Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #312 - Limited Edition, Part 5

Episode Date: March 11, 2016

Mark continues with part 5 of his six-part series on the design of Limited Edition (Alpha), Limited Edition (Beta), and Unlimited Edition.

I'm pulling away from the curb. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And I had to take my daughter to the bus stop. Okay, so we are in the middle of a series talking all about Alpha Beta Unlimited. So we can continue. Last we left, we were in the K's. So we'll start off with Keldon Warlord.

So Keldon Warlord costs two red red. So four mana, two of which must be red. It was a summon lord, and it was a star star creature. So its power and toughness is equal to the number of creatures you control. Or as it said on the card, on your side. I talked a lot about how most of the effects that Richard had done in Alpha were global. Like, you know, all your goblins get plus one, plus one. But in this particular card, this card was very much about how many creatures do you have.

This is as big as the number of creatures you have on your side. So, a couple things about Kells and Warlords. First off, this card was a pretty popular card. The funny thing is, as time went on, we kept changing what, where this went. Uh, I'm not sure why Richard put it in red. Uh, I, I think he was just trying to make cool cards. And I don't think, probably he was thinking about larger color pie mechanical issues quite as, he, he sort of just put things where they logically made sense to him or felt right.

Um, we later put this ability in green, as green was the creature color, and then we shifted it to white because white was the small creature color, the army color. And so right now this ability sits in white. Also notice there's a summon lord. Lord is a creature type that we've since...

I mean, they still exist, I think. I think his cards still say lord on them. But we no longer make new new Lords. Not sure why. Um, I, I, like I said last time, we, we used to do King and we don't really have any creature types that sort of imply I, I'm a ruler or I have some sort of, you know, I'm a monarch or something. Anyway, I'm, I'm not quite sure what happened to Lord, but I know Lord went away. But anyway, this was definitely one of those cards that was very appreciated. Oh, the other neat thing about this design, just as a designer, I guess I have to point out,

is one of the cool things is it's a star-star design, but because it gets to count itself, you don't have to do, like, star, star plus one, or do a one-one that gets a bonus whenever there's something, because it just gets to count itself. You don't have to do like star, star plus one, or do a one one that gets a bonus whenever there's something, because it just gets its count itself. So if it's the only creature in play, it doesn't die. It's a one one because it counts itself. So anyway, that's pretty cool. Next, Leidruid. So Leidruid costs

two and a green, so three mana total, one of which is green. Summon Cleric, one one, and then you can tap it to untap a land. And then it had the little rider play as an interrupt. Basically, anything that produced mana had to have a line that said, hey, I can be done like an interrupt, because otherwise you couldn't actually use your mana to do things.

For those that are unfamiliar, I'll talk about this a little bit. The way magic worked before 6th edition rules is if I cast an instant interrupts happen you couldn't respond to interrupts except with interrupts so instants can be cast at any time except

you couldn't cast instants in response to interrupts so if I cast an instant and you cast an interrupt I could cast an interrupt to stop your interrupt or mess with your interrupt but I if I cast an instant and you cast an interrupt, I could cast an interrupt to stop your interrupt or mess with your interrupt, but I couldn't cast an instant to do it.

And it definitely had a lot of quirky things that went on. But one of the things that was important was because we wanted to make sure that cards that got you access to mana

had the ability to get the mana when you needed it, it created this weird thing where, like, Leidrew is a good example where, okay, a lot of times this is going to untap land, land's going to get

you mana, so the reason that this is an interrupt is because we wanted to get you mana. But, there are effects on lands. And so, the fact that this was an interrupt meant sometimes you could untap lands at interrupt speed, which was quirky. Like, the idea that you can't stop me

getting my mana made sense, but the idea that sometimes you can't stop me doing things that normally would be instanced, but they just happen to be tied to something in which one component of it couldn't be getting mana. Or Gil Conrongafell or something. Anyway, one of the big reasons we changed

