Alpha pimp

Personally, I can go either way with the rounder corners of alpha cards. I usually don't care that much about black or white borders either, as long as there is consistency among the cards in the deck (e.g. I would much prefer to play four autumn Mishra's Factories than two autumn and two winter). However there are some cards in alpha that I really think are much sweeter than the beta or unlimited versions. Today I'll show off three of my favourites; maybe you've missed them.

There are some very well known differences between particular alpha and beta cards. The uncommon Orcish Artillery is about 5 times more expensive in alpha than in beta due to the misprinted mana cost (1R rather than 1RR), and the same huge relative prize difference can be seen in Elvish Archers (which is an 1/2 in alpha, and a 2/1 in beta). One less known 'misprint' from alpha is however a card that currently is correctly printed, and the beta (and subsequent) versions have been errated to correspond to the Alpha version. I think this is one of only two cards intially was misprinted, but as the rules changed the misprinted version turned out to be correct (the other would be Daring Apprentice from Mirage, that when printed accidentally missed the now unnecessary "Play this ability as an interrupt."). If you missed it before, check out the Alpha Red Elemental Blast's card type:

Originally misprinted as Instant rather than Interrupt, which would make it unable to counter spells in pre-6th rules.

The difference in cost between an alpha and a beta REB is almost insignificant today, even though there exists 3 beta REBs for each alpha, and the 'misprint' is really sweet.

The second card is one of the most hyped uncommon cards of it's era, a card that once upon a time fairly easily could be traded for a mox. After it's reprint in Ice Age, much of it's legendary status vanished, but it's still a very good card in 93/94. The alpha version have a cleaner text box than the beta version, and is much nicer to look at. I don't own this card in beta, so once again I'll give you a comparison between alpha and unlimited (the beta text is the exact same as the unlimited text):

Oddly, once again the alpha version is actually closer to the current wording.

Last I'd like to show off one of the only cards in alpha that got different wording in beta due to how easy it was to misunderstand the alpha version. There are lots of cards in alpha and beta that are kind of fuzzy in the wording (e.g. Rock Hydra and Raging River comes to mind). Channel was however so oddly worded that they decided to rewrite it for beta. Note that this was at the time the only card that made you pay life, and the assumed interaction between Channel and Circle of Protection: Green made them initially print the "Life spent this way is not considered damage". Good stuff, and somewhat hard to grasp.

Alpha to the right. Alpha version is awesome.