(Opened for July 28, 2015)
With Magic Origins being touted as the “last core set”, some of the cards in the set feel like obligatory “call-backs” to old cards that were prominently featured in previous core sets. Mage-Ring Responder, for example, is hard not to compare with Colossus of Sardia, which got featured in three core sets before.
Even if Mage-Ring Responder is a bit of an upgrade, it’s still pretty bad, and it’s difficult to feel any love for a dud rare like this. I suppose we could try to look at it as an exercise in elegance? Considering that the number 7 appears somewhere on the card multiple times, would it have been too much to hope that there would be seven of such instances? Let’s see:
Mana cost = 7
Power = 7
Toughness = 7
Mana requirement to untap = 7
Damage dealt to a creature when attacking = 7
Collector’s Number = 232/272 (Probably shouldn’t count, but we really don’t have a lot of options here)
That’s 6 seven’s all in all. Would it have been too much to print this with Renown 7? Sigh. So close, Wizards… so close.
-
-
Pack #57: Magic Origins, (sort of) featuring Llanowar Wastes
(Opened for July 22, 2015)
I’m writing this while on assignment somewhere in Vietnam, where I have very limited internet access. Since I’ll be posting this (and most of the stuff while I write here) in one whole batch by the time I get back, I decided to just write about one card every other day.
Anyway, with Magic Origins being the last “core set”, we might as well expect that it would be a long time before Wizards would release a set that references more than one plane in the Multiverse. Plane-specific cards like Llanowar Wastes will probably have a harder time of becoming Standard-legal from this point forward, and will only be reprinted if we ever visit that plane again. Will Wizards ever let us planeswalk back to Dominaria again?(Continued from here)
It took me a while to process this, but I soon learned that even if the cards would get cheaper, they also would eventually become harder to find, especially if I’m looking for cards that were no longer reprinted. I didn’t really have a solid play group that I could trade with back then, and I relied solely on the secondary market provided by local hobby stores. I never really thought about trading online or checking out online stores in the internet back then. I probably would have completed either (or both) sets had I known what I know now.
I decided to keep trying during the Time Spiral block. Because of the number of “time-shifted” cards included in the set, it remains to be the block with the most number of cards in the history of Magic. The Time Spiral block was filled with heaps of nostalgic references to old Magic cards more than a decade past. The set made me a lot more ambitious, as it inspired me to collect not just cards from the block, but also the old cards that each one was connected to. The fact that Opal Guardian is a actually reference to two old cards (Abbey Gargoyles and Opal Gargoyle) is hardly known to a lot of players, and I wanted my collection to showcase that kind of trivia.
(To be continued)