Locations
As with all of our spoiler lists, only fully revealed cards will be displayed here. Cards with missing game text will not be featured. We will include cards without revealed art and update them appropriately. Many of these cards were revealed in other languages and translated into English so the exact names and readings of the cards may differ. I have taken the liberty of creating the cards myself in a set editor so please forgive some of the artistic deformities. This is the nature of a Visual Spoiler. Stay tuned to this page and MTG Realm for the latest spoilers. Expect commentary weekly on the Gathering Magic main page as cards are revealed.
* 15 Premium foil cards, including 8 with new art
* An exclusive spindown life counter
* A collector’s guide
* Each card has been printed using a foil process unique to the “From the Vault” series.
* The 15 cards are all printed in the current card frame – for several, it is for the first time.
* 8 cards have new artwork commissioned from artists including Rebecca Guay, John Avon, and Randy Gallegos.
* From the Vault: Exiled will be available world-wide in English only, and will have an extremely limited print run.
* All cards are black-bordered and tournament legal. This means that these cards are legal for use in any tournaments where the original printings are still legal.
This product expected to be available August 28 2009, for the suggested retail price $ 34.99 (US dollars)
From the Vault Exiled Card List (as of 8/6/09):
(From the Official Announcement)
Balance
Balance has showed that even one copy of a sufficiently powerful card can warp games in formats with powerful tutoring effects. Multicolored control decks were among the best decks in Vintage for a long time. One of the reasons they were so strong is that if an aggressive creature deck got ahead of them, all they had to do to catch up was find their single Balance with one of their myriad tutoring effects. This meant that any creature deck had a massively uphill battle to fight, which had an oppressive effect on the format. Good players simply played control decks rather than expose themselves to getting Balanced out of games.
Balance has been printed in foil in the new card frame before, but this time we chose to give it entirely new art. Here it is!
Berserk
Early Magic developers systematically overestimated creatures and underestimated spells. One manifestation of this is the fact that Berserk was on the very first restricted list in 1994, but Balance was unrestricted until 1995. This seems hardly fair to me; I can't imagine a healthy format that contains four Balances, but Berserk has caused no problems since its unrestriction. Now Berserk has been released from the restriction it languished in for years, and it's legal to play four copies of this awesome foil version in Vintage.
Channel
Mana is one thing we use to balance Magic, and Channel is a great way to circumvent the need for mana. The near-instant win that Channel and Fireball together provided made them one of Magic's first famous combinations, and I'm sure there are similarly degenerate things people would do these days with access to four Channels. Thankfully, Vintage only allows players one.
Gifts Ungiven
Powerful things happen any time strong tutoring and card advantage is paired with tons of mana. Extended decks have used Gifts Ungiven with the Urza's lands to set up infinite Mindslaver recursion and with Heartbeat of Spring to create a high storm count. In Vintage it combined so well with Mana Drain and Yawgmoth's Will that it had to be restricted. However, in non-Eternal formats this card has enabled interesting decks that weren't miserably overpowered. Compared to some of the other cards in From the Vault: Exiled, Gifts Ungiven worked out pretty well.
Goblin Lackey
It's no fun when a game is over so quickly that no one got to make any decisions. When Goblin Lackey was printed, the most exciting Goblin to cheat into play was Goblin Mutant. This was fun and exciting to do, but could be foiled by a simple Terror on the Mutant. Onslaught block gave Goblin Lackey a new friend in the form of Seige-Gang Commander, which significantly increased the potential lethality of an unopposed Goblin Lackey and forced the banning of Goblin Lackey in Extended as part of a push to slow the format down.
A two-card combination like Goblin Lackey and Siege-Gang Commander is something that we try to avoid putting into a Standard environment. However, Magic is fun because it is modular and we do our best to allow cards to interact with other cards. The existence of Goblin Lackey in Urza's Saga must have made it difficult to justify putting a powerful and expensive Goblin in any of the sets that would be in Standard with it, but the developers of Urza's Saga must have known that someday a very powerful Goblin would see print. Putting limitations on cards like Goblin Lackey that reduced interactions with future cards is a way to avoid problems, but it usually costs far too much in lost interactivity between cards to be worth it.
This will be the first foil Goblin Lackey, and it has new art. Here it is!
Kird Ape
Some may be confused by the presence of Kird Ape on this list, but it was on the very first Extended banned list. The card was considered to be too powerful a creature for the format, so it was removed. Oddly, that same format also contained far sicker spells like Necropotence. It's quite rare that a creature built only to attack and block causes serious problems, and that is why you no longer find things like Kird Ape or Tarmogoyf on our modern banned lists.
Lotus Petal
Magic's history has shown that one-shot mana acceleration cards are usually either extremely powerful or almost irrelevant. The last time we tried to print a new "fair" one was Coldsnap's Rite of Flame, which later helped fuel the Dragonstorm deck that won the World Championships in 2006. Given that, you might wonder why we would print them at all. The reason is that even if they aren't powerful, they are very appealing to players. When I drafted Tempest back in 1997 at my local store almost every Lotus Petal we opened found its way into someone's main deck even though tournament players considered it unplayable in Limited. This continues today; Lotus Petal is very popular in casual Classic games on Magic Online. It is sad to me as a developer when a card archetype that popular is so dangerous that we can barely make any of them.
