Note from the first minute: they didn’t just “forget” to print volcanic island in Alpha. What happened was that the artwork that came in for Volcanic Island had the island itself pretty small and in the background, with a tropical bird dominating the foreground. They decided this might be confusing, but there wasn’t enough time to get a new art commissioned and completed before the set went to print. So, they created Birds of Paradise at the last minute to take Volcanic Island’s spot in the Alpha print run, and added Volcanic Island to the Beta run, leaving the new Birds of Paradise card in as well.
Is this true? It's true that the art of Volcanic Island became Birds of Paradise, but they did commission new art. They wouldn't have cut an important card simply because the art was subjectively incompatible.
The name of the first set of Magic was meant to be "The Gathering", and when Ice Age was going to come out, the back of the card was going to say "Magic: Ice Age" and Arabian Nights was going to have a completly different, pink card back. They realized this was a bad idea for many reasons, so the whole game became "Magic: The Gathering" and the first set lost it's name. Also the reason they came up with "The Gathering" in the first place was that "Magic" was too generic for trademarking/copyright purposes.
@@yurisei6732Never heard that, but this information could have been found on SF Debris’s channel. He’s been doing a series on the history of Magic: The Gathering and D&D.
Kinda funny that in yugioh we had a whole card type simply called "magic" cards, but supposedly Konami was afraid WOTC would sue them and they just started calling them spell cards instead
Richard Garfield has gone on record saying that they did understand that ABU was very imbalanced, but they just didn’t care about balance because the game was never made to be collected and become what it did. He thought you would just buy some packs and play with what you got with all the highs and lows. He very much knew how busted stuff like ancestral recall was
I made a card game in high school and after some playtests it was very obvious what was strong and what wasn't But just to get 20 packs of starter decks printed cost around $100, so by the time I got around to balancing some of the cards and making a second print run, most people didn't want to play with less powerful cards even if it meant some of their weaker cards got stronger So I totally understand where they are coming from with that
9:42 Originally Magic decks had 40 cards, not 60. The 60 card limit wasn't introduced until competitive play. The 40 card limit is referenced in Sharazaad's text box.
I think it's quite interesting that in pre-Alpha development they really didn't know or even have a way to really evaluate the power of cards and their impact, which directly resulted in the vast power variance found in ABU and the earliest sets, which is perfectly demonstrated with the Boon Cycle. Hell, a lot of the Power 9 and other broken cards from early Magic have had numerous "fixed" iterations printed that are still ridiculously busted, which I think is interesting in how it further conextualizes just how obscenely strong some of the earliest cards are/were. One of my favorite anecdotes about pre-Alpha playtesting was that one of the testers traded away his playtest _Mox Emerald_ for another tester's forest because "they both cost nothing to play and make a green mana' seeing them as functionally identical which they obviously weren't, but back then they just didn't know what they didn't know.
Actually, the original designers have gone on record saying that they were aware that certain cards were quite imbalanced, but they just didn't care and figured it wouldn't matter
29:17 There's a good reason Gatherer's only rules comment on Basalt monolith is "Basalt Monolith's last ability can untap it as often as you can pay for it. If you believe you've found a way to generate an unbounded amount of mana with it, you're probably right." As time went on they realized what they did, and they just decided 'fuck it we ball go nuts guys'
You implied that Wizards of the Coast owned D&D when Magic came out, but that’s not the case. D&D was owned by TSR at the time; WoTC bought TSR in 1997.
To be fair, Wizards of the Coast was still in the TTRPG business at the time, so while the connection he made was misleading in regards to D&D, it was perfectly reasonable for explaining WotC's decision to encourage a looser play culture that negotiated rules at the table, like you would in any TTRPG, at the beginning of MtG's life.
ABU is a wild time to hear about. 20 black lotus in a deck, each one today worth an easy 250k. Who'd have thought you'd look back 30yrs later and realize you played a 5 million dollar deck?
As for which artifacts got the "while untapped" text, MaRo had an article about it and said that it was a conscious decision. They put it on cards where they thought it was interesting. One card even got the text removed only relatively recently. It had not been reprinted since the change, so it was changed to do what the printed cards said.
You know, I was expecting you to cover Rock Hydra as one of the weirdest cards, an example of a card designed with the adventure flavor and not rule clarity in mind.
Please show the printing of the card of the set you are reviewing. If its rule text cannot be understood easily, you can show the most recent printing's rule text on the side.
3:30 research. My favorite. 22:11 Don't worry, I don't destroy creatures... unless you fly. Overall, it's funny how expensive creatures back then had really crippling downsides. Nowadays, expensive means triple upsides.
Banding gets a bad rap that it doesn't really deserve. It's great when defending and still useful on the attack if you're trying to get attack triggers. If you need an attack trigger but the opponent has enough defense that could kill the triggering creature you band it with a chump and send all the damage to the chump. It's not a *great* mechanic by any means but it is far, far from the worst.
I said a similar thing on another video talking about older cards, but it's hilarious looking at the power gap between certain old Yugioh and Magic cards. Like original Yugioh having cards that just gave you some information like Seal of The Ancients and The Inexperienced Spy while also having cards that could just win the game like Raigeki and Pot of Greed.