over from the instant interrupt system to the current stack system was there was a lot of non-intuitive things that would happen. There's a lot of times where, like, I want to do something. Nope, you can't. Why can't I? Well, this is technically an interrupt, and that's not an interrupt, so you can't interact. Okay, so Leia Druid has an interesting history. Leia Druid is thought of as being a pretty, um, not so powerful spell, but it actually

showed up in one copy in the winning deck of Zach Dolan of the very first winning, uh, world's deck, 1994. And a lot of people at the time, I know, laughed at it. Like, what was Zach Dolan doing? lot of people at the time, I know, laughed at. Like, what was Zach Dolan doing? But remember, I had an interesting chat with John Finkel. So, at the

Invitational in Sydney, we did what we called Contest of the Champions. Or, no, that's right. Well, the idea was we took winning decks. We took 16 or 17 Pro Tour slash World winning decks,

and we let players draft them. Oh, it was Auction of the Champions is what it was called, because later it would be Auction of the People when the people made the decks. And John Finkel ended up getting Zach Dolan's original World deck, and he got it at a really good price. Because everybody... The interpretation is that a lot of people think that Zach's deck was kind of a wacky deck. Because he had, like, one Lager and things like that.

And what John said is, when he played it, he goes, One, look, it has powerful cards from a time where Magic just had really powerful cards. And second, it works together. All these cards do, second, it works together. All these cards do, in fact, combo together. Like, one of the reasons I think Leidruid

was in the deck was, like, he had a Library of Alexandria, which I believe you can untap with. So Library of Alexandria allowed you to, if you have,

I think, seven cards in your hand, it lets you draw a card. Well, if you had Library of Alexandria, you could draw a card, and then you could play one of your cards,

and then untap it with Leidruid, and then draw another card. So there's a lot of combinations that... The Ley Druid wasn't quite... It's a little more potent than you realize when you actually watch how the deck came together. There were a lot of combos in the deck, and so I think Ley Druid's got a bad rap.

The other thing Ley Druid does, by the way, is we don't tend to talk too much about mana and how mana works and the Leylines. It's the kind of thing that everyone wants a little blue moon we mentioned, but I like that Leidruid is right there, sort of bringing to your face the idea that he taps into the Leylines to get the mana. Also, notice, by the way, that he's a cleric and not a druid. Druid's now a supported type, and probably in the update creature type update change, he became a druid, since druid's in his name.

But at the time, we didn't have druids. We just had clerics. Okay, next, Lightning Bolt. Lightning Bolt is an instant for a single red mana that deals three damage to target creature or player. So this is the boon for red. This is actually, I guess, alphabetically the final

boon. We've already seen Ancestral Recall, Dark Ritual, Giant Growth, Healing Salve, and now Lightning Bolt. So, Lightning Bolt is... I guess it's an interesting argument. In my mind, it's the third most powerful of the boons. Clearly, Ancestral Recall is first.

I think Dark Ritual is second. And the reason I say that is we were willing to bring back Lightning Bolt for a small amount of time, and I don't think we're willing to bring back Dark Ritual is second. And the reason I say that is we were willing to bring back Lightning Bolt for a small amount of time, and I don't think we're willing to bring back Dark Ritual. So that's my guess of why Lightning Bolt. So what happened with Lightning Bolt is we had it for a while. It's really, really good. We ended up turning it.

We made Shock, which was for a single red do two damage. And even Shock, there's a big question of we've made cards worse than shock we did bring lightning bolt back for a little while we surprised everybody it was in Magic 2010 as kind of it no one expected it to return

it really as a designer I'm not a big fan of lightning bolt because it just really warps what you can do it really bends the environment around it and it makes it hard to make cheap

direct damage it really makes it hard to make cheap direct damage. It really makes it hard to make direct damage. It just doesn't look horrible. Because it's so top, top tier. And a lot of your cards can't be top tier. But man, it makes the low cost stuff just look, I don't know, pretty, pretty, it makes it

hard to design around. Lightning Bolt's pretty iconic. It's, I remember one of my coworkers, Michael Donay, Mike Donay, who worked in R&D for a long time, collected Lightning Bolts and he had every copy of,

every different version of Lightning Bolt you've ever seen. It's actually quite impressive. Every language, every promotional thing we've done, everything, every version of Lightning Bolt.

