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Each color in magic the gathering is truly good at one or two things. Green is good at mana, blue is good at drawing and counterspells, red direct damage, white excels at large effects that everyone at the table must deal with and black is best at using every resource available to it to gain power. And in many ways this last is the most powerful because unlike the others this is not a specific game play mechanic but a conduit to many other powerful effects allowing it to do many of the things the other colors can do as well or better than they can so long as you are willing to pay for it.

Thoughtseize is a rare sorcery from the Lorwyn expansion set of magic the gathering. It costs one black mana to play and reads "Target player reveals his or her hand. You choose a nonland card from it. That player discards that card. You lose 2 life."

This is an extremely powerful card for one major reason and that reason is that you can play it before your opponent has had a chance to play a single card and even the limitation of being able to use it only on non land permanents hardly matters. All you have to do to to make this worth playing on the first turn is to remove their one drop card, or assuming that they have more than one remove the spell or creature that would most disrupt you. This is typically going to be at least as useful as the use of bounce on your second turn to return a land to your opponent hand because it does roughly the same thing, putting them half a turn behind you.

The second effect is one that is also more useful early in the game. You get to look at your opponent's hand. As a single effect this is not worth the card even if the cost was 0, but as a side effect, especially on the first turn this can be very useful. In a tournament it can tell you exactly what type of deck you are playing long before you would normally know. This may effect the way that you play your own hand considerably.

The loss of two life is hardly worth a mention except that it allows you to play the spell this early. The reason for this is simple, using this early in the game is almost certain to save you more than two life in the long run.

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