Tuesday trivia

My project has hit a few roadblocks. I feel strongly passionate about it, so I'm sure I'll solve the kinks soon enough. It's a pretty interesting concept btw. The more I think about it, the more I realize that it will open me up for haters, and that I might alienate or upset some people. Hopefully it will end up a net positive though.

But until then, I won't keep you hanging. I looked through the binder and picked a few cards for a small trivia session. Here's some random facts you probably didn't know.

During the short Legends playtesting, there existed a Fog in each of the five colors. Development argued that Fog might be too big a stretch from the flavor of red and blue, and removed them from the set. The green version was considered redundant, and in the end only the white and black was left. Today the card Darkness is seen as a big leap away from the "damage prevention slice" of the color pie, but compared to a red version it still looks very reasonable.

Su-chi is not a reference to sushi or any type of fish (nor vinegared rice), the name is a reference to its stats. Arabian Nights used a lot of Arabic words to spice up the card names (e.g. Juzam is Arabic for 'evil'), and Antiquities followed up on this, maybe as an inside joke. 'Su' and 'Chi' are the Mandarin and Taiwanese words for 'four'; i.e. Su-Chi is a four-four.

Black Vise has a typo in ABU, where the card title is not capitalized in the rules text (compare with the 4th Edition version). It seems like this cards is shockingly more expensive today than a week ago btw, as it was just unbanned in the Legacy format. The playtest version of the card was pretty different from the printed one. The original version cost 4 mana, decreased the opponent's hand size to 6, and did one damage to the opponent if he or she drew a card when they already had five or more in hand.

Speaking of playtest versions, you only had to drop the playtest version of this one from a height of six inches, and it had no flipping requirements. It also had the less evocative name "Sphere of Annihilation". It was reportedly one of the least enjoyable cards to face of its day.

In other news, Mark "Twiedel" Langria wrote a sweet primer on Old School Magic at the MKM Series webpage. I recommend checking it out. Mark seems like a great guy with a big passion for the old school community. His take on Project M looks amazing btw. Quite a few duals and Alpha-pimp ahead of me, but I think my Fellwar Stones are cooler ;)