Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #459: Early Magic Trivia

Episode Date: August 4, 2017

This podcast is dedicated to Magic trivia, focusing mostly on trivia from the early days of the game.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. My daughter forgot her computer. I had to drop it off at school. But I'm now leaving her school, which is actually slightly farther away than my home. So you get a little extra... I'm going to work today because Rachel had her internship. But anyway, I think you get slightly more content today. So today... So there's something that I've always loved about magic that I've always been very involved with, which I want to talk about today, which is magic trivia. So I have, ever since I was a little kid, just been obsessed with trivia. I love trivia. I had books upon books upon books on trivia as a child.

And I would memorize just obscure facts of like what wood was Pinocchio made out of, you know, stuff like that. Pine, by the way. So anyway, I obviously once I fell in love with magic, I wanted to combine my love of magic with my love of trivia. So one of the very first things I started doing for magic, this is before I even worked for Wizards, is I used to run trivia shows in Los Angeles, back when I lived in Los Angeles. And then, once I started working for Wizards, I started running for Wizards.

I used to do them in all the Pro Tours I went to. In fact, I went to eight years of Pro Tours. Every Saturday night was, we started calling it Question Mark, which was official trivia. And the way it used to work is you'd have teams of three, and then I would ask questions, and I would... There basically was sort of Swiss rounds where I would ask questions,

and then your team would answer the questions, and then we would trade papers after I asked a whole series of questions and grade. And then the ones that... The eight that got the highest grades on it would come off to the top eight. And then we would do face-off-face, where I would ask questions and you would face against another team. And eventually one team would win, and there would be prizes. And the prizes varied.

Usually they'd give me nice prizes when I used to work the Pro Tour. But anyway, so I've done a lot of trivia over the years, a lot of the shows, and so today I thought I would just a lot of trivia over the years, a lot of the shows. And so today I thought I would just talk all about trivia, talk about magic trivia, cool things. I'm just going to, I want to spout trivia from here till I get to my work. Some of this you might have heard.

I mean, I do this thing on my blog when it's your birthday, because people used to write to me on my blog and say, it's my birthday, say happy birthday. And so I said, okay, how about this? Ask a trivia question, and then I'll answer your trivia question, and I'll say happy birthday. And so now it's a sort of tradition on my blog. On the birthday, people ask trivia questions, I answer them. Be aware, I get so many questions. I don't answer all the questions, I try to.

And so if you have your birthday, I try to get as many as I can, but I don't many questions. I don't answer all the questions. I try to. And so if you have your birthday, I try to get as many as I can, but I don't see everybody. I get a lot of mail on my blog. So I apologize if your birthday is a day where either extra busy on the blog or I'm extra busy so I don't spend as much time on the blog. But I do try to answer as many birthday questions as I can. Some of the trivia I will give

today might have been on my blog just because trivia is trivia. Some of my favorite trivia I've obviously said a bunch of times. I'm going to try today, by the way, to do a few pieces of trivia that I don't think I've ever done before. So if you love trivia, I'm hoping today I'll hit a few things you didn't know. So let's start with some of my favorite kind of trivia, just sort of overall magic trivia. Okay, so do you know the smallest set we've ever printed, meaning the set we printed with the least number of cards in it? The answer is Arabian Nights with 78 cards. What set had the most cards we've ever published in?

Fifth edition had 449 cards. So that is the spectrum from the smallest to the largest. I believe Arabian Nights, for example, had two sheets. It had a common and uncommon sheet. And then 5th edition had to have at least six sheets, maybe more. Because you can get up to 121 on a single sheet, but that would get you to, or well, some sheets we do is 110 and some we do is 121. I guess we do more 110 these days, which gets you to 330 if you max it out. Or I'm sorry, we used to do 110 back in the day, and now we do 121s. Anyway, more trivia. Okay, so how many different booster packs have we sold?

What's the different number of cards you can get in a booster pack? Okay, so the obvious question is 15, because that's what most booster packs do. So that's the easy one. Okay, early small sets used to come with eight. It's like Arabian Nights, Antiquities. Early small sets had eight. Up through, I think, Fallen Empires. I think that's the last small set.

