Old School Mtg

I recently witnessed some people talking about what they looked forward to in Magic these days. While their discussion seemed to have originated from a place of discontent, it was kinda interesting to be a fly on the wall regardless. Their topics ranged from having a hard time looking forward to new sets as they didn't get to savor them before the next thing dropped, to the lack of in-person events due to the pandemic, to the last year and a half of card design having rendered most sanctioned formats unrecognizable at best and broken at worst. Product fatigue and lack of familiar gatherings in some weird vicious cycle. In the end, they seemed to settle on looking forward to ban list updates, but they also felt that that was a kinda sad thing to look forward too. I can relate to the ebbs and flows of Magic passion. Having played for the odd 25 years plus, some months, or years, are more exciting than others. But I know that good times always comes back. So when The Gathering fails...

Like many interesting stories, this is a hard one to know where to start. I've barely ever talked about Spectral Chaos here. The only time I think I've even mentioned it was as a throw-away link about Barry Reich's adventures around the the time The Penn Group worked on Menagerie (later Mirage) and The East Coast Playtesters had their hands full with Ice Age. But in the shadows I've though about it a lot. Partly as the unique hidden treasure it is, and partly for a particular card in the set I've been looking for for years. The Annihilator Orb. A sister-card of sorts to Spear of Annihilation , which was a playtest descendant of Sphere of Annihilation (which was the playtest card for Chaos Orb). So a distant relative for sure, but still something that I'd love to have as a reference in the binder. There are three playtest versions of that card, excluding the final "text-only" sticker. I've only ever seen the ones that originally belonged to Barry R...