The situation with grey border cards is more complex. I'll try to explain a little here in simple broad strokes. Originally, all black border sets were limited edition, and all white border sets were unlimited. Unlimited, Revised, 4th, 5th, etc. are all unlimited sets, which simply means that WotC intends to keep printing these cards. The set you know as Unlimited, wasn't supposed to exist at all. It was only printed because Beta sold out, Revised wasn't ready to be printed yet, and WotC needed more cards to sell ASAP. The decision to discontinue the power 9 cards (and others) was made prior to Unlimited being printed. WotC didn't want to reprint those cards, but they needed product to sell ASAP, and the holiday sales season was approaching. In order to start printing ASAP, they couldn't make any card changes. Revised was supposed to be the first unlimited set. Yes, they originally wanted it to have grey borders. When you hear that Unlimited or Revised was going to have grey borders, both are talking about the same thing. It only happened once. The reason grey borders weren't used, is because WotC needed the emergency printing of the set you know as Unlimited. WotC did have the technical capability to create grey borders, it would have been done with a fine screen of black dots, similar to the way Unlimited card names look under magnification. Doing this would have delayed production, because it would have required new color separation films being created, and then shipping those from Seattle to Belgium. A delay is not what you want for an emergency printing. White borders were used because white is simply unprinted space. The existing color separation films which were already in Belgium could be modified to accomplish this and start printing immediately. From that point on, subsequent unlimited releases had white borders (until 10th Edition anyway). By the way, 6 other border colors were tested in late 1994 on Revised cards, but never put into production. Test prints only. Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Purple, Red, and Green.
I've always considered Revised to be the most important set in the game's history. Smoothed out the power spikes from the first release, successfully introduced the concept of reprints, and a bunch of other significant historical precedents. It also served as the last printing for a bunch of iconic cards in the game's history. Which was really important, because otherwise dual lands, wheel of fortune, and dozens of other cards would have absolutely microscopic print copies in circulation. Also the last hurrah before a slug of absolutely atrocious core sets. If you compare this set to the 450 card monstrosity of liquid dog diarrhea which is 5th edition, you have to wonder how they fell so far.
These videos are what I've been waiting for since 2015. Card Bazaar is awesome but the videos are brief and don't go into the kind of great varied detail. The hosts Gere have phenomenal energy and seem 100% genuine always. That's rare on youtube. The knowledge of the fella on the right is so valuable.
The beginning of the pocket players guide has some excellent essays about the early history of the game and flavor behind the different colors of mana, great read for lore enjoyers.
If you guys are interested, on Maro's podcast he has some episodes where he interviews designers on sets that worked and kinda does a deep dive on it. For instance he has an episode where he interviewed Richard Garfield about Arabian Nights where they talk about some of the questions they have here such as the thought process behind the different backs as well as some of the weirder designs like city in a bottle and shahrazad.
Love this, revised is my Alpha 💃🕺 Favorite card, Vesuvan Doppelgänger and Timmy of course. Also have a special fondness for clone, because I still remember opening a Clone out of my first booster ever and I was blown away by the card 🎉
I started playing at 4th Ed., but this set was my first exposure to the game itself. Had two high school buddies who had gotten into the game at the tail end of Revised and had some Revised cards and decks. After trying the game with them, I promptly went out and bought my first starter deck. But, that was right when 4th Ed hit the store shelves. I missed out on Revised by THAT much! (I still love 4th Ed for being my first, though!)
Thank you so very much for this podcast. I came into mtg when khans of tarkir came out and is my favorite set to date. But being able to learn in depth about all the set’s before and just mtg history in general in such detail is a treasure. Best mtg podcast period. Hope you guys continue to find success in your endeavors.