But anyway, that was his collection. He had a collection of Lightning Bolts. So that was pretty cool. Okay, we move on to Land of War Elves. So Land of War Elves costs a single green mana. Summon Elves. It's a 1-1, and it can tap for one green mana. So the interesting

question is, when you go back, one of the things about Alpha that I always talk about is, um, how the creatures, creatures when the game began were just a lot weaker than creatures are now. And one of the ways of that is, there are many, many cards, there are many non-creature cards that we could never reprint in a standard legal set. It would just cause all sorts of problems. Um, and the idea is, there's really not too much we can't bring back from Alpha. I mean, the fact that Llanowar Elves is one of the cards right now that's kind of like,

you know, we've pushed away from the one-drop mana production. It just, I know that one of the things that Eric and all the developers are working on is trying to get the right, make Standard have the right timing to it, that things happen around the, you know, that if anything is too fast, it just accelerates the whole environment. And then people, you know, if the threat ends up being a turn three or turn four or whatever, it warps the environment. So

right now, Llanowar Elves isn't in standard. Kind of like Lightning Bolt. It's the kind of thing that may be in the right environment if we work around it. But once again, Light Lightning Bolt, it really does warp the environment around it. That having Llanowar Elves really, you have to, the environment has to take into account that it exists.

So Llanowar Elves, once again, had a wonderful picture by Antimatics. It was definitely an early, it was one of the cards that people sort of latched on early, and it really was a staple card for a long time. It went away only, well, we originally changed it because it was quirky that it was plural elves when we don't do a

lot of plural and so we changed it to a non-plural elf. That change wasn't, one of the things in general you discover is when we take cards and we're trying to change things, people have a lot of, you know, belovedness for old things that have been around forever. And so I know when we switched over to Lateral Elves, that didn't go particularly well. And then the one drop right now is not in Standard.

This is a good example of a card that is a lot more powerful than people realize because it seems kind of innocuous. Like, oh, just has for one mana. What does that mean? And it's like, well, why is a Mox valuable? Like, it speeds up your mana production. And, okay, Land of Worlds isn't as good as a Mox. It requires mana to cast.

It can be killed as a creature, you know. But it just, you know, when you have things that allow you to sort of skip ahead of when you can play things, that is pretty potent. The mana system is a pretty important part of what keeps magic balanced. And things that allow you to sort of hopfrog it, you know, leapfrog stuff and just get there quicker, you know, definitely is a lot more potent than you realize. And Lanra Elves is a, when you talk about strong creatures from alpha, I don't think people list land or elves near the top, but

I believe it actually is. Okay, Lord of Atlantis! So Lord of Atlantis is blue, blue, so two mana, both of which are blue, for summon Lord of Atlantis. It's a 2-2, and all merfolk in play gain Island Walk and plus one, plus one, while this

card is in play. That's what it says. So basically what it did is it was a lord for merfolk. All merfolk in play, gain island walk, and plus one plus one while this card is in play. That's what it says. So basically what it did is it was a lord for merfolk. All merfolk, not just your merfolk. And it was very popular. This card is quirky for a couple things. One is it has a real world reference in it. Atlantis. Atlantis

is an earth thing. We've been very hand-wavy about what Atlantis means in Dominaria and sort of like... It's one of the reasons that the card is kind of tricky is that early on, Richard was a little more...

He made a little more sort of Earth references in general, and since then, we've kind of retrofitted them, so most of them are retro... Retro... Recon to them, I guess.