These early small sets had eight, up through, I think, Fallen Empires. I think that's the last small set. Alliances and Homelands might have had eight. Alliances, for sure, had 15. Okay, so there's eight and 15. Those are the easy ones. Okay, let's get into a little trickier stuff. What other size have we made?

Well, for starters, Unglued, the very first unset, had 10 for some reason. I'm not sure why we had 10. We have put out a product for mass market that was 5. So we've made a booster pack with 5. I think those are the four sizes we've made. Okay, so what letters in the alphabet have we never started a magic expansion with? There's three letters. The three letters are Q, X, and Y.

Okay, speaking of that, we have made magic card titles with all of the letters. What was the last card to finish that? What card, like, at what point in magic have every letter covered on a card? What was the last card to finish that? What card, like, at what point in magic of every letter covered on a card, what was the last card to happen? First off, what was the last letter for that to happen? What was the last letter

to get a magic card starting with it? And the answer was Q. And so you have to go to Legends because Legends, it was Quorum, Trench Gnomes, and Legends. It's actually a gnome that wasn't an artifact. It might be the only gnome, by the way, that wasn't an artifact. Most of our the only gnome, by the way, that wasn't an artifact.

Most of our gnomes in Magic have been artifact creatures. Interestingly, X showed up in Antiquities with Xenic Poltergeist. That was the first X. And... But anyway, Q was the last one for us to do.

Okay. What was the first set name to... Or what was Okay. What was the first set name to, or what was I? What was the first expansion to have a card in the set be the same name as the set? We almost had the card Mirage inside the set Mirage,

but we changed it at the last minute because we didn't, I don't know, we decided we didn't want a card in the set to have the same name as the set. So we changed it for Mirage. The card stayed. I don't remember the name of the card, though.

It's a blue Enchant Land, I think. Okay, it was... Conflux. Conflux was the first set. Now, Conflux wasn't the first set to have a name of which there was a small card with the name. I believe the first set to do that was Visions, I believe. We had a card called Visions, but Visions, the card Visions was not in the set Visions. So the card Visions predates the set Visions, I believe.

What block was every card in the block specifically on purpose named after an existing magic card? That would be Time Spiral. So Time Spiral and Planar Chaos and Future Sight were all cards on purpose. I mean, we purposely named sets after cards because it was a nostalgia block. So we did that. Okay. What was

Let's see. Other set trivia for you. Oh, okay. So What was the first set to have a printing problem in which we had to we had to well, what was the first set to have a major printing problem? Or a printing problem?

So that would be Arabian Nights. We did this thing where we printed and some of the cards were too light and it was hard to see the circle. Some of the generic mana costs, it was too hard to see the circle. So we reprinted it. And so there is certain cards, there's multiple versions of the cards. The second set we had with a major printing problem was Antiquities. We made it so you could get the same cards in a single pack. It's one of our rules that we don't duplicate cards in packs. But Antiquities duplicated commons in packs, so we had a buyback program.

The next card that had a problem was Legends. Notice all the early sets. Legends, there were two different sheets of uncommons, and they didn't mix between boxes. So if you opened a box, all your uncommons were from one half of the set. And so all the cards, so we had an exchange program for that. So anyway, those were the big three printing things.

What's the other one? I had a good one for you. Okay. So, I'll see if people were listening to my pre-release. What was the first set to have a pre-release that would be Ice Age in Toronto Homeland

then had one in New York and then what was the first set to have a pre-release in more than one city was Alliances

I think we had two and then the first one that had multiple where we had you know at least around the US

I don't know if it was in Europe. It was on Mirage. Mirage had 50 or so. We had a handful. Okay. What was the first set made by people who worked within Wizards?

