This is the second article detailing my foray into the wonderful world of slapping together sets out of misfit cards. The first article dealt with selecting cards for Master’s Edition II (MED2), and I ran through the process of how I would personally put together that set. This article will deal with a number of issues larger than the set itself. MED2 was mostly about more of the same from the first Master’s Edition – get cards online that have never and would otherwise not ever appear online. However, I quickly realized one thing about pre-Mirage cards - a lot of them were horrible.

You can read MaRo’s article about design and learn a great deal what must have been going through the minds of the developers when they made those cards – a lot of them were textbook top-down design. A spectacular example of this is Island Sanctuary. Look at that rules text: It all looks great until you see the “or creatures with islandwalk” portion that to today’s eye sticks out like a sore thumb. But that’s top-down design… the idea is that you’ve retreated to an island sanctuary, so who can get to you while you’re there? Why, flying creatures and creatures that can swim, of course! The designer of that card built the rules to match his vision of how the literal translation of a planeswalker retreating to an island sanctuary would be in the world of Magic. It’s more important from the designers perspective that the translation of the literal sense of the card tops the deviation from the then highly underdeveloped color pie.

At the same time, Island Sanctuary is a great example of how the developers at the time really felt about the color pie, or at least in its’ proto-form existence back in the early days of Magic. If Island Sanctuary was wholly a top-down designed card, it would be blue and not white. I mean, you retreated to an island. The last time I looked, Islands were the bluest thing in the entire Magic universe.

So where am I going with this?

Top-down design gets boring after a while. I mean, honestly, remember Islandhome? This used to be a keyword that would describe all the text on Sea Serpent (check the 5th Edition one). It was a top-down design attached to a lot of those early cards. I remember it fondly, but not so fondly that I want to inundate today’s audience with any more than we got when Master’s Edition brought us Vodalian Knights and Seasinger. I included Giant Shark in MED2 and another in MED3, but after that I was starting to think that maybe seeing a bunch of Islandhome creatures would really start to bore people. I mean, they certainly bore me. That meant that not only was I working from a small selection of cards, but those cards had other considerations that further broke them down. I mean, do you really need to see Sea Serpent and Island Fish Jasconius and Marjhan? Exactly. That’s just too much of an old, boring design long since left behind for being too top-down.

Another great example of how difficult it was to put together a Master’s set when you start to consider other criteria beyond the eligible cards came from blue. Do you know how many cards that have the text “counter target spell…” fit into the standard Master’s Edition criteria? Four. Total. Their names are Arcane Denial, Force of Will, Mana Drain, and Vodalian Mage. You can imagine how hard it would be with the restrictions on MED2 not to copy MED, and even worse, once you included Mana Drain in MED2, how hard it would then be in MED3. The same thing happens in numerous other places, such as enchantment removal. There are simply no options. I knew pretty much right then that even though we were at three sets, there were going to be numerous cards left out, some cards needed to be repeated, and that some people might not like what was put in over what was being left out.

Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely…

You might recall that in MED2, I especially avoided choosing cards that were on the Vintage restricted list. The reasoning was very simple – all the cards on the Vintage restricted list that are Master’s Edition eligible are extremely powerful, and depending on the release date of MED, would be a huge rock to the boat for constructed formats where they were legal, such as Classic. However, MED3… well who knows how long that might be away. It could be a very long time. And by the time it comes out, it is likely that the Magic Online schedule of releasing Classic Post-Mirage sets would either have already reached or be very close to reaching Urza’s Saga. This is important because Urza’s Saga contains two of the most broken cards of all time – Tolarian Academy and Yawgmoth’s Will. The latter is the undisputed champion of broken. Really, once those two cards are in the game, all bets are off. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to hold back from just outright printing all of the most powerful cards ever to see print.

If we are getting Yawgmoth's will, why not this?

Or is there?

I’m probably going to get a lot of people who disagree with me, and likely a debate, but my gut and several larger, more logical pieces of my brain tell me that releasing the Power 9 online is a really bad idea. For one thing, yes, the Power 9 contains eight of the top ten most powerful cards ever (Sorry, Timetwister). A format without them is quite literally different from a format with them, so it has to be taken into consideration whether or not you want to facilitate that creation. I’ve always seen Classic as a way to consolidate the philosophy of Vintage (that you could play at least one of anything ever made), but with the power level of Legacy. That would be impossible to achieve with the Power 9 online and restricted. However, with everything BUT the Power 9, you stand a good chance at appeasing both crowds. The only people who still end up unhappy are those looking to turn Magic Online into the testing grounds for Vintage and/or Legacy, people whom I can only guess must make up at least a small percentage of Magic Online eternal players.

