Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1225: Interrupts in Limited Edition (Alpha)

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Magic's very first set had a card type that no longer exists called interrupts. In this episode, I walk through all the cards of this card type in Limited Edition (Alpha).

I'm pulling away from the curb because the drop must on off at school. We all know what that means It's time for the drive to work Okay, so today After doing 1200 plus podcasts. I'm always searching for little topics that I've not done yet. So today's is a very niche topic interrupts in alpha so topic interrupts in alpha so most people probably know alpha that the original version of the game that Richard put out in 1993 but a lot of you might not even know what interrupts are what are interrupts so interrupts were a card

type that went away in sixth edition so today I'm gonna talk a little bit about interrupts and then I'm gonna talk specifically so the tricky question for you to answer in your head or aloud I guess whatever is how many interrupts were in alpha? And actually there's two parts how many cards were printed as an interrupt in alpha and how many interrupts were in alpha? Those aren't the same number So it turns out there were 14 cards in alpha with the word interrupt printed on them on their card type line. But 15 of them, so one of them was printed incorrectly, 15 of them were interrupts.

We'll get to that story today. But anyway, let me go a little bit into explaining what interrupts are. Okay, so in the beginning, when magic first got made, the stack is, you know it, that is something from sixth edition that was not part of the initial game of magic. The initial game of magic had something called batches. And the way that batches worked is, so the stack is last and first out.

So I'm gonna use my example here. Let's say I have a lightning bolt or my opponent has a lightning bolt and I have a giant growth. With last and first out, let's say they, I have a creature that's a three, three creature. They cast lightning bolt does three damage to my three, three creature. And then in response, I cast my giant growth. Well, under the current rules, last and first out, first thing that happens is the last spell cast, the Giant Growth will resolve. So my creature gets bigger, now it's a 6-6, then the Lightning Bolt resolves, it does 3 damage, but I'm big

enough the 3 damage won't destroy it. But, if I cast a Giant Growth on my creature, my 3-3, and then in response you cast a Lightning Bolt, the Lightning Bolt happens first, it does 3 damage to my 3-3 creature, my creature is destroyed, and there's nothing there for the Giant Growth to affect. That's last and first out, that you respond to things and the last spell on the stack goes first. But, that is not how it worked in alpha that is the stat so in alpha they have what we call batches. Batches were first in first in first the idea is you would resolve them in the order that you cast them. The one caveat to batches was

that damage stayed till the end of the batch so damage sort of waited till the end so if I cast a leggy bolt on your 3-3 in response to you cast a giant growth or you cast a giant growth in your 3-3 in response to I cast a lightning bolt, in that particular case the creature would not die in either case because the damage doesn't happen till the end of the batch. Anyway, the problem was if you wanted to, let's say my opponent did something and you wanted to respond to that spell, I wanted to interact with that spell, the spell on the stack, um, there wasn't a way to do that with batches because the spell would resolve

before your responding spell would resolve. So the answer to that was it created something called interrupts. And the idea of an interrupt was an interrupt interrupted what was going on and it allowed you to respond. So interrupts, there's not really a speed to spell casting. Uh, but a lot, the way people sort of thought of it is it was kind of faster than, so like you got to respond with it. Interrupts allowed you to respond. And so pretty much interrupts there were two basic things about interrupts is am I affecting a card that's being cast or am I producing mana? And the reason mana was important is

that I want to make sure that if I needed the mana to cast a spell, that I could do that when I needed to do it. So things that produce mana or interacted with spells being cast, there wasn't a stack yet, needed to be interrupts. So that is why interrupt exists. And now what happened is when they got to sixth edition and they created the stack with the last and

first out, they realized that every spell had a chance. Like if you cast a spell, why could cast a spell in response to it? It would go first because the last and first out. And that meant, okay, um, I don't need, you didn't need interrupts anymore. So interrupts just became instance. So as a sixth edition, everything that wasn't interrupt just became an instant. And interrupts went away. So what I'm gonna do today is there are 15 cards in Alpha

that were interrupts, that had that special. So I'm gonna walk through those 15 cards today. That is my plan for my podcast, to explain the interrupts. Now some of these cards are very famous. Some of these cards you will know. Some of these cards you might never have heard of. In fact, there's a cycle among them. That's a fine question.