The first expansion that wasn't made external. Because a lot of the early expansions were made externally. What was the first expansion that was made made external. Because a lot of the early expansions were made externally. What was the first expansion that was made by people from within Wizards? For example, most of the early sets were made by either Richard Garfield or Alpha Playtesters. So the first set made by people within the building, well, that's some technicality. If you want to talk about someone who worked in the building, that would be Steve Conard for Legends. If you want to talk about the entire team being in the building, that would be Homeland's Kyle Namvar and Scott Hungerford,

who both worked in, well, Kyle worked in customer service and Scott worked in what we called continuity, now we would call a creative team. The first set that was designed not as a freelance job, but as part of our jobs, was Tempest. Actually, well, okay. Technically, Weatherlight, because Weatherlight came out before Tempest. So, well, here's a trivia for you. Weatherlight was the first set to come out designed internally.

Tempest started before that, though. So, Tempest was the first set to come out designed internally. Tempest started before that, though. So Tempest was the earliest set started, but Weatherlight was the first set to be released. So, little extra thing there. Okay. Okay, so... Let's talk format. What was the first format ever made for Magic? So the first format ever made for Magic? So the first format ever made for Magic was Type 2.

So what happened was, when Magic first came out, it was just play whatever cards you want. And then we said, okay, we're going to make a format now where you can't do that, where you can only play the last two years with the cards. Eventually we called it Standard. So we turned the existing format, which really was not a format as much as play any cards you have uh and then we made format so i guess you could argue

that type one which is what we now called vintage uh was the first format in the sense that that's what people played first the first one that sort of got created would be standard called Type 2 at the time. So what was the third format ever created? So we had Type 1 and Type 2 and we called it Type 1.5. Actually, I should say the third constructed format. Limited is a format.

Limited and draft happened early. Okay, so what was the first draft format we ever played in a large public venue? So what was the first time we, in a premier event, had a non-sealed... I guess the first thing we ever did was sealed. I guess the first premier event to have a sealed event would be probably the Ice Age pre-release that had a sealed event with Antti. List my podcast on that.

What was the first one? What was the first limited format other than sealed to have a premiere thing? And that would be Rochester Draft at the second Pro Tour in Los Angeles. The one that Sean Hammer the Rainier

won beating Tom Gavin. And that was Rochester Draft. We really thought Rochester Draft was going to be the big one, and Booster Draft was going to be like a secondary. Obviously, we were wrong. Booster Draft took off in Rochester. It just took too long. And made people feel dumb

because there was too much open information. Okay. Oh, here's another one. Here's one I don't think I've ever told anybody. So I'm going to tell you guys right now. So there's a format called Mini Mafters where you open up a single booster pack and you play out of the booster pack.

Where did Mini Mafter get its name? Okay. So the format was created by me and Henry Stern down in the Coast and Mesa Women's Center. This is before I worked for Wizards. So there was a format we used to play called Grandmafters. And how Grandmafters worked is you got a starter deck. So back then, Magic, instead of buying boosters, you could also buy 60 cards and a deck that you could start with.

The deck was already made, essentially. I mean, it had all five colors. But, I mean, it was playable, although not. You usually had to thin it out because it had all five colors and all the lands. But it was literally something you could play with. And so what happened was Grandmasters was you would come, you'd get a starter deck, you would play against somebody,

and then the winner would get the loser's deck. And then the winner would remake their loser's deck and then the winner would remake their deck now having two decks to build their deck out of and then play the next person and you would keep getting the cards as you won that way the winner of the Grand Master essentially the prize was they won all the cards from the tournament and so Henry and I made a variant we call mini masters which did that same format, but just with one pack. So you'd play one pack and you'd play somebody.

And the rule was you always played blind. You didn't look at your first pack. And then you would take the two packs, when you beat the other person, you'd take the pack and then make a new pack. Eventually we figured out that the funnest part of the whole thing wasn't the whole taking the deck and making more decks, although that was fun. And we sort of revamped Mini-Mafter Masters to just be the first part, which is playing blind out of one pack. And it caught on, and Grand Masters kind of fell by the wayside, probably by the fact that we don't make starter decks

anymore. But Mini Masters is still going strong, so if you ever wonder why Mini Masters has been named Mini Masters, that is why. Oh, okay. Let's do some fun playtest names. I'm going to name a set and see if... I'm going to name the set and see if you know the playtest name for the set.

