Magic: The Gathering C/D

That's helpful - thanks iatee and cider!

yeah this seems like a weird thing for a judge to get super crabby over the mechanics article was pretty clear about how it worked, and even corner case stuff that i thought up like targeting with reverberate or appetite for brains isn't that complicated.

judges should be happy about magic getting complicated

I'm a fan just for the goofy frame, I love when they modify the look of the cards like that.

I don't mind the two color split frames, but Beck / Call visually looks awful. I would have called that out as a shop instantly if it didn't come straight from Wizards.

master of cruelties is lol

http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/tcg/products/dgm/tiwoirwiixix/7isqwv12oz_EN.jpg

probably not very good though

advent of the wurm on the other hand looks bonk

http://media.wizards.com/images/magic/tcg/products/dgm/tiwoirwiixix/0g0viseo9e_EN.jpg

not gonna comment on simic guy

i really like that card, i'm just disappointed that the "life total becomes 1" ability isn't a "you may" thing. technically you can't kill your opponent with this guy alone. very cool though!

and hooooly shit @ that wurm instant. kinda confirms my suspicion that DGM is where all the really ridiculous cards that were maybe too good to print in RTR or GTC will go.

god I didn't even notice it was an instant. ridiculous.

at least we've had a year of practice not attacking into 4 open mana by now

again the card im most interested in for today's spoilers is the limited card...

also link

I'm imagining a Back to the Future moment where you show cards like Call of the Conclave, Loxodon Smiter, and this new stupid Wurm token generator to someone in 1998 and blow their fucking minds

sin collector is definitely a constructed card too, in some fashion

Oh yeah, can definitely see Sin Collector getting constructed play, in fact I think it's better there than in limited. Against control, it puts a threat on the board and snags a Wrath or Revelation. That's great for 3 mana, and with Resto, it can get nutty. It needs a home, but I think this card will get played.

I'm imagining a Back to the Future moment where you show cards like Call of the Conclave, Loxodon Smiter, and this new stupid Wurm token generator to someone in 1998 and blow their fucking minds

Master of Cruelties is lol. I thought it seemed weak on first glance, but it's an excellent Defender, and with any evasion, that's the game. It's also risky to block with a bunch of creatures to try and kill it because if they have Bloodrush, you lose your whole team.

yeah i dont think sin collector is great in limited although i think it might be surprisingly powerful in sealed where i like that kind of effect but i like sin collector as a reusable answer to sphinx's revelation in midrange decks. at least that's the first idea i had

Regardless of whether or not it's playable it's still a really neat design.

i'm not convinced that these cards are that much more powerful than like...weatherseed treefolk. it's just that there are lots of them now instead of 1 per set/block

It's not so much that - but IIRC that was an era when stuff like Shivan Dragon, Mahamoti, Serra Angel, and Sengir were all pulled from 6th edition because it was thought that they were too powerful! It was normal for really good creatures to slip through that had downsides that weren't properly balanced - Blastoderm and Negator come to mind - but the idea that they'd just great up print 4/4's with upside for 3 mana, or a 4 mana instant 5/5 trample in a set that can abuse tokens (I was obsessed with King Cheetah back then!) is really something old R&D just never would have done. That's become the mantra of crotchety old Magic players - "remember when big creatures used to have downsides?"

king cheetah was the first flash creature, right

i think having creatures be better than spells is probably a more interesting game tbh even though i can understand both the nostalgia and general preference for when it was the opposite

xp - haha i looked king cheetah up in gatherer and it at least predates flash as keyword so

I still have a collector's box with the King Cheetah artwork! At the time the idea of a creature you could play as an instant was treated the way things like flip cards or Miracles are today. Damn, did I really start this hobby when I was 10 years old? I could have done so much with my life...

have you played nonstop since?

I started at like 8-9

i think you're right iatee

I'd like to see a list of streamlined abilities by first appearance

dont lots of the 'evergreen' ones date back to like alpha?

some of the typical creature abilites took surprisingly long to get keyworded even though they were in alpha - vigilance showed up in kamigawa block i think, flash and reach not until future sight. deathtouch and lifelink were added in M10 and weren't really common abilities before that but now they're all over the place

the triggered abilites that were precursors to deathtouch/lifelink debuted in alpha (cockatrice) and legends (spirit link)

autumn willow w/ shroud

err flash/reach were in time spiral first, not future sight

shroud got keyworded in time spiral too i think

http://magiccards.info/scans/en/hl/53.jpg

this would be...2GG today?