Another terrific question. Well, I'll get to that in a second, but there's a cycle of interrupts. Okay, but first up, it is not a cycle of interrupts. I'll start with, so there's something that Richard used to do a lot of that he called reflections. So what a reflection is, is two cards that usually are, they're always in different colors, often they're in enemy colors, and they are mirrors of each other mechanically.

White Knight, Black Knight is kind of the classic, right? White Knight is a 2-2 with first strike protection from black and Black Knight is a 2-2 with protection from white and they both cost two colored mana of their color. And the idea is that they're sort of reflections of one another. So our first card today, I'm going in alphabetical order, although it's hard to talk about the first card without its reflection. So I will have to mention that. So it is the elemental blast, blue elemental blast and red elemental blast. So what those cards do is they each cost a blue elemental blast cause blue, red elemental

blast cause red. It is an interrupt because it does two things. One is it counters a spell of the appropriate color. So blue elemental blast affects red things, red elemental blast affects blue things. So blue elemental blast counters a red spell or destroys a red permanent. Likewise, red elemental blast destroys or counters a blue spell or destroys a red permanent. Likewise, red elemental blasts, destroys or counters a blue spell or destroys a blue permanent. Now, one of the interesting things whenever you're looking at alpha is,

the color pie was in its infancy. So Richard, I think when he first made magic, had this idea that your enemy could use your own powers against yourself. So the idea was that blue could counter spells. Red really didn't counter spells, but red can use blue's own magic against it. So red could counter blue spells. Likewise, blue really didn't destroy things. It's supposed to be a weakness of blue, but red at the time could destroy things. We later moved it so that red was more about direct

damage and less about destruction. But in alpha alpha red does destroy a bunch of different things, walls and random stuff. So anyway, so blue elemental blasts allowed you to counter a red spell or destroy a red permanent. And then likewise red elemental blast was the opposite. So this is now the point in my little trivia from the beginning. Red elemental blast was actually accidentally listed in alpha as an instant, not an interrupt. It quickly, I mean, the idea of errata was very in the early days was a very vague thing. Wizards didn't have a lot of means to communicate with the public. The internet was very, very young. And so the idea was that it did officially get rules once they had a way to say that. But, and I'm not saying that early people

really had a great understanding of instance for its interrupts, the whole batch system. I remember Tom Wiley, who was the first rules manager, made an article in the due list, trying to explain the timing system and he made it in the form of a rat's nest because that was the commentary about how complicated it was. So I'm not sure I mean one of the reasons they also changed to the to the stack was it's a lot cleaner and simpler and you didn't

have multiple card types They just worked a little a little more straightforward But anyway Blue mental blast and red elemental blasts. So like I said, red elemental blast was incorrectly listed as an instant. It's interesting It's a great piece of trivia, which is name a card in alpha Which was printed incorrectly it had a typo on it. But that typo later got errata'd to be correct, which is Red Emmental Blast was an instant.

In sixth edition, all interrupts became instant. So that mistake in Alpha, ironically, after the fact, ended up being correct. So you can have an Alpha Red Emmental Blast that says instant on it, which is what Elm blast currently is. So blue elemental blast and red elemental blast became tournament staples. They're still played in formats where they're illegal. And the reason for that, so early magic, blue is a little bit dominant if you look just at the first few years of cards. In fact, we talk about like the power nine, right?

The power nine is Black Lotus, five Mox, those are six artifacts, and then three blue cards and Sesshal Recall, Time Walk and Time Tractor. So like the most powerful cards in Alpha, though one could argue there's stuff like Soul Ring that's also very powerful. But anyway, the nine cards that got attributed as being the most powerful cards in alpha, though one could argue there's stuff like Sol Ring that's also very powerful. But anyway, the nine cards that got attributed as being the most powerful cards in alpha, three of them, a third of them were blue and the rest of them weren't any color, right?

