God, watching this made me remember the times i played in a tournament that used all cards, i think legacy format? and I cant remember the name of a deck that basically discarded there deck, took extra turns and had like 2 monsters in there deck to kill you on there first turn that could take upwards of 50 minutes. I swear i wanted to kill myself facing that deck. Anyone know what that type of deck was called?
Here’s the thing about Ante: When the game was originally being designed, they had no idea that it was going to become as big as it became, and didn’t even consider that a possibility. So the idea that the cards would be “worth” anything didn’t really cross their minds. The way Garfield imagined the game being played was that this was something to play while you were waiting for the 5th guy to show up for you dnd game, or as a break between other games. It was something that you played with the same group of guys every time you played, and you all essentially just bought a few packs, made a deck or two, and would just bring those along whenever you all met up. With that in mind, ante was an attempt of balancing the game. The idea was that if someone opened a really powerful card, like a black lotus, well thanks to ante that card would likely circulate around the table over time as it got won by other players and placed into their decks for a season. They didn’t expect people to seek out play sets of powerful cards or be willing to shell out real money to optimize their decks, so this was intended to be a way to keep the meta game of your small group dynamic. Obviously things turned out a bit differently than they had initially anticipated, but this was the thought process.
That’s kinda strange, though. Wouldn’t the person with the stronger cards win more games? And by winning more games, your opponents’ decks get worse, leading you to win more games.
@@davidhower7095 there were a lot of flawed assumptions that were made originally. Garfield and the original designers of magic are much more aligned, personality wise, with dnd players or super casual commander players. What I mean by that is that they were much more interested in telling cool stories via the gameplay than they were with winning or optimizing and they weren’t that personally invested in whether they won or who “owned” what card. It was all about the story making opportunities that gameplay could lead to.
Garfield was also concerned that players wouldn't be willing to trade their cards, so he wanted to add a natural way to circulate cards around to prevent collections from stagnating. But, surprise, players really like trading their cards, so ante wasn't necessary.
I think that's also kind of why lot of the anti-creature cards are so nuts in early magic. Like they originally thought creatures were just going to be a big part of the game and were way too strong, probably because of a similar assumptions of small card pools and a general lack of access to most of the available tools at any one time.
@@davidhower7095 It's a core part of marbles, which is basically the closest thing to a TCG before TCGs existed. From what I understand, you got a bunch of marbles of different materials, designs and sizes, you play a game with them, and there are ways you can take one of your opponents marbles. But the difference there is that a particular marble didn't really impact your odds of winning nearly as much, so you had a good chance of winning it back later. And it was something that could engage people in the game. If your favorite marble is on the line, the stakes of the game get a lot higher, or if someone won your favorite marble and you're now in a position to win it back. In fact, the original intent to obfuscate what cards existed so no one player would no every card seems to be an attempt to emulate the endless varieties of marbles, and the expectations of environment people would be playing MtG in wasn't all that dissimilar from marbles. Which honestly, I never even learned there was an actual game people played with marbles until hearing some of MtG's original developers talk about it (It was either Garfield, Rosewater, or possibly Rosewater interviewing Garfield).
Wildest story from early MTG: at the first World Championships the three best French players all attended. One of them got knocked out relatively early in the tournament, but he got interviewed by some gaming magazine and told them that the tournament and money he spent travelling there were by no means a loss: he had won multiple Black Lotuses in ante games while waiting for his friends to play their games in the later stages of the championships.
There is a quote about Mana Drain from WoTC. If they ever reprint it (into a format its not already legal in), it means all of the R&D department was hit by a bus.
Absofuckinglutely nailed Mana Drain. The fact that it took him negative 3 seconds to identify that Mana Drain is hands-down the most broken card you've ever shown him was awesome.
@@a.velderrain8849 In high-powered decks, Black Lotus and Time Walk are better than Mana Drain. In low-powered decks, Mana Drain is better. If both players try to win the game by casting 6/6s for 6 and attacking with them, then I'd rather be the guy with the Mana Drain than the guy with the Lotus or the Time Walk. So I can understand this Hearthstone player thinking Mana Drain is more broken.
@@lightworker2956 if both players are trying to win the game by casting 6/6s for 6, the one that did it on Turn 1 with two Black Lotuses is going to win. The one that followed that up with a Turn 2 Time Walk for an extra turn of smacking for 6 is going to win. Even if you deck is low powered, Black Lotus and Time Walk are way more powerful than Mana Drain.
@@a.velderrain8849 Or you try to do what you described on turn 2 instead, and gave your opponent all of that tempo while completely obliterating your card advantage.
One of the reasons I never got into the Pokémon card game was that I specifically remember the rules stating that you had to set cards apart as “prize cards” and I must’ve stopped reading the booklet right there.
Now, what if someone were to create a variant of Ante? In our digital age, with online card battlers, what if you both put a random card to ante. When you win, you gain a copy of your opponent's ante card (they still keep their copy of it).
That's the worst nightmare of digital CCGs. They don't want you to get cards from any other player in any way. They want to fully control how you get cards.
The prize cards in pokemon are equivalent to your life in Magic. After you get your initial hand you set 6 prize cards down and the objective of the game is getting all of them to your hand. Any time you defeat an opposing pokemon you get 1-3 prize cards depending on the type of pokemon you defeat. So it's nothing like ante because your prize cards are never in danger of being taken by your opponent. They don't interact with your prize cards at all.
One of the things I find interesting about MTG is how immune to power creep some of the oldest cards are because their concept is so game breaking. The genre was young and the list of lessons learned was so short, ideas that would immediately be scrapped on the cutting room floor today were allowed through. The power level swings from "worse than garbage" to "would be an auto include in every deck that can run it 30 years later".
its not just MTG , several Yu-gi-oh's strongest card ever are from their early days (for example, Painful Choice). It have to do with effects that was weak at start become hilariously broken as better creature/magic were printed.
I think this is common for card games because early cards are always designed around the most “simple” effects, and simple effects evolve sort of unpredictably. Some simple effects power creep to the point where early versions don’t stand up, others end up so powerful from the first iteration it becomes a lesson to the designers to never fuck with that again. Hearthstone was sort relatively insulated from this effect for a few years due to how heavily tuned the original set was and the inherent balancing of separating cards by class, but some effects like iceblock, original innervate and prep clearly stood alone as such staples of their classes that it was pretty clear that they’d never be power crept and had to be knocked out of classic or nerfed to keep them in line with the modern game
Yes and no - Some older cards were broken, but for most of MtGs history they have understood that this was the case, and those cards set the peak of the games power level. And WotC at least vaguely respected eternal formats, at least enough such that they were not willing to risk alienating their biggest spending players who had paid thousands for those busted cards. These days... Well, no not so much now. WotC has stopped caring. The only reason why some old cards have retained playability is because it's hard to make things that are actually more powerful than "0 mana, you get 1 mana every turn".
3 mana get an extra turn was unironically printed in the same set as vanilla beat sticks, meanwhile today there's no way they'd make a 3 mana extra turn, and even French vanilla creatures get a random half paragraph abylity that might be useful
@@user-ow1bc4sx2rLet's be real, Hearthstone was insulated from being too broken because they had 20 years of R&D notes to crib from when designing their game.
Rule zero: I would like to play Dakkon as a WUBRG Commander. You know just a casual game. (Ashaya, World Shaper, Avenger of Zendikar and Scute Swarm hiding behind Dakkon)
@@U1TR4F0RCE I mean, Green has had cards like Llanowar Elves and Birds of Paradise since Alpha. Green also had the only creature in Alpha that scaled off of lands in play (Gaea's Liege, although admittedly it only cared about Forests).
@@U1TR4F0RCE Black had Dark Ritual, and only Dark Ritual, Black didn't need ramp, you just needed 2 Swamps in play and you'd go, Dark Ritual Dark Ritual Dark Ritual Dark Ritual Yawgmoth's Will, Contract, Ritual Ritual Ritual Ritual, your entire hand and then there was no opponent and you won the game and the ante.
I think it's really interesting to think of cards in the early days of Magic being designed more for theme than effect. Like, Moat does what a moat does. That's what a moat does. It makes total sense, but to a modern eye it's clearly madness because we think of cards first as effects, theme being a distant second, if at all.
I really like this hearthstone dude. Thanks for featuring him multiple times. The first T1 tournament I ever won was a deck w/ 1 of abyss/nether void/chains of mephistopheles. legends was BROKEN for black
47:03 Fun fact. An opponent slammed down a Moat against me in tournament. I had 0 creatures with flying. But I did have 1 copy of Jinxed Idol in my deck, and I won because of it. Jinxed Idol: "At the beginning of your upkeep, Jinxed Idol deals 2 damage to you. Sacrifice a creature: Target opponent gains control of Jinxed Idol."
@@ThymeTwister Not necessarily, it's not a great sideboard piece if you can't search it like lands can. In a normal control deck I'd rather just have a board wipe that works immediately than have to wait a turn and my opponent gets to keep some of their guys.
@@healingvisioner1 cedh has to much mana production compared to the amount of creatures that get played that this doen't impact people that much and you can also use your land drop to actually produce mana to further your game plan. the only deck that wins by slowing down your opponents is stax and that relies on creatures as stax pieces so it would also hurt them
Also cedh decks largely want their commanders in play to function correctly. The only major deck to historically play tabernacle was Chain Veil Teferi because the commander was a planeswalker and the format was much slower. Modern CVT is a fringe deck and no longer runs tabernacle
the funny thing about rarran's tangent about the yugioh anime is that i was 100% certain he was going to bring up battle city, where the participants straight-up anted their rarest card in every duel and this straight-up influenced later episodes! it's how the god cards got passed around, but also joey won jinzo from his first proper duel of the arc and it quickly became one of his key cards from then on i was wrong
I've been looking for this comment lmao. I was never super into YuGiOh but rarrans tangent was just completely pulled out of his ass and the show didn't work like that. I assumed he was going to talk about the arc where they would win star chips from each other to go challenge Pegasus or whatever it was.
Ironically, The Abyss is actually a worse-designed version of a card from even earlier in Magic's history called Drop of Honey. Drop of Honey also destroyed a creature each turn, but it at least sacrificed itself when there were no more creatures left on the battlefield, so it wouldn't make it permanently impossible to keep creatures on the battlefield.
Also you should totally throw Chains of Mephistopheles in one of these just to watch him try to comprehend it. And once he’s struggled for a good little bit, break out the flowchart 😂
@@Crunchatize_Me_Senpai I mean _fact_ Especially the original printing I'm mostly griping about enfranchised players like Goldfish _still_ somehow struggling with Chains
The best thing about the legend rules was that at the time they released "Jace, The Mind Sculptor" one of the common ways to deal with it was to play "Jace Beleren". They were both planeswalker with the same type so they would both be sent in the graveyard, turning Jace v1 into a 3-mana "destroy target Jace v2".
Technically speaking that was due to the related but separate "planeswalker uniqueness rule" (which no longer exists in the current Magic rules) rather than the legend rule itself, hence why the "Jace" subtype mattered (the legend rule only cares about card names being the same, while the old "planeswalker uniqueness rule" cared about matching planeswalkers' subtypes).
@@GrizonIIYeah I know but the planeswalker rule was based on the legend rule at the time, saying that if two copies of the same legendary creature are on the battlefield at the same time, they all go to the graveyard. So to me it is still a direct consequences of the state of the legend rule at that time, even though they decided to go the extra mile and include planeswalker type in the planeswalker uniqueness rule.