Okay. So, Mirage. What was Mirage known as in design? It was known as Menagerie. Now, that was an out-type group. Bill Rose, Charlie Coutinho, Joel Mick. That was a group that Richard had met through his bridge club. That when Magic was going off, he had a lot of the playtesters go design their own sets.

And that group designed Menagerie, which ended up becoming Mirage and Visions. How about Ice Age? Ice Age was designed by the East Coast playtester. So Scafalias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page. What was Ice Age's playtest name? Ice Age! That was his playtest name. How about The Dark?

What was The Dark's playtest name? It was The Dark, which is a bad name, but that was the playtest name. That's what we, after the Dark, we made a rule that said that all playtest names had to be, nothing we'd actually name the set

so that we wouldn't sort of get used, what happens when you use a name, you start getting used to it and it starts sort of growing on you just because you've used it a lot. And so we made a rule that said you couldn't do that. Okay, so what was the first set to have one of these names?

Or actually, here's a good question. So I think the first set, Mirage actually had, Menagerie was the playtest name outside of Wizards. Once we brought it inside, we developed it. It had a code name that wasn't Menagerie. What was the code name? It was Sasumi,

which is Apple Soundbyte. We, for a while, named our sets after Apple Soundbytes. And the reason is everybody in Wizards at the time had a Mac. And if you...

We'd have a folder that would be the set. And when you'd open the folder it would make the sound because it was named after one of the sound files and so Mirage was Sasumi and Alliances was Quack and shortly

after we started I started doing code names that I thought were more fun rather than things that had to be sound files so we quickly moved away from that. Okay. Let's see. More trivia for you.

Okay, let's talk a little bit about early magic. I like a lot of early magic trivia. So, okay. Okay, so this is one of my, I told this trivia, but it's one of my favorite pieces of trivia. So there's a card in alpha that has five vowels in it.

One A, one E, one I, one O, one U, in that order. What is the card? And the answer is scavenging ghoul, as a wordplay person. Now, here's another cool one. as a wordplay person. Now, here's another cool one. There's another card in alpha that has the vowels A, E, I, O, and U appear together.

I mean, there's consonants in between. But there's a string of vowels that go A, E, I, O, U in order in another name, although it has other vowels in it. What is that card? And that is Magnetic Mountain. Anyway, I love stuff like that.

Okay, so what cards are in beta but not in alpha? The answer is Circle Protection Black, Volcanic Island, and five different arts of basic lands. And the reason is they accidentally left off Circle of Protection Black and COP mistakenly off the sheets and fixed in beta. But the reason they added five lands with new art

was they then could say over 300 cards. And it was 290-something. It sounded sexy to say over 300 cards. Okay they thought it was 290 something. They thought it sounded sexier to say over 300 cards. Okay. What was Magic's... When we first announced Magic, what was the name we announced it at? It wasn't

Magic. What was it? Now, it obviously changed before the thing came out, but our first announcement of the product, it was called Mana Clash. I guess we later named a card after it. What happened was there's belief that magic couldn't be

copyrighted because it's just too basic a word. And then so they tried Mana Clash and the Richard came back

and said, oh, magic is just the perfect name for it. So they decided to give that's when The Gathering got added. And the reason The Gathering was added

was magic was too generic to be trademarked. But magic, The Gathering got added. And the reason the Gathering was added was Magic was too generic to be trademarked. But Magic the Gathering wasn't. And I mentioned this before, that Magic the Gathering originally was only supposed to be on the very first limited edition set. That Arabian Nights was going to originally be Magic Arabian Nights. And then Ice Age was Magic Ice Age. That each set was going to be its own separate thing. And the idea of having a unified back

didn't happen until the very last minute of Arabian Nights. Okay, so here's another great piece of trivia. What part of Arabian Nights got done the very last night before it got shipped off? And the answer is the flavor text. So Beverly Marshall Saling was the, or Beverly Saling at the time, I think. I don't think she was married yet.