So like a blue deck could play all nine of the power nine. So that is pretty potent. And so early on in early magic or a lot of magic that allows you access to early magic because there's some really powerful stuff in early magic was very blue centric. And so if you were playing against blue, red elemental blast was a very useful tool because there were a lot of very powerful blue spells. And because red elemental blast itself got played blue elementalast was very important

because it was the answer to Red Elemental Blast. And because they cost one mana, you could get a lot of interesting fights between what we call BEB and REB. So those cards definitely saw a lot of play and were pretty instrumental cards in Magic. In fact, of the interrupts on the scene today, there's a few more, one particular we'll get to that's pretty big, but those are two of the highest profile as far as still being played interrupts from Alpha.

Okay, next, and once again, I'm going alphabetically here. Okay, next, let me ask the question. What in the interrupts in Alpha, there's 15 in alpha, five of them are in a cycle. What is the cycle of interrupts in alpha? And the reason this is hard is alpha has some, like I said, the power nine, there's a lot of really iconic, you know, giant growth,

giant spider, lightning bolt. There's a lot of iconic spells that you know, giant growth, giant spider, lightning bolts. There's a lot of iconic spells that have definitely lasted the test of time, but not everything has lasted the test of time. So now we get to the laces. So the laces were five spells. So chaos lace is the red one. The white one was pure lace. The white one was Pure Lace. The blue one was Thought Lace.

The black one was Death Lace. The red one was Chaos Lace and the green one was Life Lace. And the idea was they do one simple thing. They cost a single mana and they permanently change a spell or a permanent, they change the color, and not just temporarily, permanently. So for example, if I cast Chaos Lace on a spell, that spell's forever red. Now why would I want to turn something red?

For example, just to use Blue-Eyes-Of-Glass that I just talked about, let's say you're playing a blue red deck, and your opponent casts something. You could, for example, Chaos Lace it to turn it red and then you can use Blue Mental Blast to counter it because it is now a red spell. Early Magic did a lot more. Color matters was a much, much bigger deal in Early Magic. For example, there was a thing called circles of protection that were in white and a circle protection would be against a certain color and

then you could spend one mana to prevent all damage from something of that color. So for example, a really popular thing in early magic was circle protection red. So if your opponent tries to fireball you, well for one mana you could stop all damage from that fireball. Or if they attack you with a Shiven Dragon, for one mana you could stop all damage from that fireball or they attack you with a shiv and dragon for one mana You can stop all damage from the shiv and dragon And there were wards Wards were another cycle where it gave protection from a color It was an order to get protection from the color. There was a lot more protection like

I mean very alpha only had a few cards for protection but it showed up a lot in early magic but like white knight black knight and anyway there was there were just a lot and for example uh terror not terror that tears not the way let me tear destroy target non black spell so if you turn something black you could prevent it from dying. And then there was fear which can only be blocked by black creatures so you could make things either able to block or unable to block. So there were a lot of things in early magic like color mattered a lot more than it does nowadays. Not that color never matters but oh and there were a lot more color hosers that was another big thing in the Alpha there were very powerful color hoses in early magic and

so the ability to change the color of something either could make the color hoses apply to it or make it get around the color hoses okay next up oh and by the way that my quick on the laces is well, there were some very niche uses of the laces I definitely made some decks where I played laces, but They were very narrow never the laces never saw that much play Next up counter spell Most by the way, most of the interrupts interestingly cost a single mana It most by the way most of the interrupts interestingly cost a single mana

And the reason for that is you need to do it in response to your opponent playing spells And so you want to be able to make it cheap to make responsive counter spell cost two mana blue blue And counter spell I mean like I said, there's some iconic interrupts counter spell might be one of the most iconic interrupts If not the most iconic interrupt, I mean, and the reason it's an interrupt is it counters spells. So like I said, you have to interact with spells being cast. Well, counter spells very directly interact with spells being cast.