The discussion about flight got me thinking that an award fo best artwork in the set could lead to some good discussions out of you two. Food for thought
Holy Molly, the Magic the Gathering pocket player's guide. Stumble upon it a couple of months ago alongside some of the very first novels, was pretty sure I'd lost it back in 1998 when I finished my studies. Hard to describe how nostalgia crushed me at that moment. Play note now, Magic, even before RPGs like Vampire or D&D- Boomer alert, it used to be AD&D at that time- was THE reason why I stopped buying/ playing with French versions of American games. Ask anyone who had to face a French Vesuvian Doppleganger or even a Clone in their LGS equivalent back in 94-95 and they'll tell you why it was a nightmare to tell a 12 years old kid that the translation was wrong and you should not interpreted the card this way but that way etc. Nightmares, and I don't speak about the horse. Goosebumps while waiting for Ice Age. Technically Revised/ FBB/FWB represent my first encounter with the game, same thing for my friends at that time, though Ice Age has such a unique place in my heart. You know, coming back from work during summer- for the very first time in my life- and buying some boosters or even a starter pack 'cause the snow-covered lands were dope, and playing with people you had never met before until the day after and so on and so forth. Great times. Freaking great chan. Cheers! Edit: but that zebra :D
I heard somewhere that the color hosers where designed for two main reasons; they were meant to be safety valves in case one color ended up being too good and became ubiquitous. and also to give players a strong reason to play as many colors as possible as to not get blown out by one of these. I think the intention was solid, but the designs themselves were a little heavy handed to say the least.
24:30 Dominia was the entire universe, what we now just call the Magic Multiverse. Dominaria was at its center, and was treated as essentially, its capital - its name literally means "Song of Dominia." This was very poorly communicated in early sources and the terminology has since been retired.
Great episode as always. The first cards I ever bought were a Starter pack of Unlimited and two Arabian Nights boosters, but Revised was what I really consider my first set so this one's near and dear to my heart. I never got one of the pocket guides when they came out, but my grandmother bought me a copy from a library sale for $.25 about a year after it came out.
A friend in seventh grade got one of those gift boxes, I saw Force of Nature and was like oh my God!, I have to have that!. That started the 30 year magic addiction.
I saw some of my friends playing Magic in the cafeteria in 7th grade too. I remember laughing at them. Then I sat down to see what was going on. 30 years later they’ve long since stopped and I’m still here 😂😂
I feel like you guys made a concerted effort to put up more cards from the sat in this particular podcast than in previous ones. As a player since 1994, I appreciate the enhanced exposure with regard to old cards.
Great episode, finally getting to the point right from when I started playing magic. This next run is going to be all my teen years, I can't believe you guys are really doing this. SO STOKED. Thank you endlessly!
Saying that you wouldn't be shocked if Lightning Bolt was printed into standard is really funny to me. Because it's true that a lot of people wouldn't be shocked, because no body would be playing Shock when Bolt is available. 😂
As a kid, my friends and I interpretation of the Serendib Effreet was not that it was a blue card with a green border, but that it was a green card with the wrong mana symbol.
I think the color hosers were for the casual players to regulate the very common small playgroups. So if someone had strong black deck we hated to play against we told him: "Change your deck or we will put Circle of protection: Black in our decks." And so he had to change to another deck. And since we didnt even know what a sideboard was, we use these cards just for that reason.
I always loved the Tsunami and Flashfires cards. They helped decks feel fear because certain cards could absolutely destroy you even if the opponent probably didn't have it...they might.
The discussions on the Satanic panic and pre-internet days is something I always find fascinating. I was born in the late 80s, and I got to experience both of those eras to some degree. I was raised and still am a Greek Orthodox Christian, but my neighborhood buddies were all Protestant to some degree. My dad picked up AD&D in the Marine Corps, and he introduced that to me, but some of my friends weren’t allowed to play it. Funnily enough, it took LoTR coming out that my dad had a talk with the other parents and just related D&D to that, then after that everyone could play. The other weird thing, was some of the kids that couldn’t play D&D were allowed to play MTG….which I felt was super weird lol but oh well it really shows how parenting goes sometime lol. Oh well, those were good times. The “surprise” of things really made it so much more interesting. You never knew when someone would pull out a new card they got from that $3 booster pack that their parent complained to high heaven about how expensive that was 😂😂😂.
I still have some of those old counters! I don't remember if it was the first thing we got, but it was definitely early. Sadly I don't remember my DCI number anymore though lol
Incredible content, but Patricks' audio is all over the place in this one. Check the mic positioning, Cedric's mic is much closer to his face and pointed right at his mouth. Compression may also help. Again, great work.
