Yes, in my Master’s Edition II, all 10 dual lands are in.

No, I didn’t put the power nine in the set.

The above is my generous offering for those of you who would like to skip reading the rest of the article, but get the general gist of it. If the demographic reading this is anything like the demographic that made posts previous to the unveiling of Master’s Editions’s full content, 95% of you just got all the information you wanted to know from this exercise.

For those of you interested in the exercise of actually going through how I came up with the imaginary list, read on.

The Rules.

You might recall an article I wrote about putting all the Pre-Mirage cards online sometime ago. There, I explained that what was most fun about putting together sets like Masters Edition (MED) is that you get to make up the rules. Apparently the rule for the actual, first Master’s Edition was “don’t rock the boat”. Really, MED was pretty tame in comparison to what it could have been. Force of Will will change the tourney environment, but there is very little else to build a competitive deck around. That’s not to say that a lot of the cards won’t get used in tourney, but very little is enabled by MED. That would not be the case if the set had, say, Necropotence in it, since that would obviously enable an archetype on it’s own.

So when I set out to make my imaginary MED2 and MED3, I made some governing rules. Some of them were hard rules and some of them were more like guidelines – like the pirate’s code Geoffrey Rush told you all about. I actually started just making MED2, and decided on MED3 after I was done that one since all the rules for MED3 formed after making MED2. So I’ll actually go through the article in much the same way I went through the process of putting it together. I also tried to put myself in the shoes of WoTC putting together the set, as opposed to Fan Boy #1 who just wanted to see whatever card he wanted reprinted.

MED2 Rules

#1 – No Cards that appear on Magic Online already. This was tough be because it would be nice to include Swords to Plowshares, but in the end I didn’t think it worth it for just a handful of cards. If you broke the rule once, it would beg the question of why other cards weren’t included.
#2 - No Reprints from MED. There are more than enough unreleased cards from pre-mirage that can be put in. I guess you could say this is really a sub-rule of rule #1, but it’ll be an important distinction later.
#3 – No Portal cards. They feel like cheating, just to get the handful of good cards that exist from that set, or so you could break rule #2 by putting in, say Ravages of War.
#4 – No Vintage Restricted cards. I felt like if this set was to come out one year from now, this would be a poor time to be throwing in a lot of really powerful cards. Probably the time for that is closer to when Urza’s block is coming out, when the restrictions will be fast and furious anyway. This was a hard rule until… well you’ll find out.
#5 – No cards that appear post Mirage. There is no need to steal the thunder from Classic releases later on by putting those cards in an a Master's Edition set.
#6 – Even distribution amongst the colours. It sounds obvious, but it is tempting – really tempting – to ignore this and say, print way more blue and black cards than the other colors since blue and black were so much more powerful (and memorable) in those days.
#7 – It has to be draftable. This is more a guideline that says blue can’t be 28 instants and sorceries. I also tried to go a step further and actually make sure the set was internally draftable – despite not really having the means to do so. So for example, unlike MED, I didn’t forget to put in some enchantment removal
#8 – Cards that are impossible, or at least stupidly intensive to program, are out. What this really means is no Chaos Orb and no Shahrazad.

MED2 Distribution

This is what I essentially used to build the set. It started off slightly different (there were originally 11 uncommons and 12 commons for each color) but I had to move that down once I started trying to fill in some spots for drafting purposes.

MED2 Choices

Starting with the obvious, I put in all ten dual lands. No, not just the allied colors in this set and the enemy ones in another – all ten. Sure, one in every six packs will have a dual. So what? Isn’t that good? It’s not like there isn’t enough great rares to fill out another MED set anyway. I did toy with the idea of doing the 5/5 split between sets, and putting them at uncommon, but I really felt dual lands at uncommon in a draft felt odd. And besides, Worth has pretty much said MED will have the ten dual lands.

Not restricted...