Counter spell, we realized pretty early on that counter spell was a little better than it, like two mana was a little bit too good. So we ended up making cancel. It turns out cancel's a little on the weak side So now we make cancels with upside But shoe man in the country spells a little bit too good I mean, obviously if you play a format where counterspell is illegal people play counterspells because they're quite good

And like I said counterspell the fact that the entire Category of spells is named after this spell should tell you how potent and powerful a spell it is but anyway a counter spell I mean from the just out of the gate the other thing by the way is because blue was so powerful in early magic and counter spell was was pretty cheap and efficient there are a lot of counter spells that got played in early magic that is one the reasons that like a red elemental blasts and blue elemental blasts definitely started showing up because you had to deal

with counterspells and there weren't a lot of answers outside the blue to deal with counterspells and that's why Red Elemental Blast saw a lot of play. Next up, Dark Ritual. So Dark Ritual costs one black mana and it produces three black mana. So this was part of what Richard called the boons. So in alpha there were five cards that all cost one mana that produced three of something. Healing Sav was the white boon. You either gained three life or prevented three damage, just because gaining three life

wasn't quite powerful enough. It is by far the weakest boon. Blue had Ancestral Recall where you draw three cards, the most powerful of the boons, and it got moved up to rare. Black was Dark Ritual. Red was Lightning Bolt, very iconic, do three damage for one thing. And green was Giant Growth, also very iconic. So as it turns out, Healingve ended up being historically too weak. Giant growth historically ended up being just right and the other three were overpowered by different amounts. I believe the order of how powerful things are is and such a recall is the most powerful boon then dark ritual then lightning bolt then giant, then Healing Salve. Dark Ritual was interesting in that,

I think it took us a while to understand the power of Dark Ritual. There's a lot of early Magic, for example, where like Hypnotic Spectre was a card in early Magic. It's a two-two flier, so whenever it hits your opponent, they have to discard a random card. And a lot of people really thought that Hypnotic Spectre was this dangerous, dangerous card.

And it turned out it's not. In fact, we later reprinted hypnotic specter. It wasn't that the specter was dangerous. It was a turn one specter was dangerous. But the only reason you could cast a turn one specter was Dark Ritual. In fact, Dark Ritual gets printed in sets, in a bunch of sets.

It's not till Mercadian Masks. The last printing in a standard legal set of Dark Ritual gets printed in sets, in a bunch of sets. It's not till Mercadian Masks. The last printing in a standard legal set of Dark Ritual is Mercadian Masks, which is like, is that 99, I think? So I mean, six years into Magic, we're still printing Dark Ritual, which is kind of shocking to me, now that we understand how potent and powerful Dark Ritual is.

And in general, the other thing that happened was we also, we ended up moving this ability from black to red. Red has the sort of one-shot mana producers. We're careful with them. They're very powerful. We don't make a lot of them. So even though red does it, we don't make a lot of them anymore just because the lessons of Dark Ritual. It It turns out by the way, jumping even a few turns of your mana, meaning on turn one, being able to cast something that I need to cast on turn three is just super super potent and super powerful. And it's interesting, like one of the things when I look back at early magic, I mean, like I said, I was around, you know, I magic comes out in 93. I started freelancing in 94. I'm working full time at wizards at 95. I, you know, I'm here for very early magic and very early development. And

like I said, I worked on sets that we put dark ritual on and you know, I, anyway, it's funny looking back how it took us a while to understand that. Okay. Next up is death lace. That's the black of the lace thing turns things black Next up another a pretty famous card one of my favorites another another one that cost two is fork So fork costs red red and lets you copy an instant or sorcery or at the time an interrupt but Yes, so you've got you you can copy instant sources or interrupts and the idea of fork was it just like you copy things and do things and I think the reason it was stuck in red was the idea that you do stuff like I cast a

fireball and then I copy my fireball and fireball cost a lot to you know because it had X in it so it cost a lot so maybe I'm doing a fireball like eight but then for two men I can do eight more. So fork was very, very popular early on in direct damage decks. And it turned out when blue was so dominant, red had the best tools to deal with blue because of the red elemental blast.