38:00 the idea of hosers at the time was as an emergency valve. They were there and kept in as a goto solution should mistakes in balance crop up and a single color become too powerful as to become gamebreaking. It was felt that, as long as there was a reasonably easy way to hose a single color, it would prevent the possibility of a single color dominating every game should they mistakenly print a too powerful card. Right or wrong, the intention came from a good place.
An interesting thing about color hoser cards, in side boards they are amazing (certified dealers, if you will) ... but in a world where your deck just had tp play a bunch of other decks randomly, they are not good. So at Friday night magic in my youth we often did endless pickup games, and there was never a real meta that developed. In that world it would have been dumb to use hosers. I was also playing the 1996 Playstation certified classic Magic The Gathering: Battlemage, and the single player campaign is like a deck building rpg. And in that world, again with no side board, hosers are not viable. So, I wonder if WotC in the day figured that these cards were for tournament players only and the rest of the base didn't really have to worry about them. I also wonder if the hosers, and cop in particular, are the game designers hedging their bets against accidentally printing an OP card. It's OK if you print Winny-Pants the OP Gablin Prince as a 20/1 haste, trample for 1 mana if the other person can block it for 1 mana. Well, it's not "ok" exactly, but maybe the product is still playable in a less extreme example. Of course that only covers damage dealers ... which leads me to wonder if they weren't just trying to communicate the concept of counter play to an audience that did have the tactical experience an audience would have after living in a world with MTG, Pokémon, and the like. Interesting to think about!
Let me see if I can make this point more clear: The designers were trying to communicate that counter-strategy existed at a deck level and a card selection level. Remember the era and the audience; we're talking about the first trading card game. But also, Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat came out only 1 and 2 years prior. There are no real time strategy or competitive FPS games. The idea of a tactical strategy game was relatively new with risk-like video games starting in the 80's and Civilization 1 releasing 2 years prior in 1991. So the idea in MTG of completely different decks and making these small choices around card selection really needed to be spon-fed to players.
2:51 As it pertains to revised, aka 3rd edition, I always considered Alpha as 1st edition (missing two cards), Beta as 2nd edition, with unlimited being a second printing of Beta (adding the two missing cards and a third version of each basic land), thus making revised 3rd edition
hey! no dissing of my beloved pocket players guide.. I got one in 1994/95 as well (I started playing a few months before Patrick) and I read that book several times in the following years. it wasn't as useless as they think . I still have it somewhere in my game room, and i am sure i will reread it again some day when I find it.
1:06:21 duelist May 1994 had three reasons listed for cards’ omissions from ABU: spoilers, mystifiers, and retirees. The latter included things like Dwarven Demolition Team and Ironclaw Orcs.
I think whether you heard "3rd edition" depends on when you were active and how active you were. If you were going to events and meeting/trading with people a lot when 4th edition came out, you would have heard it called 3rd edition a good amount to distinguish it from 4th. 4th edition's release was a couple months from when type 1 and type 2 came out, and the idea of different formats with different legal card lists first entered everyone's minds, with minimal to no internet guidance. So you would ask and be asked if a card was reprinted in 4th or if it was just in 3rd, like, totally as a daily question because your tournament life depended on not getting DQed over a Sedge Troll or something (literally saw a guy DQed for a Sedge Troll once).
theyve been speading rumors for like 10 years that they dumped Summer Magic into a garbage can in Texas and somebody hopped into the dumpster and got away with them. The hoarders are extra gatekeepy on that set.
I can confirm that Summer was indeed for sale in one high street shop in Cork, Ireland. Unfortunately I was 9/10 at the time and about 2 years before getting into Mtg at Ice Age.
Oh man, that gift box was everything to 11-year-old me (though I had the 4th Edition gift box, not Revised - they actually just ran the same product back the following core set). Everyone knew those beads were how you tracked life - dark blue beads were 5 life, light blue beads were 1 life.
