Fallen Empires
No.
There we go.
Yes, that's non-foiled wrapping, so if you really cared you could see some of the card names without opening them using bright lights and shit. But no one did.
Fallen Empires was the fifth expansion for Magic: the Gathering, and the first one that came out after I started playing the game around mid-1994. It was an important set in many respects, not necessarily because it introduced important mechanics (it largely didn't), or many classic cards (does anyone still remember Homarids?), but because it was probably the official start of proper world-building for Magic in a sense that hadn't been attempted before (yes, there was Antiquities, but that was sort of retroactively incorporated in Ice Age) - and, after the further debacle of Homelands it would serve M:tG well as a foundation for Ice Age
It was my first set. It was terrible. But I am nostalgic about it, because even Young Bobby remembers when game shops proliferated in every mall, and packs of Fallen Empires could be had for a buck or less. Heady days indeed, in an era when getting a free card in a comic book or magazine was a big deal.
In 1994, Fallen Empires was an economic disaster for Wizards of the Coast. They produced more packs of Fallen Empires than any previous expansion, making it have very high supply. And by “high supply” we mean crazy high supply: Fallen Empires had a print run about 7 times that of the previous set (The Dark). But it wasn't just also had literally no “chase cards,” meaning that demand was very low.
The Law of Supply and Demand actually just defines a price point where all commodities for sale would be sold. In reality, markets often don't clear.
High Supply combined with Low Demand caused the price to crash. Holdouts could sell a pack of Arabian Nights for big moneys, but the price of a Fallen Empires pack actually went down. The most powerful card in Arabian Nights is the Library of Alexandria, and a near mint copy sells for nearly four hundred dollars today. By contrast, the most powerful card in Fallen Empires is the Hymn to Tourach, and you can buy one for less than two dollars. This low value actually still couldn't reach the equilibrium and there are still unopened packs to this day.
Whole boxes of them, still wrapped. If you care. Which you do not.
Now obviously Magic the Gathering survived this particular fiasco. The state of game design has improved a lot over the years, and future sets were more popular. Later sets were actually printed in higher numbers than Fallen Empires and still managed to sell through, because the game continued to become more popular. Hell, there are professional players and shit. That's weird in its own right, but back in 1994 Wizards of the Coast was a fringe company and they lost a lot of money on Fallen Empires.
I'm not actually sure how many sections we're going to do here, because a card set doesn't really have a beginning and an end. We're going to rant until we're done I guess. We'll try to talk about why Fallen Empires was like it was, and why that was bad. And also how the game's direction was changed for good and ill by the fact that Fallen Empires happened and also by the fact that it was poorly received.
Frank is stronger on the mechanics, so I'm mostly going to be playing Team Nostalgia on this one, and even I recognize that Fallen Empires was terrible. Although perhaps not as terrible as Homelands. But I'm also more sensitive to the story stuff than Frank, which is why he is much better at mechanics and playing Magic and I make Hare decks and write odd fanfic. Normally this would be a problem, but in this case it's actually a bonus because the creators of Fallen Empires weren't terribly good at mechanics either.
And when I say that, what I mean is that the creators weren't looking at concepts like "Tempo" or "card advantage" like you would today - these are emergent concepts of play which are very useful and make powerful decks and card strategies, but they weren't obvious in the early days of the hobby. No, the creators of Fallen Empires were thinking thematically, and once you grok that a lot of apparently stupid choices that make FE one of the weakest sets of all time make a lot more sense.
It's not just that the designers wanted to hit every card with a balance stick until it's 3rd edition equivalent looked pretty by comparison, it's that the designers really did think in terms of the game from a theme level - for example, the idea of summoning big monsters to attack your opponent with instead of little ones, or waiting three turns for counters to accumulate to X happens. They really did think that the games would play out for twenty-odd turns and that people should be rewarded for saving their money in the bank letting their counter accumulate.