Fork also could double as a counter spell, not in the vacuum, but it could be a counter spell to a counter spell. So if someone counter something, you could fork their counter spell to counter their counter spell. Anyway, I played a lot of fork of all the all the cards on this list. I think I played more fork than any other card. I played some blue, I played counter spells, I played elemental blasts and stuff. I even played some laces. But I love fork. In fact, I'm responsible for making the blue fork. What's the blue fork called? We basically decided that copying stuff, that blue and red could both copy instance and source for you. So both those abilities exist. Anyway, fork is

near and dear to my heart. Okay, Life Lace is the green member of the Lace. Okay, Magical Hack. So Magical Hack, and there's another card coming up called Sleight of Mind. So Richard played around with the idea of, what if I had cards that could change text? So what Magical Hack did is it changed a basic land type, so plains, island, swamp, mountain, or forest, into another

basic land type. The reason that mattered were a couple things. A, there was land walk. So there was things like, there was a 3-3 with spirit walk, there was a 1-1 with forest walk. That there was, there were, idea of a land walk was, if my creature has land walk, then my opponent can't block it

if they have the appropriate. So a creature with swamp walk, if I'm playing swamps, I have a swamp in play, I can't block a swamp walker. The idea essentially is that creature is an expert in the swamp, and so if there's a swamp to sneak through, you can't stop them.

Also, there were a lot of color hosers, some of which refer to color, but some of which refer to land types. And so the idea of magical hack was either it was an answer to things like this or it allowed you to turn your things into threats. Oh, I have a color hoser that mentions swamps, but you have islands. Well, I'll turn my karma into caring about islands rather than swamps. You know, you can alter things.

Or I could change my landwalker to not be able to land walk on you, or vice versa, turn off your landwalker so it can't land walk on me. Okay, we'll get to slide mine in a second. Next up, Power Sync. So there's a couple of counterspells. In fact, there's, I mean there's the Elemental Blast, there's Counterspell, there's Power Sync, there's Spellblast. So let me get to those two. So first I'll do, I'm going in order. Power Sync is the one, sorry, there's two X spells, they're both counter spells. There's two X spells in interrupts in alpha.

So Power Sync is, I counter the spell unless you pay X. So the idea is, it's actually very good early on because whatever you spend, if you tap out, it only costs two mana to stop your spell if you tap out. Now, later on when you have more mana like power sync is very good early game and gets weaker as the game goes on and Because power sync was something that was pretty in the early magic. It was one of the better counter spells in early magic We've there's much better stuff now, but the idea was that you sometimes would remember Oh, if they have power

sync I want to leave mana open for example in the classic red versus blue matchup or red is like fireball and blue out one of the things you would do is leave extra mana so that you could pay for power sinks if you needed to but anyway that is power sync pure lace is the white version of the laces. Oh, so Pure Lace, by the way, I think of the five laces, Pure Lace saw the most tournament play and the reason for that is circle protections are in white. And so one of the things, there were a couple different ways people use them,

but the most common way was, if you played a mono white deck and played circle protection white and played pure laces in your deck, you could turn the biggest threats white so that you can then stop them. That wasn't high level tournament play or anything, but I do remember seeing people do that.

The other thing that sometimes people would do is they'd play red white and they would use chaos laces so that their circle protection red could stop other things. Pure lace was nice because it was in the same color that the circle protections were. Okay then is red elemental blast. I talked about that when I talk about blue enteral blast. Like said, both of those saw a lot of play. Next up is Sacrifice. So this is a black card. It costs a single black mana. And the way Sacrifice works is it allows you to sacrifice a creature and you then get black

mana equal to the mana value, although the words mana value didn't exist at the time, but equal to the mana value of the spell. So the idea is if I needed to get a bunch of black mana, I could sacrifice a creature and then, oh, let's say I sacrifice a three mana creature, mana value three, oh, I got three black mana. Sacrifice is nowhere near as far from a Stark ritual because you needed to have the creatures to sacrifice. And so it did allow you late in the game,

sometimes the way sacrifices got used is I'm doing a giant drain life to win the game or something. And this allowed me to get extra black mana to get a big enough drain. So sacrifice saw a little bit of play, but it's a lot weaker. It was very, very flavorful.