So they're not quite... They're referencing the Dominaria things or in-plane things and not actual Earth things. The other quirky thing about this card is technically, well, I think for a long time it wasn't a merfolk. It was a lord and not a merfolk. Although if you look at the picture,

it's got a tail. It's a merfolk. So I think we eventually eroded these to be of the creature type, like Goblin King and Lord Atlantis, to be of the creature type, but not to affect themselves. So, like, I think the card now in Oracle says all other merfolk, all other merfolk yet. We've also shifted away from the global, for lords that are global, and now the lords affect

your stuff and not everybody's stuff. Next, Lord of the Pit. Four. Black, black, black. Seven mana. Three of which is black. Summon Demon. Seven, Lord of the Pit. Four. Black, black, black. Seven mana. Three which is black. Summon Demon. Seven, seven. Flying Trample. So, uh,

so the card says, sacrifice one of your own creatures during your upkeep or Lord of the Pit deals seven damage to you. Um, it's still allowed to attack if it does damage. As long as either you have to feed it one of your creatures or it's going to do damage to you, it still is allowed to attack. If it does damage, as long as either you have to feed it one of your creatures, or it's going to do damage to you, it still is allowed to attack. Some creatures sometimes, if you don't pay the upkeep, it sort of locks itself down and you can't use it.

You can still use Lord of the Pit. Um, so this card was interesting. It was a very flavorful card and pretty popular for being not that powerful a card. Having to feed it a creature every turn is actually a pretty big deal. I know there are some decks that instead of feeding it, what they would do is they would use Circle of Protection

in black or something. They would make a deck in which they'd protect itself from the damage of the Lord rather than feeding the Lord. It's another way to do it. But Lord of the Pit was... Well, actually the biggest creature in Alpha

was a creature called Force of Nature that was an 8-8. Lord of the Pit was the well, actually the biggest creature in Alpha was a creature called Force of Nature. It was an 8-8. Lord of the Pit was the second largest as a 7-7. And in Antiquities, we would get to a 9-9 Colossus Zardia, that I've actually talked about a couple times. There's a little game we played for a while where we kept one upgrade of stuff, making it a little bit bigger. We haven't actually played that game in a little while. But for a while, I was like, there's a 7-7. There's an 8-8. There's a 9-9. There's a 10-10. for a while I was like, there's a 7-7, there's an 8-8,

there's a 9-9, there's a 10-10, there's an 11-11, there's a 12-12. But anyway, Lord of the Pit is definitely, I think, a good example of how you can use a downside in a way that people like. Because in general, players don't like downsides. But if the downside is just really flavorful, the audience is much more accepting of it. It's like, oh, it's a demon

and you've got to feed the demon creatures. And like, oh, it's kind of cool. You've got to feed the demon creatures. Okay, next. Magical hack. Okay, so magical hack

is an interrupt. You can change the text of any card being played or already in play by replacing land, by replacing a land type with another. For example, change Swamp Walk to Planeswalk.

The thing that's funny about that is Swamp Walk was pretty prevalent, and Planeswalk, I don't even think existed. Like, their example uses, I think the first Planeswalk showed up in Legends. So it's kind of funny that its example is like Swamp Walk, you know, Bogwrith existed, to Planeswalk, which does, like, it's kind of, maybe they were trying to say, hey, look at the neat things you can do. Planeswalk, that doesn't even exist, but you can make it.

So Magical Hack, the idea was, there's a card called Sleight of Mind and Magical Hack. They were two sort of companion cards. Both of them were interrupts. And they were interrupts so you could affect spells getting cast and stuff. Like, the idea of this spell was, let's say someone casts a spell to, like, destroy all islands or something. You could change islands to whatever lands they were playing and destroy their lands. That was the idea of why it was an interrupt. It definitely did some quirky things because, once again, because it's an interrupt, it couldn't be replied to or responded to, except with other interrupts. And so it could do some quirky things because once again because it's an interrupt it couldn't be replied to or responded to except with other interrupts and so it could do some quirky things um the other

thing was there are a lot of hosers out there and so it allowed you to either um fine-tune your own hosers or turn off your opponents hosers like a very common thing you would do with this thing is imagine for example you are playing a blue black deck and so you have swamps and you're playing someone who's playing white and so they play karma. And you're like, okay, well instead of me taking, instead of you know, swamps damaging people, how about planes