After that, I figured I’d start pulling cards that I was surprised (or disappointed) not to see in MED. Things like Reset and Lich seemed odd exclusions since their well-known combo pieces (High Tide, Mirror Universe) were included. Some other eternal staples like Elvish Spirit Guide and Sinkhole were early inclusions. Then I started picking out cards I think were more casually remembered from those days – like the twin Minions, Tevesh Szat and Leshrac and Ali from Cairo and Blood Lust. It was after I got to this point where I was surprised how little you can fill up a set like this. I’d gotten to about 60 cards just of the top of my head. 120 more cards wasn’t going to be easy. Firing up Gatherer to start going through the sets one by one helped out immensely with commons, and I was surprised to find it was much easier to pick out commons to fill the set than uncommons or rares this way. For one thing, with a common you don’t have to get to sentimental – if it fills a role in a limited capacity, it’s doing it’s job With uncommons or Rares though, you really want to pick the most remembered cards from that era, and you want them to have either Johnny/Spike/Timmy catch to them.

I also tried to make sure there was at least one way to deal with just about everything the set, and not at rare. This was a lesson learned from MED – other than Nevinyrral’s Disk, there is no way to destroy an enchantment.

Still, there were a lot of cards to choose from, and I was able to get most of the Red, Blue and Black cards done fairly easily, with some cards to spare. White was a little more difficult to complete in the uncommon category. It was easy to get white rares, but the cards back then were very swingy for white. Either you get a total bomb like say, Personal Incarnation, or you have common weenies. In the end, I ended up bumping a couple of cards that could have been rares into the uncommon slot.

Then I ran into a real problem: Green sucks.

I honestly think Richard Garfield must have had like a frightening experience as a child in a forest, or perhaps he hates tree-hugging elves, but boy oh boy did he (and future pre-Mirage designers) ever stick it to green. Most of what would be a green rare card back then would be considered uncommon power-level or worse by today’s standards, and what actually matched in some way was already reprinted. I guess it’s easy for so many green (and to some extent, white) cards to end up reprinted in the more modern era of card design since the power level of a lot of their cards wasn’t ridiculously high or extremely complicated, like the other colors (especially Black or Blue) tended to be. But I really needed to get 8 rares in green, and I really wanted the colors to have some sort of balance amongst them. Meaning I didn’t want black to be mostly super-rares while green was stuck with stuff like Wiitigo or Arboria as it’s top rare. In the end, I decided to give up on one of my rules – I put in a restricted card, and just gave them Regrowth at rare. It made too much sense, and it really helped even out green in terms of constructed power. And really, why Regrowth is on that Vintage restricted list… but that’s a conversation for another time (on another website)

One unintended consequence of picking MED2 with what was left after MED was that there were a lot of good color-hosers from the design file of old left – and I ended up picking them. These days, the hatred for each “enemy color” isn’t nearly as defined as it was in the old days. I mean, you think Stromgald Crusader is a great anti-white card? Try Gloom! Or Aegis of Honor would be good against Red Decks? Try Conversion! I did consider that having these kinds of cards might be horrible for drafting. I mean, imagine you drafted a mono-red deck and your opponent put out Conversion. Game over. To combat this, I thought I would make sure there was more color fixing than what was available at rare via the dual lands. I dropped some common artifacts into the list (this is the first time I cut one common form each color), namely Astrolabe and Celestial Prism. This way, MED2 x3 drafting could be more than picking one color and hoping to god you didn’t get land hosed or defeated by a single color hoser. After realizing the possibility of multicolor, I went back to Legends and pulled out another common from each color and replaced it with 5 of the really crappy but interesting legends. Like Jedit Ojanen and Lord Magnus.

After checking through a couple of times for mistakes (Whoops! Singing Tree is listed twice... whoops! Singing Tree was in MED) my imaginary MED2 set was finally done. I’m not really sure it would provide the limited experience I was hoping to make possible, without help from another set for staples. One thing that was really hard was finding utility cards like Disenchant that wasn’t reprinted somewhere (thank you, Essence Filter). It was also hard to know that I couldn’t put in all the Multicolor legends that I liked – not even close.

So without further ado, here is my imaginary MED2 set:

What I did get out of putting together MED2 was that, even though they had 180 more cards to pick from, WoTC must have had one heck of a time trying to put together Master’s Edition. It took me about 8 days to make all the picks for MED2 in my spare time, which for a single person not getting paid for it felt like forever. I really have a greater appreciation for the process having tried to go through it myself.

Stay tuned for part 2 – How I made MED 3