Great pod! Look forward to every two weeks :) I wanna push back on the 5e Flight is hilariously bad art. It looks exactly like what a zebra would do if some wizard enchanted it randomly with flying. It would be flailing around with its hooves awkwardly trying to make sense of what is happening to it.
Can't wait to see Patrick's reaction to Dragon Engine being a rare in 4th, 5th AND 6th edition. Also the bit about 5e Flight made me laugh so hard it physically hurt my ribs.
Atleast if you pulled Dragon Engine in 3rd, 4th, or 5th, they hide the rarity, so you might think another card is rare and still be happy with your pack. But in 6th, that gold symbol is staring you in the face, and sadness closes in all around you 😢
I suspect they cut Dwarven Demolition Team due to its power level, which is pretty funny. They really wanted walls to be playable (they printed so many), and honestly I still kinda wish they were playable.
Dr. Fredric Wertham is the name you younger viewers should Google if you want to know about the 50's comic congressional hearings. He almost killed the comic book industry.
Shout out to The Gamekeeper. I also probably got my first MTG cards from The Gamekeeper at the Commons lol. Years later I got my first full booster box when my father and sister went to the mall to try and find Christmas gifts for me, luckily my sister had the faintest idea what magic was and bought a Tempest box from some store there for me.
For powerful cards, what about Fastbond? Surely it has a similar power level to Dark Ritual and that ilk. It is more powerful today than yesterday, but I think a lot of its power is inherent.
The situation with grey border cards is more complex.
I'll try to explain a little here in simple broad strokes.
Originally, all black border sets were limited edition, and all white border sets were unlimited.
Unlimited, Revised, 4th, 5th, etc. are all unlimited sets, which simply means that WotC intends to keep printing these cards.
The set you know as Unlimited, wasn't supposed to exist at all.
It was only printed because Beta sold out, Revised wasn't ready to be printed yet, and WotC needed more cards to sell ASAP.
The decision to discontinue the power 9 cards (and others) was made prior to Unlimited being printed. WotC didn't want to reprint those cards, but they needed product to sell ASAP, and the holiday sales season was approaching. In order to start printing ASAP, they couldn't make any card changes.
Revised was supposed to be the first unlimited set.
Yes, they originally wanted it to have grey borders. When you hear that Unlimited or Revised was going to have grey borders, both are talking about the same thing. It only happened once.
The reason grey borders weren't used, is because WotC needed the emergency printing of the set you know as Unlimited.
WotC did have the technical capability to create grey borders, it would have been done with a fine screen of black dots, similar to the way Unlimited card names look under magnification.
Doing this would have delayed production, because it would have required new color separation films being created, and then shipping those from Seattle to Belgium.
A delay is not what you want for an emergency printing.
White borders were used because white is simply unprinted space. The existing color separation films which were already in Belgium could be modified to accomplish this and start printing immediately.
From that point on, subsequent unlimited releases had white borders (until 10th Edition anyway).
By the way, 6 other border colors were tested in late 1994 on Revised cards, but never put into production.
Test prints only.
Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Purple, Red, and Green.
I've always considered Revised to be the most important set in the game's history. Smoothed out the power spikes from the first release, successfully introduced the concept of reprints, and a bunch of other significant historical precedents. It also served as the last printing for a bunch of iconic cards in the game's history. Which was really important, because otherwise dual lands, wheel of fortune, and dozens of other cards would have absolutely microscopic print copies in circulation.
Also the last hurrah before a slug of absolutely atrocious core sets. If you compare this set to the 450 card monstrosity of liquid dog diarrhea which is 5th edition, you have to wonder how they fell so far.
When flight popped up I spat coffee all over my screen. God I love this game.
I'm still salty that you discarded your islands when I had Sea Serpent
best podcast on the web
it's certainly a podcast on the web
@@sobmanyou seem unpleasant.
Wow just found this and couldn’t be more pleased! Killer show y’all
These videos are what I've been waiting for since 2015. Card Bazaar is awesome but the videos are brief and don't go into the kind of great varied detail. The hosts Gere have phenomenal energy and seem 100% genuine always. That's rare on youtube. The knowledge of the fella on the right is so valuable.