Ante was implemented because Richard Garfield didn’t expect Magic to be as big as it is. The expectation was that a person would buy a starter deck and maybe a couple of boosters, make a 40 card deck, and play with a couple other people. Once those few players with their fairly static card pool had settled on decks after trading each other, their experience with magic would be static and get stale very quickly. Ante was a way to ensure cards would flow between players and decks would continually evolve, which bore out with the alpha play testers. Obviously when Magic absolutely blew up and the competitive scene started to emerge, that idea of how the game would be played was quickly shed. But the flow of cards between small playgroups and evolving decks overtime was the original conception of what the “metagame” was, in that the experience of trading and anteing and trying to stop one player in your group from getting too many good cards was a part of the experience.
MtG was also developed a few years before the public had access to the internet. Garfield had been working on MtG prototypes as early as 1982. He'd meet with future WotC CEO Peter Atkinson over pizza in 1991 to pitch Robo Rally before Atkinson asked if he had something easier to produce. Garfield brought up "Mana Clash," which is what would turn into MtG. Garfield didn't think there would be a metagame per se because there was no way of knowing what all the cards were. He thought player groups may not even realize every color has a mox or there were creatures larger than 4/4s. This went out the window when people were able to communicate with each other from all over the world. By the time they were running around trying to get Arabian Nights out, "The Deck" had started floating around online.
There's a law of diminishing returns with regards to card quality: You can upgrade a deck, but doubling the budget for it doesn't double its efficacy, it might increase it by 50% or somethng. Then doubling the budget again will increase the card quality by 25%, or whatever other numbers you want to assign. This means that if two people play against each other, and one deck is twice as expensive as the other, then all other things being equal the more expensive deck might have a 60% win rate, but that means that on average ante is *bad* for them, not good; 66% is the break-even point. And they can hit that point by going to 4x the other player's budget, but at that point the 1 game they lose will on average cost more money than the multiple games they win. So ante can serve as a force to prevent people from paying-to-win the game and flattening out a playgroup. Even if one player owns all the expensive cards on your block, he might not want to run them all in the same deck because that means he's risking more for relatively marginal benefit. ...Or so goes some theorycrafting. That's one of the reasons it took years for ante to fully vanish, I suspect.
Fun fac about Yu-Gi-Oh: "The Shadow Realm" was a euphemism for dying. In the original Japanese dub, the Shadow Realm didn't exist. All of the characters that were "banished to the Shadow Realm" all actually just died.
I saw a guy lose a Black Lotus in a game of ante at a tournament in Edison, New Jersey in the 90s. The guy who lost refused to give up the card, and they almost got into a fist fight. Ante was a wild mechanic.
you know they would taken the opponents card if they had won though. I honestly can't imagine how toxic this game would be if they had kept that around.
Another reason Dakkon is popular is because the Blackblade is a very popular weapon in the lore. It has many cards referencing it and cards like blackblade reforged which have the same or similar effects that stack with dakkon.
My favorite thing to bring up when The Legend Rule is discussed is that when Legends came out it also included a rule where you were only allowed to have a single copy of any given Legend in your deck. The rule only lasted for about 3 months, but I kind of like it.
Tabernacle spiked when the deck Lands established itself as a Legacy archetype over a decade ago. Mirror's price is probably because the format Old School has gained a lot in popularity in recent years and they play with the old rules (which includes mana burn). Nether Void actually saw some play in Pox decks back in the days.
just wanna say thank you for making content like this about Magic history. i didn't play Magic until 2016 and didn't really get into it seriously until like 2020. content like this informs me on historical Magic stuff that I never knew about and in a way that I genuinely really enjoy. keep it coming!
When I was 13 I used to scoff at the price of the Legends packs behind the counter and go home with handfuls of Fallen Empires for 50 cents a pop instead. Loving this series keep it up
Being in Europe which got only tiny tiny amount of cards, legends was sold out on the first day that summer, we had to wait for the dark! Also I wonder how old the cc was in 1994 that he could work multiple jobs to buy his magic cards? Like 5 or 6 ?
Okay but Fallen Empires is pound-for-pound one of the greatest sets of all time. There's cards that have only been printed in FE still seeing play 25 years later in a variety of formats, but because they were common and FE was overprinted, there still only $1 (if that). Original printings of High Tide and Hymn to Tourach would easily be $25+ if they had been printed in Arabian Nights. I fucking love that I can walk into almost any shop on the planet and still buy fresh packs of Fallen Empires and knowing I'll likely get multiple good cards.😂
I will have at it since CGB said to... Each combination of 2 or 3 colors has a name associated with it that players use as shorthand. They are the names of groups or regions in lore who were associated with those combinations in past sets. White/Blue/Black - Esper White/Black/Green - Abzan Blue/Black/Red - Grixis Blue/Red/White - Jeskai Black/Red/Green - Jund Black/Green/Blue - Sultai Red/Green/White - Naya Red/White/Black - Mardu Green/White/Blue - Bant Green/Blue/Red - Temur White/Blue - Azorious White/Black - Orzhov Blue/Black - Dimir Blue/Red - Izzet Black/Red - Rakdos Black/Green - Golgari Red/Green - Gruul Red/White - Boros Green/White - Selesnya Green/Blue - Simic There have been some other names used for the 3 color combinations, that came before and after the ones we have, but these are the ones that stuck.
The enemy wedges were commonly referred to using the volver cycle in Apocalypse: Degavolver, Anavolver, Cetavolver, Rakavolver, and Necravolver. Dega in particular because there was no easy shorthand for "WRB." Other names include: • BUG and RUG are just the colors' letters. • "Junk" for Abzan. Named after a pile of crappy commons and uncommons that won tournaments. • "Italia" for Naya- colors of Italy's flag. • Canadian for decks splashing WR. The most well-known being Canadian Threshold (which doesn't play white or threshold cards anymore lol) • American/French/UK/Patriot for Jeskai. It depends on where the deck's creator originates from.
I love the concept of Ante in a vacuum, and it works really well in a closed system like Shandalaar, but in real life it requires the ultimate level of social buy-in and commitment and pretty much breaks any semblance of trust for most people if they're playing with strangers, so it's a good thing the rule as written was cast out of the book long ago.
In regard to ante, as you mentioned, mtg was the first ever TCG. That matters because I suspect that Garfield just truly believed that the only way people would get cards is through opening packs, trading, and ante. Key point being, I don’t think he thought people would buy singles. So people wouldn’t assign finical value to cards, and it would much more difficult to obtain cards. That would make mid tier cards much more useful, and make ante seem much less feels badsy. It would also make decks more varied and make more “one man’s trash is another’s treasure “ type situations.
Rarran talking about the YuGiOh anime and discussing characters losing and being sent to the shadow realm as reference to ante stakes when they literally had a tournament where ante was always on is wild to me. Not really, but I did think it was funny. But yeah they did have a tournament with ante and also the non-American version of the anime often had the characters literally die if they lost the game- not sent to the shadow realm. Fun show that first version was LOL “Hello, the two main protagonists. We are two random antagonist grunts, and we challenge you to a duel.” “Okay.” “By the way, we placed BOMBS on top of the glass panels on the 40 story building we’re dueling on. If your life hits zero, they blow up and you’ll die from the fall.” “Oh. Well…”
I'll be honest, I never watched the anime and I stopped reading the manga when the "cardgame" became the main focus of the story, but at the start of the manga, Yu-Gi-Oh was pretty much an Egyptian vengeance God who played made up games with his "victims" and killed them in a personalized way if they lost (which they all did, obviously). On a personal note, I understand why the switch from made up games to a cardgame was made. It's hard to come up with new original games each story and thus not sustainable in the long run, so to "standardize" it is easier. But it did make me lose interest, probably because of the absurd numbers in the stat lines (insert "it's over nine thousand" meme here).
@@SuddenRealit was not because Takahashi ran out of ideas. It is well documented that the card game chapter got a great response in comparison to the rest of the series and after it started to lose readership again the editors and him decided that the series should be moved to focus on a card game. With the millennium world finale being one of a very few opportunities during the series for Takahashi to return to the original concept to some degree.
Rarran also didn't understand that Yugioh as a card game had all the same problems of as early Magic at the start. The monsters all sucked, answers and other busted spells were ridiculously better, with mostly the same mitigating factor: people didn't own the cards to make the most miserable decks possible at the time. The battle mechanics of Yugioh are also pretty atrocious when playing a bunch of vanillas with all the same statlines (the optimal build in early Yugioh), but because nobody had playsets of all the best monsters there was more variety and so back and forth to be had. Magic was ultimately carried out of its early period by being literally "the only game in town", while the anime played a big role in driving early Yugioh sales long enough for the game to get its feet under it.
@@MetallicityOf course depending on what one is talking about in terms of early Yugioh it also had issues of just being completely miserable to play with tier 0s in it's early time in Japan, only saved by the fact that Magic and Pokemon also had terrible formats at the time.
I believe the YuGiOh Anime in the beginning of the first tournament arc had the ante, that each player bets their strongest monster or something like that. Because I remember Joey Wheeler getting big monsters from winning and adding them to his deck. I believe the shadow realm thing, which btw is a euphemism for the underworld/hell, only becomes a thing when they get to the island.
Regarding Mana Drain, I’m pretty sure a card that said “UU: counter target spell and lose life equal to its mana value.” Would have still been pretty strong at the time. But also allowing you to reduce the penalty by performing positive game actions is just crazy.
Right. I didn't realize that was an attempt to "balance" Counterspell. That is a Skullclamp level design oversight. As you said, all they had to do was just make you immediately lose life equal to the spell's mana value. That would be almost strictly worse (with the exception of like a Death's Shadow deck) instead of being incredibly broken. Not only does Mana Drain counter a spell for the same cost as Counterspell, but you get a bunch of free mana too, lol.
Oh, and as far as the ante stuff, I played a lot of games for ante early on before magic basically pulled it from their official rules. We had a standing rule in my area that people could trade back for any card lost through ante. And since everyone in the area who played magic at the time knew each other, it was always pretty cheap to do so. No one tried to stick it to you to get your card back, because then they stopped getting invited to play, and they also didn't want to have to trade hard to get their own cards back when they lost. You'd get a rep, and in a local gaming community, that really mattered at the time. Some people didn't care, and would roll with it, win or lose. I think in the early early days, the biggest card I ever won in an ante that someone didn't want to trade back for was a time vault.
"What kind of feedback could you get in 1994?" idk 1994, but in 1996 they had a mail in survey about the next edition of their game that was published in The Duelist (Wizards' old print mag about the game) asking what cards players would like to see removed. I sent one in, with my list of five cards. Four were on the Restricted list and OP, the fifth was Cyclopean Mummy, a 2 mana 2/1 that got exiled when it died. Because it did not fit black's "vibe" of reanimating things.
Funny story about my experience with the legend rule, I started magic with Dual of the plainswalkers 2013. That game had the old legend rule of one legend per board and the oldest played gets sacrificed. This was my main reference for magic all the way until i finally played in paper in 2019, in which i played the same legend as my opponent had on board and i said "shouldn't that have sacrificed your card?" and they just looked at me completely straight faced and said "8 years ago or something, sure.". Bruh.
26:51 So as far as "why" ante was a part of early Magic: The Gathering, I know it had something to do with how Richard wanted the "local ecosystem" of each small play pod to not stay stagnated. These local groups were predicted to be usually only around as big as a DnD group or maybe the size of a small local game store and an individual person could be a part of multiples of these groups. So the idea was to introduce a sort of "churn" to get cards circulating between players (b/c who is going to trade or sell their cards in a secondary market, right? There is simply no other way of moving cards around!) so that the players that were a part of multiple groups would rotate cards both in and out of their various play groups. It is also a part of the reason why the original set was so under printed, b/c they expected that Churn to propagate the cards around, (because players are not just gonna buy and play with only the most powerful of cards, they're just gonna play with what the packs dealt them, right?) plus also the fact that they were not expecting Magic to be as popular as it ended up being, which that is totally reasonable. Also, Raran mentioning the Yu-Gi-Oh! show and starts talking about the "Shadow Realm" and not about the Battle City Tournament where the players literally played with their rarest card at stack for each game! I mean I don't expect him to have watched the series after him not mentioning that, but that is such the perfect comparison point and he was just a couple of steps away from getting there. His overall point was fairly correct though.
