Old School Mtg

Didn't get the chance to update this Friday, so I'll compensate with both a card of the day and a decklist today. To keep the fun at a reasonable level though, let's talk about Stasis. Stasis was a late addition to Alpha, one of the five rare cards added in the last minute "top-down cycle" of the set. The five cards in the cycle were reportedly added to make use of otherwise unused art, and the cards never got playtested before release. The five in question were Island Sanctuary, Stasis, Word of Command, Sedge Troll and Birds of Paradise. Some of these cards worked better than others, and e.g. Word of Command is easily in the top five of "cards-giving-rules-headaches" in Magic. The function of Stasis was inspired by the team working on Ice Age, and gave us a first peek on what would later become Cumulative Upkeep. The art is a story in its own. In contrast to most of the other Magic artist, who were mainly local art school students, Fay Jones was an...

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...

Hm, writers block? That was a long time since last. It's a kind of odd experience. Now that the blog actually has lots and lots of readers, I feel some new sense of responsibility to actually write something. Lets look in the closet and see if we find something sweet to talk about. Khalsa Brain mats? Those are sweet indeed, but I already did it . An old school life counter perhaps? Yeah, that one is definitely coming. Not today though. Should do some more research before. Maybe the first Magic novella from 1994? I guess I should try to read it first. Also found a Shandalar game. Now that's something. Bought it back in 1997. Only works well on Windows though, and there's currently no computer in my possession running on anything less than Linux. I'll put that in the future-pile as well. A Legends-booster? Yeah, lets look at the Legends rule card. That could be a lark. Before we check out the rule card, lets take a quick look at the three uncommon...

Creating expansions to The Gathering wasn't really the plan. The idea was to let the 10 million cards from Magic: The Gathering fill the demand for the foreseeable months, and then phase them out for Magic: Ice Age about a year later. Instead, the first edition of Gathering sold out in weeks. To saturate the demand a second edition, Unlimited, was printed. It was soon clear that this wasn't enough. The players demanded new cards to fill the void before Ice Age would hit the shelves. The story of Arabian Nights is a tumultuous one. I'm sure I'm going to write about it in more detail in the future. For now, lets simply state that there were some reservations at WotC about adding cards to The Gathering. Ice Age had been planned as a standalone version of Magic with different card backs. Using different backs was also suggested for Arabian Nights, as well as having a different color on the borders, before finally settling on having an expansion symbol to differentiate the...

" We were originally planning to change the card mix in September, but... well... some stuff happened and we didn't. "  - Kathy Ice. Card Collector Confidential, Scrye Magazine, Feb 1995. Imagine if you will. Ireland, a game store in the late summer of 1994. Magic has celebrated its one-year anniversary. Players are cracking boosters from the newly released The Dark, dreaming about opening the legendary Leviathan. A couple of novice mages have just built their first decks from a few packs of "Gathering". Spells like Clone and the flavor of the Oi-Oi Troll capture their imagination, as they are yet to find out about Doppelgangers or Juzams. And Power Sink is an interrupt. At another table in the store, two old sharks who have played the games for many months are slinging with their finely crafted decks. Decks with price tags of tens or hundreds of dollars even at the time. New playmats are used to protect their cards. A similar scenario plays out at their...

The early days of Magic goes hand in hand with the early days of the web. The web became publicly available in august 1991, two years before the release of Alpha, but it wasn't really something the general public knew about or would use at that time. I got internet access at home in 1995, as the second person in my class to get it. The other one was also a Magic player, but we still didn't use the web for looking up cards or strategy. Some advanced players knew to use Stephen D'Angleos early web page for rule references, but the easily obtainable knowledge sharing of today didn't exist. In its infancy, Magic strategy and ideas was shared to the world via printed media. The very first examples of printed Magic strategy was geared towards more novice players. If we would read e.g. the strategy article on how to use circles of protection from The Duelst #1 today, we would regard it as very basic advice which anyone would understand after playing the game a few times. The...

" This is just an expansion, so I'm not going to worry about balance. People will just play it for flavor, and when they get tired of it, they will stop playing with it ."  -Richard Garfield, Email to Dave Pettey, late 1993 Arabian Nights turned out to be a wonderful expansion; not the least considering it had the shortest development time of any set, a development team of only four people, and a design team of one. There are many gems among the 78 different cards, and the stories are plentiful if you dig a little. Today, we dig. Serendib Efreet is awesome. It is so good it supports strategies on its own, and strong enough that you should look for reasons not to play it in blue decks, rather than look for reasons to play it. The card was actually banned in extended in 1995, as it is a bolt-proof moat-jumper for the cost of a Devouring Deep. It may not be as iconic as Juzam, but then again, what is? The card itself has a colorful history of reprints. The most famo...

No one used gloves while playing Risk. No one laminated or graded D&D-books. No one used plastic sleeves for their Civilization cards. Magic was one of the first games of its kind, the first of what was called collectible games. And it was literally touch and go for a while. Even in The Duelist, it was suggested that you could tape your cards to a wall to battle Chaos Orb. If you didn't use sleeves for your "Draw 4s" in Uno, why would you use it for your "Draw 3" in Magic? The early cards got sticky and beat up by being roughly played on dirty tables in bars, schools, and kitchens. Today, almost everyone plays with some protective measures to avoid marking the cards and to expand their lifespan. What we all see as a natural part of the game today, started on a dirty table in a coffee shop in San Francisco. Between the 2-16 August 1993, WotC founder Peter Adkinson and his wife travelled through the western US to run demos of Magic in a few local game stor...

Magic's very first B&R rules simply stated that you could not play with more than one of each artifact, and no more than a total of five artifacts in your deck. That didn't live for long, and in January 1994 (after Arabian Nights, before Antiquities) USENET provided the first ever proper banned/restricted list. The banned cards were the ante cards and Shahrazad; the restricted cards were a pile of power and randoms. Cards like Orcish Oriflame was restricted due to the 2-mana alpha version, Dingus Egg was restricted since it was to good with Armageddon. Cards like Balance, Mind Twist, Channel, Library of Alexandria and Chaos Orb were free to play as 4-offs. Flash forward to the autumn of 94. Three new expansions have been released (Antiquities, Legends and The Dark). The tournament scene has grown, the successful tournament players understand the power of card advantage, and the control decks have evolved to the best decks in the game. This is where we come in, these ar...