Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1354: Quirks of Limited Edition (Alpha)

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

In this episode, I talk about many of the weird elements of Magic's first set.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. Okay, so today is about the quirks of Alpha. So Match of the Gathering first appeared in August of 1993 in a set that originally was called Limited, I guess. Match of the Gathering Limited, but there's two versions of Limited what we now refer to as Alpha and Beta.

Basically what happened is they put out, they made what they thought was enough for like a year sold out in three weeks then they made another set which I thought was enough for a year sold out in a week Alpha is very similar to beta there's two cards that were missing from Alpha Circle Protection Black and Volcanic Island

those got added and then they added one more art for each basic land in beta just so they could say I think over 300 cards on the advertising and stuff but anyway one of the things I want to talk about today is there's a lot of of charm in Alpha. There's a lot of quirky things in Alpha. So I want to walk through and just talk about some of the things when the game began, things that aren't so anymore, but were true

when the game began. So that's today, just talking about some of the fun quirks of Alpha. So I'm going to start by going through the card types and talking about how the card types were a little bit different. We'll start with creatures. So creatures actually did not say creature on them. They said summon. So they said summon and they said a creature type. One of the rules that shortly after Alpha came to be true for a while was that each creature had only one creature type. Actually, in Alpha, there are a few cards that have, I mean, usually when they had more than one creature type, they went together. Like, I believe Birds of Paradise was originally like Manor Birds or something.

So, but mostly, mostly they had one thing, but it would say summon and would say they're creature type. Power and toughness was the same. Mostly, like, a lot of the things, by the way, a lot of things were the same. The mana symbols, we tweaked them a little bit later, but basically the mana symbols and the way we did mana cost and the positioning of where the titles are and where the power toughness is, all that has stayed the same since Alpha. But it was interesting, like, in Alpha, for example, there's a card like terror where it's

destroyed target creature, non-black, not an artifact creature. But there's nowhere on a lot of the creatures that even the word creature was on the card. Like, how did you know that Goblin King was a creature? I mean, maybe you could go, well, only creatures have power and toughness. It is power, toughness, so I guess it's a creature. But one thing as we realized was it was just odd that the card, like not all the car types were on the card in Alpha. And so, like I said, creature, it just was summoned. I think Richard did that because it was flavorful.

Like, oh, summon gobbling, summon elf. I mean, and it is flavorful. And the idea that you summon creatures and stuff, vernacularly was fun. But it just was a little bit weird that there's cards that interacted with creatures, and there's nothing on the cards that were creatures that often would say, yeah, yeah, this is what we mean. this is a creature. A lot of it was kind of implied, like you would assume that's a creature. It looks like a creature, but come sixth edition, we changed that up so that it actually

said creature. Another car type that did not say, exactly did not say his name, was enchantments. Now, there are two types of enchantments, sort of what we call local and global, although those are old terms. There are oras that go on something, and there are general enchantments that sit on the battlefield. General enchantments did say enchantment on them. But if you were an aura, that term didn't exist yet, it would say enchant and it would say the thing you enchant.

Enchant creature, enchant land. In fact, there's a card that was enchant dead creature. One of the interesting things about a lot of the templating in Alpha was a lot of it was done without this preciseness that the rules would later have, but in a way that was just as flavorful as possible. I think one of the ideas that Richard was really enamored with, which made a lot of sense. I believe part of the reason Magic became such an immediate hit

was that the game was just dripping with flavor. And a lot of that was some choice early on to really make a lot of the conscious. Like, obviously, you know, the decision was made in the beginning, still true, obviously, that the deck is not called a deck. It's called the library. And the discard pile, it's not called the discard pile. It's called the graveyard. At the time, by the way, the battlefield wasn't yet the battlefield.

That would come much later, like 2010, magic 2010, I believe. It was just in play. Things are in play. And there's some confusion there because you play cards, and there were things in play. So anything that was an aura. And also, now, for example, if things are an aura, or as a subdubts, so this is enchantment aura,

and then it says enchant whatever in the rule text of the card. It used to just be enchant whatever. whatever he enchanted was on the card type line. And so if I enchant a creature, just say enchant creature. And that's the other quirky thing. So creatures wouldn't have the word creature on them. But as that went on creatures did, in fact, have the word creature on their type line. Oh, no, no, but they weren't creatures.

And that was confusing a little bit. Because there are things like raised dead is like, put a creature card in your graveyard in your hand. Like, here's cards that have the word creature on their type line. But they're not creatures. Now, artifacts did in fact say artifact on them, but there were different kinds of artifacts. A mono artifact meant it's an artifact that you had to tap to use. Now, note, there wasn't a tap symbol on the card that a mono artifact just implied by the word mono that you had to tap to use it.