Oh my gosh I love the what if with ante cards in that, there is 10 of them and they all say remove from your deck if not playing for ante so technically in your 60 card deck you could have 40 ante cards, refuse to play for ante, then just have a 20 card deck. And you have to wonder about the parallel world where that became the meta thing to do.
The legend rule was changed twice according to a wizards article I read on it (didnt play during original rule). OG rule was if you cast a legend your opponent controls, your copy would be sac'd to the graveyard. Then it went to, your opponent has Jace? Cast your Jace to remove it. Newest version of the rule separated your side of the battlefield from your opponents, you can now both have Jace or multiple Jaces w different names for example.
Actually, the OG rule was that you couldn't cast a legend if there was already one with the same name on the battlefield. So whoever played their legend first would prevent the opponent to cast the same one. I do vaguely remember a version of the rule that sent the most recent legend with the same name in the graveyard, but I don't find any trace of it. And I don't think it lasted long. Then Kamigawa hit and the rule went to "if at least 2 legends with the same name are on the battlefield, all of them are sent to the graveyard." And finally, the current version, which only checks the legendaries you control, and if 2 with the same name are found you decide which one is sent to the graveyard. There was also the planeswalker uniqueness rule, which sent to the graveyard any planeswalker of the same type controlled by a player but one (controller's choice), but that rule was changed and the planeswalkers were changed to be legendary instead, checking the names instead of the type.
Three iterations of the rule OG) once the legendary creature was cast, no player could play the same one until the first copy was killed. 2nd version) while only one of those legendary permanents could be on the field at a time, a player could cast an additional permanent of the same subtype, and both permanents would be sacrificed (this matters because the best sideboard option many decks had to Jace, the Mindsculptor in its standard rotation was actually to cast Jace Baleren, as it was a cheaper card with lower cmc that shared a subtype with JtMC). The third and current iteration is : each player is allowed a permanent of the same legendary subtype and if another permanent would enter the battlefield of a player, that player chooses one copy to keep and sacrifices the other(s).
Just for a little extra context, the move from the OG rule to the "kill both" was spurred on by some horrible play patterns that arose during Masque's block. There were a few colorless legendary lands (Kor Haven and Rath's Edge) that decks played as 4-ofs, so if you got yours out first you would just randomly lock your opponent out of their 2nd land drop sometimes. When a few years later WotC wanted to make another legendary focused set (Champion's of Kamigawa) they changed the rule to the "kill both" version to create interesting counter-play instead of a static board state.
You should have shared Contract From Below when sharing Ante. One single black mana. Draw 8. Yeah, the first one goes to ante, but it says draw 8 and we now have replacement effects, which means you could get around the ante clause WHILE PLAYING FOR ANTE.
The real hack with ante cards is to include them in your deck when not playing for ante. You set your deck, they set theirs, -- and then the ante cards evaporate from your deck at the start of the game leaving you with a thin deck ready to go all in on turbo sligh. Redder Deck Win.
@@williambarnes5023 People keep passing around this "one weird trick" but it never worked. If you time travel to when ante was supported in the rules, deck minimum rules are enforced after illegal cards are removed. You'd have to add basic lands to replace the ante cards. (If you time travel back far enough, there were no deck minimum rules, but then you don't need to even bother with the ante cards then if you want to play a 20 card deck.)
@28:44 If MTG is the first TCG- it makes sense. The only other type of "card game" was the one with a regular deck of cards, and those tended to involve some sort of stakes or gambling, like Poker or Blackjack.
8:00 Nicol Bolas: Born as a dragon-god, who also happens to be a Planeswalker. In the modern Post-Crisis era, also the last Old-style Planeswalker. "What if Deathwing was also pre-Crisis Superman?" And this is Jace's nemesis...
I can name the impetus for at least two of the legend rule changes: When Block Constructed was still a thing, the best deck in Onslaught+Legions constructed was an Astral Slide-based deck with the newly printed Akroma, Angel of Wrath as one of the kill cards. The final match was a slide mirror and the designers decided it was dumb how much the match came down to "whoever sticks Akroma first wins." That's when they changed it so that both die instead of the first legend "winning". Much later, during Zendikar/Scars of Mirrodin Standard, wizards printed Phantasmal Image, a 1U clone card with a drawback. Because of the "both legends die" rule, you could play it to destroy any arbitrary legend, which probably cost more than the 1U you spent on the card, making the drawback irrelevant. What was extra enraging about this was that a blue deck was already running away with the format (Jace the Mind Sculptor, better than all) and Wizards had even tried to print a blue hoser in Thrun, the Last Troll, which couldn't be targeted but it didn't matter because *clones don't target*, meaning he couldn't do his one job. This meant that not only did the legend rule change again but Thrun failed to prevent Jace from getting banned.
As someone who's been playing since Fallen Empires, this brought back a lot of memories. I never really got to play a lot from this specific set outside the Chronicles expansion, but what I did was personally a fun experience. I like this guessing the overall power/ financial value of every card displayed. Please keep more of this content going.
1:09:35 I think it may not have been clear to Rarran that you could mana burn yourself just by tapping your own lands. (Don't need to use a card like Mana Drain) So if you have 6 lands, you can tap them at the end of your opponents turn to cause 6 damage to yourself, and then immediately do 6 more damage to yourself at the start of your turn. Your opponent probably doesnt want to attack you when this card is out.
I could be wrong but I don’t think it worked exactly how you described. I think normally you aren’t able to do anything during your untap step, so you would have no way of mana burning yourself during your turn before your upkeep. I think it would require you to have a card in play that triggers during untap step. At least that’s how I remember it. We might have been playing wrong lol you could still get low and lightning bolt yourself in upkeep, of course.
@@marakah5298 Yeah I didn't mean before your upkeep. Just that having 6 lands could lead you to burn yourself for 12 by doing it at the end of opponents turn, and then on yours, and the opponent probably cant do anything about it.
But CGB's explanation makes it sound like you mana burn to 0 during your upkeep, then swap life totals, which is not how the timing of mana burn works, right? Mana doesn't empty/burn until the end of the phase, so the kill combo still requires a bolt, or City of Brass activation or something that can happen during the upkeep, followed by the Mirror Universe activation.
@@BucknerSJ I believe the reasoning is that there are two different effects that automatically happen at the end of your upkeep: First, suffer mana burn. Second, check for death. So you resolve the mana burn to make your health negative, then, because it's still the upkeep until after the death check, you immediately tap Mirror Universe and swap Life, either between those two steps or in reaction to the check for death step, before it's resolved.
I started playing around the time unlimited came out, you could still find beta packs at the comic shop, i haven't played in a few years now but some of these prices seem completely insane, especially when i think back to early days when we were still actually trading the cards, and sleeves weren't a thing, i remember playing at the school lunch table with a guy running 2 black lotus's bareback on a filthy lunch table, to this day i remember trading a mox jet for half a dozen truly junk cards just because i didnt run a black deck at the time, but it was a few years before we really grasped that these cards could actually be worth real money, middle school me definitely fucked adult me out of thousands of dollars in cards 😂
It must have taken so much restraint not to show him all of the overcosted, truly terrible, legends, and not immediately following them up by showing him Karakas. Can you imagine back in the day seeing somebody sink all of their mana into a Nicol Bolas and passing the turn with a smug look on their face, thinking they'd just locked up the game. Then on your turn playing a Karakas, only to pass the turn back, waiting for them to pay the upkeep cost, and bounce it back to their hand. Demoralizing probably doesn't even begin to cover it.
Honestly, a modified version of ante in a digital form, where people don't lose their cards but winners gain a random card from their opponent's deck could be interesting
I started playing this game when ante was still a thing, we all agreed on keeping a seperate "ante deck" that your opponent could pick from that way they were pulling a card from your playing deck, but even at that some of those ante cards we would play for back then are worth a buttload now, i haven't really kept up with card values for a while since i haven't played for years, last set i really played was timespiral, but these values seem way beyond what i remember them being.
I've been playing since unlimited came out, used to go to all of the pre-release tournaments and they would almost always have a few of the artists there with booths set up selling signed prints, i probably have a dozen or more prints in my attic, but to this day i have the prints of Brainstorm and Braingeyser hanging in my game room, some of the artists they get to do the card art are absolutely amazing.
@@Greg1096 I think you missed the subtext. That particular artist is famous in the MTG community for other (Racist possible Neo-Nazi, painted Hitler as Jesus) reasons, in spite of many of the cards he did art for being both really good art and really good cards. Shame that he turned out to be a wacko, a lot of his art is quite good when it isn't ludicrously racist. Sylvan Library is another one he did.
Rarran saying he'd hang Nether Void's art on his wall gave me a chuckle. It's the sort of thing you might hang up... and then you learn about the artist and you probably quietly take it down XD
@@darkjackl999 Thank you for taking my light-hearted comment so seriously. Just as an aside if you enjoy Harold McNeill's art, an artist who drew Hitler as Jesus proclaiming "blood is life", and you _don't_ want to distance yourself from that, that's far more telling than me having some basic moral standards. Ta-ta.
You should consider Island Sanctuary too, another confusingly named white card that you can get copies of for a couple bucks. For 1W to cast, every draw step you can skip a draw, and if you do, you’re hiding on your island and only creatures with flying or islandwalk can attack you until your next turn.
As the person above me said, Island Sanctuary is the way to go here. And I'll throw in another card, if your deck is white and blue: Archetype of Imagination. With these two cards, for the low price of not drawing 1 card: 1. All your creatures gain flying. 2. All your opponents' creatures lose flying, and cannot gain flying. 3. Creatures without flying cannot attack. I started playing commander with the 2018 precons. The enchantress deck had 2 alternative commanders that gives you card draw on top of a lot of "enchantments = card draw". Both Island Sanctuary and Archetype of Imagination are enchantments... It was just too easy, had to build it.
CGB. You should start a podcast where you invite content creators from magic or rarran or Anyone like that and tell your stories of your magic games back in the mid 90s. Oh and if you do this, you can call the little kid going to the game store. Little Danny.
39:00 Holy god. A Red/Blue/Black deck in 1994😊 with this, the Legendary Troll, the Djinn as he said, and all the mana acceleration in the world... And Efreets to yoink more cards from the enemy deck. EDIT: Also some red/blue nuking and anti-magic. 49:00 Such as Mana Drain.
I'd listen to a podcast of you two just telling eachother Magic/Hearthstone stories, or both of you picking up Yugioh. The two of you together is good content.
Having an uncanny "People Who Know" moment when Rarran said he liked Nether Void's art best lol. Like he's right, compared to the standard at the time it's a surprisingly enduring style but... OOOOF.
Speaking of ante...I played in a card shop in the early 2000s that had a league with special rules. to buy into the league you had to buy a certain number of booster packs, I forget how many you started with, and you could buy one more each week. You built a deck out of those booster packs and the store's supply of basic lands and kept your deck at the store to prevent people from sneaking cards in. The league played for ante and had prizes for accomplishing certain game situations such as hardcasting Emrakul.