damage people? And so it was an interesting answer for a lot of the color hosers. It was one of blue's answers is that you could use slight and magical, slight of mind and magical hack to sort of take things that are supposed to be hosers and change them. It was one of, like, Blue's answers,

or Sleight of Mind was, to Circle Protections. But anyway, it definitely was something that was very, I mean, one of the things Richard really liked was a lot of meta stuff. Blue definitely had a lot of what I call meta spells in that it's kind of the color that kind of understands it's a game and that there's text and you can change the text,

which is very meta into the awareness. Like this card's like, oh, that says Swamp Walk. Well, I can change Swamp to Planes, and now it says Planes Walk. But I think Magical Hack was, I don't know, it was a pretty cool spell. And definitely, I think Richard loved the idea of just exploration and customization and that this card, this in Slate of Mind, And definitely, I think Richard loved the idea of just exploration and customization. And that this card, this Enslaved of Mine, really let you sort of customize what, you know, I could take a spell I had and then change it so it did something different than even what it said on the card it did.

Okay, moving on. Mana Flare. So, Tuna Red is an enchantment. Whenever either player taps land for mana, each land produces one extra mana of the appropriate type. What is that? So essentially what it does is, so it has three mana, one of which is red,

and then whenever you tap a land, you get an additional mana of whatever that land could produce. If a land could produce... I think what happened was... I think whatever you produced, it produced another one. I think. Meaning, I think if I have a city of brass, we could tap for any color, and I tap it for red, I think Mana Flare produces

another red. I don't think it produces any color it could produce. I think it matches the color it produces, how it works. Anyway, Mana Flare is very interesting. I think the existence of Mana Flare is what sort of got the idea of Mana Burn into Richard's head, I think. Because without something like Mana Flare, there really was no way to Mana Burn yourself.

In fact, I remember the first time I saw Mana Flare was... I didn't understand Mana Burn until I saw Mana Flare. Because I didn't understand how you could have mana in your pool and not have spent it on the spell. Like, why would you tap mana and put mana in your pool if you were going to then right away use it? And Mana Flare, like, I saw it and I go, Oh! Now I get it! Now I see what's going on! Ah, you could have extra mana because you don't mean to have extra mana. Now, this is interesting.

This spell, this effect ended up getting put in green. There are a lot of spells. For some reason, I think Richard was just sort of trying to make flavorful spells, and this spell mechanically likes to go in a, you know, in a red direct damage deck that has a lot of X spells and stuff. So it mechanically sort of fits with it,

but it doesn't thematically fit. Red's not really the, you know, the deck that has a lot of X spells and stuff. So it mechanically sort of fits with it, but it doesn't thematically fit. Red's not really the, you know, the mana production card, at least especially at the time. And it's not permanent. This is permanent mana production. Red, we since gave it sort of temporary stuff. But this, every turn is producing mana for you.

So anyway, we moved it to green. It ended up being a little too strong in green, so we haven't reprinted the green card yet. One day... I like Mana Flare effects. Like I said, I also like Gauntlet of Might, which essentially had a Mana Flare into it. Once again, I talked about it the last time

I was trying to do infinite, not infinite, but lots and lots of damage. And so it had its four Mana Flares and four Gauntlets of Might and its four Forks and stuff. Okay, next, Merfolk of the Pearl Trident. So it's a 1-1 summon Merfolk for blue, for single blue

mana. One of the things about, it's funny when people talk about magic and we make sure to put some number of vanilla creatures in. And usually in modern day magic, we put in about five vanilla creatures usually, about one per color. And then we do a bunch of what I call French vanilla,

which is like creatures that have like one keyword, usually evergreen, like it flies, it's first strike. But anyway, if you look at Alpha, and people are always like, why all these vanillas? And I'm like, look at Alpha. There's a lot of vanillas. I mean, last time I talked about Grey Ogre and

Grizzly Bear and Hill Giant. Now I'm talking about Murfog of the Pearl Trident. I'll get to Mines of the Goblin Raiders in a second. So this was pretty generic. I mean, all it really did was it was a Merfolk. And in fact, it was the only Merfolk. Remember, Lord of Atlantis was not a Merfolk. So if you wanted to make a Merfolk deck, the only Merfolk you had was this card.