Release me
So when you see in Fallen Empires a lot of cards involving Elves, there is the strong impression that the designers really did expect you to build an Elf-themed deck, not necessarily a deck that used a clever combination of mechanics that only worked if the critters involved were elves. It's a quite natural reaction for many new players (like moi) to think that all these like-named cards should somehow work together and form a viable deck. This is not the case. Yes, you can do a Goblin deck these days, but you don't do a Goblin deck by sticking one or two copies of every card that has "Goblin" on it in a stack and declaring yourself a winner. I understand the appeal of that, but at the same time I also recognize that is fucking retarded, because it's not keywords that win games in Magic - it's the mechanics.
So this is part of what I mean when I say the game was built more thematically than mechanically - because it's obvious from the cards and how they do (and don't) interact that the designers were thinking along certain lines of play and deck construction but not others. Instinctively you can see what they were going for, trying to build up factions for players to gravitate to like they were Terrans, Protoss, or Zerg. But mechanically, those factions are largely empty of any real synergy and the basic "moral mechanics" of spore counters and charge counters and oh-my-dark-fucking-gods-how-many-counters-are-there just lead to a lot of painful accountancy with little real benefit. Like I said, a lot of play considerations like tempo and card advantage were clearly not under consideration here.
So many counters. Remember when these things were only used for filling fucking flower vases and shit?
One of the core conceits of Magic the Gatheric is the wheel of hate.
Different kind of hate.
There are five colors and each color has two colors that it is supposed to not get along with terribly well. Each color is supposed to have some spells to throw a spanner into the works of the colors that it doesn't like. Red hates White and Blue, Green hates Black and Blue, White hates Red and Black, Blue hates Green and Red, and Black hates everyone Green and White. All super duper symmetrical. The hate cards were generally things that you didn't put in your deck, because they only triggered if your opponent was playing the right color. So they introduced the concept of “sideboards,” where players could have some extra cards that they could optionally hot swap into their deck in game 2. This made the hate cards a lot more playable, since they wouldn't clutter your hand unless and until you already knew you had an appropriate opponent. That being said, the original hate cards were ridiculously powerful at times but incredibly blunt.
Fucking seriously?
I mean, don't get me wrong, that card will end the game if played against a White deck. And it does literally nothing against a deck with no White. It's not subtle or interesting. It's not un-powerful, but it's a bad card and the guy who wrote it should feel bad. Today, when a hate card gets published, it's usually a bit more subtle than that.
Much better.
That card has the same literal effect no matter who you are facing. It just happens that this card is very useful at stalling an early rush powered by small creatures and cheap burn spells. Like a tournament quality Red deck strategy happens to be. So people sideboard this card in against the Red Rush, but because it happens to perform well against the playstyle of the hated color. Rather than because it simply bluntly tells a player to spread cheeks if they happen to have brought a Red deck to the table. It's subtle, it's elegant, and I heartily approve.
Anyway, Fallen Empires did two things with the concept of Hate. The first was to make a new set of standard Hate cards which were terrible and I'll get to them in a bit. And the second was to make additional factions that hated each other within the colors. So there was a war within Red between Dwarves and Orcs. And that is the kind of thing that is obviously very difficult to do, because the basic conceit of Magic is that you are fighting your opponent's deck with whatever it happens to have in it. So for a Dwarvish anti-Orc card to actually be useful, you'd need to be facing a deck that was not only the same color as you, but which was trying to make a tribal deck around the other tribe from the one you used. That just obviously wasn't going to happen. Orcs and Dwarves would have to both be viable and frequently used, and even then we're talking about a matchup that would happen against one opponent in ten or less. It was fucked on first principles.
For this sort of thing to have worked at all, there would have had to be a set of “deck archetypes” that would appear in constructed deck environments and then the Hate cards would be directed at the archetype that their opponent's faction happened to be part of. So maybe Orcs would be useful in an aggro deck, and Dwarves would be good in a Control deck, and there could be some Orcish cards that you'd sideboard in against Control decks and Dwarvish cards that you'd sideboard in against Aggro decks. Design really would have had to be thinking several steps ahead for this to be even remotely viable. But it wasn't. Instead we got shit like this:
It's like you're not even trying.