I can't be the only one who's anticipating his reaction to necropotence right? I love these vids, you two have enjoyable chemistry, and I'm a boomer mtg player who enjoys the historical context anecdotes Only edit: I'd slap the tar out of anyone calling richard kane ferguson art anything other than sublime Second edit: I'm so happy he ended with tabernacle. Without a doubt the most valuable card I own
@@jdgarrison9913If you roll up with a tabernacle, then expect in the next session everyone to roll in with mass land destruction, strip mines and tutors. And they all target you to 0 before they even look at each other
Honestly, Tabernacle is the kind of card I'd only expect to see in CEDH - and, as far as I know, it's simply not playable there (there are not enough creatures around to make it worthwhile, to the point you're just costing yourself a land drop).
We used to play Ante sealed leagues during revised. All my mates would buy a starter deck and make a 40 card ante deck. Every card was initialed by the owner and each winner and thus legendary cards evolved :-) I have a Sol Ring with 7 different players initials on the card.
I was part of a sealed ante league using Stronghold-Exodus. We could make up to five cards immune from ante so I always protected my Survival of the Fittest:)
I have a friend who is fairly rich. He has a mono white Avacyn, Angel of Hope deck that contains a real Moat and a real Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale. Yes, this deck is absolutely as frustrating to play against as you might expect.
I remember reading about ante at one point, can't remember the article, but apparently it was designed as a way to keep people from loading their decks with all their best and busted cards. A built in way to discourage toxic deckbuilding. Idk how true that is or if they're coming up with that after the fact.
In regards to Tempest Effect, especially in Not-Ante games, isn't it just super OP? (Presuming it itself isn't banned and just Ante as a whole isn't allowed as a format.) Removing four copies from your deck at the start of the game means you get to functionally play with a 36 card deck.
Ante has been discussed plenty before. Basically, the idea that individual cards would be worth a lot of money or even have emotional attachment to people wasn't something Garfield predicted. He viewed the cards like game pieces in a board game. No one would feel devastated if they had to give up the thimble when they lost a game of Monopoly. He expected people to buy a handful of packs and play against their friends. Ante would forcefully shuffle the cards around and encourage you to switch up strategies as you gained and lost cards. The idea that folks would seek out individual cards didn't occur to him. As another example of this, the original game didn't include the 4-of rule - you could play as many copies of a card as you owned (this got changed pretty quickly).
The Original Legend rule was like Hearthstone, you could only put one copy in a deck. But also, if you played it first, your opponent couldn't play it. The whole "it's worth a lot of money!" aspect of Ante wasn't imagined to be a thing. Maybe after A/B/U they realized the cards were expensive, but originally, the concept was that you didn't really build a deck, the deck would build itself as you gain and lose cards to Ante, maybe open a pack every couple of weeks. But with cards having real value, it becomes gambling.
I started playing magic in 7th grade around the time unlimited came out, we had no clue these cards were ever going to have real money value, it was something we would play in the lunchroom at school or on weekends at the comic shop, card sleeves werent a thing yet and we definitely werent super careful to keep our cards clean, i remember this guy that i would play at school that was running 2 black lotus bareback on on those dirty ass lunchroom tables, and i couldn't even take a guess at the amount of money in cards i traded away or ruined back then, i do specifically remember trading a mox jet to a guy for some random junky cards because I didnt like playing black decks, middle school me definitely screwed adult me out of a ton of money 😂
I'm looking forward to an Un-set special. Rarran saw City of Brass last time, when someone discovers City of Ass for the first time is always a moment. Hearthstone being purely digital and spending so much time on whimsy and humor in the regular game, the idea of an Un-set and the fun of opening packs at the card shop is another thing that makes Magic so interesting, like the way having lands makes the mechanics of the game interesting
Gotta love how Rarran "saying something nice about Yu-Gi-Oh" is him saying it peaked at the start and is the only major card game that got worse with time
@@FlozzSD Yeah, original Yugioh was just dull for the first few sets. I think the two main time periods that people consider to be the hay days are GOAT (2005) and Edison (2010), so while the modern state is not very good (personally stopped playing since COVID) it was by no means at it's best in 2002 when it first began.
Ante could be fun if the cards aren't valuable. If you can imagine an alternate universe where the secondary-market never takes off, people only get cards from packs, trades, and antes then ante could be a lot of fun. I have to believe something like this was in Richard Garfield's mind when he made those first ante cards.
I could see a version of limited where you play with the same deck for a while against others in the store with ante. Maybe cube so that you return them all at the end anyways. It also could probably work for some sort of single player deck building mtg game (not sure if they had it in Shandelar, but that sort of Idea).
You would still have the feels bad of losing a card you really like. And in a world without the secondary market, it will be very hard for you to get a copy of that card back unless you are regularly playing the same opponent over and over.
@@seandun7083Shandalar does indeed use ante; it works much better there than in paper Magic obviously as you're just battling with the computer and there's no actual property being lost.
IIRC, most of the legends in Legends were old D&D characters from the design team. You should show Raran Goblins of the Flargand the inception of mono-red aggro. The understanding and implementation of tempo is a huge part of most TCGs, so showing him how bad a one-drop can be and still be playable.
Of all the gorgeous art from legends the one Rarran complimented the most (though nether void is a nice piece tbh) had to come from Harold McNeil bummer.
To be fair to Rarran the art is pretty good (although he should maybe think twice about hanging it on his wall lol), terrible people can still be talented
Another thing that ante brought was game balance. Cards were random, so some decks would be better than others. In a duel, the worst deck would probably lose, but if it won, it would win a more valuable card. Tyring to crush noobs had some dangers to it. Also the ante brought variety. If you won a good card of another color, you could start a new deck of that color to be able to use it. Garfield had no idea his game would become so successful, and nobody at WotC expected players to build all-rares hyper-tuned decks to become unbeatable. At first, there wasn't even a "4 copies of each card" limit, because no one thought anyone could be so crazy to build a 20 Volcanic Island, 20 Lightning Bolt, 20 Ancestral Recall deck. I think MagicTG was envisioned to be played in a casual, relaxed way and cards were never expected to become so expensive. In that format, the ante was a quite interesting mechanic.
As someone who quit Magic around the time Visions came out - Google tells me that was 1997, ruddy hell - I love hearing that mono Red is still traumatizing people all those years later. I remember spending like 2 years messing around with Blue / Black, then just giving in to the dark side and going mono Red. IIRC our entire nerdy kids group got bored & quit not long after. Probably just coincidence :p
I love these videos! Really hope you do all expansion releases, or maybe blocks, to see Rarran react to how Magic changes. XD His reactions are great and really show his card-gaming mind, instantly seeing broken things unless he his missing specific context or mechanics. Please keep it up!
re: ante and why it exists; as others have pointed out, the original designers did not anticipate that players would go so far out of their way to build the perfect deck that they would bid up the price of cards. Some other fruits of this missed prediction include: * Sometimes they would try to "balance" an overpowered card by making it rare. The most famous example of this is the "boon" cards from alpha: the red one is one mana for 3 damage, the green one is one mana for +3/+3 for a turn, while the blue one is one mana to draw three cards. The first two are common and the third is rare. * There was originally no limit on how many copies of a card you could put in your deck. A deck of nothing but Channels, Black Lotuses, and Fireballs was perfectly legal because they just didn't figure anyone would go to the trouble to build that deck.
as it turns out the *actual* best use of the ante was a 1990s computer game released by Microprose, often casually nicknamed "Shandalar". That game was essentially a roguelite dungeon crawler where all the combats were games of Magic, and ante was an important way to build your collection. Too bad you almost can't play it because it started hitting backward compatibility problems around WinXP and there's never been an official rerelease.
*discussing Nether Void* "Nicest art, would hang it on my wall." Oh boy, oh boy. Wizard's thought police would have some words for you :D For those who don't know: the artist Harold McNeill is on Wizard's naughty list as a known neonazi - most known for his art on Invoke Prejudice, the most prominent card banned in 2020 in the series of bans marked as being culturally offensive.
Super-early members access on this one, let me know if you see any issues we can fix before this goes live
loving this rarran series!
Great stuff! Watched at 1.5x and saw/heard zero problems
I am one of those hyped about legends, I will not be deterred
I do like Rs comparison to yugioh
Show him Balance(the most balanced card of all time)
God, watching this made me remember the times i played in a tournament that used all cards, i think legacy format? and I cant remember the name of a deck that basically discarded there deck, took extra turns and had like 2 monsters in there deck to kill you on there first turn that could take upwards of 50 minutes. I swear i wanted to kill myself facing that deck. Anyone know what that type of deck was called?
Here’s the thing about Ante: When the game was originally being designed, they had no idea that it was going to become as big as it became, and didn’t even consider that a possibility. So the idea that the cards would be “worth” anything didn’t really cross their minds. The way Garfield imagined the game being played was that this was something to play while you were waiting for the 5th guy to show up for you dnd game, or as a break between other games. It was something that you played with the same group of guys every time you played, and you all essentially just bought a few packs, made a deck or two, and would just bring those along whenever you all met up.
With that in mind, ante was an attempt of balancing the game. The idea was that if someone opened a really powerful card, like a black lotus, well thanks to ante that card would likely circulate around the table over time as it got won by other players and placed into their decks for a season. They didn’t expect people to seek out play sets of powerful cards or be willing to shell out real money to optimize their decks, so this was intended to be a way to keep the meta game of your small group dynamic.
Obviously things turned out a bit differently than they had initially anticipated, but this was the thought process.
That’s kinda strange, though. Wouldn’t the person with the stronger cards win more games? And by winning more games, your opponents’ decks get worse, leading you to win more games.
@@davidhower7095 there were a lot of flawed assumptions that were made originally. Garfield and the original designers of magic are much more aligned, personality wise, with dnd players or super casual commander players. What I mean by that is that they were much more interested in telling cool stories via the gameplay than they were with winning or optimizing and they weren’t that personally invested in whether they won or who “owned” what card. It was all about the story making opportunities that gameplay could lead to.
Garfield was also concerned that players wouldn't be willing to trade their cards, so he wanted to add a natural way to circulate cards around to prevent collections from stagnating. But, surprise, players really like trading their cards, so ante wasn't necessary.
I think that's also kind of why lot of the anti-creature cards are so nuts in early magic. Like they originally thought creatures were just going to be a big part of the game and were way too strong, probably because of a similar assumptions of small card pools and a general lack of access to most of the available tools at any one time.
@@davidhower7095 It's a core part of marbles, which is basically the closest thing to a TCG before TCGs existed. From what I understand, you got a bunch of marbles of different materials, designs and sizes, you play a game with them, and there are ways you can take one of your opponents marbles. But the difference there is that a particular marble didn't really impact your odds of winning nearly as much, so you had a good chance of winning it back later. And it was something that could engage people in the game. If your favorite marble is on the line, the stakes of the game get a lot higher, or if someone won your favorite marble and you're now in a position to win it back.
In fact, the original intent to obfuscate what cards existed so no one player would no every card seems to be an attempt to emulate the endless varieties of marbles, and the expectations of environment people would be playing MtG in wasn't all that dissimilar from marbles.
Which honestly, I never even learned there was an actual game people played with marbles until hearing some of MtG's original developers talk about it (It was either Garfield, Rosewater, or possibly Rosewater interviewing Garfield).
Wildest story from early MTG: at the first World Championships the three best French players all attended. One of them got knocked out relatively early in the tournament, but he got interviewed by some gaming magazine and told them that the tournament and money he spent travelling there were by no means a loss: he had won multiple Black Lotuses in ante games while waiting for his friends to play their games in the later stages of the championships.
My god. One of the people there won a tournament, and one of them got a ton of money.
