One with Nothing

The most notorious feel-bad card the game ever printed deliberately, and one of the few designs whose function is to do harm to its own caster. Discarding your hand for one black mana is not a cost attached to an effect: it is the entire effect, with no payoff stapled on. The card exists as a piece of pure pattern-completion, the black instant that fills the slot where you would expect a draw-seven or a graveyard payoff and then declines to deliver one. The hard cases people invent for it are real but vanishingly thin: dodging a discard-your-hand-equals effect, fizzling an opponent's Mind Twist or a forced-discard symmetry, emptying a hand to enable some madness or graveyard trigger you happen to have already cast. None of those windows justify the slot, because each of them is served better by a card that does the same thing and something else. Black has spent its whole history pricing the trade of cards for power; this is the rare design that takes the cards and forwards none of the power, an inversion that makes it the standing answer to "what is the worst card in Magic" and a fixture of joke-deck and worst-card-in-the-cube lists for exactly that reason. It is interesting precisely as a negative space: the shape of a payoff with the payoff surgically removed.