She was the editor at the time for Magic. She later became the head editor before she left Wizards many years ago. And what happened was, no, but Richard had, Magic had been done so well that they asked Richard to very quickly make an expansion, which was Arabian Nights.

One of the reasons it's kind of small, he made it very quickly. And Beverly realized the night before the set was going to go to print that no one had bothered to make flavor text for it. So Beverly had three different books, three different versions of Arabian Nights that she had been using for editing or something. And she went through that and pulled an all-nighter and wrote all the flavor text for Arabian Nights in a single night.

So, what is the first set to have any sort of story built into it? And that would be Antiquities. Now, you'll notice that there's a few names in Alpha. So what happened was Richard put some proper

names in Alpha, and then when the East Coast playtesters were sort of building a story, they used some of those names. So obviously the name Urza and Mishra, those names show up in Alpha. But it's not until the Brothers War got created in Antiquities that it was so.

Okay. When Magic was first played, what was the original deck construction rules? How big did the deck have to be? The answer is 40 cards. 60 cards wasn't until later. 60 cards, and how many copies of a card were you allowed to have? As many as you wanted. There was no deck.

The original deck construction rules were 40 cards in your deck, and you get as many copies of cards as you wanted. Later, when they started, you know, sanctioning tournaments, they changed it to being 60 cards and having four minimum. They also made a banned list early on. I'm trying to remember. I remember all the cards on the banned list. The original banned list, I think, had four cards on it.

I'm not going to remember all four cards, though. It had Orcish Aura Flame. It had Dingus Egg. It had... These are very silly cards if you know anything about early magic, by the way. Like, land destruction was a problem, so they put the card that did damage in a land destruction deck rather than stopping the land destruction cards.

But anyway, that's some fun early magic. I will, by the way, if you guys like this, do trivia on later magic. I'm just... I'm sort of running through trivia and early magic. There's a lot of fun. I don't know. I like a lot do trivia on later magic. I'm just, um, I'm sort of running through trivia and early magic. There's a lot of fun. I don't know. I like a lot of fun early magic trivia. Um, okay.

Um, what color was the Arabian night back supposed to be? That got changed at the last minute. Uh, it was purple. It had a purple back. Uh, so it had the magic backing but done with a purple, sort of a purple coloring. We made an encyclopedia way back when.

The very first encyclopedia we made, which has cards up through alliances, I want to say. And that in the back has a few random cards in it, including the Arabian Nights back. If you ever want to see that, we have publicly shown it. Okay, let's talk misprints a little bit. Okay, so how many misprints, okay, how about this? In Alpha, there were a number of cards that had the wrong casting cost. How many can you name? I mean, can I name is a good question.

Okay, so first off, Orcish Aura Flame, one of the reasons it was banned was that it was supposed to cost three in a red, and instead on the alpha version, it cost one in a red. Orcish Artillery was supposed to cost one red red, and it only cost one in a red. The Cyclopean Tomb

was missing its mana cost. That Cyclopean Tomb cost missing its mana cost. That Cyclopean Tomb cost four, I think. But it just didn't have it. It just literally was missing its mana cost. I think that is all the cost. Now, there's some other

mechanical differences. Elvish Archers was supposed to be a 2-1 First Strike, and it was printed as a 1-2 First Strike. What else? Island Sanctuary prevents all damage from creatures that don't have Island Walker flying, but that included your creature.

So if you have an alpha version of Island Sanctuary, you can use your alpha version of any Orcish Artillery, which does 2 damage to a creature and 3 to you. But since it doesn't have flying or island walk, damage from it gets prevented

by the Alpha Island Sanctuary. Are there any other? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Red Elemental Blast was listed not as an interrupt, but as an instant. Ironically, so that's a great trivia question.