@@ROYBGPand back then they still had no much money it was going to be
There is a quote about Mana Drain from WoTC. If they ever reprint it (into a format its not already legal in), it means all of the R&D department was hit by a bus.
The same people that printed Oko.
@@Dhips.The quote was IIRC: "We'd have to be hit by a bus to print a card like mana drain ever again."
@@kingdo22 almost. "Mana Drain won’t get reprinted until all of R&D is hit by a bus”, as per MaRo
@@Dhips. Oko is a dumb card but mana drain is unfathomable.
Rarran is right: mana cheating and restrictionless interruption? What on earth?
Half of the team was hit by a bus when they designed Companions then
Absofuckinglutely nailed Mana Drain.
The fact that it took him negative 3 seconds to identify that Mana Drain is hands-down the most broken card you've ever shown him was awesome.
Given that he's seen Black Lotus and Time Walk before, Mana Drain can't possibly be the most broken card he's been shown.
@@a.velderrain8849 Mana Drain is Black Lotus + Time Walk
@@a.velderrain8849 In high-powered decks, Black Lotus and Time Walk are better than Mana Drain.
In low-powered decks, Mana Drain is better. If both players try to win the game by casting 6/6s for 6 and attacking with them, then I'd rather be the guy with the Mana Drain than the guy with the Lotus or the Time Walk. So I can understand this Hearthstone player thinking Mana Drain is more broken.
@@lightworker2956 if both players are trying to win the game by casting 6/6s for 6, the one that did it on Turn 1 with two Black Lotuses is going to win. The one that followed that up with a Turn 2 Time Walk for an extra turn of smacking for 6 is going to win.
Even if you deck is low powered, Black Lotus and Time Walk are way more powerful than Mana Drain.
@@a.velderrain8849 Or you try to do what you described on turn 2 instead, and gave your opponent all of that tempo while completely obliterating your card advantage.
I remember reading the rules about Ante, and my friends and I all looking at each other and agreeing "...Yeah, no."
One of the reasons I never got into the Pokémon card game was that I specifically remember the rules stating that you had to set cards apart as “prize cards” and I must’ve stopped reading the booklet right there.
The prize cards are a mechanic that benefit you as a player and are the win con of the pokemon tcg. I could see how the could get confused however
Now, what if someone were to create a variant of Ante?
In our digital age, with online card battlers, what if you both put a random card to ante. When you win, you gain a copy of your opponent's ante card (they still keep their copy of it).
That's the worst nightmare of digital CCGs. They don't want you to get cards from any other player in any way. They want to fully control how you get cards.
The prize cards in pokemon are equivalent to your life in Magic. After you get your initial hand you set 6 prize cards down and the objective of the game is getting all of them to your hand. Any time you defeat an opposing pokemon you get 1-3 prize cards depending on the type of pokemon you defeat. So it's nothing like ante because your prize cards are never in danger of being taken by your opponent. They don't interact with your prize cards at all.
One of the things I find interesting about MTG is how immune to power creep some of the oldest cards are because their concept is so game breaking. The genre was young and the list of lessons learned was so short, ideas that would immediately be scrapped on the cutting room floor today were allowed through. The power level swings from "worse than garbage" to "would be an auto include in every deck that can run it 30 years later".
its not just MTG , several Yu-gi-oh's strongest card ever are from their early days (for example, Painful Choice). It have to do with effects that was weak at start become hilariously broken as better creature/magic were printed.
I think this is common for card games because early cards are always designed around the most “simple” effects, and simple effects evolve sort of unpredictably. Some simple effects power creep to the point where early versions don’t stand up, others end up so powerful from the first iteration it becomes a lesson to the designers to never fuck with that again.
Hearthstone was sort relatively insulated from this effect for a few years due to how heavily tuned the original set was and the inherent balancing of separating cards by class, but some effects like iceblock, original innervate and prep clearly stood alone as such staples of their classes that it was pretty clear that they’d never be power crept and had to be knocked out of classic or nerfed to keep them in line with the modern game
Yes and no - Some older cards were broken, but for most of MtGs history they have understood that this was the case, and those cards set the peak of the games power level. And WotC at least vaguely respected eternal formats, at least enough such that they were not willing to risk alienating their biggest spending players who had paid thousands for those busted cards. These days... Well, no not so much now. WotC has stopped caring. The only reason why some old cards have retained playability is because it's hard to make things that are actually more powerful than "0 mana, you get 1 mana every turn".
3 mana get an extra turn was unironically printed in the same set as vanilla beat sticks, meanwhile today there's no way they'd make a 3 mana extra turn, and even French vanilla creatures get a random half paragraph abylity that might be useful
@@user-ow1bc4sx2rLet's be real, Hearthstone was insulated from being too broken because they had 20 years of R&D notes to crib from when designing their game.
rarran: "i'm not personaly a gambler"
also rarran: spending 500$ to get signature tony
Only for Tony to get COMPLETELY reworked and now it's boring and lame lol
@TwizzElishus tbh I don't know lol
@@TwizzElishusthe former? Yes the latter idk i don't play HS, just enjoy watching entertaining people that play it
Tony AND Sif. Dude is just like my father, addicted to Sigs
Dakkon is WILD color-wise...Esper creature with a pure green ability that references mountains in its flavor text.
Yeah... he should really be Jeskai based on that flavour text.
Rule zero: I would like to play Dakkon as a WUBRG Commander. You know just a casual game. (Ashaya, World Shaper, Avenger of Zendikar and Scute Swarm hiding behind Dakkon)
Isn’t it that black initially was the colour of mana production with stuff like dark ritual?
@@U1TR4F0RCE I mean, Green has had cards like Llanowar Elves and Birds of Paradise since Alpha. Green also had the only creature in Alpha that scaled off of lands in play (Gaea's Liege, although admittedly it only cared about Forests).
@@U1TR4F0RCE Black had Dark Ritual, and only Dark Ritual, Black didn't need ramp, you just needed 2 Swamps in play and you'd go, Dark Ritual Dark Ritual Dark Ritual Dark Ritual Yawgmoth's Will, Contract, Ritual Ritual Ritual Ritual, your entire hand and then there was no opponent and you won the game and the ante.
NEVER stop with these collabs, please!
This
eventually the guy will learn magic
I think it's really interesting to think of cards in the early days of Magic being designed more for theme than effect. Like, Moat does what a moat does. That's what a moat does. It makes total sense, but to a modern eye it's clearly madness because we think of cards first as effects, theme being a distant second, if at all.
I really like this hearthstone dude. Thanks for featuring him multiple times. The first T1 tournament I ever won was a deck w/ 1 of abyss/nether void/chains of mephistopheles. legends was BROKEN for black
47:03
Fun fact. An opponent slammed down a Moat against me in tournament. I had 0 creatures with flying. But I did have 1 copy of Jinxed Idol in my deck, and I won because of it.
Jinxed Idol: "At the beginning of your upkeep, Jinxed Idol deals 2 damage to you. Sacrifice a creature: Target opponent gains control of Jinxed Idol."
Tabernacle's price is more likely maintained by how popular lands decks are in legacy and vintage than by commander players
Basically any deck that doesn't predominantly run many creatures will want a Tabernacle, at least in the sideboard. It's very *very* good.
@@ThymeTwister Not necessarily, it's not a great sideboard piece if you can't search it like lands can. In a normal control deck I'd rather just have a board wipe that works immediately than have to wait a turn and my opponent gets to keep some of their guys.
Also competitive commander exists
@@healingvisioner1 cedh has to much mana production compared to the amount of creatures that get played that this doen't impact people that much and you can also use your land drop to actually produce mana to further your game plan. the only deck that wins by slowing down your opponents is stax and that relies on creatures as stax pieces so it would also hurt them
Also cedh decks largely want their commanders in play to function correctly. The only major deck to historically play tabernacle was Chain Veil Teferi because the commander was a planeswalker and the format was much slower. Modern CVT is a fringe deck and no longer runs tabernacle
the funny thing about rarran's tangent about the yugioh anime is that i was 100% certain he was going to bring up battle city, where the participants straight-up anted their rarest card in every duel and this straight-up influenced later episodes! it's how the god cards got passed around, but also joey won jinzo from his first proper duel of the arc and it quickly became one of his key cards from then on
i was wrong
I've been looking for this comment lmao. I was never super into YuGiOh but rarrans tangent was just completely pulled out of his ass and the show didn't work like that.
I assumed he was going to talk about the arc where they would win star chips from each other to go challenge Pegasus or whatever it was.
yup I was like "how'd he not mention battle city?... it's literally ante in yugioh..."
Ironically, The Abyss is actually a worse-designed version of a card from even earlier in Magic's history called Drop of Honey. Drop of Honey also destroyed a creature each turn, but it at least sacrificed itself when there were no more creatures left on the battlefield, so it wouldn't make it permanently impossible to keep creatures on the battlefield.
That was the point of abyss. Your creatures can stay since you are built around it. Nobody gets to put any on the battlefield.
I have a Xira deck that has drop of honey in it for flavor. It can be very good for popping her insects for more card draw as well.
Also you should totally throw Chains of Mephistopheles in one of these just to watch him try to comprehend it. And once he’s struggled for a good little bit, break out the flowchart 😂
Oracle text for Chains is very easy to understand.
Kind of disappointing.
Chains is overhyped as a complicated card.
It's just a series of conditional replacements.
@@Red-yt2dk To someone who doesn’t know Magic hardly at all and has struggled reading way simpler cards, it’ll do the job.
@@Crunchatize_Me_Senpai I mean _fact_
Especially the original printing
I'm mostly griping about enfranchised players like Goldfish _still_ somehow struggling with Chains
The best thing about the legend rules was that at the time they released "Jace, The Mind Sculptor" one of the common ways to deal with it was to play "Jace Beleren". They were both planeswalker with the same type so they would both be sent in the graveyard, turning Jace v1 into a 3-mana "destroy target Jace v2".
Technically speaking that was due to the related but separate "planeswalker uniqueness rule" (which no longer exists in the current Magic rules) rather than the legend rule itself, hence why the "Jace" subtype mattered (the legend rule only cares about card names being the same, while the old "planeswalker uniqueness rule" cared about matching planeswalkers' subtypes).
@@GrizonIIYeah I know but the planeswalker rule was based on the legend rule at the time, saying that if two copies of the same legendary creature are on the battlefield at the same time, they all go to the graveyard. So to me it is still a direct consequences of the state of the legend rule at that time, even though they decided to go the extra mile and include planeswalker type in the planeswalker uniqueness rule.
"Destroy target Jace" would unironically see play.
There was also a brief period during Kamigawa block where you'd use multiple copies of Kokusho to kill each other and trigger their effects.
Ante was implemented because Richard Garfield didn’t expect Magic to be as big as it is. The expectation was that a person would buy a starter deck and maybe a couple of boosters, make a 40 card deck, and play with a couple other people. Once those few players with their fairly static card pool had settled on decks after trading each other, their experience with magic would be static and get stale very quickly. Ante was a way to ensure cards would flow between players and decks would continually evolve, which bore out with the alpha play testers. Obviously when Magic absolutely blew up and the competitive scene started to emerge, that idea of how the game would be played was quickly shed. But the flow of cards between small playgroups and evolving decks overtime was the original conception of what the “metagame” was, in that the experience of trading and anteing and trying to stop one player in your group from getting too many good cards was a part of the experience.
MtG was also developed a few years before the public had access to the internet. Garfield had been working on MtG prototypes as early as 1982. He'd meet with future WotC CEO Peter Atkinson over pizza in 1991 to pitch Robo Rally before Atkinson asked if he had something easier to produce. Garfield brought up "Mana Clash," which is what would turn into MtG.
