As the Great Designer Search continues on MTGO.com (aside: What an unimaginative name given to a unoriginal medium - haven't we got enough of "Voted off the island"?), I thought it might be high time to play a game of my own. The great thing about this game is that it it's not about answering the questions as much as it is making up the rules. The reason I thought this would be great fun for everyone is that it is often much more fun to make the game than it is to play it. For example, I would have much more fun making questions or the basis for comparison in the Great Designer Search than I would actually trying to follow their rules to design the cards they want. I imagine it would be much the same for Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell - it's much more fun to critique and criticize singers than it is to go through the nerve-racking feat of actually singing the song. For one thing, it is much easier to be correct (or hold higher opinion) when you are the ones making the rules.

So, here is the name of my game:

If you were in charge of MTGO - what pre-Mirage cards would you try to get online and how?

Note that I realize this particular name isn't quite as concise as The Great Designer Search, thus making my dumping on that name in my opening purely hypocritical without retort. Hence I present the actual name of the game to you as Gettin' Classy.

So, you are now the person who has to pitch the game to the studio exec. (I like to picture of some pinstriped-suited triumvirate as Hasbro - one of them a buxom blonde woman who has one too many buttons undone and a hint that maybe she didn't quite work her way to the top, with pouty, full lips.... wait... that is another writing exercise.) How does one play the game? What are the rules?

I mean - it would be easy to say - "Print them all!" The Execs would probably jump all over that until the techs got back to them and let them know all the difficulties they will have trying to let you digitally rip up Chaos Orb and throw it all over as many of your opponent's cards as possible. And when the lawyers will then get back to them with some mumbo-jumbo they can't possibly understand, which someone with a looser collar and a more reasonable attitude explains that what all the mumbo-jumbo means is that ante cards are no good online, they'll probably see your carefully laid plan to get them as much money as possible isn't going to fly. Likely, half the purist consortium at MTGO will be upset that several of the sets did not follow the Rare, Uncommon and Common distribution method, and would be difficult to program. The other half would point out that several of the sets didn't even come in packs of 15. Later, the accountants would get angry with the poor sales that the analysts agree is a result of the fact that none of the sets are really useful for drafting (Ice age possibly excepted) and in the end, you are maybe making it to the third or fourth episode before your ass is fired.

Now, the other side of the coin is the promo crowd. The straight and narrow. The "we are already doing this, so why stop now?" Well, you are probably the first one voted off the island for being an insufferable bore. MTGO in 4 years has exactly 5 promo cards (not counting the Unhinged basic lands). So, even at say, 10 times that rate over the next 6 years (which at two sets a year is the estimated time that we'll be at the end of Mercadian Masques block) you'd have 75 promo cards. Now, I don't know about you, but I think 75 promo cards might be a little small when it comes to cards you'd like to recreate out of 1500+ pre Mirage cards (2000+ if you count portal) that don't exist on MTGO. But hey, you never know.

And of course, there is more than just distribution and money matters to consider. Why print a Mox when you know you are going to have to restrict it? Does the format really need the kind of brokenness associated with the first sets? Perhaps players are happier knowing that there is no way a player will be able to have 4 mana on the table and still have a full hand on turn 1. So I guess a poll is in order - who want's Vintage-style brokenness?

Well, I can tell you there are a number of people whom I've talked to who would like nothing better than to see Vintage online. Of course, most of these people don't currently own moxes or Beta Time Walks or playsets of Mishra's Workshop. Some of them, like me, they once owned them but sold them when they began college, got married, etc... Well, absence makes the heart grow fonder, I guess. If I'm the one making the rules for Gettin Classy, I would like nothing more than to help out those of us who'd like to play with power online.

So without further ado - I'm going to make my rules for Gettin' Classy

1) Have some cards as promos

Cards that are deemed highly powerful, obviously restrictable and/or are worth a ton of money offline for playability reasons are made into promos. I think that would put down the number of promo cards to a much more manageable number. Off the top of my head, cards that fit in this category are

• Ancestral Recall
• Balance
• Black Lotus
• Black Vise
• Channel
• Demonic Tutor
• Fastbond
• Mana Vault
• Mind Twist
• Mox x5
• Regrowth
• Sol Ring
• Wheel of Fortune
• Time Walk
• Timetwister
• Bazaar of Baghdad
• Library of Alexandria
• Mishra's Workshop
• Strip Mine
• Land Tax
• Mana Drain
• Necropotence
• Mana Crypt

Obviously, every card on that list is a Vintage restricted card with the exception of Drain, Workshop and Bazaar. This is nice in that, should you give them to people for attending tournaments (which is exactly how I'd do it) you only need to attend 1 of most of them. The unrestricted ones are just so damn good, that putting them in packs anywhere just seems wrong. Some notable exceptions to the list are: Force of Will and Dual Lands. More on those later. But with 27 cards to promo, You've got years worth at a fairly normal rate of promos there. And the best part? Foils to the top 8... anybody want a premium Lotus?

Note that I've left Portal off the list. I'm not sure in the end I'd do that, but short of the couple of cards that portal brings to vintage (Imperial Seal, Grim Tutor), I think overlooking portal will be the easier route to go in the long run.

2) Make a new block out of the remaining cards. Release them in packs of 15.

There are still a host of great cards not found found in that list above. Dual Lands and Force of Will obviously come to mind, but other great cards - fun cards, are waiting to come back. Cards like The Abyss, All Hallow's Eve, Tawnos's Coffin and Shahrazad (yeah - program THAT one). There are great cards like Berserk, Sinkhole, Reset, High Tide, Hymn to Tourach and Candelabra of Tawnos. And there are also crappy cards like Personal Incarnation and Veteran Bodyguard. We should have no problem making 3 sets of these cards - 297, 165, 165, the point of which would be to put in packs all the cards that people would actually want. And when I say that, I mean really leave out the total and absolute crap. Cards like Seafarer's Quay and the Five Laces can remain dead and buried. After all, we have 1500 cards to choose from - something in the realm of 60% aren't going to make my list.

The second part of the plan is to make sure the cards in the sets are relatively draftable. I'm not naive enough to think you are going to get something coherent in the realm of drafting a set with these cards. The goal would be to make sure drafting them was an experience that was more than just rare drafting, with an eye to some of the obvious mistakes of the past sets. What this means if you might have to adjust the rarity of some cards. For example, Sinkhole would be bad at common, I think. You'd have to avoid having every green common being an elf or a 6/4 beater. Control Magic might be better in the 2nd set so at uncommon, it wouldn't appear quite so many times in a draft, especially the first one. The narrow cards that focus on artifacts from Antiquities might have to be reduced or removed. Sufficed to say, it would take some testing. But if you want to sell packs, you have to make sure SOME of the goodies are available... and taking a page out of Ravnica's book - put dual land in packs and let the drafters go wild - seems to be a good queue to take.

On the opposite side of the coin, I would NOT call the packs Chronicles, Chronicles II or Chronicles: Chucky's Revenge. If we don't even mention Chronicles, maybe the paper players won't even notice we've stolen their game.

Given enough time, I could probably list all 627 cards I'd put in those packs. But that's not the part of the game - making the rules for someone else to figure out the answers and do the work for them is the fun part, right?

Well, time to have fun - what would you do?