But the Power 9 represent, in my opinion, the only subsection of cards that the paper community would feel grievously slighted by their online printings. Realistically, I can’t see very many people who wouldn’t want to trade in their power for something a little more useful like, say, a car, if they could play with them for far less online. No matter how you release the Power 9, there is no way to make sure Black Lotus would remain a $600 card, short of really unfair (and therefore unacceptable) release strategies. (Something like having to win a PE in a one-month span, with only a hundred Lotuses total and therefore only the very best or very lucky ending up with one…) Sure, some collectors would want them as collectibles, but all those who have Power so that they can play Vintage would really have no more need for thousands of dollars worth of cards. They would become immediately devalued to far less that what many people have invested in them. To boot, the fact that they remain unprinted would keep Vintage intact which would mean that other cards that are Vintage staples, like Mishra’s Workshop and Mana Drain, would retain all their value offline. By not printing just those nine cards, you pretty much have free reign to print anything else, since the Vintage format would be preserved.

One of the reasons I feel the Vintage community would crumble if it were available online is that the Vintage community is very small. So small they only get out to a handful of tournaments each year, and are found in small pockets spread across the globe. As well, they are generally older individuals who have been into Magic for a long time. Most of them already fit the profile of an MTGO junky. Give them the ability to play their format online, 24/7 with tournaments they don’t have to pay travel, food, and hotel costs for, and they’d likely swarm to it.

Hence, no Power 9. I, personally would love to have a digital Mox Sapphire, so I wouldn’t make that decision lightly. I’d be keeping the best interests of the Magic community at large, which is really the game I’m playing here. I think you’ll find, through the course of time, that this is really the position of Wizards of the Coast right now. They’ve already given hints on how they want to make Classic into its own format. If they really wanted Vintage online, I suspect the Power 9 would have been the first 9 cards on the actual MED list.

Keeping all that in mind, here are the rules I used to make MED3

MED3 Rules

A couple less restriction really opened up the card choices - let’s look at them:

MED3 Distribution

MED3 Choices

You can see that every color had a couple of reprints. This is partially be because I would expect that by the time this set came out, a lot of newcomers would be complaining about how hard it was to get Force of Will and the like, but also because, as I explained earlier, it helps fill out spots that were needed in areas that would otherwise be left unfilled.

After doing this little exercise, I was stricken by a number of things I didn’t expect to happen. First of all, after putting MED2 together, I was very surprised to find out there wasn’t really a whole lot left for MED3. I suppose it would be possible to stretch those cards across four sets, but you seriously run into reprinting a whole lot of pure junk. Despite the split opinion on the actual Masters release, I think it did pretty well by reprinting cards for all types of players. However, it gets pretty slim when you get to the third set. This is especially true in green and white, where you’d end up printing an awful lot of crap at rare that would never be remotely considered rare by today’s standards. There would be something like three Argivian Archaeologist-caliber cards in each color in each set. I don’t think Masters Edition should be about making those cards. It should be about bringing the best for everyone – tourney, casual and nostalgia.

Another startling discovery is just how many things have actually been reprinted over the years. It’s really quite a lot. Time Spiral block actually hurt a lot in this respect since a lot of the casual cards you might want to reprint from that era appeared there. For instance, I had to keep reminding myself that Gaea’s Liege was in there, and that Pestilence was in Urza’s Saga, and also that Magical Hack never appeared again but Sleight of Mind did. To give a statistical example, of the two-hundred and eighty-seven non-basic land cards in Unlimited Edition, only one-hundred and sixty of them are eligible for reprinting online (Things like Darkpact and Chaos Orb are also considered off limits for obvious reasons). Of those, twenty-nine were in Masters Edition. Now you’re down to one-hundred and twenty-one cards. At this point, you start to look at those cards and shudder with the very thought of ever releasing them again. Cards like the Laces and the Wards cycles. Or things like Farmstead – does anyone want to see this released again? Legends is filled with good examples here; does the thought of Cathedral of Serra get anyone at all excited? Or does Crevasse make your Johnny urges rise? The old sets are simply full of that kind of jank. Ice Age also presented a number of problems because of all the references to snow lands, of which you really need to build a whole set around to make any sense. This is the Master’s set. If we really needed those cards, which are essentially pointless to anyone regardless of how they enjoy magic, it would have been better to sell each of the sets individually, like the Post-Mirage sets are selling now.

So yeah, there may be about one-thousand or so cards that are possible to print from that era using the concept of “nothing that has or will appear online anyway”, but you certainly wouldn’t want to come close to trying to use all of them. I can’t see a way that Master’s Edition, should it stick to that philosophy, could possibly be more than three 180 card sets (540 cards total).

I’m sure that if I had the time to actually draft and test the set, I’d probably be making adjustments here and there. I’m not going to pretend I did any of that work – just picking the cards was hard enough in my spare time. In the end, I’m much happier having gone through the actual discovery process than I am happy with the contents of the set. And I am certainly happy to share that experience with everyone.