Garfield didn't think there would be a metagame per se because there was no way of knowing what all the cards were. He thought player groups may not even realize every color has a mox or there were creatures larger than 4/4s. This went out the window when people were able to communicate with each other from all over the world. By the time they were running around trying to get Arabian Nights out, "The Deck" had started floating around online.
There's a law of diminishing returns with regards to card quality: You can upgrade a deck, but doubling the budget for it doesn't double its efficacy, it might increase it by 50% or somethng. Then doubling the budget again will increase the card quality by 25%, or whatever other numbers you want to assign.
This means that if two people play against each other, and one deck is twice as expensive as the other, then all other things being equal the more expensive deck might have a 60% win rate, but that means that on average ante is *bad* for them, not good; 66% is the break-even point. And they can hit that point by going to 4x the other player's budget, but at that point the 1 game they lose will on average cost more money than the multiple games they win.
So ante can serve as a force to prevent people from paying-to-win the game and flattening out a playgroup. Even if one player owns all the expensive cards on your block, he might not want to run them all in the same deck because that means he's risking more for relatively marginal benefit.
...Or so goes some theorycrafting. That's one of the reasons it took years for ante to fully vanish, I suspect.
Fun fac about Yu-Gi-Oh: "The Shadow Realm" was a euphemism for dying. In the original Japanese dub, the Shadow Realm didn't exist. All of the characters that were "banished to the Shadow Realm" all actually just died.
I saw a guy lose a Black Lotus in a game of ante at a tournament in Edison, New Jersey in the 90s. The guy who lost refused to give up the card, and they almost got into a fist fight. Ante was a wild mechanic.
you know they would taken the opponents card if they had won though.
I honestly can't imagine how toxic this game would be if they had kept that around.
Another reason Dakkon is popular is because the Blackblade is a very popular weapon in the lore. It has many cards referencing it and cards like blackblade reforged which have the same or similar effects that stack with dakkon.
Plus he had a whole comic book too back in the day
My favorite thing to bring up when The Legend Rule is discussed is that when Legends came out it also included a rule where you were only allowed to have a single copy of any given Legend in your deck. The rule only lasted for about 3 months, but I kind of like it.
Tabernacle spiked when the deck Lands established itself as a Legacy archetype over a decade ago. Mirror's price is probably because the format Old School has gained a lot in popularity in recent years and they play with the old rules (which includes mana burn). Nether Void actually saw some play in Pox decks back in the days.
I love my Tabernacle
This series is amazing on both channels. Honestly I’d be happy if you did a video for every single set.
just wanna say thank you for making content like this about Magic history. i didn't play Magic until 2016 and didn't really get into it seriously until like 2020. content like this informs me on historical Magic stuff that I never knew about and in a way that I genuinely really enjoy. keep it coming!
When I was 13 I used to scoff at the price of the Legends packs behind the counter and go home with handfuls of Fallen Empires for 50 cents a pop instead. Loving this series keep it up
Being in Europe which got only tiny tiny amount of cards, legends was sold out on the first day that summer, we had to wait for the dark! Also I wonder how old the cc was in 1994 that he could work multiple jobs to buy his magic cards? Like 5 or 6 ?
Okay but Fallen Empires is pound-for-pound one of the greatest sets of all time. There's cards that have only been printed in FE still seeing play 25 years later in a variety of formats, but because they were common and FE was overprinted, there still only $1 (if that). Original printings of High Tide and Hymn to Tourach would easily be $25+ if they had been printed in Arabian Nights.
I fucking love that I can walk into almost any shop on the planet and still buy fresh packs of Fallen Empires and knowing I'll likely get multiple good cards.😂
I will have at it since CGB said to...
Each combination of 2 or 3 colors has a name associated with it that players use as shorthand. They are the names of groups or regions in lore who were associated with those combinations in past sets.
White/Blue/Black - Esper
White/Black/Green - Abzan
Blue/Black/Red - Grixis
Blue/Red/White - Jeskai
Black/Red/Green - Jund
Black/Green/Blue - Sultai
Red/Green/White - Naya
Red/White/Black - Mardu
Green/White/Blue - Bant
Green/Blue/Red - Temur
White/Blue - Azorious
White/Black - Orzhov
Blue/Black - Dimir
Blue/Red - Izzet
Black/Red - Rakdos
Black/Green - Golgari
Red/Green - Gruul
Red/White - Boros
Green/White - Selesnya
Green/Blue - Simic
There have been some other names used for the 3 color combinations, that came before and after the ones we have, but these are the ones that stuck.
Lol yeah when CGB just casually dropped the term "Esper" without thinking to explain what that means I felt sorry for the poor hearthstone man
The enemy wedges were commonly referred to using the volver cycle in Apocalypse: Degavolver, Anavolver, Cetavolver, Rakavolver, and Necravolver. Dega in particular because there was no easy shorthand for "WRB." Other names include:
• BUG and RUG are just the colors' letters.
• "Junk" for Abzan. Named after a pile of crappy commons and uncommons that won tournaments.
• "Italia" for Naya- colors of Italy's flag.
• Canadian for decks splashing WR. The most well-known being Canadian Threshold (which doesn't play white or threshold cards anymore lol)
• American/French/UK/Patriot for Jeskai. It depends on where the deck's creator originates from.
I love the concept of Ante in a vacuum, and it works really well in a closed system like Shandalaar, but in real life it requires the ultimate level of social buy-in and commitment and pretty much breaks any semblance of trust for most people if they're playing with strangers, so it's a good thing the rule as written was cast out of the book long ago.
honestly, this is one of my favorite series. we need rarran to show him our boy yogg and his many cards one day
Already shown
@@UnfitRulerWe got a new one in the latest set
In regard to ante, as you mentioned, mtg was the first ever TCG. That matters because I suspect that Garfield just truly believed that the only way people would get cards is through opening packs, trading, and ante. Key point being, I don’t think he thought people would buy singles.
So people wouldn’t assign finical value to cards, and it would much more difficult to obtain cards. That would make mid tier cards much more useful, and make ante seem much less feels badsy. It would also make decks more varied and make more “one man’s trash is another’s treasure “ type situations.
This format is so much fun, could watch it for hours. I mean even more hours.
I need more
"I'd hope they learn from this"
[ laughs in Urza's Saga block ]
Rarran talking about the YuGiOh anime and discussing characters losing and being sent to the shadow realm as reference to ante stakes when they literally had a tournament where ante was always on is wild to me.
Not really, but I did think it was funny. But yeah they did have a tournament with ante and also the non-American version of the anime often had the characters literally die if they lost the game- not sent to the shadow realm.
Fun show that first version was LOL
“Hello, the two main protagonists. We are two random antagonist grunts, and we challenge you to a duel.”
“Okay.”
“By the way, we placed BOMBS on top of the glass panels on the 40 story building we’re dueling on. If your life hits zero, they blow up and you’ll die from the fall.”
“Oh. Well…”
I'll be honest, I never watched the anime and I stopped reading the manga when the "cardgame" became the main focus of the story, but at the start of the manga, Yu-Gi-Oh was pretty much an Egyptian vengeance God who played made up games with his "victims" and killed them in a personalized way if they lost (which they all did, obviously).
On a personal note, I understand why the switch from made up games to a cardgame was made. It's hard to come up with new original games each story and thus not sustainable in the long run, so to "standardize" it is easier. But it did make me lose interest, probably because of the absurd numbers in the stat lines (insert "it's over nine thousand" meme here).
@@SuddenRealit was not because Takahashi ran out of ideas. It is well documented that the card game chapter got a great response in comparison to the rest of the series and after it started to lose readership again the editors and him decided that the series should be moved to focus on a card game. With the millennium world finale being one of a very few opportunities during the series for Takahashi to return to the original concept to some degree.
Rarran also didn't understand that Yugioh as a card game had all the same problems of as early Magic at the start. The monsters all sucked, answers and other busted spells were ridiculously better, with mostly the same mitigating factor: people didn't own the cards to make the most miserable decks possible at the time. The battle mechanics of Yugioh are also pretty atrocious when playing a bunch of vanillas with all the same statlines (the optimal build in early Yugioh), but because nobody had playsets of all the best monsters there was more variety and so back and forth to be had. Magic was ultimately carried out of its early period by being literally "the only game in town", while the anime played a big role in driving early Yugioh sales long enough for the game to get its feet under it.
@@MetallicityOf course depending on what one is talking about in terms of early Yugioh it also had issues of just being completely miserable to play with tier 0s in it's early time in Japan, only saved by the fact that Magic and Pokemon also had terrible formats at the time.
I believe the YuGiOh Anime in the beginning of the first tournament arc had the ante, that each player bets their strongest monster or something like that. Because I remember Joey Wheeler getting big monsters from winning and adding them to his deck. I believe the shadow realm thing, which btw is a euphemism for the underworld/hell, only becomes a thing when they get to the island.
Regarding Mana Drain, I’m pretty sure a card that said “UU: counter target spell and lose life equal to its mana value.” Would have still been pretty strong at the time. But also allowing you to reduce the penalty by performing positive game actions is just crazy.
Right. I didn't realize that was an attempt to "balance" Counterspell. That is a Skullclamp level design oversight. As you said, all they had to do was just make you immediately lose life equal to the spell's mana value. That would be almost strictly worse (with the exception of like a Death's Shadow deck) instead of being incredibly broken. Not only does Mana Drain counter a spell for the same cost as Counterspell, but you get a bunch of free mana too, lol.
Oh, and as far as the ante stuff, I played a lot of games for ante early on before magic basically pulled it from their official rules. We had a standing rule in my area that people could trade back for any card lost through ante. And since everyone in the area who played magic at the time knew each other, it was always pretty cheap to do so. No one tried to stick it to you to get your card back, because then they stopped getting invited to play, and they also didn't want to have to trade hard to get their own cards back when they lost. You'd get a rep, and in a local gaming community, that really mattered at the time. Some people didn't care, and would roll with it, win or lose. I think in the early early days, the biggest card I ever won in an ante that someone didn't want to trade back for was a time vault.
"What kind of feedback could you get in 1994?"
idk 1994, but in 1996 they had a mail in survey about the next edition of their game that was published in The Duelist (Wizards' old print mag about the game) asking what cards players would like to see removed.
I sent one in, with my list of five cards.
Four were on the Restricted list and OP, the fifth was Cyclopean Mummy, a 2 mana 2/1 that got exiled when it died. Because it did not fit black's "vibe" of reanimating things.
Funny story about my experience with the legend rule, I started magic with Dual of the plainswalkers 2013. That game had the old legend rule of one legend per board and the oldest played gets sacrificed. This was my main reference for magic all the way until i finally played in paper in 2019, in which i played the same legend as my opponent had on board and i said "shouldn't that have sacrificed your card?" and they just looked at me completely straight faced and said "8 years ago or something, sure.". Bruh.
Good lord almost one and a half hours of CGB and Rarran??? Christmas came SUPER early this year
26:51 So as far as "why" ante was a part of early Magic: The Gathering, I know it had something to do with how Richard wanted the "local ecosystem" of each small play pod to not stay stagnated. These local groups were predicted to be usually only around as big as a DnD group or maybe the size of a small local game store and an individual person could be a part of multiples of these groups. So the idea was to introduce a sort of "churn" to get cards circulating between players (b/c who is going to trade or sell their cards in a secondary market, right? There is simply no other way of moving cards around!) so that the players that were a part of multiple groups would rotate cards both in and out of their various play groups. It is also a part of the reason why the original set was so under printed, b/c they expected that Churn to propagate the cards around, (because players are not just gonna buy and play with only the most powerful of cards, they're just gonna play with what the packs dealt them, right?) plus also the fact that they were not expecting Magic to be as popular as it ended up being, which that is totally reasonable.
