Why Were The Earliest Sets So Unbalanced? (Looking Over Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited Sets)

Comments · 207

• DO

  @double2254 · 2 years ago

  Richard Garfield has gone on record saying that they did understand that ABU was very imbalanced, but they just didn’t care about balance because the game was never made to be collected and become what it did.<br><br>He thought you would just buy some packs and play with what you got with all the highs and lows. He very much knew how busted stuff like ancestral recall was

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• WI

  @willowparker-ct3pq · 2 years ago

  Note from the first minute: they didn’t just “forget” to print volcanic island in Alpha. What happened was that the artwork that came in for Volcanic Island had the island itself pretty small and in the background, with a tropical bird dominating the foreground. They decided this might be confusing, but there wasn’t enough time to get a new art commissioned and completed before the set went to print. So, they created Birds of Paradise at the last minute to take Volcanic Island’s spot in the Alpha print run, and added Volcanic Island to the Beta run, leaving the new Birds of Paradise card in as well.

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• AL

  @AlexG0080 · 2 years ago (edited)

  The name of the first set of Magic was meant to be &quot;The Gathering&quot;, and when Ice Age was going to come out, the back of the card was going to say &quot;Magic: Ice Age&quot; and Arabian Nights was going to have a completly different, pink card back. They realized this was a bad idea for many reasons, so the whole game became &quot;Magic: The Gathering&quot; and the first set lost it&apos;s name. Also the reason they came up with &quot;The Gathering&quot; in the first place was that &quot;Magic&quot; was too generic for trademarking/copyright purposes.

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• JA

  @jarzz3601 · 2 years ago

  ah yes chaos orb one of the few cards to have the dishonour of being banned in vintage

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• CL

  @CleazyMane-ef2cg · 2 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCsj10WVCSs&amp;t=582">9:42</a><br><br>Originally Magic decks had 40 cards, not 60. The 60 card limit wasn&apos;t introduced until competitive play. <br><br>The 40 card limit is referenced in Sharazaad&apos;s text box.

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• AL

  @Aluranae · 2 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCsj10WVCSs&amp;t=1757">29:17</a> There&apos;s a good reason Gatherer&apos;s only rules comment on Basalt monolith is &quot;Basalt Monolith&apos;s last ability can untap it as often as you can pay for it. If you believe you&apos;ve found a way to generate an unbounded amount of mana with it, you&apos;re probably right.&quot; <br>As time went on they realized what they did, and they just decided &apos;fuck it we ball go nuts guys&apos;

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• RY

  @RyokuKuzu · 2 years ago

  Imagine playing Ante and the nature of the system bet someone&apos;s Black Lotus that they now cannot use in that game, while your bet was a basic land. And then you won.<br><br><br><br>You&apos;re getting stabbed in the parking lot after that game

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• KE

  @KeroTheInvincible · 2 years ago

  If multiple players were playing Channel/Fireball/Lotus combo at local tournaments, this means that AT SOME POINT in time, MULTIPLE PEOPLE were just casually carrying around a deck with TWENTY BLACK LOTUSES in them.

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• DE

  @democrrrracymanifest · 2 years ago

  You implied that Wizards of the Coast owned D&amp;D when Magic came out, but that’s not the case. &nbsp;D&amp;D was owned by TSR at the time; WoTC bought TSR in 1997.

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• MA

  @marcusmeitzler6592 · 2 years ago

  As for which artifacts got the &quot;while untapped&quot; text, MaRo had an article about it and said that it was a conscious decision. They put it on cards where they thought it was interesting. One card even got the text removed only relatively recently. It had not been reprinted since the change, so it was changed to do what the printed cards said.

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• AT

  @atlys258 · 2 years ago (edited)

  I think it&apos;s quite interesting that in pre-Alpha development they really didn&apos;t know or even have a way to really evaluate the power of cards and their impact, which directly resulted in the vast power variance found in ABU and the earliest sets, which is perfectly demonstrated with the Boon Cycle. Hell, a lot of the Power 9 and other broken cards from early Magic have had numerous &quot;fixed&quot; iterations printed that are still ridiculously busted, which I think is interesting in how it further conextualizes just how obscenely strong some of the earliest cards are/were.<br>One of my favorite anecdotes about pre-Alpha playtesting was that one of the testers traded away his playtest <i>Mox Emerald</i> for another tester&apos;s forest because &quot;they both cost nothing to play and make a green mana&apos; seeing them as functionally identical which they obviously weren&apos;t, but back then they just didn&apos;t know what they didn&apos;t know.

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• MI

  @michaelstapley4878 · 2 years ago

  ABU is a wild time to hear about. 20 black lotus in a deck, each one today worth an easy 250k. Who&apos;d have thought you&apos;d look back 30yrs later and realize you played a 5 million dollar deck?

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