There's something you see with a lot of games like this where the developers are learning what's powerful in the game just as much as the players are. I feel like the key difference in those misunderstandings between the two are that early Magic didn't seem to really know or care what was powerful yet and were just printing whatever, while YGO definitely knew they had powerful cards but grossly misjudged what those cards were (i.e. thinking weird hand info would help, or assuming people would be switching between attack and defense a lot). In contrast, the Pokemon TCG seemed to understand itself pretty well from the jump. The video games, though, THOSE clearly took a few iterations until the developers nailed down what 'a good Pokemon' actually was.
@@calemr There's always gonna be some balance struggles like that, but for the most part Pokemon worked like it was supposed to, which is... not how the other two games' first sets handled. I think the strength is that early Pokemon more had issues with underpowered cards that were too gimmicky for their own good; early MtG and YGO were defined by unexpectedly powerful cards warping the meta around them, but barring a few outliers (basically all Trainers) Pokemon's high end looked like they expected, and it's the low end that's filled with 'the hell were you thinking'.
@@EinDoseI wonder if that’s because the Pokémon TCG was originally designed by Wizards of the Coast. By that point they had been making Magic for years and would have had a solid idea on how to set up good cards. Plus mechanics like energy cards are pretty similar to Magic’s lands.
Moxen are mostly better than lands, but they are not strictly better due to be susceptible to artifact hate, which has gotten stronger over time while we moved away from land destruction, and their cost can be increased. Minor, but still there. And even in sets like ABU, without Trinispheres and with land destruction being common and artifact destruction non-existent, they still occupied the stack, meaning they could be answered to (or give priority to the opponent in general), while lands don't. Also, talking about the power-creep of Birds of Paradise, I feel that we should mention the best one-drop of all times, Deathrite Shaman.
I believe one of his editors for one of the Pokemon videos left a comment on a thread with a similar wording error. This is due to them recently rushing things out and not checking for errors before he does voice work. Basically all of the mistakes he makes goes to his editor, who overlooks stuff, as the voiceover guy isn't always the most knowledgeable about non-YuGiOh stuff, hence the editor has his trust but continues to muck things up. It's not that hard or sinister, guys. Three or four comments of a couple of lakes doesn't immediately skyrocket these things into the recommended tab. You would probably already be watching him or similar card game stuff if videos from them are already showing up.
You're shortselling banding again. It's incredible on defense, you can chump trample and group-block to take out something bigger without trading, or make your stack of 1/1s only lose a single guy instead of the whole stack. It's not as strong on the attack, but it can still open up opportunities on even boards that would otherwise be stalled to force a chump, chip damage, or a trade just how you want it.
Banding is not a garbage mechanic. It is actually really strong, but very bad for the game. Getting to assign the damage your opponent’s creature deals to your creatures in the band makes you win almost every double block. The overall lack of strength of creatures at the time creates an environment for a mechanic that tilts the math in your favor to thrive. It was the complexity of the mechanic and it’s strength in basic creature based matchups that did it in. As you said, they also have to design the game for limited-a format all about creature based gameplay. This is where banding is truly egregious.
Mentioning blue removal and talking about Unsummon but not Psionic Blast. Between this, the "Wizards owned D&D" and "Revsied is basically the same as Alpha," I'm wonder if they intentionally make mistakes to farm comments. If so, it is working.
His editors come out on his other videos to talk about this. They had a string of rushing crap out Linus Tech Tips style and fail to spellcheck or redo voice work to make corrections. It's hard to believe a handful of comments and errors will positively benefit things in the algorithm to a sinister extent.
If multiple players were playing Channel/Fireball/Lotus combo at local tournaments, this means that AT SOME POINT in time, MULTIPLE PEOPLE were just casually carrying around a deck with TWENTY BLACK LOTUSES in them.
@@lethalweeb4415 None of the power wins a game on its on aside maybe time walk but they all require setup. I’ve played a lot of powered magic and Sol Ring is a lot more powerful than Timetwister. Its legality in Commander has really skewed its perception but any of the Moxen would be at a similar power level in that they put you ahead of everyone else at the table.
@@lethalweeb4415sol ring is arguably better than the moxen, allowing you to power out 4 drops on turn 2 is crazy powerful, like in vintage cube draft sol ring is considered better than most of the p9. I'd probably only take recall and lotus over it.
Here is hoping for more ser review/retrospectives! I got into Magic around when Prophecy was about to release, and the highschool lunch sessions of watching players use house rules to fit within the lunch period (no land play limit for one) and the infinite combos caused by a weird use of 5th Edition/6th Edition Rules and Urza/Tempest cards
I hope you can continue doing this for each set. Do an overview of each set and what it meant to the history of the game. I have been looking for someone who does something like this. I have found very little in the way of that. At least from the first 10 years or so of MTG.
Imagine playing Ante and the nature of the system bet someone's Black Lotus that they now cannot use in that game, while your bet was a basic land. And then you won. You're getting stabbed in the parking lot after that game
"Blue doesn't have any broken cards." Are you keeping me? Blue is the ONLY color represented in the Power 9 for a reason, and the ONLY members of the Power 9 who aren't just mana generators.