The beginning of the pocket players guide has some excellent essays about the early history of the game and flavor behind the different colors of mana, great read for lore enjoyers.
This game has changed so much in so many ways...
55:41 let us all take a moment of silence for all the dual lands that lost their lives to the shredder. Gone too soon :(
This might be the best ever MtG content, period. All the shows, before and after the transition to TH-cam.
27:50 uh... don't you remember those huge JNCO pockets in the 90s 😅
proud to be the new owner of 3/500-millionths of Revised
Oh man, those blue counters were so sick. I was so jealous my friend's older brother and his friends had them. I still want some today!
Happy Birthday to me! New episode is the best present I've received.
If you guys are interested, on Maro's podcast he has some episodes where he interviews designers on sets that worked and kinda does a deep dive on it. For instance he has an episode where he interviewed Richard Garfield about Arabian Nights where they talk about some of the questions they have here such as the thought process behind the different backs as well as some of the weirder designs like city in a bottle and shahrazad.
He just did one for Legends.
1:06:48 going through the same amazed reaction every magic player has had upon learning Dragon Engine went from common to rare
Funny how Cedric says "Legend has it" while Patrick is wearing a Run The Jewels inspired shirt!
Great job as always folks
For what it's worth, I love taking 5-10 minutes to talk about Fungusaur.
Great episode!
Hurricane being the card that got a reverse Serendib Efreet treatment in summer magic is so poetic.
Love this, revised is my Alpha 💃🕺 Favorite card, Vesuvan Doppelgänger and Timmy of course. Also have a special fondness for clone, because I still remember opening a Clone out of my first booster ever and I was blown away by the card 🎉
I started playing at 4th Ed., but this set was my first exposure to the game itself. Had two high school buddies who had gotten into the game at the tail end of Revised and had some Revised cards and decks. After trying the game with them, I promptly went out and bought my first starter deck. But, that was right when 4th Ed hit the store shelves. I missed out on Revised by THAT much! (I still love 4th Ed for being my first, though!)
Thank you so very much for this podcast. I came into mtg when khans of tarkir came out and is my favorite set to date. But being able to learn in depth about all the set’s before and just mtg history in general in such detail is a treasure. Best mtg podcast period. Hope you guys continue to find success in your endeavors.
In case you see this Patrick, I agree that Demonic Bargain is a wonderful design. Good job!
5th Edition Flight did not disappoint!
I keep a copy of Flight on the back of my transparent phone case, it brings me so much joy, glad to see you having a good laugh with it
The discussion about flight got me thinking that an award fo best artwork in the set could lead to some good discussions out of you two. Food for thought
loved opening sol ring in revised back when i started playing back then :)
Holy Molly, the Magic the Gathering pocket player's guide. Stumble upon it a couple of months ago alongside some of the very first novels, was pretty sure I'd lost it back in 1998 when I finished my studies. Hard to describe how nostalgia crushed me at that moment.
Play note now, Magic, even before RPGs like Vampire or D&D- Boomer alert, it used to be AD&D at that time- was THE reason why I stopped buying/ playing with French versions of American games. Ask anyone who had to face a French Vesuvian Doppleganger or even a Clone in their LGS equivalent back in 94-95 and they'll tell you why it was a nightmare to tell a 12 years old kid that the translation was wrong and you should not interpreted the card this way but that way etc. Nightmares, and I don't speak about the horse.
Goosebumps while waiting for Ice Age. Technically Revised/ FBB/FWB represent my first encounter with the game, same thing for my friends at that time, though Ice Age has such a unique place in my heart. You know, coming back from work during summer- for the very first time in my life- and buying some boosters or even a starter pack 'cause the snow-covered lands were dope, and playing with people you had never met before until the day after and so on and so forth. Great times.
Freaking great chan. Cheers!
Edit: but that zebra :D
I heard somewhere that the color hosers where designed for two main reasons; they were meant to be safety valves in case one color ended up being too good and became ubiquitous. and also to give players a strong reason to play as many colors as possible as to not get blown out by one of these. I think the intention was solid, but the designs themselves were a little heavy handed to say the least.
they should’ve known blue would always be ubiquitous
Newer players will never know the experience of true rule lawyering that took place nearly every game back in the day because of the original rules.
