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Stay with me for a minute.
I have this theory, this theory that the design and development blunders committed during the Urza’s Saga and Mercadian Masques blocks may have been the impetus for not only modern block design, but an entire revamping of R&D within Magic.
Mark Rosewater, the mad genius who currently holds the title of head designer for Magic, has a running podcast called “Drive to Work,” in which he spends his half-hour commute to work talking about different aspects of Magic, sometimes even discussing sets he helped design in the pasts. Subjects discussed include planeswalkers, the expansion set Tempest, the expansion set Unglued, and player psychographics, to name a few. The logic behind it is, “Hey, I have all this free time on my commute—why not use that time constructively?”
What a master.
On his “Time Spiral” (the expansion, not the card) episode, Rosewater stresses that we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes.
Okay, Jon. Let’s get to the frigging point already. What do Time Spiral and Coldsnap have to do with Urza’s Saga and Mercadian Masques?
I’m glad you asked!
First, let’s be clear that when I said “Urza’s Saga” and “Mercadian Masques” up at the top, I was referring to their respective blocks, not the individual expansions. It’s an important distinction, I swear.
The reason I bring up the one-two punch that is Coldsnap and Time Spiral is that while they were mistakes, they represent a ceiling on the repercussions that a string of mistakes can have on the state of Magic. While people may not have liked the two sets, they didn’t drive people away from the game in droves. The Standard metagame actually proved to be quite healthy despite the increased card pool.
In 1998, when Urza’s Saga was released, there was no ceiling on what a flawed set could do to Magic.
Urza’s Saga was first showcased at Pro Tour: Rome, an Extended tournament. This was the winning deck, piloted by Tommi Hovi:
"Tommi Hovi’s Academy"
- Spells (41)
- 3 Abeyance
- 3 Intuition
- 3 Power Sink
- 4 Stroke of Genius
- 4 Time Spiral
- 4 Windfall
- 3 Mind Over Matter
- 2 Scroll Rack
- 3 Voltaic Key
- 4 Lotus Petal
- 4 Mana Vault
- 4 Mox Diamond
- Lands (19)
- 3 City of Brass
- 4 Ancient Tomb
- 4 Tundra
- 4 Volcanic Island
- 4 Tolarian Academy
Any aficionado of Eternal Magic reading this will notice that this decklist bears more than a passing resemblance to the current Legacy banned list. As it turns out, being able to play four copies of restricted cards in your deck is pretty good.
Looking at a decklist can only give you so much information about a deck. I know that I personally have trouble look at a decklist and seeing how it plays right away. Let’s see how that Academy deck plays out, shall we?
Our turn one: Ancient Tomb, tap Ancient Tomb (18 life), cast Mana Vault, tap Mana Vault, cast two Voltaic Keys, use the 2 colorless mana floating to untap Mana Vault with one Voltaic Key, then untap the tapped Voltaic Key with the untapped Voltaic Key
Our opponent’s turn one: Mountain, Jackal Pup
Our turn two: Draw Ancient Tomb, play Ancient Tomb, cast Lotus Petal. We’re gearing up for a big Stroke of Genius here (pun unintended, but I’ll allow it).
Our opponent’s turn two: Mountain, Giant Strength targeting his Jackal Pup, attack us for 4 (14). On his end step, we tap both our Ancient Tombs (4 colorless floating), crack the Lotus Petal for 
(
floating), and follow that up by tapping Mana Vault (
), untapping Mana Vault with a Voltaic Key, (
), tapping the Mana Vault again (
), untapping the Mana Vault with the other Voltaic Key (
) and then tapping the Mana Vault one last time. We now have 11 in our mana pool, and we use that to cast a Stroke of Genius (X equals 9), targeting ourselves. We’re now at 10 life. We draw Intuition, Intuition, Intuition, City of Brass, Abeyance, Tolarian Academy, Mox Diamond, Volcanic Island, Tundra, Lotus Petal.
) and cast Intuition ( floating), searching our library for three copies of Mind Over Matter. Our opponent gives us a Mind Over Matter off the Intuition, and we tap an Ancient Tomb in order to cast said enchantment. We pitch an Abeyance to Mind Over Matter to untap our Tolarian Academy, only to tap it again () to cast another Intuition ( now floating). We search for three Time Spirals with this Intuition, and then tap the other Ancient Tomb in order to cast our Time Spiral. We untap the two Ancient Tombs and the Tolarian Academy upon Time Spiral’s resolution.