With all the things with “creature attacks alone” I think banding might actually be good, like banding into rouge’s passage or security bypass allowing you to sneak your way into your enemy’s defense
It's also arguably an error to say that Revised is almost the same as ABU...it's got a LOT of different cards. Is 4th Edition also basically the same as Revised? Does not make sense
@@LibertyMonkright now I am waiting for a table at a restaurant. If I design something while I’m waiting, I don’t own the restaurant I’m waiting to eat at.
@@LibertyMonk It may have been designed with DnD (this was 2ed mind you ) players in mind as the target demographic but there was certainly friction between D&D and MtG with D&D seeing MtG as infringing on its turf.
If banding had "The band can only be blocked by a number of creatures equal to or greater than the number of banded creatures" would banding be any good? So if you have two creatures with banding, you can attack as a 3 creature group, and unless the opponent has three blockers, none of the three creatures can be blocked.
The thing that makes banding good is using it defensively blocking as a band vs an opponents big creature where you can lose nothing and kill their big beaters
Banding is already powerful, it's just that nobody wants to try to understand it. Yes, it's really easy to block a Band, but you're basically always going to be chumping it. But that only matters in a vacuum where you have chumps to spare. Attacking as a band can let you swing into a large blocker and force them to decide between chumping, trading their fatty for a dork, or getting chunked. Then protecting small creatures with abilities that make them want to attack comes into play. Either way, Banding can let you swing when you otherwise wouldn't want to. Then there's it's use during blocking, where it gets oppressively powerful. Blocking happens as normal, then, if a single creature blocking has Banding, you can do anything you want to the blocked creature.
@@LibertyMonkSounds like cope. I mean, it's a keyword that does something. It's not useless. But on the attacking front, it has the same problem as auras: you need two+ cards to do one thing. Offensively, you're basically always better off using unblockable than giving something banding, or using an unblockable creature than a creature with banding. Defensively, you'd be better off using a 0/1 indestructible creature, rather than having a 1/1 banding creature and producing a 1/1 token for chump blocking every round. Pretty much every theoretical situation where banding would be helpful, there's something better that you could be doing. Could WotC have forced banding to be good? Probably. But I think acting like banding is actually very strong is kind of silly.
Arcades is so good with walls though, especially in Arena where it has a neat little extra effect when attacking with them, the screen shake and impact of the card on the opponent is stronger than normal creatures, plus most people don't think about it too much and lose to it a lot, especially in Brawl as Arcades as your commander and his colors, so fun to play! And no I don't heavily use counters, only 2 or 3 at most, I hate playing against them and only use them on cards I loath, like Laughing Jasper Jack (and similar scam cards), Elesh Norn and so on, the rest I let it be cast normally.
Same reason why Raigeki was one of the first cards in YuGiOh and was banned for a long time. The earliest iteration of the game is usually low-stakes, so a board-wipe card isn’t difficult to recover from. Then the game evolves and cards that enable a board-wipe or something else that’s game-crippling becomes better and better as cards become stronger.
That’s backwards… raigeki was banned back when it took 3 turns to get one big creature on the board and now is unbanned when you do 20 special summons a turn…
@@GhGh-gq8oo Raigeki’s unbanned because it got power-crept. EDIT: But that being said, a better example would then be Pot of Greed. It’s not very impactful in the very early game. It’s a game breaker nowadays lll
@@Varooooooom It's because it's relatively just not that powerful anymore when you can make a full board off a one card starter compared to a full board needing 5 full turns to make back in the day.
I am very surprised that these 2 things haven't happened in the larger Wizards community: A community based 'PhD format' that tries to play MTG the way Richard Garfield intended (including ante, playground deckbuilding and rules negotiation) with the entire Vintage card pool, and a competitive D&D scene.
In a way, competitive D&D did once exist! Some early D&D scenarios, printed primarily for conventions, had secret 'scoring sheets' for handling the various encounters players would be put through, rewarding points for thurough puzzle solving, treasure collecting, etc., and losing points for falling to traps and such.
The problem is that having access to the entire Vintage pool isn’t something Garfield intended. He figured that the rarity of cards like the Power 9 would keep players from even seeing them very often, let alone bunches of them using those cards. He never expected Magic players to care about optimization and competition the way they do.
Chaos Orb was top tier power, the Power 9 was the Power 10 at that point, when the orb was banned LOA took its place on the Power 10 list. Sol ring was of course in every single deck and usually more powerful after the first turn than any of the moxes or lotus. TIme vault broke immediately because of twiddle. Unsummon was good but blues staple removal was Psionic blast.Icy Manipulator was also in every deck it could be both as defense, to shut off mines and orbs, and at the time tapped creatures did not deal damage so tap[ping a blocker was exceptionally powerful. Banding was never great on the attack but in blocking if even one blocker had banding you could divide the damage yourself so you could toss 4 chumps in front of a large threat and only lose your benalish hero or such. I am taking it much of this came from research not having played at the time and I have a feeling a lot of the what was being played and how comes from articles written by people who were also not playing.
Love your videos! The yellow text over a busy, animated background does make the video busy and the text hard to read. Maybe tone it back for the future to improve accessability?
this may be quite nitpicky but when you’re talking about ABU sets it would be cool if the original ABU versions of the cards were shown. it doesn’t make any difference as far as the explanation but it would make it more “immersive”
I find it amusing you specifically mention purelace as being the example among the laces as never being playable when it was very playable in the right deck. I had a white weenie deck back in Legends and later that used purelace to turn one of my opponents lands white. Why? Because not many people played land destruction cards and if I turned a card they couldn't destroy white I could play jihad against white and know they had few options to get rid of the effect.