24:30 Dominia was the entire universe, what we now just call the Magic Multiverse. Dominaria was at its center, and was treated as essentially, its capital - its name literally means "Song of Dominia."
This was very poorly communicated in early sources and the terminology has since been retired.
For those wanting to learn more about the Satanic Panic/MTG intersection, Rhystic Studies did an excellent video on it.
Ray Dill and especially Jonathan Choi, y'all both got name dropped and well-deserved! Awesome production y'all (and the flight timing landed😉)
This is fantastic. I time in as soon as I can every time.
Great episode as always. The first cards I ever bought were a Starter pack of Unlimited and two Arabian Nights boosters, but Revised was what I really consider my first set so this one's near and dear to my heart. I never got one of the pocket guides when they came out, but my grandmother bought me a copy from a library sale for $.25 about a year after it came out.
Please turn 22:50-23:18 into a short, that bit is far too good 😂 great episode as always!
It's so good, hahaha. I pulled out my phone while watching on my TV just to say this.
This is seriously the GOAT of magic content. So happy this is back. Thanks for the great stuff!
"Also this doesn't fit in your pocket"
- Patrick, on the Revised Pocket Player's Guide
A friend in seventh grade got one of those gift boxes, I saw Force of Nature and was like oh my God!, I have to have that!. That started the 30 year magic addiction.
I saw some of my friends playing Magic in the cafeteria in 7th grade too. I remember laughing at them. Then I sat down to see what was going on. 30 years later they’ve long since stopped and I’m still here 😂😂
I was a little worried about where this one would go, being strictly reprints and all, but y'all knocked it out of the park.
Brilliant podcast, really happy having discovered it. Trip down memory lane!
Wow this brings back memories, this is the set I started with and I remember getting the gift box which was so dope
Awesome podcast
I feel like you guys made a concerted effort to put up more cards from the sat in this particular podcast than in previous ones. As a player since 1994, I appreciate the enhanced exposure with regard to old cards.
38:33 I use Lifetap, Thoughtleech and Powerleech in a Simic Commander Deck. I would argue that it isn’t a hoser, rather all three are boons.
Great episode, finally getting to the point right from when I started playing magic. This next run is going to be all my teen years, I can't believe you guys are really doing this. SO STOKED. Thank you endlessly!
Saying that you wouldn't be shocked if Lightning Bolt was printed into standard is really funny to me. Because it's true that a lot of people wouldn't be shocked, because no body would be playing Shock when Bolt is available. 😂
I forgot how much I missed the banter and chemistry between you guys. Great show, great laughs. I'll definitely be coming back for more of these.
Love these deep dives. Looking forward to more!!!
Great show. So excited for legends
Love the shout out to the Bridgewater Commons.
As a kid, my friends and I interpretation of the Serendib Effreet was not that it was a blue card with a green border, but that it was a green card with the wrong mana symbol.
I love your show. It has jumped to the top of my favorite magic content. Thank you and keep up the good work.
Nostalgia hitting hard with this one 👌
Every time I get near the end of an episode it feels like the end of summer camp, keep up the great work
Commenting for the algorithm, y'all are great.
I think the color hosers were for the casual players to regulate the very common small playgroups.
So if someone had strong black deck we hated to play against we told him: "Change your deck or we will put Circle of protection: Black in our decks." And so he had to change to another deck.
And since we didnt even know what a sideboard was, we use these cards just for that reason.
Best show on the internet, keep it up guys!
I always loved the Tsunami and Flashfires cards. They helped decks feel fear because certain cards could absolutely destroy you even if the opponent probably didn't have it...they might.
The discussions on the Satanic panic and pre-internet days is something I always find fascinating. I was born in the late 80s, and I got to experience both of those eras to some degree. I was raised and still am a Greek Orthodox Christian, but my neighborhood buddies were all Protestant to some degree. My dad picked up AD&D in the Marine Corps, and he introduced that to me, but some of my friends weren’t allowed to play it. Funnily enough, it took LoTR coming out that my dad had a talk with the other parents and just related D&D to that, then after that everyone could play. The other weird thing, was some of the kids that couldn’t play D&D were allowed to play MTG….which I felt was super weird lol but oh well it really shows how parenting goes sometime lol.