I may give it away, is what card in Alpha was misprinted but was later eroded to its Alpha printing? That would be Red Elemental Blast, because it was supposed to be an interrupt, which is something we had early in the game, that were the cards you could sort of interrupt things with. I mean, early in Magic, the timing worked a bit differently. And we got rid of interrupts in 6th edition, and Red Dome Lentil Blast needed to be an interrupt

because it countered spells, which needed to be an interrupt. So it had to be errata to be an interrupt. But then, when 6th edition happened, all interrupts became instants, so it got errata back to an instant, which is what it was printed with. So its original printed version is the version it got eroded to. Alpha also had a whole bunch of

had a whole bunch of cards so we use letter codes to do expansion, to use mana symbols. So if you ever look at all my articles and stuff, white is W, blue is U, black is B, red is R, green is G. And on alpha, the way it works is you have to code them. You have to sort of put bubbles on either side of them to tell the computer that what I'm, you know, bubble G, bubble means green mana symbol.

So on some of the places, they forgot to put the bubbles. So on the alpha version of the cards, sometimes letters show up instead of mana symbols. It didn't happen in any mana costs, but it happened in upkeep costs, and I think maybe some activation. I think it mostly happened in upkeep costs is where it happened. That's where they, I think maybe some I think it mostly happened in upkeep costs is where it happened that's where they

I think when it was activation cost or a mana cost those they were vigilant about but when they were floating in the middle

I'm not quite sure what caused the problem actually maybe when you float in the middle you have to template it differently

but like the upkeep for force of nature for example is supposed to cost green green green green instead it costs g g g g for Force of Nature, for example, is supposed to cost green, green, green, green.

Instead, it costs G, G, G, G. What other? Oh, here's another great one, which is, so when Unlimited came out, one card had a new piece of art. Which card and why? And so it was Plateau, which is one of the dual lands

and the reason was that they lost when they went to print it the original file got corrupted and they didn't have the art they didn't have the original art and so the last minute

they had to substitute a piece of art that they had for Ice Age I think Ice Age Ice Age had dual lands and they grabbed a piece of Ice Age land and put it Age. Ice Age had dual lands and they grabbed a piece of Ice Age land

and put it in and I believe is what happened. Okay, so here's another great question. There's a card in Alpha that the art on the card was originally commissioned for Tropical Island,

but something about the art made Richard feel like they ended up getting a new piece of art for Tropical Island and they made a brand new card top-down from that art. What art? Birds of Paradise!

Birds of Paradise, actually, that was Tropical Island art, and Richard felt the bird was just too prominent. So he ended up making a card for the bird. So that was one of the last-minute additions. Also, there was a card whose art bird. So that was one of the last minute additions. Also, there was a card whose art didn't come in that Jesper Mirfors was the artist and at the last minute

he had to scramble something together because the art didn't come in. What card was that? That was Howling Mine. Which is like eyes in a cave. Oh, not Howling Mine. Sorry. Not Howling Mine, that's Howling Mine. Was the black spell that you can play your opponent's cards. Word of Command.

He took the eyes, I think, from Howling Mine and cropped into it and made it its own art, I believe is what happened. But anyway, that's why the art is like eyes in the middle of the dark because the art didn't come in. Okay, what alpha piece of art got oriented sideways from what the artist intended the art to be? That the artist had intended it to be a certain direction,

and they didn't understand that and turned it sideways. And so the card art as you know it is actually sideways from the original intent of the artist. What card is that? Terror. Original Terror. The guy's kind of on his back. He wasn't supposed to be on his back. He was supposed to be on his side. Anyway, that

didn't get caught until later. Anyway, I'm now coming up to work. So I'm not sure what you guys thought of a trivia. This is going to be sputting up trivia. If you guys like this, this is something I can do more of. I did early Magic Trivia today. I can do later trivia and stuff.

But anyway, just a little... I do a lot of very structured podcasts every once in a while. I like doing something just a little more off the top of my head. I mean, I do a lot of them off the top of my head. But I mean, where I don't... I haven't mapped out the subject matter per se. And so I just... I know a lot of trivia. So it's fun just sort of spouting off trivia. So anyway, if you guys enjoyed this, let me know. I could do more trivia podcasts. If not, maybe, maybe this is a

one of a kind, but we shall see. But anyway, I just showed up at work. So that, we all know what that means. It's the end of my drive to work. It's not a talk in magic. It's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you soon.