And a mono artifact, I mean, essentially a mono artifact just meant you had to tap to use it. it but we didn't write the word the alpha did not have a tap symbol by the way the tap symbol didn't come till a little bit later it just would say tap it would write out tap to blah the idea of tapping as a cost that wasn't there yet um that didn't really happen until we had a symbol um uh the colon did exist when there was activated when there was manna activations so if you cost red manna the colon was there, but the colon wasn't there for some other cost that weren't mana. I don't believe the colon was there yet. Okay, so other than mono artifacts, there was poly artifacts. Poly artifacts that you could activate as many times as you wanted. And then there were continuous artifacts. Those are

artifacts, kind of like enchantments that had an effect while they were on the board. There was a rule in Alpha, by the way, that we got rid of in Sixth Edition that said, if artifact is tapped, it turns off. Might have said non-creature. But if you had a continuous artifact, like one of the famous ones, was Howling Mine. So Howling Mine's a card that says every player during their upkeep draws an extra card. So if you tap Howling Mine, Howling Mine's effect no longer happens. So one of the common things to do, there's a card called Icy Manipulator in Alpha that you could spend mana and then tap something.

So you would have the Holland Mine, you would draw the extra card, but then you would tap it before your opponent's turn so they wouldn't get to draw the extra card. They would untap on your turn so that you could draw the card. That causes endless problems. We've constantly forgetting about artifacts shutting off. There's a card, not an alpha, but there's a card called Sands of Time in Mirage or Visions that, I think it was visions, that caused us endless headache just because you could turn the card off so you could like sort of lock down your opponent but then turn it off for you and anyway

it was problematic. The final artifact, I believe was artifact creature, artifact creature. So artifact creatures in Alpha did exist. They had power toughness. They did not have a creature type. In fact, artifact creatures did not have a creature type

for a good chunk of time. It was actually quite a while for artifact creatures. I was, I was the big advocate to get them creature types. In fact, I was the advocate that said all creatures should have creature types, and I fought very hard for artifact creatures, and we started introducing.

Now, the interesting thing is, I think there were, there were cards like Gollums and stuff, but I don't think Gollum was a creature type originally because artifact creatures didn't have creature types. Artifacts also, in Alpha, had a brown, they were brown. Their frame was brown.

At some point, we realized that the artifact frame and the land frame are a little too close to each other in color, and so we changed artifacts from being brown to being silver, which is what they are now. Originally, when we first printed them, they were a little too light silver, and they were getting confused with white, and then we had to sort of silver them up a little bit more and make sure they felt different from white. But yeah, so the frame for artifacts was just a different frame. In fact, the frames in Alpha got redone in eighth edition when we changed over the frames in general.

So there's a lot of stuff. Yes, for Mereforce and Chris Rush did all the graphic design on the original game. And if you look at it, there's a lot of texturing behind the boxes. Like the green text box, I believe it's like a leaf. And the red one, I want to say, is meat. I don't know what it was. It looks like meat.

And the black one had like little bubbles, like a bubbling swamp. So anyway, there's a lot of cool little things. Oh, the other thing that people might realize just talking about graphic design. So the back of the magic card, what is the back of the magic card? Well, if you bought Alpha and bought the starter box, which came of 60 cards, it showed you that that was a book. The back is the cover of a tome. And the starter box in Alpha was a tome.

And like the sides of it had pages. And you could see that that's what the card was representing was, it was a magical tone. That's what the back is. But if you ever wondered what the magic back is. Okay. Next up. So incident of sorceries existed.

There was another card type, though, what we called interrupts. So the idea back in Alpha, the stack didn't exist yet. Last in first out didn't exist yet. It used things they called the batches. And batches were sort of, it's hard to describe, but effects that would come together. The other weird thing was like direct damage didn't happen until the end of a batch.

So whether or not, so right now in magic, let's say I lightening bolt a creature and you giant growth it in response, you saved the creature. If you giant growth the creature and a lightning bolt in response, I destroy the creature, right? Whatever cast last happens first.

But in the way Alpha worked, that damage didn't resolve until the very end. So no matter when you cast the giant growth, it would do the damage at the end. So the giant growth would save it no matter when you cast it, even if you giant growth first, then the lady bolted. Which was not an intuitive agreeable. So interrupts, basically, for those that have never heard of interrupts, the idea originally was you could respond to instance but you could only respond to interrupts with other interrupts.