I think the worst cards in those set were the "Laces" the cards that chane a card to the color of the lace... wordt part of this was that those cards were RARE...
I wish WotC was still its own company rather than owned by Hasbro. Edit: Plague Rats needs to be reprinted with errata that removes the four per deck limit. And Relentless should be made a keyword.
Might I just say that Benalish Hero's flavor text describes something out of a jRPG-esque fantasy setting? I am very well aware what Benalia was like in lore, but still.
Given how much fast mana was available at the time, I can understand why creatures were so underwhelming. Wizards wouldn't want crazy things happening too easily, but they nerfed the wrong thing.
It’s because creatures were weak and spells were strong. Now to keep up with power creep every creature needs to be at or above rate (3/3 for 3) with a great ETB or it’s useless. There’s so much removal that in anything but limited the creatures need to be able to have full cards worth of value without the body.
It's interesting to compare the early Magic ethos to Dungeons & Dragons, but it may have been worth distinguishing that WotC had nothing to do with the design or ownership of DnD when Magic was getting started. You refer to DnD as "Wizards of the Coast's OTHER major property" and later say "Magic was originally designed as an accompaniment to Dungeons & Dragons". I can't find any source to support this. Magic first released in 1993, and WotC did not purchase TSR until 1997.
Sol Ring isn’t played in most formats either because it’s illegal or banned. It absolutely is still a great card. Almost no other Mana rock will give you twice the mana you paid to cast it and come in untapped.
It's a staple in EDH / Commander. My pre-con came with it. I was told to never remove it unless I have a Black Lotus, but even then, that's banned in that format.
th-cam.com/video/nCsj10WVCSs/w-d-xo.html , Yeah they say the same from counterspells... i cant destroy a land for 3 but i can counter any card for 1 or even free mana ( WIZARDS LOL XD ) still loving the game btw :3
Actually they went through quite a bit of playtesting. The designers knew the Power 9 were powerful, but no one expected Magic players to react to the game the way they did. They figured most players wouldn’t know all the cards and would buy a starter pack and maybe a booster or two. In that scenario the rarity would keep most players from even seeing a Black Lotus, never mind playing one. But between the burgeoning internet scene having people build a database of all the cards and players buying entire boxes of booster packs the whole thing spiraled out of control.
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Note from the first minute: they didn’t just “forget” to print volcanic island in Alpha. What happened was that the artwork that came in for Volcanic Island had the island itself pretty small and in the background, with a tropical bird dominating the foreground. They decided this might be confusing, but there wasn’t enough time to get a new art commissioned and completed before the set went to print. So, they created Birds of Paradise at the last minute to take Volcanic Island’s spot in the Alpha print run, and added Volcanic Island to the Beta run, leaving the new Birds of Paradise card in as well.
He mentions it later
@@Terrabyte13 he mentions your mom later too 😏
So what about CoP: Red?
Is this true? It's true that the art of Volcanic Island became Birds of Paradise, but they did commission new art. They wouldn't have cut an important card simply because the art was subjectively incompatible.
@@fernandobanda5734 That was my understanding, though it may just be hearsay.
The name of the first set of Magic was meant to be "The Gathering", and when Ice Age was going to come out, the back of the card was going to say "Magic: Ice Age" and Arabian Nights was going to have a completly different, pink card back. They realized this was a bad idea for many reasons, so the whole game became "Magic: The Gathering" and the first set lost it's name. Also the reason they came up with "The Gathering" in the first place was that "Magic" was too generic for trademarking/copyright purposes.
I too watch Lateral with Tom Scott.
@@yurisei6732Never heard that, but this information could have been found on SF Debris’s channel. He’s been doing a series on the history of Magic: The Gathering and D&D.
@@yurisei6732 never heard of it, I'll check it out though
Kinda funny that in yugioh we had a whole card type simply called "magic" cards, but supposedly Konami was afraid WOTC would sue them and they just started calling them spell cards instead
Richard Garfield has gone on record saying that they did understand that ABU was very imbalanced, but they just didn’t care about balance because the game was never made to be collected and become what it did.
He thought you would just buy some packs and play with what you got with all the highs and lows. He very much knew how busted stuff like ancestral recall was
I made a card game in high school and after some playtests it was very obvious what was strong and what wasn't
But just to get 20 packs of starter decks printed cost around $100, so by the time I got around to balancing some of the cards and making a second print run, most people didn't want to play with less powerful cards even if it meant some of their weaker cards got stronger
So I totally understand where they are coming from with that
This is why cards like black lotus and the moxen were rare and not printed st the same quantity as other things
9:42
Originally Magic decks had 40 cards, not 60. The 60 card limit wasn't introduced until competitive play.
The 40 card limit is referenced in Sharazaad's text box.
I think it's quite interesting that in pre-Alpha development they really didn't know or even have a way to really evaluate the power of cards and their impact, which directly resulted in the vast power variance found in ABU and the earliest sets, which is perfectly demonstrated with the Boon Cycle. Hell, a lot of the Power 9 and other broken cards from early Magic have had numerous "fixed" iterations printed that are still ridiculously busted, which I think is interesting in how it further conextualizes just how obscenely strong some of the earliest cards are/were.
