If we just look at unique card names from Alpha to the advent of foils, that gives us 3,075
Magic: The Gathering's Marvel Secret Lair Superdrop Adds a Great Commander November 4 is Going to be a Big Day For Marvel and Magic: The Gathering Fans While cards like Black Panther and Arbor Dryad can pair excellently together for infinite combos and Iron Man can easily lend itself to an artifact deck, not all these potential commanders are equally good
For example, if you put Cursed Rack (an artifact that sets a chosen player's maximum hand size to four) onto the battlefield choosing your opponent and then put Gnat Miser onto the battlefield, your opponent will have a maximum hand size of three
Modern is in such a fast, powerful place that it's hard for me to believe that a repeatable three-mana Shock that requires a two-card combo to work (Grove of the Burnwillows) is all that scary
Atraxa decks just became 200 card monstrosities
Zone Replacements A lot of replacement effects are about sending a card to one game zone (exile is the most common) rather than where they would normally have ended (usually the graveyard)