And the funny thing, the compelling thing of how strong tribal stuff is as just a strategy is a lot of people made merfolk decks back in Alpha when, I mean, remember, there wasn't a four of rule yet, which essentially was I played a whole bunch of Lord of Atlantis' and a whole bunch of merfolk, you know, one-one merfolk for single mana, and that was my merfolk deck. I mean, maybe I had a few other of merfolk, you know, 1-1 merfolk for single mana, and that was my merfolk deck.

I mean, maybe I had a few other spells in it, but, like, my creatures were this 1-1 and a 1-drop, and then a 2-drop that made the 1-drops better. Usually what would happen also in the merfolk deck is you had some means to turn one of their lands into an island. Fantismal Terrain, I guess, was probably the most commonly used one.

It was just a spell that literally turned their land into a land of your choice, a basic land of your choice. And so what you would do is you'd take a land, maybe color-screw them if you could, turn it into an island, and then all of a sudden, all of my creatures couldn't be blocked. And then I had an army of creatures that kept getting bigger and bigger. And because it was blue, it could have countermagic in it, so. Oh, the one other trick at the time, by the way,

was blue had clones. It had a clone and an assuming doppelganger. So one of the other tricks that would happen is you would actually have your Lord Atlantis' and you'd have your merfolk, and then you'd have your clones and your assuming doppelgangers, which could double as clones. Not double as clones, double as merfolk, then you have your clones and you assume doppelgangers which could double as clones. Not double as clones.

Double as merfolk or double as Lord Atlantis' and so that was another way to kind of sneak in some extra merfolk into the deck. Okay, next. Mind Twist.

Mind Twist costs X and a black. It's a sorcery. Opponent must discard X cards at random. So this is a famous card because it got restricted. It was banned for a while and now it's restricted. It was banned for a while, and now it's restricted. It's restricted to vintage, and I think it's banned in Legacy.

It is a potent, potent card. The funny thing is, this card, for some reason, a lot of it was at random back in the early days. I'm not a big fan of random discard, but this one was a little silly in the random because it was an expel. Because the joke usually with this card was discard random hand. It was like, usually I'm casting Mind Trust. I'm making you lose all your cards. I'm not making you lose some of your cards. It's like, oh, okay, you now have three cards and I have four mana.

Well, guess what? Randomly discard your hand. So the random thing was kind of funny. I mean, sometimes you did it hand. So the random thing was kind of funny. I mean, sometimes you did it and not do the whole thing and random did allow you to hit lands and things, you know,

allowed you to sort of sometimes wreck their hand just because you got lucky what you hit. My interest is pretty brutal, not beloved. I mean, beloved in people who love powerful spells,

but it was a pretty potent spell, and it was a cornerstone. Early magic, black had two very strong and very annoying strategies. One was land destruction, because it had a two mana sinkhole land destruction spell, and also because

it had discard, and it had some aggressive discard stuff, especially mind twists. Okay, next. Mons' Goblin Raiders. So this is a Red Mana 1-1. It's a Goblin. In fact, it and Goblin Balloon Brigade were the two Goblins. Then Goblin King could boost them up.

The reason I bring this card up is, who is Mons? Mons' Goblin Raiders. Mons is a guy named Mons Johnson, who is a friend of Richard's, who loves goblins. And Mons has worked at Wizards for the vast majority of the time I've worked at Wizards. He left for a little while to go off to some other stuff, but he's back.