One of my favorite anecdotes about pre-Alpha playtesting was that one of the testers traded away his playtest _Mox Emerald_ for another tester's forest because "they both cost nothing to play and make a green mana' seeing them as functionally identical which they obviously weren't, but back then they just didn't know what they didn't know.
Actually, the original designers have gone on record saying that they were aware that certain cards were quite imbalanced, but they just didn't care and figured it wouldn't matter
ah yes chaos orb one of the few cards to have the dishonour of being banned in vintage
Only because of the use of dexterity.
29:17 There's a good reason Gatherer's only rules comment on Basalt monolith is "Basalt Monolith's last ability can untap it as often as you can pay for it. If you believe you've found a way to generate an unbounded amount of mana with it, you're probably right."
As time went on they realized what they did, and they just decided 'fuck it we ball go nuts guys'
You implied that Wizards of the Coast owned D&D when Magic came out, but that’s not the case. D&D was owned by TSR at the time; WoTC bought TSR in 1997.
To be fair, Wizards of the Coast was still in the TTRPG business at the time, so while the connection he made was misleading in regards to D&D, it was perfectly reasonable for explaining WotC's decision to encourage a looser play culture that negotiated rules at the table, like you would in any TTRPG, at the beginning of MtG's life.
ABU is a wild time to hear about. 20 black lotus in a deck, each one today worth an easy 250k. Who'd have thought you'd look back 30yrs later and realize you played a 5 million dollar deck?
As for which artifacts got the "while untapped" text, MaRo had an article about it and said that it was a conscious decision. They put it on cards where they thought it was interesting. One card even got the text removed only relatively recently. It had not been reprinted since the change, so it was changed to do what the printed cards said.
You know, I was expecting you to cover Rock Hydra as one of the weirdest cards, an example of a card designed with the adventure flavor and not rule clarity in mind.
Please show the printing of the card of the set you are reviewing. If its rule text cannot be understood easily, you can show the most recent printing's rule text on the side.
3:30 research. My favorite.
22:11 Don't worry, I don't destroy creatures... unless you fly.
Overall, it's funny how expensive creatures back then had really crippling downsides. Nowadays, expensive means triple upsides.
Banding gets a bad rap that it doesn't really deserve. It's great when defending and still useful on the attack if you're trying to get attack triggers. If you need an attack trigger but the opponent has enough defense that could kill the triggering creature you band it with a chump and send all the damage to the chump.
It's not a *great* mechanic by any means but it is far, far from the worst.
I think with a little more time, Banding could have been a really cool mechanic.
I said a similar thing on another video talking about older cards, but it's hilarious looking at the power gap between certain old Yugioh and Magic cards. Like original Yugioh having cards that just gave you some information like Seal of The Ancients and The Inexperienced Spy while also having cards that could just win the game like Raigeki and Pot of Greed.
There's something you see with a lot of games like this where the developers are learning what's powerful in the game just as much as the players are. I feel like the key difference in those misunderstandings between the two are that early Magic didn't seem to really know or care what was powerful yet and were just printing whatever, while YGO definitely knew they had powerful cards but grossly misjudged what those cards were (i.e. thinking weird hand info would help, or assuming people would be switching between attack and defense a lot).
In contrast, the Pokemon TCG seemed to understand itself pretty well from the jump. The video games, though, THOSE clearly took a few iterations until the developers nailed down what 'a good Pokemon' actually was.
@@EinDose I dunno, I remember that Every deck ran 4 Bills, because there was no cost or restriction to playing Trainer cards.
@@calemr There's always gonna be some balance struggles like that, but for the most part Pokemon worked like it was supposed to, which is... not how the other two games' first sets handled.
I think the strength is that early Pokemon more had issues with underpowered cards that were too gimmicky for their own good; early MtG and YGO were defined by unexpectedly powerful cards warping the meta around them, but barring a few outliers (basically all Trainers) Pokemon's high end looked like they expected, and it's the low end that's filled with 'the hell were you thinking'.
@@EinDoseI wonder if that’s because the Pokémon TCG was originally designed by Wizards of the Coast. By that point they had been making Magic for years and would have had a solid idea on how to set up good cards. Plus mechanics like energy cards are pretty similar to Magic’s lands.
@@magnusprime962 WOTC never designed any pokemon cards, they just distributed them outside of Japan
I like the video but in the future you should use a version of the card that looks like what it looked like in the set you're talking about.
Yes! Thank you. This was bothering me the entire video.
Moxen are mostly better than lands, but they are not strictly better due to be susceptible to artifact hate, which has gotten stronger over time while we moved away from land destruction, and their cost can be increased. Minor, but still there.
And even in sets like ABU, without Trinispheres and with land destruction being common and artifact destruction non-existent, they still occupied the stack, meaning they could be answered to (or give priority to the opponent in general), while lands don't.
Also, talking about the power-creep of Birds of Paradise, I feel that we should mention the best one-drop of all times, Deathrite Shaman.
It's fastbond, not fastbound.
He pronounces stuff incorrectly on purpose for the induced extra comments for the algorithm.
I believe one of his editors for one of the Pokemon videos left a comment on a thread with a similar wording error.