We’re at 5 life, thanks to our Ancient Tombs. We can’t take any more damage, lest we want to lose to a Fireblast. Off the Time Spiral, we draw Time Spiral, Time Spiral, Tolarian Academy, Windfall, Volcanic Island, Mana Vault, and Scroll Rack. We could do a number of things at this point, but I like just making a jillion mana and casting a Time Spiral. How we do this:
- Tap Tolarian Academy (every tap is worth ).
- Pitch a card to Mind Over Matter in order to untap our Tolarian Academy.
- Go back to step one, repeat until there’s only one card in your hand and it’s a Time Spiral.
At the point when we have one card left—the Time Spiral—we should have 42 blue mana in our mana pool. Now we cast Time Spiral, leaving 36 blue mana floating and untapping our Tolarian Academy.
Off our second Time Spiral of the game, we draw Abeyance, Windfall, Mind Over Matter, Volcanic Island, Stroke of Genius, Ancient Tomb, and Mana Vault. From here, we discard everything but the Stroke of Genius to keep making mana with our Tolarian Academy, and we target our opponent with a Stroke of Genius, where X is somewhere in the seventies.
When I was a kid just getting into Magic, I used to read this gaming magazine, published by Wizards of the Coast, called TopDeck. TopDeck was ultimately short-lived, but some of the articles in the magazine were very good. The one I’m thinking of is one written by Jamie Wakefield during Pro Tour: Chicago 2000, a Standard Pro Tour, which would ultimately be won by Kai Budde, piloting Rebels.
In an article titled “Wake-Up Call,” Wakefield and his friend Alan Webster have dinner with none other than Mark Rosewater, and they discuss the turbulent state of constructed Magic in 2000:
“You have to understand how we work,” he responded. “We work on one set at a time, and we only have so many play-testers. We didn’t quite realize how the free spells, fast mana, and card drawing would all combine to make such abusive decks. You have to see that it was the introduction of three separate things that combined to make those decks not only possible, but unfair.”
Here, Rosewater more or less throws the set developers under the bus. Which isn’t totally uncalled for; it should be abundantly clear that the combination of free spells, fast mana, and card-drawing would result in degenerate combo decks. It’s also worth noting that here, we get an idea of how the old playtest process worked: one set at a time, with a limited number of playtesters. I shudder to think how few playtesters you’d have to have to fail to realize how completely busted Urza’s block is.
“I had nothing to do with Time Spiral,” Mark said defensively. Then he backed off a bit. “Well, almost nothing. I invented the free mechanic, someone else invented the revised Time Twister known as Time Spiral, and the development team decided that the free mechanic would be a neat effect to tack onto that card.”
I should take this time to acknowledge that hindsight is 20/20. I used to think I would’ve loved to develop Magic, and then I read this TopDeck article and decided the stakes were just too high.
Have you ever played Dominion? It’s a deck-building game, with multiple expansions. Of the games I’ve played—and I may be wrong here—it’s basically about exploiting your opponents, be it what they’re overvaluing or what they’re undervaluing and subsequently using that information with the cards available to beat them.
I am very bad at Dominion.
My mind just doesn’t work like that, I guess. Most brilliant minds do. My mind, however, is decidedly unbrilliant. I mention this because being able to identify and exploit all those little idiosyncrasies within a set, or even a block, is what makes a developer worth being on the payroll. I’d like to think I would’ve been able to identify that a free Timetwister is bad for the game, but honestly, I don’t know.
Mark dropped his eyes and started to pick at his food. “We didn’t think Masticore would dominate the game as much as it does.”
“Then, why wasn’t it banned?” I countered. “And today, I died to a second-turn Hatred. I don’t play Magic to die on the second turn. How come these cards aren’t banned once you know they’re mistakes?”
“Well, we try to ban as few cards as possible—” Mark began.
“But don’t you understand?” I interrupted. “By not banning some cards, you’re banning hundreds of other cards that aren’t as good. Cards that might see play but never will because of the inclusion of other cards. Cards that are just far better because of their low cost.”