Also, Raran mentioning the Yu-Gi-Oh! show and starts talking about the "Shadow Realm" and not about the Battle City Tournament where the players literally played with their rarest card at stack for each game! I mean I don't expect him to have watched the series after him not mentioning that, but that is such the perfect comparison point and he was just a couple of steps away from getting there. His overall point was fairly correct though.
"Imagine how big magic would be... if it had been fun to play for the first 7 years."
That line got me good
These videos with Rarran are my favorite. He's such a golden retriever.
Oh my gosh I love the what if with ante cards in that, there is 10 of them and they all say remove from your deck if not playing for ante so technically in your 60 card deck you could have 40 ante cards, refuse to play for ante, then just have a 20 card deck. And you have to wonder about the parallel world where that became the meta thing to do.
The legend rule was changed twice according to a wizards article I read on it (didnt play during original rule). OG rule was if you cast a legend your opponent controls, your copy would be sac'd to the graveyard. Then it went to, your opponent has Jace? Cast your Jace to remove it. Newest version of the rule separated your side of the battlefield from your opponents, you can now both have Jace or multiple Jaces w different names for example.
Actually, the OG rule was that you couldn't cast a legend if there was already one with the same name on the battlefield. So whoever played their legend first would prevent the opponent to cast the same one.
I do vaguely remember a version of the rule that sent the most recent legend with the same name in the graveyard, but I don't find any trace of it. And I don't think it lasted long.
Then Kamigawa hit and the rule went to "if at least 2 legends with the same name are on the battlefield, all of them are sent to the graveyard."
And finally, the current version, which only checks the legendaries you control, and if 2 with the same name are found you decide which one is sent to the graveyard.
There was also the planeswalker uniqueness rule, which sent to the graveyard any planeswalker of the same type controlled by a player but one (controller's choice), but that rule was changed and the planeswalkers were changed to be legendary instead, checking the names instead of the type.
Three iterations of the rule OG) once the legendary creature was cast, no player could play the same one until the first copy was killed. 2nd version) while only one of those legendary permanents could be on the field at a time, a player could cast an additional permanent of the same subtype, and both permanents would be sacrificed (this matters because the best sideboard option many decks had to Jace, the Mindsculptor in its standard rotation was actually to cast Jace Baleren, as it was a cheaper card with lower cmc that shared a subtype with JtMC). The third and current iteration is : each player is allowed a permanent of the same legendary subtype and if another permanent would enter the battlefield of a player, that player chooses one copy to keep and sacrifices the other(s).
Another related change was rolling the planeswalker uniqueness rule into the legend rule and errataing all the old planeswalkers to be legendary.
Just for a little extra context, the move from the OG rule to the "kill both" was spurred on by some horrible play patterns that arose during Masque's block. There were a few colorless legendary lands (Kor Haven and Rath's Edge) that decks played as 4-ofs, so if you got yours out first you would just randomly lock your opponent out of their 2nd land drop sometimes. When a few years later WotC wanted to make another legendary focused set (Champion's of Kamigawa) they changed the rule to the "kill both" version to create interesting counter-play instead of a static board state.
Wasn’t there also initially a deck building restriction of only 1 copy of a legend per deck, so only one black blade in your deck at all.
You should have shared Contract From Below when sharing Ante.
One single black mana. Draw 8. Yeah, the first one goes to ante, but it says draw 8 and we now have replacement effects, which means you could get around the ante clause WHILE PLAYING FOR ANTE.
Contract have been Oracled to only Draw 7, with the eight being an explicit ante.
@Red-yt2dk - Dang. I see that. Thanks. Still seems like it would be fun in Dredge. Discard your dredge cards, then get 7 triggers to dredge off of.
The real hack with ante cards is to include them in your deck when not playing for ante. You set your deck, they set theirs, -- and then the ante cards evaporate from your deck at the start of the game leaving you with a thin deck ready to go all in on turbo sligh. Redder Deck Win.
@@williambarnes5023 Ante is banned in all formats. This would only work in kitchen table, and I doubt your friends would appreciate it.
@@williambarnes5023 People keep passing around this "one weird trick" but it never worked. If you time travel to when ante was supported in the rules, deck minimum rules are enforced after illegal cards are removed. You'd have to add basic lands to replace the ante cards. (If you time travel back far enough, there were no deck minimum rules, but then you don't need to even bother with the ante cards then if you want to play a 20 card deck.)
Please dont ever stop collabbing with Rarran! You guys have such great vibes and the synergy is amazing
I suspect that the Phil Foglio art also plays into the price point for Mirror Universe.
@28:44
If MTG is the first TCG- it makes sense. The only other type of "card game" was the one with a regular deck of cards, and those tended to involve some sort of stakes or gambling, like Poker or Blackjack.
8:00 Nicol Bolas: Born as a dragon-god, who also happens to be a Planeswalker.
In the modern Post-Crisis era, also the last Old-style Planeswalker.
"What if Deathwing was also pre-Crisis Superman?"
And this is Jace's nemesis...
I can name the impetus for at least two of the legend rule changes: When Block Constructed was still a thing, the best deck in Onslaught+Legions constructed was an Astral Slide-based deck with the newly printed Akroma, Angel of Wrath as one of the kill cards. The final match was a slide mirror and the designers decided it was dumb how much the match came down to "whoever sticks Akroma first wins." That's when they changed it so that both die instead of the first legend "winning".
Much later, during Zendikar/Scars of Mirrodin Standard, wizards printed Phantasmal Image, a 1U clone card with a drawback. Because of the "both legends die" rule, you could play it to destroy any arbitrary legend, which probably cost more than the 1U you spent on the card, making the drawback irrelevant. What was extra enraging about this was that a blue deck was already running away with the format (Jace the Mind Sculptor, better than all) and Wizards had even tried to print a blue hoser in Thrun, the Last Troll, which couldn't be targeted but it didn't matter because *clones don't target*, meaning he couldn't do his one job. This meant that not only did the legend rule change again but Thrun failed to prevent Jace from getting banned.
As someone who's been playing since Fallen Empires, this brought back a lot of memories. I never really got to play a lot from this specific set outside the Chronicles expansion, but what I did was personally a fun experience.
I like this guessing the overall power/ financial value of every card displayed. Please keep more of this content going.
1:09:35 I think it may not have been clear to Rarran that you could mana burn yourself just by tapping your own lands. (Don't need to use a card like Mana Drain)
So if you have 6 lands, you can tap them at the end of your opponents turn to cause 6 damage to yourself, and then immediately do 6 more damage to yourself at the start of your turn. Your opponent probably doesnt want to attack you when this card is out.
I could be wrong but I don’t think it worked exactly how you described. I think normally you aren’t able to do anything during your untap step, so you would have no way of mana burning yourself during your turn before your upkeep. I think it would require you to have a card in play that triggers during untap step. At least that’s how I remember it. We might have been playing wrong lol
you could still get low and lightning bolt yourself in upkeep, of course.
@@marakah5298 Yeah I didn't mean before your upkeep. Just that having 6 lands could lead you to burn yourself for 12 by doing it at the end of opponents turn, and then on yours, and the opponent probably cant do anything about it.
But CGB's explanation makes it sound like you mana burn to 0 during your upkeep, then swap life totals, which is not how the timing of mana burn works, right? Mana doesn't empty/burn until the end of the phase, so the kill combo still requires a bolt, or City of Brass activation or something that can happen during the upkeep, followed by the Mirror Universe activation.
@@BucknerSJ I believe the reasoning is that there are two different effects that automatically happen at the end of your upkeep: First, suffer mana burn. Second, check for death. So you resolve the mana burn to make your health negative, then, because it's still the upkeep until after the death check, you immediately tap Mirror Universe and swap Life, either between those two steps or in reaction to the check for death step, before it's resolved.
I started playing around the time unlimited came out, you could still find beta packs at the comic shop, i haven't played in a few years now but some of these prices seem completely insane, especially when i think back to early days when we were still actually trading the cards, and sleeves weren't a thing, i remember playing at the school lunch table with a guy running 2 black lotus's bareback on a filthy lunch table, to this day i remember trading a mox jet for half a dozen truly junk cards just because i didnt run a black deck at the time, but it was a few years before we really grasped that these cards could actually be worth real money, middle school me definitely fucked adult me out of thousands of dollars in cards 😂
It must have taken so much restraint not to show him all of the overcosted, truly terrible, legends, and not immediately following them up by showing him Karakas. Can you imagine back in the day seeing somebody sink all of their mana into a Nicol Bolas and passing the turn with a smug look on their face, thinking they'd just locked up the game. Then on your turn playing a Karakas, only to pass the turn back, waiting for them to pay the upkeep cost, and bounce it back to their hand. Demoralizing probably doesn't even begin to cover it.
Honestly, a modified version of ante in a digital form, where people don't lose their cards but winners gain a random card from their opponent's deck could be interesting
I started playing this game when ante was still a thing, we all agreed on keeping a seperate "ante deck" that your opponent could pick from that way they were pulling a card from your playing deck, but even at that some of those ante cards we would play for back then are worth a buttload now, i haven't really kept up with card values for a while since i haven't played for years, last set i really played was timespiral, but these values seem way beyond what i remember them being.
Always love seeing these Rarran collab videos!!
When Rarran said he'd hang that art on the wall and CGB said "art is subjective"... he knew.
I've been playing since unlimited came out, used to go to all of the pre-release tournaments and they would almost always have a few of the artists there with booths set up selling signed prints, i probably have a dozen or more prints in my attic, but to this day i have the prints of Brainstorm and Braingeyser hanging in my game room, some of the artists they get to do the card art are absolutely amazing.
@@Greg1096 I think you missed the subtext. That particular artist is famous in the MTG community for other (Racist possible Neo-Nazi, painted Hitler as Jesus) reasons, in spite of many of the cards he did art for being both really good art and really good cards. Shame that he turned out to be a wacko, a lot of his art is quite good when it isn't ludicrously racist. Sylvan Library is another one he did.
@@KunouNoHana hmm I hadn't heard about that one, interesting...
Rarran saying he'd hang Nether Void's art on his wall gave me a chuckle. It's the sort of thing you might hang up... and then you learn about the artist and you probably quietly take it down XD
Hang it right next to the lovely castle painted by a failed Austrian art student.
Good art is good art, if you can't separate the art from the artist that's on you
@@darkjackl999 Thank you for taking my light-hearted comment so seriously.
Just as an aside if you enjoy Harold McNeill's art, an artist who drew Hitler as Jesus proclaiming "blood is life", and you _don't_ want to distance yourself from that, that's far more telling than me having some basic moral standards. Ta-ta.
As soon as I saw moat.. I knew. This is it. This is the card that I need to play in commander... and then you tell me it is legal. I MUST
They have the same ability stapled onto a creature as well. Magus of the moat I believe
You should consider Island Sanctuary too, another confusingly named white card that you can get copies of for a couple bucks. For 1W to cast, every draw step you can skip a draw, and if you do, you’re hiding on your island and only creatures with flying or islandwalk can attack you until your next turn.
As the person above me said, Island Sanctuary is the way to go here. And I'll throw in another card, if your deck is white and blue: Archetype of Imagination. With these two cards, for the low price of not drawing 1 card:
1. All your creatures gain flying.
2. All your opponents' creatures lose flying, and cannot gain flying.
3. Creatures without flying cannot attack.
I started playing commander with the 2018 precons. The enchantress deck had 2 alternative commanders that gives you card draw on top of a lot of "enchantments = card draw". Both Island Sanctuary and Archetype of Imagination are enchantments... It was just too easy, had to build it.