This is due to them recently rushing things out and not checking for errors before he does voice work. Basically all of the mistakes he makes goes to his editor, who overlooks stuff, as the voiceover guy isn't always the most knowledgeable about non-YuGiOh stuff, hence the editor has his trust but continues to muck things up.
It's not that hard or sinister, guys. Three or four comments of a couple of lakes doesn't immediately skyrocket these things into the recommended tab. You would probably already be watching him or similar card game stuff if videos from them are already showing up.
It's a misprint, very common in the older sets.
You're shortselling banding again. It's incredible on defense, you can chump trample and group-block to take out something bigger without trading, or make your stack of 1/1s only lose a single guy instead of the whole stack. It's not as strong on the attack, but it can still open up opportunities on even boards that would otherwise be stalled to force a chump, chip damage, or a trade just how you want it.
Banding is not a garbage mechanic. It is actually really strong, but very bad for the game. Getting to assign the damage your opponent’s creature deals to your creatures in the band makes you win almost every double block. The overall lack of strength of creatures at the time creates an environment for a mechanic that tilts the math in your favor to thrive. It was the complexity of the mechanic and it’s strength in basic creature based matchups that did it in. As you said, they also have to design the game for limited-a format all about creature based gameplay. This is where banding is truly egregious.
Mentioning blue removal and talking about Unsummon but not Psionic Blast. Between this, the "Wizards owned D&D" and "Revsied is basically the same as Alpha," I'm wonder if they intentionally make mistakes to farm comments. If so, it is working.
Update...another likely intentional error. Whatever he said instead of "Llanowar." Blatantly butchered the first time, then said correctly later
I know it's probably not the case, but this channel and his other ones give off the vibe of being a content farm with scripts written by an ai.
His editors come out on his other videos to talk about this. They had a string of rushing crap out Linus Tech Tips style and fail to spellcheck or redo voice work to make corrections.
It's hard to believe a handful of comments and errors will positively benefit things in the algorithm to a sinister extent.
@@uriel7395idk about an ai but the guy speaking in the videos definitely doesn't write them. I don't think he even plays mtg.
If multiple players were playing Channel/Fireball/Lotus combo at local tournaments, this means that AT SOME POINT in time, MULTIPLE PEOPLE were just casually carrying around a deck with TWENTY BLACK LOTUSES in them.
This is gonna be a really great series!
Is there a reason the arguable tenth piece of power Sol Ring wasn’t mentioned?
Sol Ring is really good but it doesn’t hold a candle to the power 9. Those cards win games on their own. Sol Ring puts you ahead of your opponent
@@lethalweeb4415 None of the power wins a game on its on aside maybe time walk but they all require setup. I’ve played a lot of powered magic and Sol Ring is a lot more powerful than Timetwister. Its legality in Commander has really skewed its perception but any of the Moxen would be at a similar power level in that they put you ahead of everyone else at the table.
@@lethalweeb4415sol ring is arguably better than the moxen, allowing you to power out 4 drops on turn 2 is crazy powerful, like in vintage cube draft sol ring is considered better than most of the p9. I'd probably only take recall and lotus over it.
@@joshdoughty5211yeah anyone who plays vintage cube knows that sol ring is just as good and situationally actually way better than a mox.
I love this! More themed history or general stuff pls, I personally like it even more than top 10s :3
Can't wait to see what you say about Homelands, haha.
Here is hoping for more ser review/retrospectives!
I got into Magic around when Prophecy was about to release, and the highschool lunch sessions of watching players use house rules to fit within the lunch period (no land play limit for one) and the infinite combos caused by a weird use of 5th Edition/6th Edition Rules and Urza/Tempest cards
You should use the old versions of the power 9 (ABU) instead of the modern frame reprints when referencing them in your videos
I hope you can continue doing this for each set. Do an overview of each set and what it meant to the history of the game. I have been looking for someone who does something like this. I have found very little in the way of that. At least from the first 10 years or so of MTG.
Fastbond doesn't have a U in it.
It wouldn’t be a hirumaredx video without at least 2 spelling/pronunciation errors per minute
It's a famous misprint
Imagine playing Ante and the nature of the system bet someone's Black Lotus that they now cannot use in that game, while your bet was a basic land. And then you won.
You're getting stabbed in the parking lot after that game
"Blue doesn't have any broken cards."
Are you keeping me? Blue is the ONLY color represented in the Power 9 for a reason, and the ONLY members of the Power 9 who aren't just mana generators.
I didn't know Fastbond got unrestricted! Fun stuff, I can break out my playset for the first time in decades!
With all the things with “creature attacks alone” I think banding might actually be good, like banding into rouge’s passage or security bypass allowing you to sneak your way into your enemy’s defense
A somewhat funny error right at the start of the video is talking about D&D being owned by WotC; that didn't happen until later.
It's also arguably an error to say that Revised is almost the same as ABU...it's got a LOT of different cards. Is 4th Edition also basically the same as Revised? Does not make sense
You're right, but Magic was allegedly designed as something to do between actions in a D&D game.
@@LibertyMonkright now I am waiting for a table at a restaurant. If I design something while I’m waiting, I don’t own the restaurant I’m waiting to eat at.