Oh well, those were good times. The “surprise” of things really made it so much more interesting. You never knew when someone would pull out a new card they got from that $3 booster pack that their parent complained to high heaven about how expensive that was 😂😂😂.
I still have some of those old counters! I don't remember if it was the first thing we got, but it was definitely early. Sadly I don't remember my DCI number anymore though lol
Incredible content, but Patricks' audio is all over the place in this one. Check the mic positioning, Cedric's mic is much closer to his face and pointed right at his mouth. Compression may also help. Again, great work.
38:00 the idea of hosers at the time was as an emergency valve. They were there and kept in as a goto solution should mistakes in balance crop up and a single color become too powerful as to become gamebreaking. It was felt that, as long as there was a reasonably easy way to hose a single color, it would prevent the possibility of a single color dominating every game should they mistakenly print a too powerful card. Right or wrong, the intention came from a good place.
An interesting thing about color hoser cards, in side boards they are amazing (certified dealers, if you will) ... but in a world where your deck just had tp play a bunch of other decks randomly, they are not good. So at Friday night magic in my youth we often did endless pickup games, and there was never a real meta that developed. In that world it would have been dumb to use hosers. I was also playing the 1996 Playstation certified classic Magic The Gathering: Battlemage, and the single player campaign is like a deck building rpg. And in that world, again with no side board, hosers are not viable. So, I wonder if WotC in the day figured that these cards were for tournament players only and the rest of the base didn't really have to worry about them. I also wonder if the hosers, and cop in particular, are the game designers hedging their bets against accidentally printing an OP card. It's OK if you print Winny-Pants the OP Gablin Prince as a 20/1 haste, trample for 1 mana if the other person can block it for 1 mana. Well, it's not "ok" exactly, but maybe the product is still playable in a less extreme example. Of course that only covers damage dealers ... which leads me to wonder if they weren't just trying to communicate the concept of counter play to an audience that did have the tactical experience an audience would have after living in a world with MTG, Pokémon, and the like.
Interesting to think about!
Let me see if I can make this point more clear:
The designers were trying to communicate that counter-strategy existed at a deck level and a card selection level. Remember the era and the audience; we're talking about the first trading card game. But also, Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat came out only 1 and 2 years prior. There are no real time strategy or competitive FPS games. The idea of a tactical strategy game was relatively new with risk-like video games starting in the 80's and Civilization 1 releasing 2 years prior in 1991. So the idea in MTG of completely different decks and making these small choices around card selection really needed to be spon-fed to players.
Always like the history lesson around when I was playing!
1:11:03 disintegrate, for whatever reason, has no mention in its Revised text about the inability to regenerate
2:51 As it pertains to revised, aka 3rd edition, I always considered Alpha as 1st edition (missing two cards), Beta as 2nd edition, with unlimited being a second printing of Beta (adding the two missing cards and a third version of each basic land), thus making revised 3rd edition
Can’t get enough of this show. Keep ‘em coming
hey! no dissing of my beloved pocket players guide.. I got one in 1994/95 as well (I started playing a few months before Patrick) and I read that book several times in the following years. it wasn't as useless as they think . I still have it somewhere in my game room, and i am sure i will reread it again some day when I find it.
1:06:21 duelist May 1994 had three reasons listed for cards’ omissions from ABU: spoilers, mystifiers, and retirees. The latter included things like Dwarven Demolition Team and Ironclaw Orcs.
Ironclaw Orcs is in 4th edition. It just is.
@@Zarbon000 indeed, and beyond, but it was not in Revised, and it was for that stated reason. Dwarven Demolition Team would also later get a reprint.
1:18:00 grim tutor was in a recent ish core set
I got a hold of the pocket players guide in 1995 and absolutely devoured it. It might be funny now but I treasured that thing so much at the time.
