I've had at least a dozen dark/smeared misprinted cards so far, not all of which were from a single box. They were from three different sources, at least.
I suspect we'll be hearing about a lot more of these.
Does anybody else think that this topic really deserves to be stickied? It seems to come up about three or four times a year, with the same replies every time.
Well, when I started playing again a little over two years ago, I had a drive to build at least viable casual decks with decent win/loss ratios based around cards that most people disparage outright. One of those decks, and one of the few I still play because I can actually get T4 wins out of it, is based on two of the most maligned cards in recent times: One With Nothing and Barren Glory.
Couple of weeks ago, I'm playing kitchen table casual with that deck, against an opponent playing mill and some discard. I was mana screwed for the first six turns at least. By about turn 8, and following a string of terrible draws, I managed to get just enough mana to drop Barren Glory, and I then proceeded to do little else but get milled for a turn or two more, by which point my opponent had managed to get me down to one card in my library, but with nothing at all to force me to draw. I had one turn to go. My next turn, I drew my last card: One With Nothing. In my hand, I had Renounce and some dross I didn't need. During my opponent's end step, I cast Renounce followed by One With Nothing, winning the game during my upkeep - just shy of losing in my draw step.
I'm fairly confident that the phrasing on the reminder text is written as it is for the sake of brevity. Hideaway is an ETB trigger, so you'll get to take advantage of it either way. Besides, the amulet doesn't make permanents ETB untapped, it untaps them after they've already entered the battlefield tapped.
I wonder if WotC will ever see this poll. Because I hope so. Then they might see what some players think... And perhaps even admit the mistake.
It's likely they were aware of all the potential consequences of the implementation of mythic rarity long before they actually went ahead with it. After all, a lot of players and collectors could easily foresee the result, predicting the practical upshot quite accurately. It's a safe assumption that Wiz could as well.
You can bet that if Wizards went ahead with this despite their advance knowledge of the negative backlash it would cause, it's because they felt they had something even greater to gain. By all accounts, they may have been right. Alas for the players.
That Avon forest was originally a Lorwyn era MPS promo for Japan. I'm wondering now if they might maybe have all his MPS promos from that year as basics in M11, which would be spectacular as they're among the nicest-looking basics I've seen, from Avon or anyone.
Edit: Looking at another topic called "Some 'Blue' scans", it seems that we will in fact be getting Avon's Lorwyn promo art for all the basics, since the first Island in the scans from that topic is also from the MPS mailouts of that year.
I've been using oxygen absorbers/dessicants in by deck boxes for years, and they work wonders at keeping my cards nice and flat, with the added bonus reassurance that cards won't sustain damage from humidity over long periods.
The best thing about this is that it's practically free - nearly everything comes with one of these nowadays, from supplement bottles to shoeboxes to some food items. Drop one in your deck box and give it a day or two for full effect.
Going from memory, I originally started playing sometime around The Dark or Fallen Empires, and played almost purely kitchen table casual up until the start of Mirage. I first started because just about everyone I knew had been playing for a while, and I was basically hounded into learning, despite my personal desire to avoid the game at all cost.
I then quit partly because I'd left my job and needed funds (I sold my collection over the course of three months, netting enough profit to live off for a year), partly because I thought card design was getting worse and worse, but mostly because my friends complained no end about me playing combo. Back then, I was what could have been described as a hardcore Johnny, and I played elaborate combo decks that would only go off only about once every five games, and that took forever to get going in the first place. Honestly, I have no idea what my friends were whining about - they killed me with their unimaginative (and painfully un-fun) goblin decks more often than not. My final deck was a 4x Juzám Djinn affair that was completely non-combo and absolutely no fun to play either with or against. It won pretty much every game in just a few turns.
I then quit and didn't look back for over a decade. I started again during Shadowmoor when my girlfriend and I had gone for dinner at my folks' place one evening, and as we were on our way out, my dad chased after us to say that he'd found an old box full of Magic cards in the back of a closet. I told him that I could care less and that he should recycle them, but my girlfriend, who's a gamer but had never tried Magic and wanted to learn, insisted we keep them. These were all the "crap" cards from back in the day that I couldn't give away, much less sell. Of course, at the time, that included stuff like Swords to Plowshares, Counterspell, and even Sol Ring.