So all counterspells were interrupts, and all the things that produced mana mostly were interrupts. And so the idea was that if I did something, if I didn't interrupt, unless you had another interrupt, you couldn't interact with it. And so there are certain kinds of effects that you can only interact with other interrupts. Eventually, what we realized with Last and First Art solves a lot of those problems,

and so we didn't need them. So in sixth edition, when the new rules took place, interrupts went away. Lans. So, lands, the biggest difference of lands over time,

the original Alpha and Lans had text, which I believe said, something like tap this to add one, you know, white mana to your manapool. So it spelled it out.

It had words. I referred to the manapool. Eventually, we learned that the less words were a little bit better for people understanding what was going on.

that when we just put the giant symbol on lands, people were having an easier time understanding than when we wrote words on it. That is why the basic lands... Also, it looks prettier, but why they just have the big man symbol on it. Lands, the basic didn't exist in alpha. I mean, I think the idea of the concept of basic lands

sort of existed, but the word basic wasn't written on lands. And there's a lot, as we kind of cleaned up the rule system and wanted to differentiate. For example, there was no deck constructions in Alpha. You could put any, like, the only deck constructions, you had to have 40 cards. That was deck constructions. But you could put any number of cards you wanted.

In fact, there was cards like plague rats that were kind of designed to have you have a whole bunch in your deck. I mean, there were decks. There were nothing but dark rituals and plague rats. So they did not worry about restrictions of lands. They did not, like, so once the rules came out, So in early 1994, the DCI starts up and they start doing sanctioning and having tournaments and they start having to have tournament rules.

When they did that, they then needed a way to say, well, you can only have four of any one card except these five lands, the basic lands. And so in order to call those out, they needed to identify them. So I don't think, I don't think we refer, Alpha refers to things as basic. That would come later. It would refer them by name, like go get a forest or something, but it wouldn't go get it like basic forest or something. It wasn't there yet.

What am I forgetting? So I talked about land, creatures. Yeah, that's the seven. Those were the seven card types. Was land, creature, enchantment, artifact, instant sorcery and interrupt. Those were the original seven car types. Interrupt would go away. For a while, there's something called manor ritual.

That was sort of a cart type for a while to try to, before six edition rules, trying to clean up some stuff to make the rules look better. But Sixth Edition did a better job of it in Mana, mana, what was called? Mana sources, manna sources went away. Later, obviously, we would introduce Plainswalkers in Lorain. We would introduce also in Lorwin, what the time was called typo. We now called Kindra was introduced in Lorwin. In March of the Machine, we introduced battles.

We haven't actually made that many new car types, but those, that stuff wasn't in Alpha. also things that weren't in alpha there were no Alpha had no expansion symbols when Arabian Nights came out which was the first expansion we started putting expansion symbols on things and then later

we started putting them on core sets as well so that every set had a thing to tell you what set it's from Alpha did not have any rarity indicator in fact one of the funny stories is when Magic first came out like you understand So, so the idea that there were cards of different rarities in the sense that it was a trading card game.

And like, if you opened up enough packs, you kept seeing some cards and not seeing others. Like, oh, I keep seeing crawlworm. Okay, I guess crawlworm's common. Oh, I had this one card I saw once that my friend had that I've never seen. Oh, that's probably rare. In fact, there was a magazine, there was a role-playing magazine called Shadis that I think centered in California. And they were the first people ever to actually have a card list, a rarity list. But they didn't officially get from Wizards because Wizards wasn't sharing the information

time. What they did is they just opened a lot of packs and wrote down all the cards. And then they, I'm not sure how they figured out, maybe they, maybe Wizards said how many cards were in the set or something. Maybe we announced how many cards were in the set. So they once they knew they had all the cards, then they did their best guessing of what they thought that rarities were. And they were, they mostly were right on the commons. They messed up a bunch of uncommonds and rairs. Because if you get a rare twice, it might seem like an uncommon, where you only get one uncommon once, it might seem like a rare. And so I remember early on when we were trading, we used the Shadeth because that's the only thing that had any sense of rarity.