@@LibertyMonk It may have been designed with DnD (this was 2ed mind you ) players in mind as the target demographic but there was certainly friction between D&D and MtG with D&D seeing MtG as infringing on its turf.
If banding had "The band can only be blocked by a number of creatures equal to or greater than the number of banded creatures" would banding be any good?
So if you have two creatures with banding, you can attack as a 3 creature group, and unless the opponent has three blockers, none of the three creatures can be blocked.
it’s kinda like. turbomenace
The thing that makes banding good is using it defensively blocking as a band vs an opponents big creature where you can lose nothing and kill their big beaters
Banding is already powerful, it's just that nobody wants to try to understand it. Yes, it's really easy to block a Band, but you're basically always going to be chumping it. But that only matters in a vacuum where you have chumps to spare. Attacking as a band can let you swing into a large blocker and force them to decide between chumping, trading their fatty for a dork, or getting chunked. Then protecting small creatures with abilities that make them want to attack comes into play. Either way, Banding can let you swing when you otherwise wouldn't want to.
Then there's it's use during blocking, where it gets oppressively powerful. Blocking happens as normal, then, if a single creature blocking has Banding, you can do anything you want to the blocked creature.
@@LibertyMonkSounds like cope.
I mean, it's a keyword that does something. It's not useless. But on the attacking front, it has the same problem as auras: you need two+ cards to do one thing. Offensively, you're basically always better off using unblockable than giving something banding, or using an unblockable creature than a creature with banding.
Defensively, you'd be better off using a 0/1 indestructible creature, rather than having a 1/1 banding creature and producing a 1/1 token for chump blocking every round.
Pretty much every theoretical situation where banding would be helpful, there's something better that you could be doing.
Could WotC have forced banding to be good? Probably. But I think acting like banding is actually very strong is kind of silly.
Arcades is so good with walls though, especially in Arena where it has a neat little extra effect when attacking with them, the screen shake and impact of the card on the opponent is stronger than normal creatures, plus most people don't think about it too much and lose to it a lot, especially in Brawl as Arcades as your commander and his colors, so fun to play!
And no I don't heavily use counters, only 2 or 3 at most, I hate playing against them and only use them on cards I loath, like Laughing Jasper Jack (and similar scam cards), Elesh Norn and so on, the rest I let it be cast normally.
Same reason why Raigeki was one of the first cards in YuGiOh and was banned for a long time. The earliest iteration of the game is usually low-stakes, so a board-wipe card isn’t difficult to recover from. Then the game evolves and cards that enable a board-wipe or something else that’s game-crippling becomes better and better as cards become stronger.
That’s backwards… raigeki was banned back when it took 3 turns to get one big creature on the board and now is unbanned when you do 20 special summons a turn…
@@GhGh-gq8oo Raigeki’s unbanned because it got power-crept.
EDIT: But that being said, a better example would then be Pot of Greed. It’s not very impactful in the very early game. It’s a game breaker nowadays lll
@@Varooooooom It's because it's relatively just not that powerful anymore when you can make a full board off a one card starter compared to a full board needing 5 full turns to make back in the day.
I am very surprised that these 2 things haven't happened in the larger Wizards community: A community based 'PhD format' that tries to play MTG the way Richard Garfield intended (including ante, playground deckbuilding and rules negotiation) with the entire Vintage card pool, and a competitive D&D scene.
In a way, competitive D&D did once exist! Some early D&D scenarios, printed primarily for conventions, had secret 'scoring sheets' for handling the various encounters players would be put through, rewarding points for thurough puzzle solving, treasure collecting, etc., and losing points for falling to traps and such.
The problem is that having access to the entire Vintage pool isn’t something Garfield intended. He figured that the rarity of cards like the Power 9 would keep players from even seeing them very often, let alone bunches of them using those cards. He never expected Magic players to care about optimization and competition the way they do.
i remember watching dudes shuffle unsleeved ABU deck. thinking back on that is painful
Power surge is still ok. Mana empties from upkeep to main phase so they would have to use the mana or they have none unless they take the damage.
Chaos Orb was top tier power, the Power 9 was the Power 10 at that point, when the orb was banned LOA took its place on the Power 10 list. Sol ring was of course in every single deck and usually more powerful after the first turn than any of the moxes or lotus. TIme vault broke immediately because of twiddle. Unsummon was good but blues staple removal was Psionic blast.Icy Manipulator was also in every deck it could be both as defense, to shut off mines and orbs, and at the time tapped creatures did not deal damage so tap[ping a blocker was exceptionally powerful. Banding was never great on the attack but in blocking if even one blocker had banding you could divide the damage yourself so you could toss 4 chumps in front of a large threat and only lose your benalish hero or such. I am taking it much of this came from research not having played at the time and I have a feeling a lot of the what was being played and how comes from articles written by people who were also not playing.
Love your videos! The yellow text over a busy, animated background does make the video busy and the text hard to read. Maybe tone it back for the future to improve accessability?
this may be quite nitpicky but when you’re talking about ABU sets it would be cool if the original ABU versions of the cards were shown. it doesn’t make any difference as far as the explanation but it would make it more “immersive”
Most would be unreadable though, both because of the words and because of the low contrast
I find it amusing you specifically mention purelace as being the example among the laces as never being playable when it was very playable in the right deck. I had a white weenie deck back in Legends and later that used purelace to turn one of my opponents lands white. Why? Because not many people played land destruction cards and if I turned a card they couldn't destroy white I could play jihad against white and know they had few options to get rid of the effect.
