Word of Command

One of Richard Garfield's original experiments in puppet-the-opponent design, and a card whose templating troubles became a kind of folklore among judges. The card hands you the opposing pilot's seat for a single forced play, with a hand-peek bundled in so you can pick the most ruinous option: their only blocker, their combo piece, their counterspell aimed at the wrong target. The pricing is the joke. Two black mana to play someone else's card for them, using their own mana, sits at a rate that no modern designer would sign off on; the reason it survives is that the chosen card has to be legally castable, and the opponent's mana pool has to support it, which in 1993 was a meaningful brake and today is barely one. What makes it a historical curio rather than a played card is the rules text underneath the effect. "You control that player" is one of the most tortured phrases in the game's vocabulary, and the parenthetical about mana abilities exists because the original printing did not anticipate that a controlled player might tap lands to pay for spells you did not want them to cast. The card has been functionally re-templated more than most cards have been reprinted, and the current oracle is the result of decades of judges trying to make the original sentence mean something coherent.