And Mons, Mons' love for goblins knows no bounds. That whenever he builds a deck, like, I've just seen him build, take any theme you can think of and then add goblins to that theme. You know, Goblin Ageddon or whatever. He's

Goblin Stasis. Pick your thing. He's figured out a way how to play that deck but with goblins. Next, the Moxes. Mox Emerald, Mox Jet, Mox Pearl, Mox Ruby, Mox Sapphire. Okay, so Mox Pearl is the white one. Mox Sapphire is. Okay, so Mox Pearl is the white one.

Mox Sapphire is the blue one. Mox Jet is the black one. Mox Ruby is the red one. Mox Emerald is the green one. You can remember this because those are all precious stones, the color of the thing in question. So Mox is all were mono artifacts. You could cast for zero, and they tap for a mana of the color.

So for example, Mox Sapphire taps for blue. Mox Pearl taps for white. So one of the things that's interesting about this is the Moxes, when the game first came out, people didn't quite get them. I didn't get them. I remember the first time I saw it, I told the story of trading it for a fungosaur.

And I I'm swearing that I honestly believe I was giving my dad I told the story of trading it for a fungasaur. I'm swearing that I honestly believe I was giving my dad the better end of the bargain, because I thought fungasaur was awesome. I thought I was giving him a really cool card for a card that I hadn't seen. So anyway, people didn't quite get it.

I remember I spent a lot of time when I saw the Mox Emerald, like, why isn't this just a forest? And it took me a while to get to the, oh, because I can only play one forest a turn, but I can play as many Mox Emerald, like, why isn't this just a forest? And it took me a while to get to the, oh, because I can only play one forest a turn, but I can play as many Mox Emeralds as I have. And like I said when I was talking with Landor Elf earlier today, the ability

to sort of leap ahead in mana is so powerful and so potent. I mean, this card is not vulnerable to creature destruction, because it's not a creature. It's zero, so you can just play it for free. Because it's an artifact, there's a lot of positive interactions you can have with it.

I mean, there's some negative because they can destroy it as an artifact, but there are a lot of positive things you can do with an artifact. But anyway, these five cards are part of what we know as the Power Nine. So the Power Nine are the five moxes, Black Lotus, Time Walk, Time Twifter, and then

Structural Recall, which are considered by many to be the 9 most powerful cards from Alpha. There's some discrepancies between the power level of even those 9 cards, but pretty powerful cards. You see those cards played in Vintage Tournaments. They're all restricted.

But anyway, the Moxes are much beloved. We've definitely, on occasion, made some more Moxes. The rule for us is a Mox is an artifact that costs zero that taps for mana. There's additional costs we've stuck on them, but usually that's the rule to become a Mox. You have to be a zero-drop artifact that can tap for mana. Okay, next. Nether Shadow. So, Nether Shadow was a creature, a shadow,

summon shadow, black, black. So, two mana, both of which were black. And it's a 1-1 creature. And the thing about it was, A, it can attack the turn it enters the battlefield. So, it's the first creature really to have haste.

When people ask where haste started, people think of haste as being a red thing. But actually the very first card to have haste was Nether Shadow. And there was a green card I talked about last time called Instill Energy that kind of gave pseudo haste. So it's funny that green and black, which are the secondary or tertiary and secondary colors, are the ones that actually first showed up in alpha. So what Nethershadow did was, it was a one-on-one creature, and at any point in time, if there were three creatures above it in your graveyard,

you could spend its casting cost, its mana cost, black-black, to bring it back into play. So it was a creature that would die, but as other creatures die, it would come back. So it did something that we did for a while, which is it cares about graveyard, the graveyard order. And I mean, there was neat space there to think, oh, what happens if things die?

And, you know, Nether Shadow can do some cool things where I would sacrifice this creature so I can get my Nether Shadow back so I can, you know, use it for whatever. There's a lot of neat sort of interactions there. But it came at a cost. And the cost is people having to care about their graveyard and their graveyard order.

And that can be problematic. And it's just people having to care about their graveyard and their graveyard order. And that can be problematic and it's just a lot of extra busyness. And there wasn't so much design space that was worth it. So after Mirage block, or actually after Tempest block, we abandoned graveyard order. I think Stronghold might be the last card where the graveyard order matters. And so we no longer do that.

