of whatever else your deck is trying to do.

Pale Moon, however, has such an extremely narrow use that it’s essentially never worth a slot in any deck. You can’t throw it in a blue deck and be sure it will do anything.

So while Opportunistic Dragon and Pale Moon have similar financial values, and I’d consider both bobos, I’d consider Pale Moon a far, far more egregious bobo.

This leads to my last point:

Bobo rares are cards you never want to see in a pack

If you buy a booster, even a discounted one, and are thrilled that your purchase nets you a rare that’s readily available for less than $1, you might want to rethink your purchasing habits. The only difference between that and being happy your five $1 scratch-off tickets netted you $2 is that your Magic purchase bestowed upon you a permanent reminder of your rotten luck.

I know there’s some unquantifiable value to the act of opening a booster, beyond what the cards are worth financially. And if you can open junk and find enjoyable uses for it, “more power to ya” or something. You got some value for your purchase, and that’s not nothing. But if you’re thrilled to see a bobo rare in your pack, you’re doing this wrong.

Even as a collector that loves to acquire at least one copy of every card (within financial reason), I’d much rather open a $10 rare I’ll never play than a 50-cent rare I want for a deck. I can scarf up stacks of bobo rares to help me grow my collection or build decks and spend very little doing that. If I never open that $10 rare in a pack, I’m stuck buying it on the secondary market, or simply resigning myself to never owning a copy.

If you’re opening packs just for the pure joy of doing so, like me, then you damn well better be hoping to win the lottery with each foily tear. Hope for the best but expect the worst, I say. I’ll accept the consequences, or stop the behavior.

And I’ve yet to stop, even though I adamantly maintain that I suck at this particular behavior. Maybe for me, there’s value in being…

The King of Bobo Rares.