Fastbond – MTG Throwback Thursday (1993) – Ban List Week

Fastbond is a card that’s…well, “broken” is a good way to put it. Paying 1 life to put an additional land into play is an excellent deal that most decks would take advantage of, and it’s not too hard to see how playing a massive spell on your first turn would warp the game irreparably. It’s a simple enough spell, but it’s crazy powerful in spite of that; the most infamous card it enables is Gush, and Fastbond turns what would be a “downside” into a “not really a downside because you’re paying 2 life and no mana to draw 2 cards”.

Fastbond did get unrestricted in Vintage, allowing for a full four copies to be played there. This gives the handful of Fastbond-centric decks a fighting chance, as well as the lands-based strategies that might pop up in the format; the effect is useless in multiples, but redundancy always helps a deck reliant on a particular combo. Still, Vintage is the only place you can play Fastbond in a sanctioned event; the rate of return is way too good for the price, and it’s an effect that’s way too easy to break wide open.

Constructed: 4.75
Casual: 5
Limited: 3 (relies on combo pieces to work; it’s not great on its own)
Multiplayer: 4
Commander: N/A (banned; would easily be a 5 if it was unbanned)

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

Fastbond was one of the first cards in Magic to be recognized as – it’s hard to put it politely – broken. Some people even noticed it faster than they did the Moxen, depending on what they opened and when. It’s also somewhat more intuitively powerful than artifact mana, because we have the baseline of one land per turn drilled into us from the first day we play Magic. Having said that, it didn’t entirely come into its own as a combo card for a couple of sets, when people started turning lands into life with Zuran Orb and turning life into cards with Greed or even Necropotence. 

I’ll be interested to see what it does in Vintage. Until this week, you generally only saw it in Old School Constructed, where it is definitely rather overpowered but doesn’t have as many things to make combos with. There are certainly Vintage decks that don’t care about conventional Magic concepts like losing life, and that format has a literally mind-boggling array of interactions to choose from.

Constructed: 5/5
Casual: 5/5
Limited: 3/5
Multiplayer: 4/5
Commander: Still banned (probably 5/5, though!)