So, um, Vintage and Legacy still have graveyard order matter, but, um, Modern and Forward don't. And so you can rearrange your graveyard and look at your graveyard, and you don't have to keep it all in the exact same order because there's no game relevance to it. Okay, next, Nevenrall's Disc. Okay, so Nevenrall's Disc is an artifact that costs four, enters the battlefield tapped, and then for one, I guess it's a mono-artifact,

so one and tap, you sacrifice it, it destroys all creatures, enchantments, and artifacts in play. So at the time, it destroyed every permanent but lands. It interestingly doesn't destroy planeswalkers now, only because it names what it destroys. So, flavorfully it should,

but it mechanically doesn't. It also said on the card that it destroyed itself, even though clearly it's an artifact. So, it did destroy itself. So, this was a very, very powerful card in early Magic, and the reason was one of Blue's vulnerabilities is supposed to be it's bad at destroying things, permanents. It can steal them and bounce them,

and there's things it can do, but it's not supposed to easily be able to just get rid of permanents. And Nez Dis does that. And so one of the reasons that it was so powerful was it filled in a major weakness of blue. And blue is a very powerful color with very powerful spells. I just talked about the Power 9. The Power 9 were three blue cards and six artifacts, all of which the blue decks could play.

You know, mono blue decks could play all of the power nine. And that was quite potent. And the fact that the one thing it had trouble doing, Neverall's Diss just came in and solved the problem for it, was quite problematic. Neverall's Diss, by the way, for those who don't know it, is based on a story by Larry Niven. In fact, Neverall, backwards, is Larry Niven.

That's an Easter egg. Richard was a big fan of Larry Niven. In fact, Nevenrall backwards is Larry Niven. That's an Easter egg. Richard was a big fan of Larry Niven and was inspired. There's a story, I don't know that Tom had the name of the story, but there's a story about an object that can destroy the world, essentially. And so that was,

Richard came up with that as a nod to that story. And so Nevenrall's just definitely, it is a very powerful potent spell because it sort of lets you circumvent some weaknesses of some other colors, blue especially. But also very popular,

very much beloved because, I mean, it got played a lot. Okay, next is Nightmare. Nightmare is five and a black for a star, star creature. Summon Nightmare.

It is flying and its power and toughness are equal to the number of swamps you control. So this was a pretty cool card. One of the early things about Alpha

was Richard really liked the idea that black magic encouraged you to play more black magic. That black magic was the color that kind of sucked you into wanting to play a lot of itself. And Nightmare was one of the cards that really helped get you there. Nightmare was a very popular early card.

And one of the reasons was, it just gave red... I mean, you had Lord of Atlantis, which was a 7-7 flyer, but that came at a real cost. Nightmare didn't come at any cost. I mean, once you were playing Mino Black, it's like, okay, it's just a really big flyer. And other colors had big flyers. So, this was Black's big flyer

that didn't, you know, require you sacrificing half your team to keep it in play. And as such, it was very, very popular. This was one of the cards I talked flyer that didn't require you sacrificing half your team to keep it in play. And as such, it was very, very popular. This was one of the cards I talked about earlier, when they originally put out three shirts, the very, very first three shirts that Magic put out. And they were trying to put out things that they thought people liked.

And the three cards were Super Doppelganger, Armageddon Clock, and Nightmare. And Nightmare was, the art was very popular by Melissa Benson, and the card was very popular. So it definitely was an early sort of fan favorite. And it's one of those cards that kept popping up in the core set. It's just a fun card.

The name is cute. It's a very cute name. It has a nice little pun in the name. But anyway, that, my friends, is Nightmare. Okay, I've gotten through N. So I'm chugging along we got up to oh so I'm hoping

one or two more podcasts we'll get through this but anyway that my friends is today's podcast all about alpha

and beta unlimited I hope you guys are enjoying this it's fun looking back at age old magic so but anyway I'm not in my parking space

we all know what that means means 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 guys next time.