I think the worst cards in those set were the "Laces" the cards that chane a card to the color of the lace... wordt part of this was that those cards were RARE...
I wish WotC was still its own company rather than owned by Hasbro.
Edit: Plague Rats needs to be reprinted with errata that removes the four per deck limit. And Relentless should be made a keyword.
Might I just say that Benalish Hero's flavor text describes something out of a jRPG-esque fantasy setting?
I am very well aware what Benalia was like in lore, but still.
looking at contract from below and i realized i somehow have to know what the 8th card drawn is so i can remove it from the game before we play.
@11:54 Amrageddon!
I definitely feel like I _am raged on_ when an opponent casts an Armageddon. :P
Always felt like Swords to Ploughshares was a bit of a flavour fail, as it should give a land instead of life.
Given how much fast mana was available at the time, I can understand why creatures were so underwhelming. Wizards wouldn't want crazy things happening too easily, but they nerfed the wrong thing.
Shivan Dragon used to be worth as much as Black Lotus. They both sold for 25$
Am I the only one wondering why the power 9 includes time twister but not channel?
I know the rule was only for the one bad set, but I kind of wish standard decks still had to use at least 4 cards from each set in rotation.
fastBOND not fastbound.
Please please please. It drives me nuts.
And sha-ha-ra-zad not sha-ra-ha-zad. You've been at it too long for this my dude.
It's a common misprint
9:30 damn between the FTK and combo heaviness it seems early MTG was just Yugioh lol
It’s because creatures were weak and spells were strong. Now to keep up with power creep every creature needs to be at or above rate (3/3 for 3) with a great ETB or it’s useless. There’s so much removal that in anything but limited the creatures need to be able to have full cards worth of value without the body.
Wizards of the Coast did not aquire DnD until 1997
See that’s what I mean !!! I remember that way of playing and now it’s soooo confusing !!!!! Now o fer it
WotC did not own TSR and DnD at the time of ABU.
There is no U in Fastbond!
It's interesting to compare the early Magic ethos to Dungeons & Dragons, but it may have been worth distinguishing that WotC had nothing to do with the design or ownership of DnD when Magic was getting started. You refer to DnD as "Wizards of the Coast's OTHER major property" and later say "Magic was originally designed as an accompaniment to Dungeons & Dragons". I can't find any source to support this. Magic first released in 1993, and WotC did not purchase TSR until 1997.
There's a story (maybe it's just that) that mtg was made to be something to do in between D&D sessions
There is no U in Fastbond yet you keep pronouncing it FastboUnd.
...ive never seen anyone claim Birds of Paradise was anytging other than Volcanic Island, what the fuck are you smoking
Bring back the ante!!!
Mad at myself for spending all of 93 in my dads balls instead of buying and preserving alpha and beta cards
Makes sense not mentioning Sol Ring, as it's not that great and rarely played these days.
Sol Ring isn’t played in most formats either because it’s illegal or banned. It absolutely is still a great card. Almost no other Mana rock will give you twice the mana you paid to cast it and come in untapped.
It's a staple in EDH / Commander. My pre-con came with it. I was told to never remove it unless I have a Black Lotus, but even then, that's banned in that format.
Amazing❤omg so amazing🤩
I can't believe you wouldn't use the original artiwrok for these cards. Why use the crappy MTGO reimagines???
Because game design is really fucking hard.
Grammar nazi time! 22:04 you cannot live something. You can live through or survive something, such as a bolt.
its UNREAL how you can never pronounce fast BOND correctly. There is no such card called fastBOUND
I don't think it's the narrator's fault whoever is writing the script for them is to blame.
Its "fastbound" but was a misprint, very common in old sets
Fustating indeed.
Fastbound
"No creature has the same stats as Savannah Lions for 1 mana without a downside". Recruitment Officer "Am I a joke to you?"
these old cards are fustrating
Dual lands need to be reprinted for commander
th-cam.com/video/nCsj10WVCSs/w-d-xo.html , Yeah they say the same from counterspells... i cant destroy a land for 3 but i can counter any card for 1 or even free mana ( WIZARDS LOL XD ) still loving the game btw :3
What’s this all’s bonf ?????? Huh huh ?????
They were probably unbalanced because they weren't properly playtested.
Actually they went through quite a bit of playtesting. The designers knew the Power 9 were powerful, but no one expected Magic players to react to the game the way they did. They figured most players wouldn’t know all the cards and would buy a starter pack and maybe a booster or two. In that scenario the rarity would keep most players from even seeing a Black Lotus, never mind playing one. But between the burgeoning internet scene having people build a database of all the cards and players buying entire boxes of booster packs the whole thing spiraled out of control.
This is true, they didn't think some bozos would by 10 copies of one card and win immediately.@@magnusprime962
@@magnusprime962 That's find that they didn't expect that. But rigorous playtesting includes trying to break the game. So I stand by my comment.
Very incorrect to say that this was the first trading card game. There's been so many trading card types for a long time
Which ones are games?
From what I've heard mtg was the first game but obviously cards have been collected for over 100 years.
Awesome video