None of the civil wars within the colors ever played out anywhere, because the basic premise was flawed. Even if the Dwarf anti-Orc cards were any good against Orc decks (which they were not), you'd still never pack them because “Orc Decks” was obviously too small of a slice of the potential opposition for that to be a worhtwhile life choice. You might as well make cards that punish enemy players whose name is David. But basically the idea of dividing up constructed decks into archetypes wasn't really mature in 1994, and the idea that the design team could successfully predict what the future archetypes were going to look like was pretty much a fairy tale at that point. So this project was doomed from the beginning and it's still kind of surprising that no one put their foot down before this went to print.
Another reason the internal wars within the colors don't work in Fallen Empires is that while you understand thematically that orcs and goblins are fighting Dwarfs, thallids are fighting elves, homarids are fighting mermen, thrulls are fighting the Order of the Ebon Hand, and Icatia is fighting against the Order of Light Beer Leitbur...mechanically, the civil wars thing doesn't really hold up on the tabletop. There's just no Orc-centric anti-Dwarf cards, or downsides for an Order of the Ebon Hand deck to use thrulls...in fact, there's just not enough cards in the set to play any faction pure and whole with the cards you had for 3rd edition. There's only 3 dwarfs in the entire fucking FE set; it's not much of a faction.
Even when you get something like Tidal Influence that's supposed to be this, it's a footbullet:
And to top that all off, the sides tend to be...I won't say complementary, but you get shit like Elvish Farmer which produces saproling tokens, and Praetor of the Ebon Hand which gets a bonus from eating thrulls. It's not like you have a special mechanic for capturing thrulls or saprolings from opponents (exception: Thrull Champion) or some exclusive mechanic that causes you to lose elves the more saprolings you have, so from a mechanical point of view the cards aren't antagonistic - and some of their effects actually work together. Because after all, they're all the same color.
The color Hate cards are no less blunt than the ones from the basic set – they just happen to also be pretty much crap.
You can't see it, but I'm giving myself a facepalm because of this card.
Obviously, Thelon's Curse doesn't do dick diddly unless your opponent is trying to kill you with Blue creatures. Which means already that even if it works, it's insultingly blunt. And there's a lot specifically wrong with this as well. It doesn't even work, since at this point the Blue decks tended to be “Permission Decks” which used Blue for card advantage and counterspells and then used another color to actually get creatures to beat you to death with. And if they did use Blue creatures at all they tended to show up in small numbers and be defended with counterspells and removal. So not only did this spell do actually nothing to most Blue decks, on those few decks it actually did anything to the mana drain was disappointingly small.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but there was no point at that point in that sort of thing being a thing. There's a new set coming out on October 2nd of 2015 and it might have cards that are overtly worse than cards in Theros (and expansion that came out in September of 2013). But that's OK, or at least accepted by the Magic community because also on the same day all the cards in the Theros expansion will stop being tournament legal in the most popular format. So if Battle For Zendikar has a version of a popular card from Theros that's weaker, that means that cards of that type simply are weaker in the new environment. But Fallen Empires existed at a time when there was no tournament rotation. A new card became legal and no cards left the environment because of it. A new card therefore had to be doing something new for people to want it at all. Or if not new, then at least better than what was already available.
And if a Green deck really wanted to reduce the amount of Blue mana a Blue deck had on hand... they had an app for that in the basic set.
So this year, the basic mana elf is rotating out in a bit over a month. So whatever mana generating Elves Zendikar gives us will be desired to some extent for players of the standard format. They could be better or worse than the Elvish Mystic and people will still play with them. But when Fallen Empires came out, Thelon's Curse was never going to see play unless it was competitive with existing options like Tsunami. And it fucking wasn't, so that card was a god damn coaster. And that is why Thelon's Curse is a twenty year old rare card that you can buy in mint condition for thirty cents. It was never playable in any format and still isn't.