And like, oh, this is uncommon. And I remember there was one card, what was it called, Sirens Call that was listed in Shadis as rare that I had a whole bunch of. And it turns out of it was uncommon. But anyway, so, yeah, there's no rarity. There was no foil, no premium cards at all. There's only, you know, no booster fun. Like, there was one version very. every card with exception of lands, basic lands, did have multiple versions of art. So there are

multiple versions of the art. Oh, the other thing, by the way, that could happen in Alpha is the way we do rarities is there's sheets. So there's a common sheet, an uncommon sheet, and a rare sheet. To try to sort of hide what was what, there are in fact, or maybe, I don't know if that was the reason, but there are some basic lands on both the uncommon and the rarer sheets. So sometimes your uncommonds and or your rairs in alpha packs and i think this continued for a little while in corsets um but sometimes you could you could open up like your rare would be uh the only basic land on the rare sheet was islands so you could open up a rare island and by the way same art wasn't different art or anything there is no way to tell the difference between a common island and a rare island

that had the same art um so that another thing is hard sometimes to like it's hard to tell when you open to Alpha Pack whether or not, like what your rare was, or maybe you didn't get a rare because you got an island. The starter decks also, originally, you only got two rairs in them. Eventually, you would get three. But when I bought my very first starter, I got two rairs. I got stasis, and I got dark packed. That was my first two rars ever.

I did get a crawlerworms common. I did get a crawlerworm, and that inspired me to build my very first deck, which was a monorraine deck, because crawlerworm seemed so awesome. It was larger than everything else I had. it seemed very cool. Okay, so that is all the card types. Other things that were unique in Alpha. There were not, well, Alpha had a bunch of keywords.

There are only a handful of keywords that are in Alpha that are still evergreen or deciduous. The three evergreen keywords that are still in the game that were there in Alpha are flying First Strike and trample. Protection, which is deciduous, was also in Alpha. That is it. Alpha also

had landwalk, like Forest Walk or Swamp Walk. It had banding, which is complicated. It had regeneration or regenerate. What else did it have? It had a few... The other thing is, it had a bunch of mechanics

that were spelled out, but not written, like not keyworded. The thing about keywords in Alpha was, reminder text wasn't a thing yet. So if a card had banding, like, go look in the rulebook. That card's not going to tell you how banding works. And even the rulebook, I would say, does not do a great job telling you how banding works.

But there's a lot of keywords that you would recognize that did essentially exist. They just weren't keywords yet. Vigilance, Sarah Angel in Alpha essentially had vigilance. There was two cards, Thickett Baselisk and Cockatress that essentially had Death Touch. It wasn't exactly death touch. You had to block them, I think.

Or not block them. You had to block them, I believe. But anyway, it's not a hundred percent death touch, but essentially what would later become death touch. There were a couple cars, although none in red, that had haste like nether shadow. And still energy sort of gave your creature haste. So there were definitely keywords that were there,

but not written out and not, not actually keywords yet. And then there are other things like menace. That wouldn't show up. The first version of menace, not called menace, showed up, I believe, in Fallen Empire's on Goblin. What was it? Goblin drums. And there are some mechanics like a mechanic that later be called Fear.

There was a card called Fear that essentially had fear, although it wasn't called Fear at the time. They'd only be blocked by blacker artifact creatures. So the keywords themselves weren't, you know, weren't quite the way as we know them. Templating, well, as I said, the tap symbol didn't exist yet. Templating was, I'm not saying that it wasn't templating, there was, but the sense sort of a unified template, meaning there are cards in Alpha that fundamentally do the same thing that the words on the card are not the same words.

Like, one of the things that we come along later is this idea that if two cards do the same thing, they use the same words. And that there are, like, a lot of the ways we do now for showing you when something, like, whenever, or like things that tell you a condition of, like the template and communicate how the card works, none of that stuff was there.

But a lot, I mean, a lot of stuff did show up in Alpha. Alpha had the very first tokens, The WASP makes, I think there are WASP tokens, but the WASP makes tokens. There are cards that have plus one plus one counters. There's a card called Fungasaur that I really like. If you damage it and it doesn't die, basically, it gets plus and plus one counters. So it gets stronger as you damage it. It had counters, like other types of counters went on cards, not just plus and plus one counters,

but things that sort of like would track. Like Richard understood even from the very beginning that like part of the flexibility you needed of the game is to have things that can sort of help track things or have extra components that could bring. And so Elvin didn't have a lot of it. In fact, I think WASP might be the only token. In fact, I think one of the reasons the WASP was really, really popular

when the game came out was because there was no other card in the game that made tokens. And that was so novel at the time that you could make tokens. Obviously, tokens soon became a thing that Magic did it much more frequently. But also, the idea of token cards. In fact, in Alpha, there's no other cards, no rules cards, no token cards, no ad cards. None of that was there yet. What did I think of else?

