best vintage cards mtg 24x Oversized 8th Edition Magic the Gathering Promo Lot New Old School & Vintage

It's a small price to pay to be able to shutdown an opposing creature

Being able to ramp the best land out of the top four cards of your deck at instant speed is already very useful, but the fact that you can still draw one of them into your hand as a fall back means that you wont have a major downside (see Growth Spiral for a similar effect)

At the time, rarity was not marked on cards and was closely linked to the demands of the printing process

But even if you can't do that, and the turtle manages to soak up twenty damage that would otherwise be going toward your creatures or your dome, you're still going to net ten Treasure tokens when this guy dies, which is a very nice little perk

Swiftspears aforementioned downshift to common is certainly part of it, but beyond that, haste is a powerful keyword that makes Monastery Swiftspear among the best aggressive one-drops of all time for red decks

Red is good at sacrificing artifacts, too