Don't forget to put humility next to it!
I've been really enjoying this series. Glad that Rarran and CGB have good chemistry and seem to actually enjoy talking to each other.
CGB. You should start a podcast where you invite content creators from magic or rarran or Anyone like that and tell your stories of your magic games back in the mid 90s. Oh and if you do this, you can call the little kid going to the game store. Little Danny.
Dakkon was also the protagonist of magic comics
No Chains of Mephistopheles?
39:00 Holy god. A Red/Blue/Black deck in 1994😊 with this, the Legendary Troll, the Djinn as he said, and all the mana acceleration in the world...
And Efreets to yoink more cards from the enemy deck.
EDIT: Also some red/blue nuking and anti-magic. 49:00 Such as Mana Drain.
I'd listen to a podcast of you two just telling eachother Magic/Hearthstone stories, or both of you picking up Yugioh. The two of you together is good content.
Having an uncanny "People Who Know" moment when Rarran said he liked Nether Void's art best lol. Like he's right, compared to the standard at the time it's a surprisingly enduring style but... OOOOF.
Had the same thought as well
No Chains of Mephistopheles sadly, wouldve been fun to see rarrans reaction to that one
This
Speaking of ante...I played in a card shop in the early 2000s that had a league with special rules. to buy into the league you had to buy a certain number of booster packs, I forget how many you started with, and you could buy one more each week. You built a deck out of those booster packs and the store's supply of basic lands and kept your deck at the store to prevent people from sneaking cards in. The league played for ante and had prizes for accomplishing certain game situations such as hardcasting Emrakul.
I can't be the only one who's anticipating his reaction to necropotence right?
I love these vids, you two have enjoyable chemistry, and I'm a boomer mtg player who enjoys the historical context anecdotes
Only edit: I'd slap the tar out of anyone calling richard kane ferguson art anything other than sublime
Second edit: I'm so happy he ended with tabernacle. Without a doubt the most valuable card I own
I loved that he got the answer right about if people played it in Commander, too. "Not if they have friends."
Necropotence and Doomsday are such amazing cards.
@@jdgarrison9913If you roll up with a tabernacle, then expect in the next session everyone to roll in with mass land destruction, strip mines and tutors. And they all target you to 0 before they even look at each other
Honestly, Tabernacle is the kind of card I'd only expect to see in CEDH - and, as far as I know, it's simply not playable there (there are not enough creatures around to make it worthwhile, to the point you're just costing yourself a land drop).
We used to play Ante sealed leagues during revised. All my mates would buy a starter deck and make a 40 card ante deck. Every card was initialed by the owner and each winner and thus legendary cards evolved :-) I have a Sol Ring with 7 different players initials on the card.
I was part of a sealed ante league using Stronghold-Exodus. We could make up to five cards immune from ante so I always protected my Survival of the Fittest:)
Ah, the Mirror Universe kill. A classic of a lost age.
In an online mtg game, the Tabernacle was the only thing that really let me do anything against a token generating nightmare boss.
4:40 lands with flash sounds like cool design space.
I have a friend who is fairly rich. He has a mono white Avacyn, Angel of Hope deck that contains a real Moat and a real Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale.
Yes, this deck is absolutely as frustrating to play against as you might expect.
I remember reading about ante at one point, can't remember the article, but apparently it was designed as a way to keep people from loading their decks with all their best and busted cards. A built in way to discourage toxic deckbuilding.
Idk how true that is or if they're coming up with that after the fact.
In regards to Tempest Effect, especially in Not-Ante games, isn't it just super OP? (Presuming it itself isn't banned and just Ante as a whole isn't allowed as a format.) Removing four copies from your deck at the start of the game means you get to functionally play with a 36 card deck.
I love these collabs. I recently discovered both of you and i've been going back and watching your vids
Ante has been discussed plenty before. Basically, the idea that individual cards would be worth a lot of money or even have emotional attachment to people wasn't something Garfield predicted. He viewed the cards like game pieces in a board game. No one would feel devastated if they had to give up the thimble when they lost a game of Monopoly.
He expected people to buy a handful of packs and play against their friends. Ante would forcefully shuffle the cards around and encourage you to switch up strategies as you gained and lost cards. The idea that folks would seek out individual cards didn't occur to him. As another example of this, the original game didn't include the 4-of rule - you could play as many copies of a card as you owned (this got changed pretty quickly).
The Original Legend rule was like Hearthstone, you could only put one copy in a deck. But also, if you played it first, your opponent couldn't play it.
The whole "it's worth a lot of money!" aspect of Ante wasn't imagined to be a thing. Maybe after A/B/U they realized the cards were expensive, but originally, the concept was that you didn't really build a deck, the deck would build itself as you gain and lose cards to Ante, maybe open a pack every couple of weeks. But with cards having real value, it becomes gambling.
I started playing magic in 7th grade around the time unlimited came out, we had no clue these cards were ever going to have real money value, it was something we would play in the lunchroom at school or on weekends at the comic shop, card sleeves werent a thing yet and we definitely werent super careful to keep our cards clean, i remember this guy that i would play at school that was running 2 black lotus bareback on on those dirty ass lunchroom tables, and i couldn't even take a guess at the amount of money in cards i traded away or ruined back then, i do specifically remember trading a mox jet to a guy for some random junky cards because I didnt like playing black decks, middle school me definitely screwed adult me out of a ton of money 😂
I'm looking forward to an Un-set special. Rarran saw City of Brass last time, when someone discovers City of Ass for the first time is always a moment.
Hearthstone being purely digital and spending so much time on whimsy and humor in the regular game, the idea of an Un-set and the fun of opening packs at the card shop is another thing that makes Magic so interesting, like the way having lands makes the mechanics of the game interesting
Gotta love how Rarran "saying something nice about Yu-Gi-Oh" is him saying it peaked at the start and is the only major card game that got worse with time
Is he wrong though?
@@FlozzSD Yeah, original Yugioh was just dull for the first few sets. I think the two main time periods that people consider to be the hay days are GOAT (2005) and Edison (2010), so while the modern state is not very good (personally stopped playing since COVID) it was by no means at it's best in 2002 when it first began.
44:49 "Don't know what flying creatures white had"
MESA FALCON WAS RIGHT THERE!
Ante could be fun if the cards aren't valuable. If you can imagine an alternate universe where the secondary-market never takes off, people only get cards from packs, trades, and antes then ante could be a lot of fun. I have to believe something like this was in Richard Garfield's mind when he made those first ante cards.
Garfield was defeated by capitalism.
I could see a version of limited where you play with the same deck for a while against others in the store with ante. Maybe cube so that you return them all at the end anyways.
It also could probably work for some sort of single player deck building mtg game (not sure if they had it in Shandelar, but that sort of Idea).
@@seandun7083Shandalar is built around ante
You would still have the feels bad of losing a card you really like. And in a world without the secondary market, it will be very hard for you to get a copy of that card back unless you are regularly playing the same opponent over and over.
@@seandun7083Shandalar does indeed use ante; it works much better there than in paper Magic obviously as you're just battling with the computer and there's no actual property being lost.
IIRC, most of the legends in Legends were old D&D characters from the design team.
You should show Raran Goblins of the Flargand the inception of mono-red aggro. The understanding and implementation of tempo is a huge part of most TCGs, so showing him how bad a one-drop can be and still be playable.
I love that Rarran used the Yugioh anime as an example for ante and didn't mention the entire arc where they actually played for ante 😂
Wasn't it a more extreme version of ante - instead of a randomly chosen card, they played always for the opponent's most powerful card?
Lands with Flash is unexplored design space. Let him cook.
Of all the gorgeous art from legends the one Rarran complimented the most (though nether void is a nice piece tbh) had to come from Harold McNeil bummer.
When he said "I'd hang that on my wall", I audiably whispered "Oh no..."
I really wish he'd dropped the lore of that artist on him lol. Would have been funny.
Hey good art is good art.
To be fair to Rarran the art is pretty good (although he should maybe think twice about hanging it on his wall lol), terrible people can still be talented
Ok but saying Dakkon is ugly should be a crime. That card is like a Frazetta painting
I love the content with rarran on both channels
Another thing that ante brought was game balance. Cards were random, so some decks would be better than others. In a duel, the worst deck would probably lose, but if it won, it would win a more valuable card. Tyring to crush noobs had some dangers to it.
Also the ante brought variety. If you won a good card of another color, you could start a new deck of that color to be able to use it.
Garfield had no idea his game would become so successful, and nobody at WotC expected players to build all-rares hyper-tuned decks to become unbeatable. At first, there wasn't even a "4 copies of each card" limit, because no one thought anyone could be so crazy to build a 20 Volcanic Island, 20 Lightning Bolt, 20 Ancestral Recall deck.
I think MagicTG was envisioned to be played in a casual, relaxed way and cards were never expected to become so expensive. In that format, the ante was a quite interesting mechanic.
1:15:50 even some of the legends that did actually have useful abilities were ones that had pretty toxic effects (Angus "fog every turn" Mackenzie)
"Do they play this in commander?"
"If they want to win."
No, that is how you are the first person to get piled on and wiped off the board. 😄
As someone who quit Magic around the time Visions came out - Google tells me that was 1997, ruddy hell - I love hearing that mono Red is still traumatizing people all those years later. I remember spending like 2 years messing around with Blue / Black, then just giving in to the dark side and going mono Red. IIRC our entire nerdy kids group got bored & quit not long after. Probably just coincidence :p
Absolutely loving these videos for both the magic history lessons and the chemistry between you two. Please keep them coming!!
Mirror Universe costs so much because it has Phil Foglio art. BRING BACK THE FOGLIOS! Universes Beyond: Girl Genius!
I love these videos! Really hope you do all expansion releases, or maybe blocks, to see Rarran react to how Magic changes. XD His reactions are great and really show his card-gaming mind, instantly seeing broken things unless he his missing specific context or mechanics. Please keep it up!
Hanging Nether Void art on your wall may raise a few eyebrows...
Not everyone knows the artist's beliefs, I had to looking after seeing several of these comments. But man, nah thanks
re: ante and why it exists; as others have pointed out, the original designers did not anticipate that players would go so far out of their way to build the perfect deck that they would bid up the price of cards. Some other fruits of this missed prediction include:
* Sometimes they would try to "balance" an overpowered card by making it rare. The most famous example of this is the "boon" cards from alpha: the red one is one mana for 3 damage, the green one is one mana for +3/+3 for a turn, while the blue one is one mana to draw three cards. The first two are common and the third is rare.
* There was originally no limit on how many copies of a card you could put in your deck. A deck of nothing but Channels, Black Lotuses, and Fireballs was perfectly legal because they just didn't figure anyone would go to the trouble to build that deck.
as it turns out the *actual* best use of the ante was a 1990s computer game released by Microprose, often casually nicknamed "Shandalar". That game was essentially a roguelite dungeon crawler where all the combats were games of Magic, and ante was an important way to build your collection. Too bad you almost can't play it because it started hitting backward compatibility problems around WinXP and there's never been an official rerelease.
*discussing Nether Void*
"Nicest art, would hang it on my wall."
Oh boy, oh boy. Wizard's thought police would have some words for you :D
For those who don't know: the artist Harold McNeill is on Wizard's naughty list as a known neonazi - most known for his art on Invoke Prejudice, the most prominent card banned in 2020 in the series of bans marked as being culturally offensive.
Glad someone mentioned this. It was funny to hear praise
You two have such great chemistry! The conversations between cards are more interesting than the actual analysis at times. Hope you keep making these!