The idea that I'm sacrificing my creature to get extra mana was very cool and that's that's definitely I mean the flavor is good. Okay next up is sleight of mind so this is the companion to magical hack so sleight of mind instead of changing basic land types it changes colors so like I said circle protections this was blues's answer to circle protection. So for example, if you're playing white and you did circle protection blue, well now you can start stopping blue effects. Now obviously blue could counter them, but let's say you got the

circle protections were only cost two mana I believe. So you could get them under the counter spell sometimes. So the answer then, because blue can't destroy anything, I mean blue could bounce things, but and blue could steal things, although in alpha it couldn't steal enchantments. That didn't happen until I think in Tempest they made steal enchantment. Anyway, sometimes you could use Sleight of Mind to change the circle protection to a different color so that it couldn't stop you. And once again, like I said, there's things with protection. it was a way to round some protection stuff a lot of early magic. Protection blue wasn't super prevalent in early magic so oftentimes flight of mind was the answer if you if you were playing a multicolor deck in

which they'd answer to your other colors sometimes you could use you could use flight of mind. Remember both magical hack and sleight of mind were permanent. In fact same with laces. Most these effects I'm talking about I mean mana you produce for the turn and counter spells happen right then and there but most the other effects I'm talking about interrupts were permanent. When you lace something when you made a different color it was for the rest of the game. When you magical hack something or sleight of mind something it was for the rest of the game when you magical hack something or sleight of mind something It was for the rest of the game. And so you forever changed it We really haven't done a lot of text changing

There's a few cards that are kind of you know Magical hacks or sleight of mind. We've done a few of those we've made a few sort of spells they're sort of in that ilk referencing those two cards, but spells are sort of in that reference in those two cards but it gets tricky. The one thing about that is those are words that are universal. In the unsets I've messed around a little bit more trying to change words around but it gets tricky very fast. It's hard to do.

In unsets I have changed numbers which is something we don't do in Black Border. Next up is Spellblast. Spellblast. Spellblast is the other X spell. So Spellblast is counter-target spell where X is its mana value. So the tricky thing about Spellblast, and this is why Spellblast is all less play, is you need a lot of mana to counter big spells. Yeah, you can counter sheep spells, but even then if I'm countering, like in order to be the same as counter spell, I can counter a one

drop spell for two mana. Which you know, and so you don't even save any, like the counter spells is better on almost every vector. I mean you need two blue mana for counter spell, but spell blast, you know, I mean early magic didn't have infinite counter spells, so spell blasts saw play early, but once other things started coming around, spellblast quickly got eclipsed. But I think in general, Richard really liked X spells, and it was a clean X spell in the sense of, oh, well I counter something that big. But it turns out that usually counter spells have to be slightly ahead of the things that I'm countering.

The idea that I cost more mana to counter than the thing I'm countering just makes it pretty inefficient. Okay, and the final thing is Thought Lace. That's the blue version of the Lace. So again, Blue Mental Blast, Chaos Lace, Counter Spell, Dark Ritual, Death Lace, Fork, Life Lace, Magical Hack, Power Sync, Pure Lace, Red Emmental Blast, Sacrifice, Sleight of Mind, Spell Blast, and Thought Lace. Those are the 15 interrupts of alpha. And like I said, I like talking history once in a while. So it's interesting

to look back on something that I mean, these spells still exist, the functionality still exists. So it's not that the spells went away. But early magic just treated them a little bit differently. So if anyone talks about interrupts and you had not heard about them, now you know what interrupts are. So hopefully I've educated you today. But anyway guys, I'm at work. So all that means is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.