Unknown Side of MtG - Weird Old Effect Text - Alpha

Comments · 213

• DA

  @david10808 · 1 year ago

  The original Swords to Plowshares text makes it sound like they were worried that people were going to throw out their creatures that had been exiled with the card

  223

• OL

  @oliveragag8576 · 1 year ago

  The Hive saying "Wasps must be killed individually" makes it sound like you have to kill the wasps yourself with your bare hands.

  15

• MA

  @matesafranka · 1 year ago

  The "CARD ed" typo reminds me of an old D&D anecdote. In one of the supplemental books, the text repeatedly contains the words "iwizard" and "dawizard". This is because in the original draft, they used the word "mage" to refer to a magic user, but later decided to go with "wizard", and they did a simple search-and-replace in the word processor; however, this also ended up affecting the words "image" and "damage". I wonder if something similar might have happened with MtG's text, or maybe they had a macro or custom keyboard shortcut that backfired.

  84

• SM

  @smallmetalowl3209 · 1 year ago

  Maybe the slashes on the Alpha Birds of Paradise were there to distract from the fact that the card does not, in fact, specify that the mana can be of any color.

  53

• TY

  @Tylerbremner · 1 year ago (edited)

  I love stone giants flavour. It gets flying because it picks it up and throws the creature and that’s why it dies at the end of turn. 😅Bad wording in the alpha text but brilliant flavour

  48

• TH

  @thebadshave503 · 1 year ago

  Honestly the part I thought you'd bring up about Weakness is the odd sort of double negative of 'loses -2/-1'

  44

• CE

  @Celal_035 · 1 year ago

  Not only old MtG cards but also old Yu-Gi-Oh card texts were weird, for example in old text of mask of restrict was "No matter what the situation, neither player can offer any monster as a Tribute"

  62

• MA

  @mathieujaillet5996 · 1 year ago

  Ooooh this video reminds that, yes, back in the days my friends and I were first using Counterspell as a removal. Rules were not clear, there was no internet to clarify for us and the games were pretty local and limited to a close circle of friends. So it was making sense at the time that some cards were very wordy ! Many abilities were subject to personal interpretations.

  38

• GO

  @GodKingPepe · 1 year ago (edited)

  Just as a small clarification- Magic does still occasionally use X/X in the power and toughness box. When it&apos;s X&apos;s, its a static effect; it checks once, and then is set permanently. This usually comes up with making tokens- &nbsp;&quot;make an X/X, where X is...&quot;<br><br>* / * Means that the card is actively checking at all times, in all zones. If you have a tarmogoyf in hand and another card cares about the P/T of creature cards in hand, Tarmy will &apos;know&apos; it&apos;s stats.

  8

• FU

  @fuuryuuSKK · 1 year ago

  I wanna say Alpha Unsummon&apos;s CARD arises from a typo/mishearing, where the &quot;discard&quot; was misheard as &quot;this card&quot;, which internally would be transcribed as CARD and then filled in with the card&apos;s name later. You can see a somewhat similar thing nowadays on Arena, where if you have a copy of a Mutate creature, the name of the creature in the textbox is CARDNAME instead of, say, Scute Swarm (which is the context I&apos;ve seen it in Brawl)

  59

• SU

  @SultaiGuy · 1 year ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5F_Bkmc8bc&amp;t=231">3:51</a> i feel like it would have been played for the flavor &quot;Well if the angel attacks, she&apos;s gotta leave the castle so she doesnt get the buff anymore, that&apos;s why it says attacking creatures lose it, they&apos;re out of the castle man.&quot;

  24

• HE

  @henke37 · 1 year ago

  The &quot;CARD ed&quot; thing is probably some sort of search and replace issue. &quot;CARD&quot; would be the usual placeholder for the card name.

  8