This kind of thing was sort of endemic in the early Magic sets. I like to call it Elder Dragon Syndrome, because I fucking can.
The thing about Elder Dragons is that they look very impressive. They're legends, and they are flying 7/7s that can go toe-to-toe with a Pit Fiend. But they are largely terrible because they are fucking expensive, and three colors with upkeep, and their abilities do not match the price tag. Said skills do not pay the bills, even if it is fun to let Nicol Bolas ping your opponent with Fire Whip and discard their entire hand.
The thing is though - and Frank and I talked about this, and will in greater depth later - FE doesn't even have an Elder Dragon. There's no big critter or "ooh, shiny!" card that really stands out in the set. The winner is, and always has been, Hymn to Tourach, which is a rather common card - and absolutely awesome.
I do not like rare cards being substantially better than common cards. There are a lot of things that I think are wrong about that. I make a lot of money now, but I remember being a poor kid who brought a pbj sandwich to school every day because he couldn't afford pizza. There were decks back in the day that I would have loved to make that I could not make because I did not have the funds. Even today there are decks that I can't make properly because I just can't justify slapping down three hundred dollars for a deck of cards. Individual lands cost nearly twenty five bucks and I'm just not willing to do that. Even though I now could, I still don't. Because I remember being the poor kid and I just find the whole thing offensive on a bunch of levels.
But here's the thing: chase cards sell packs. I hate the idea that there are Mythic Rares. There are mythic rares that I would like to own that I do not own and will not own because I am not going to throw down that kind of money on a children's card game. But I would like to own them. And the number of packs you'd have to open in order to get those mythics is very high. On average you get about one of any particular mythic rare after opening four boxes of Boosters. I'm not going to do that, even for sets I like quite a bit (like Magic Origins and Khans of Tarkir). But some people will. In fact, some people will want to get their grubby hands on four copies of a specific Mythic, and if they want to do that by opening packs they will need to open the packs in fifteen boxes of boosters.
That probably sounds insane to you, and it sounds insane to me. But if there are Mythics that people genuinely want, there are people with more money than pride who will just go ahead and do that. And that sells product. It is clearly good for the financial health of Wizards of the Coast for there to be incentives for some dumb assholes to buy fifteen boxes of booster packs to chase multiple copies of super rare cards. These “chase cards” increase the demand for the set, which supports a higher supply and keeps MaRo in hookers and blow. A box of Fallen Empires had 60 booster packs of eight cards each, and none of them were both good and rare.
This card is very good, but it was also “very common.”
This card is relatively rare, but it sucks and no one wants it. Also I have no idea what's going on in the picture. Like, a bunny is dragging a Thrull to a dark fantasy tribunal. And the explanation is way too complicated.
Keep in mind: the random sample of cards in each booster is what gives Magic an addiction rating close to crack cocaine.
It's really no different than playing the lottery, except it's legal for kids to buy boosters with their lunch money, praying for a rare. It's the collector jones which really pushed the surge in Magic speculation in the mid-90s, before InQuest price guides went insane. And no, I'm not going to regale you with tales about when Black Lotus was the by-word for expensive fucking trophy cards - because by the time I got to the game it was already illegal in tournaments. I never even saw a Mox in regular play. I came into a game that was a couple years old and I was already behind the power curve. But that's okay, because I was happy with my Land Leeches and Giant Strength, and putting Unholy Strength on my Black Knight. That sort of shit really appealed to me back in the days when I didn't have enough friends to play D&D with and Lone Wolf books by myself were getting a little fucking lonely. Fallen Empires never gave me the opportunity to "flatten the field" - but it was at least a way that I, a newcomer to the hobby with some cash to spend could get in the game...and of course, you never knew; maybe you would find the cards for a killer deck.
Man, I forgot these things only had 8 cards, too.
Next up: Fractional Reserve Banking.