there's a creature enchantment in legends called spectral cloak that gives shroud

oh good call

but yeah she's the first creature who has it on naturally without an activation

looks like defender was added at kamigawa too

in general i like having all these keywords, to save text on cards if nothing else. they're all pretty intuitive from the word except maybe vigilance

from wikipedia:

Even when separated from its place as Magic's first expansion, Arabian Nights was a groundbreaking set in terms of its impact on the game. In his article "It Happened One Nights",[10] Mark Rosewater detailed amongst others the following innovations or expansions on Alpha mechanics:

Stealing opponent's cards — Alpha enabled players to gain control of their opponent's permanents, but Arabian Nights explored this theme further.
Opponent activated abilities — Ifh-Bíff Efreet has an ability that each player can activate. This theme was further explored with the Mongers in Mercadian Masques
Lands with abilities — Arabian Nights was the first set with Lands that had abilities other than mana abilities.
Coin flips — Arabian Nights was the first set that made use of coin flips to introduce additional randomness to the game.
Cumulative upkeep & Cantrips (cards that draw a new card when played) — Both concepts were more formally introduced in Ice Age, but Arabian Nights made use of these on Cyclone and Jeweled Bird respectively.
Lifelink — The concept of the ability that would become Lifelink was first introduced on Arabian Nights' El-Hajjâj.
Exile zone as a Limbo — Oubliette was the first card to use what would eventually come to be called the Exile zone as a holding zone for cards temporarily out of play.

deathtouch and lifelink were added in M10 and weren't really common abilities before that but now they're all over the place

isnt this partly because the simplified the way damage works on the stack or something so the ability is easier to play with for newer players and thus suitable for lower rarities?

well yeah it changed from a trigger to something that happens naturally at the damage step, since i guess it's less intuitive if you can die with your armadillo cloak life on the stack or unsummon a creature that got damaged by cockatrice.

you can still do those things though since they didn't retroactively change the old cards to have lifelink or deathtouch, just the ones printed from M10 onward

it still kinda sucks that the ability couldn't be called "spirit link" since the card "Spirit Link" actually doesn't work that way

this site is kind of cool, some old magic documents from one of the early WotC guys http://howell.seattle.wa.us/games/MtG/

the story of how expansion symbols came to be is pretty great:

The Arabian Nights booster box features the Magic card back, but all purple-y, like the box itself. That was what the backs of Arabian Nights cards were going to look like. If you'd mixed them into your deck, you'd know you were about to draw one. We'd found that this really was not a problem when we'd been playtesting. After all, playtest cards mixed into a real Magic deck were glaringly obvious, but none of the playtesters had any issues with it.
But when Magic players heard the news, they went ballistic. Mind you, this was the same rabid throng that had told us what utter losers we were to try and scam the public by releasing a game where you didn't get all the cards when you bought it, but only some of them. Yea, right. Nevertheless, Peter was really worried, and felt we'd better switch the card backs back to the brown of the basic set.
(The ONLY reason, by the way, this was considered was because Carta Mundi could just use the printing plates they already had. If we'd had to make new film, it would never have been changed.)
But changing the card back was also very problematic. City in a Bottle required that a player could identify the Arabian Nights cards, and that was supposed to be done by the color of the back. How could we mark the cards? As you can tell from the previous story, there was absolutely no way whatsoever that we'd be making new film for the fronts!
The printer told us that they could "step and repeat" over the black printing plate to put a symbol on the front of the cards. It had to be black, and it had to be identical on all of them. We figured a scimitar would work, and Jesper and I picked out a spot where we could squeeze it onto the cards.
But how to get this image to Carta Mundi, in Belgium? We're already a few days late in getting the cards printed. Our fans are screaming, and any further delay means the printer won't have time to print the cards now. They have other jobs that are scheduled to start. Our job would have to wait until the next open slot in their schedule, which was a couple weeks out.
“We'll fax it to them.” I announce.
Naturally, everybody looks at me like I'm insane. Everybody knows how crappy and jagged faxes look. How can we possibly fax this teensy little scimitar to them in any useful form?
Blow it up first. We fax over a copy of the simitar that's eight inches long. An eight inch scimitar at 200dpi (that's "fine" quality on a fax), is a 3200dpi scimitar when it's shrunk down to 0.5 inches long.
And that's what we did.

is that true for all creatures? i know cockatrice's ability works a bit differently from deathtouch in that it destroys the creature post-combat instead of on damage (and it only kills via combat damage) but i hadn't realized that all the old deathtouch/lifelink creatures still have their abilities go on the stack

also lol @ that homeland legend. so terrible. i was looking at homelands cards a few days ago and i feel like thats the next plane they should revisit - its really flavorful and imo the kinda set they can do really well now

I think maro says people request that a lot actually, I forgot his reason why they don't