Great Show! I hadn't started playing by this time, but I'm learning a lot! Can't wait for the next episode :)
Love these videos, they've definitely become a regular favourite of mine - keep up the great work!
I love Demonic Bargain! It hits the card you want almost every time, lol. I love it
I think whether you heard "3rd edition" depends on when you were active and how active you were. If you were going to events and meeting/trading with people a lot when 4th edition came out, you would have heard it called 3rd edition a good amount to distinguish it from 4th.
4th edition's release was a couple months from when type 1 and type 2 came out, and the idea of different formats with different legal card lists first entered everyone's minds, with minimal to no internet guidance. So you would ask and be asked if a card was reprinted in 4th or if it was just in 3rd, like, totally as a daily question because your tournament life depended on not getting DQed over a Sedge Troll or something (literally saw a guy DQed for a Sedge Troll once).
Been really enjoying this series thanks lads
That pocket player's guide fit in the pockets of my jnco's pretty well. Lol
theyve been speading rumors for like 10 years that they dumped Summer Magic into a garbage can in Texas and somebody hopped into the dumpster and got away with them. The hoarders are extra gatekeepy on that set.
Glad I found this channel❤
I can confirm that Summer was indeed for sale in one high street shop in Cork, Ireland. Unfortunately I was 9/10 at the time and about 2 years before getting into Mtg at Ice Age.
Where is the shirt that Patrick is wearing from?
www.coalesceapparel.shop/products/run-the-power
The revising of satanic symbols on cards I remember quite well as it did not save my early collection from ending up in a shoebox at Goodwill 😭
the picnic table bit has me losing it
Oh man, that gift box was everything to 11-year-old me (though I had the 4th Edition gift box, not Revised - they actually just ran the same product back the following core set).
Everyone knew those beads were how you tracked life - dark blue beads were 5 life, light blue beads were 1 life.
Been looking forward to this one!
Great pod! Look forward to every two weeks :) I wanna push back on the 5e Flight is hilariously bad art. It looks exactly like what a zebra would do if some wizard enchanted it randomly with flying. It would be flailing around with its hooves awkwardly trying to make sense of what is happening to it.
I started with a fifth edition starter deck. It was literally 3 booster packs worth of cards and 5 of each basic land.
Can't wait to see Patrick's reaction to Dragon Engine being a rare in 4th, 5th AND 6th edition. Also the bit about 5e Flight made me laugh so hard it physically hurt my ribs.
Atleast if you pulled Dragon Engine in 3rd, 4th, or 5th, they hide the rarity, so you might think another card is rare and still be happy with your pack. But in 6th, that gold symbol is staring you in the face, and sadness closes in all around you 😢
Ivory tower I wouldn’t walk back. It was necessary, as a hard counter to black vice
Shout out to Cleveland! I grew up in Shaker. Where can I get magic cards in CLE?
I suspect they cut Dwarven Demolition Team due to its power level, which is pretty funny. They really wanted walls to be playable (they printed so many), and honestly I still kinda wish they were playable.
Living the walk through Magic history. 🦓 can not be tamed so they must fly 😂
Dr. Fredric Wertham is the name you younger viewers should Google if you want to know about the 50's comic congressional hearings. He almost killed the comic book industry.
Shout out to The Gamekeeper. I also probably got my first MTG cards from The Gamekeeper at the Commons lol. Years later I got my first full booster box when my father and sister went to the mall to try and find Christmas gifts for me, luckily my sister had the faintest idea what magic was and bought a Tempest box from some store there for me.
Tempest box good lord! Maybe a Tempest Starter or Precon would be good 😂
For powerful cards, what about Fastbond? Surely it has a similar power level to Dark Ritual and that ilk. It is more powerful today than yesterday, but I think a lot of its power is inherent.
Fastbond was restricted forever. It’s insanely strong.
Chiming in to say how AWKWARD it was to have the parents know what NIN was up to, lol
1:20:07 "I wouldn't be shocked" I see what you did there.
27:43 of course there is 😂
As someone who started around m15, I had the 2nd players guide handbook, and I'm pretty sure the 2nd one doesn't get much better haha