Magic: The Gathering C/D

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

innistrad had some stylistic callbacks to homelands in it, i think that's the closest we're going to get. they don't like to repeat worlds from poorly received sets, is the line they give us when people ask about this

http://magiccards.info/hl/en/52.html
http://magiccards.info/isd/en/239.html

have you played nonstop since?

― iatee, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 9:40 AM (34 minutes ago)

Kind of? Ok - born in 1986, when I started, your options were Ice Age, Alliances, 4th edition, and Chronicles (which was the cheapest, so I bought a lot of it). Played until Visions (my first two rares were Cadavorous Bloom and Squandered Resources, and I remember being super disappointed at how terrible they seemed at the time), then quit, came back for Mercadian Masques. Started playing competitively and actually took 2nd at a Masques Block PTQ as a 14-year old (should tell you something about that format). I was pretty good around Odyssey block. There I built a deck that almost ran the table at a PTQ (based around Nomad Mythmaker!) but got 'busted' for marked sleeves (I bought a new pack before the tournament and didn't check them for scuffs) which soured me on big tournaments. I did one more and beat some pro with a Might of Oaks at which point he flipped out on me, so I didn't play another one for a while. Got real big into 5-color (or "250") which was all anyone played around here for like five years. Didn't really play T2 at all. Just draft and 5-color. When I was in college I didn't play much because the Green Bay stores were terrible. Then the 5-C format tanked because it was managed really poorly and I didn't play much at all but around Innistrad I started to do Type 2 again. Through it all I think I hit like 80% of the prereleases so I've always known what's been going on, so to speak. And that's my life story.

I'm also 1986, I started just before ice age was released and played til urzas saga when I dropped out completely

xp though i'm with you in that if they do more world-revisiting i'd like it to be a world that didn't get the full-on modern creative-department treatment last time around

haha another 1986 dude here, i played from tempest to onslaught then picked it back up a couple years ago when i ended up w/ a roommate who plays competitively

also re: creative: even though i don't like the extreme to which they've taken style-guide homogeneity in the card art these days i still really love the land/setting art in the game and i think they still knock that out of the park every time. this makes me far more interested in sets on new planes than revisiting old ones

i think theros, if it's what we think flavor-wise, would actually be a reasonable spot for them to bust out some more of the more stylized stuff like rebecca guay etc that's largely been non-present since lorwyn block or earlier

haha cider an-hava township/gavony township was one of the connections i was looking at a few days ago

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=2960

^ proto hamlet captain? looking over the set i can def see what you mean about the parallels btw innistrad and homelands. i can also understand not wanting to invest a bunch of time in revisiting planes that are both failures and not as easily communicated to newer players

I remember blowing all my Burger King money on some dude's collection that he sold off when he went to school - $1600 for three Moxes (including a beta Sapphire), Ancestral Recall, Timetwister, all 40 duals (I think this was around when they were banned from Extended, so they were at an all-time low), 4 Mana Drains, 4 Force of Wills, and 20 fetches. Plus, lots of cards that are valuable now, like Sneak Attack and Gaea's Cradle. Not easy explaining that one to my parents, but maybe the best decision I've made. Worst: selling the Sapphire for $300 (it was beat up) in order to pay for a busted head gasket on my freakin' Ford Escort.

how much of that do you still have?

Anyway to join into the actual discussion, I like the art direction they've gone in - agree that things look a bit samey, but when you see the blown up art on WoTC's website it's pretty incredible just how detailed some of it is. I would love a bit more personality - I really like the totally oddball art on Descendant's Path but that seems to be a rarity these days. I miss Phil Foglio and Drew Trucker a lot; shifting from that to very obviously CGI-enchanced stuff by the time of Odyssey was really a disappointment. But they've really done well lately. Except y'know, the whole male-dominated fantasy thing (I'm actually kind of embarrassed to play Lilliana of the Veil for this reason)

As far as world revisiting, I think the dual failures of Time Spiral and Coldsnap kinda made it clear that R&D shouldn't attempt to return to stuff that was problematic in the first place? The only old set that would be real interesting to return to IMO is Arabian Nights.

xp - Almost all of it. Planned to sell a lot of it but luckily I got into online poker shortly after and didn't have to. I broke out my old 5-color deck that I hadn't opened in about five years the other day and was kinda stunned at how much cool junk I had collected. I wish I hadn't left it out in my freezing car so much, I had no idea this stuff would be worth major cash one day. One of the characteristics of 5-C was that you alter or draw on your cards and I remember people regularly defacing dual lands back then.

i still really love the land/setting art in the game and i think they still knock that out of the park every time

land art is probably my favorite magic art - its sorta the most evocative. i like that a lot of the classic mtg land art is similar to the stuff the do know, stuff like taiga or sheltered valley wouldn't look out of place on a modern card

Except y'know, the whole male-dominated fantasy thing (I'm actually kind of embarrassed to play Lilliana of the Veil for this reason)

I think they're a lot better about the overly-sexualized art stuff than most fantasy properties. I mean, they still could tone it down a little, but by comparison I always thought they did ok. I do miss the weirder art stuff. They do a great job now but it's a little homogenous. Would be cool to see a really out-there block that called for some more abstract art, like a dream world or something.

I started playing in middle school in '94, but I similarly took a break around Visions because a big chunk of my collection got stolen around the time I was thinking I needed a new group of friends. Felt like a sign, really. Got dragged back in during college around Odyssey when some roommates wanted to pick the game back up, and I took it more seriously. Although to this day, I'm still pretty much just a limited player who follows Constructed rather than playing it - the only times I've really played it was when I had to for a PT (humblebrags).

I think they're a lot better about the overly-sexualized art stuff than most fantasy properties.

Oh, totally agreed on that. But a lot of it is still pretty bad - Blustersquall for example. Even stuff that's supposed to be horrifying like Nin, the Pain Artist doesn't make it through without gigantic cans. Of course, I come from the days of ogling Serra Angel and that bizarrely sexualized Elvish Ranger (from Alliances) so I'm not really one to talk.

i kind of want to become one of those people who only play mono-red in standard regardless of the metagame, at least for paper events. would save me so much trouble/money on my paper collection and it's almost always a playable deck these days

Renounce the Guilds
https://twitter.com/mtgaaron/status/321700395435053056

scg put these up at 0.99 which seems like the absolute floor for the card, i would preorder a set if i had any intention of playing with them

oops too late they sold out already, will be back up at something higher i assume