Despite having a few powerful cards, and despite having only very reluctantly agreed to start playing again, I was forced to concede that the card pool we had available simply wasn't very good or particularly interesting, and so we invested a bit of cash in some new stuff, buying a few boosters each from Ravnica through to Shadowmoor. I was immediately impressed by how much more interesting and fun card design had apparently become during the interim years, particularly thinking back to the apparent nerfing trend in action around the time that I had first quit. I then slowly became hooked again, much to my girlfriend's dismay - which persisted until I met a local casual playgroup, who are quite a fine group of gentlemen, and who have enriched my girlfriend's and my lives in a number of ways not even related to magic.
I simply had to admit that there's just something about this game that I love, and so I began to build deck after deck after deck. I currently have 50+ decks fully constructed and ready to go, and I'm working on about 15 more. I still mostly play kitchen table casual, but I've dropped the Johnny pretenses. Mostly.
I suspect we'll be hearing about a lot more of these.
Couple of weeks ago, I'm playing kitchen table casual with that deck, against an opponent playing mill and some discard. I was mana screwed for the first six turns at least. By about turn 8, and following a string of terrible draws, I managed to get just enough mana to drop Barren Glory, and I then proceeded to do little else but get milled for a turn or two more, by which point my opponent had managed to get me down to one card in my library, but with nothing at all to force me to draw. I had one turn to go. My next turn, I drew my last card: One With Nothing. In my hand, I had Renounce and some dross I didn't need. During my opponent's end step, I cast Renounce followed by One With Nothing, winning the game during my upkeep - just shy of losing in my draw step.
I won with nothing. Well, almost...
It's likely they were aware of all the potential consequences of the implementation of mythic rarity long before they actually went ahead with it. After all, a lot of players and collectors could easily foresee the result, predicting the practical upshot quite accurately. It's a safe assumption that Wiz could as well.
You can bet that if Wizards went ahead with this despite their advance knowledge of the negative backlash it would cause, it's because they felt they had something even greater to gain. By all accounts, they may have been right. Alas for the players.
Edit: Looking at another topic called "Some 'Blue' scans", it seems that we will in fact be getting Avon's Lorwyn promo art for all the basics, since the first Island in the scans from that topic is also from the MPS mailouts of that year.
Princess Leia
Darkness from the film Legend
The Shadows from Babylon 5
The best thing about this is that it's practically free - nearly everything comes with one of these nowadays, from supplement bottles to shoeboxes to some food items. Drop one in your deck box and give it a day or two for full effect.
I then quit partly because I'd left my job and needed funds (I sold my collection over the course of three months, netting enough profit to live off for a year), partly because I thought card design was getting worse and worse, but mostly because my friends complained no end about me playing combo. Back then, I was what could have been described as a hardcore Johnny, and I played elaborate combo decks that would only go off only about once every five games, and that took forever to get going in the first place. Honestly, I have no idea what my friends were whining about - they killed me with their unimaginative (and painfully un-fun) goblin decks more often than not. My final deck was a 4x Juzám Djinn affair that was completely non-combo and absolutely no fun to play either with or against. It won pretty much every game in just a few turns.
I then quit and didn't look back for over a decade. I started again during Shadowmoor when my girlfriend and I had gone for dinner at my folks' place one evening, and as we were on our way out, my dad chased after us to say that he'd found an old box full of Magic cards in the back of a closet. I told him that I could care less and that he should recycle them, but my girlfriend, who's a gamer but had never tried Magic and wanted to learn, insisted we keep them. These were all the "crap" cards from back in the day that I couldn't give away, much less sell. Of course, at the time, that included stuff like Swords to Plowshares, Counterspell, and even Sol Ring.
Despite having a few powerful cards, and despite having only very reluctantly agreed to start playing again, I was forced to concede that the card pool we had available simply wasn't very good or particularly interesting, and so we invested a bit of cash in some new stuff, buying a few boosters each from Ravnica through to Shadowmoor. I was immediately impressed by how much more interesting and fun card design had apparently become during the interim years, particularly thinking back to the apparent nerfing trend in action around the time that I had first quit. I then slowly became hooked again, much to my girlfriend's dismay - which persisted until I met a local casual playgroup, who are quite a fine group of gentlemen, and who have enriched my girlfriend's and my lives in a number of ways not even related to magic.
I simply had to admit that there's just something about this game that I love, and so I began to build deck after deck after deck. I currently have 50+ decks fully constructed and ready to go, and I'm working on about 15 more. I still mostly play kitchen table casual, but I've dropped the Johnny pretenses. Mostly.