The, yeah, the templating was quite different. The things that were there, I mean, magic from the very beginning had its art. When we redid the 8th edition frame, the art box got a little bit bigger. But the artist credits were always on the card, although some were misspelled in Alpha. Like Doug Schuler, sadly, was misspelled. His name was misspelled every time it appeared. And there were some miscredits where people were credited with the wrong artist. I don't think any other things that were very...

I mean, one of the things that was, the other thing that was just to remember when Alpha came out was, there was no, the internet existed, but it was in its infancy. The World Wide Web hadn't happened yet. And there was zero information about what, Wizards did not give any information about the game. So a lot of the early,

the early parts of magic, there was a lot of like you would hear about it. Like the guy that taught me how to play. So I first bought Magic I went to a game convention in Los Angeles. I think it was OrchCon, but it was one of those. I bought a starter in three boosters and then someone taught me how to play.

And the person who taught me how to play, the very first thing he taught me was that I wanted to spread my cards far apart from each other because he had heard of a card that you could flip and if it landed on your cards, they destroyed your cards. So that was chaos or for those that don't know. He hadn't seen the card. It's not like he had played against it. He had just heard about it.

He was teaching me how to play based on this, like, rumor he had heard, which was very funny. So Early Magic, that was another big part of it is when you sat down to play someone, you truly would see things you had never seen. There was no listing of things online. And that was one of the really interesting things that Early Magic is I would meet people and want to see their cars just because I would see things I'd never seen before. And the other thing I did, a fun story, is when the game came out, I bought one starter of one starter and three boosters.

And then I said, oh, this is great. I want more. So I went back to the store, and they were sold out because it was alpha. So when Beta came out, I was there the day it came out, waiting in line, and I ended up buying,

I think, two boxes of starters and two boxes of boosters. The idea at the time was, if I wanted to get friends into the game, I had to sell the game to them because the game was going to sell out. What would happen was I introduced

a bunch of friends. I would later buy back all. None of my friends really got into the game. later bought back all the cards from them. But anyway, one of the things I would do is I let myself open one booster pack a day because I was trying to like, you know, like I realized that I wanted to,

I knew that I wasn't getting more magic for a while and so I wanted to sort of stretch it. So every day I would open my booster pack and it really made me appreciate it because I got one pack and I would like pour through the cards and I would see things I'd never seen before because the only place to ever see cards

was once again, I'd gone to the convention. I saw a few cards at the convention. And then I didn't even know anybody that played magic. There was no, there wasn't any regular places to go play yet. And so the only thing I ever saw was what I opened up. So those days were really exciting because I was seeing things for the first time. In fact, when I saw Thicket Basilisk, which is an uncommon, kind of a proto death touch,

basically it's a creature that anything that blocks it, that's not a wall, gets destroyed. And I was, I could not believe it was a card. I was like, this can destroy anything? Like, it just blew my mind at the time. And it was very fun, you know, opening up. And then eventually what would happen is I'd, you know, we start having get together. It was very informal in the early days.

It wasn't related to the Costa Mesa. And that happened a year in or something where I had a regular place I could go every week and play magic. And that was awesome. How are we doing? I'm at work here. Okay, well, I'm almost to my parking spot. One of the things of today I just hoped is that the magic has evolved a lot, just because, you know, it's been 33 years.

We've gone through a lot of things. There are a lot of very quirky fun things about Alpha. We actually up in the office, although it's a beta sheet, not an Alpha sheet. We have a common, uncommon, and beta sheet hung in the office so that we can go look at it. And it's really fun. I know when Aaron, for example, was inspired to do Magic 2010 when he was kind of like redoing the corset. he kept looking at the beginning of the game and just trying to get inspired. You know, there's a lot of things that changed over the years.

But the essence of what magic is, Richard, it's amazing how many things Richard just nailed completely out of the gate. I'm not saying there were the things that got improved over time. There are plenty of things. But so much of just kind of what makes magic magic, you can see there in Alpha. It's very cool. But for all that, you know, there's a lot of... there's a lot of corkiness in that they were still figuring things out,

and there's a lot of things they didn't know yet, you know, a lot of, one of the cool things about the way magic works is we keep building on the technology of it. And so now 33 years in, we've learned a lot of lessons in 33 years. We know a lot of ways to make magic. But early on, when they were doing for the first time, there's a lot of things they didn't know. And so Alpha has its share of really quirky things. So anyway, I hope you guys, I hope you guys enjoyed today's talk. looking a little bit at the quirks of Alpha.

But anyway, guys, I am now at work, so we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. But instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.