“We try to ban as few cards as possible,” Mark repeated. “We really want people to be able to play with the cards they buy. The Banned List isn’t followed by just tournament players. There are a lot of casual players who never hit a tournament but keep track of that list. And if a card is banned, they don’t play it anymore. We’d be hurting them, too, so we try to ban as few cards as possible.”
“That may have been true in the past,” Alan joined in, “but I play with a lot of casual players, and they don’t have fun with the cards you don’t ban. I play a lot of blue, and a lot of the decks I make are very frustrating for the casual player.”
We’re pretty much forced to take Rosewater’s word for it here—that there’s a sect of players who don’t play in tournaments but who pay attention to the Banned & Restricted list—but it’s important to note that this fraction of Magic players (who may or may not be fictional) also have to deal with the cards that aren’t banned, whether they play in tournaments or not.
Alan was ready with his answer. “Well, I know enough that I’ll play them with a deck that I’m working on to the point where I see they’re frustrated, and then I switch decks. But there are cards out there that need to be banned that won’t have any effect on casual play. You know what I think? I think you need to think about the starter-level game. That’s just what casual players like, and there’s no way—no way at all—to move people from there to what Magic has become today. They bear no resemblance to each other. There’s no stepping stone at all from Portal Second Age to Hatred and Rec-Sur. Starter-level players would be aghast at moving to that type of deck.”
“You may not believe it, but our goal really is to get the game focused on big creature combat,” Mark responded. “Lots of fatties and the combat stage actually meaning something.”
“Well, you can tell with the Mercadian Masques cards,” Alan said. “That’s a much slower set.”
The Masques set is the result of people complaining about the Urza block,” Mark explained. “We thought people wanted faster games and better cards, so we gave it to them. Now they say that they want slower games and attack phases, so we’re giving that to them. Eventually, as we learn from our mistakes, the game will be what people want.”
That last paragraph details how the slower Masques block was actually a reaction to the powerful cards in Urza’s block. So, did players rejoice when Mercadian Masques was released, hailing a return to sanity and reason?
No! Players quit en masse! The same flawed cards were still in Standard, just now, they had a bunch of non-intuitive Mercadian Masques cards to back them up, including two of the most un-fun cards to ever see print: Rising Waters and Rishadan Port. They both eventually found a home in this prison-style mono-blue deck that would win Pro Tour: New York in 2000:
"Mono-Blue Prison"
- Creatures (12)
- 4 Drake Hatchling
- 4 Stinging Barrier
- 4 Waterfront Bouncer
- Spells (26)
- 1 Brainstorm
- 3 Counterspell
- 3 Daze
- 4 Gush
- 4 Thwart
- 3 Seal of Removal
- 4 Rising Waters
- 4 Eye of Ramos
- Lands (22)
- 18 Island
- 4 Rishadan Port
- Sideboard (15)
- 2 Bribery
- 1 Counterspell
- 1 Hoodwink
- 2 Island
- 3 Misdirection
- 1 Rath's Edge
- 1 Seal of Removal
- 4 Stronghold Zeppelin
Prophecy, one of the hands-down worst expansions in recent memory, would add more cards to this deck, such as Chimeric Idol, Withdraw, Foil, and Spiketail Hatchling.
I know I keep coming back to this article a lot, but one of the things I keep coming back to is how, in Magic, people don’t often know what’s best for them. They call for bannings, even when it’s not clear what the latent results of those bannings will actually be. They say they want less broken cards, and then when you give them Champions of Kamigawa, they throw their food all over the floor and go pick up poker—or something.
Randy Buehler was hired as part of the development team for Invasion, the first expansion released after the Masques block. Aaron Forsythe was hired shortly after. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Mark Rosewater and other certainly realized, in the wake of Combo Winter, that Magic had become too big to skimp on playtesters and developers. Ultimately, I’m grateful for those two blocks, not because of the cards in them, but because of the cards that they made possible in the future.
Jon Corpora
Pronounced Ca-pora
Works Cited
- Rosewater, Mark. "Drive to Work #10 - Time Spiral." Audio blog post. Www.magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast, 30 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Jan. 2013.
- Wakefield, Jamie. "Wake-Up Call." TopDeck Apr. 2000: 12-13. Print