Mystical Tutor
Searching your library for cards—"tutoring"—is very powerful, even at great cost. Spells like Demonic Tutor and Demonic Consultation that put cards immediately into a player's hand are good in almost any deck. However, the Mirage tutors are a little more restrictive. They require you to wait a turn to draw the cards you found, and for those tutors to show up in tournaments, that wait had better be worth it. This cuts down the number of decks that are interested in playing them. However, for the decks that do want them, they are no less powerful. Legacy decks built around Ad Nauseam are not afraid to play Mystical Tutor, nor are Vintage decks that can use cards like Yawgmoth's Will or the aforementioned Balance to steal games. Mystical Tutor's power depends entirely on how powerful the cards around it are. These days, we try not to print cards that are only powerful or worth playing if they have degenerate friends.
Necropotence
Necropotence teaches many lessons about Magic. One of them is that powerful card drawing engines aren't very picky about what sorts of decks they fuel. Early Necropotence decks used the card to fuel seemingly endless creature assaults. Later ones used repeated Drain Life and Corrupt effects to win the game without playing creatures. The final evolution of Necropotence came in the form of Illusions of Grandeur / Donate combination decks. These decks all looked different, but they all worked fundamentally the same: draw tons of cards, then throw them at the opponent until the Necropotence player wins.
Another lesson of Necropotence has to do with managing formats. Necropotence was a dominating presence in Magic tournaments for years, and many times the DCI chose to ban or restrict the cards that were in the Necropotence decks rather than Necropotence itself. However, each time this happened Necropotence surrounded itself with new friends and continued to cause the same problems. These days, when a card shows the potential to be a repeat offender in this way, we don't wait to ban it.
Necropotence appeared in foil in the Deckmasters box set, but has never before been printed in the current card frame. We gave it new art to commemorate the occasion, although you might not want to know what is happening to the unfortunate mage in the art.
Sensei's Divining Top
The physical operation of a Sensei's Divining Top takes a long time. Looking at three cards, thinking, ordering them, and putting them back is a lot of things to do. Some people enjoy performing delicate manipulations of this sort, but many do not, and few people enjoy sitting across from someone else who is doing them. Sensei's Divining Top is so powerful that people who didn't enjoy such manipulations but like winning were encouraged to play it, which made formats less fun and slowed tournaments down. We won't stop making cards like this altogether because some of our players like them, but we have learned to be more careful when we do.
Serendib Efreet
From the very beginning of Magic, blue was the color that was best known for having powerful spells. However, some very early aggressive tournament decks chose to splash blue in order to have access to Serendib Efreet, which was one of the most efficient beatdown creatures in the game when Arabian Nights was released. This is a failure of development. Blue's creatures should be strong enough for blue decks to win with, but they should not be so good that it is correct to splash for them in beatdown decks. Errors like this hurt color pie definition.
Skullclamp
Powerful artifacts can be problematic. Because they don't require color commitment, one sick artifact can warp an entire format. Skullclamp was one such artifact. The three best-performing deck archetypes in U.S. Regional Championships in 2004 were Ravager Affinity with Skullclamp, Goblins with Skullclamp, and Elf and Nail with Skullclamp. These decks were all different, but basically you had to play with Skullclamp or not be competitive. That's pretty oppressive, so Skullclamp was banned.
Strip Mine
It is fun to cast spells. Three-mana land destruction sometimes comes close to being too good at keeping people from playing spells. Strip Mine costs zero mana and can be used over and over again with recursion effects like Life from the Loam and Crucible of Worlds. Nothing to see here, move along ....
Tinker
Two of the most powerful categories of effects in Magic are mana acceleration and tutoring, and Tinker manages to fit into both of them. The tutoring is obvious, and the mana acceleration happens when the artifact that was searched for jumps immediately onto the battlefield rather than going to the player's hand. Most ways to cheat expensive permanents onto the battlefield require multiple steps; for example, Animate Dead can produce a Kalonian Behemoth for only two mana, but first that Behemoth needs to find its way into the graveyard. Tinker doesn't even require the second step. There are so many things wrong with Tinker that it's no surprise it has found its way onto tons of banned lists.
This version of Tinker has new art featuring a familiar face. However, he looks a little different now ....
Trinisphere
Once again, it is fun to cast spells. It is not fun when Mishra's Workshop pops one of these out on the first turn of a Vintage game and keeps you from playing any spells. However, I don't consider this one a development error because Mishra's Workshop is itself a silly card, and Trinisphere has played a hero's role against combination decks in Extended and Legacy. Sometimes we have to accept that a card we want to make may be silly in Vintage but is correct to print for Magic as a whole. Trinisphere is one of those cards.
If you want to be one of the first four hundred people to get their hands on a copy of From the Vault: Exiled, you'll need to be at Gen Con Indy next weekend. We'll be selling one hundred copies of it each day at the Wizards booth in the exhibitor hall. Everyone else will have to wait until August 28, when the set releases to the general public.
