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[OSSR]Magic: the Gathering: Ice Age
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OSSR: Ice Age: Colons: Colors
Green
Green is the color of Growth. And also sideboob.
This piece is late and it is my fault. It was snowing here and I went to California for a week and a half. But what really delayed things was that I left my laptop's power converter in Europe, so I couldn't finish my half until I got back. Mea culpa.
S'right, I've been dragging my ass too. I don't think we'll see Space Madness before 2016.
For many a young Magic: the Gathering player, this is one of the first Ice Age cards that they saw, because it was released for free bagged with InQuest magazine. It's not horribad, but it is sort of indicative of the set: a card that would be awesome for 1 mana or acceptable for 2 mana is really overpriced at 3 mana. Really, it's a little disheartening when you think about it: the poster child for Ice Age, one of the cards they used to advertise the fucking set, was a fat-ass frog that didn't interact with any of the set's special rules.
Also, that rhyme doesn't make any sense: if the Chub Toad is at the door, why the fuck are you running, and where are you running to? It doesn't have trample. It doesn't have opposable thumbs! Keep the fucking door locked and you're golden. Parents should threaten kids with sending them out of doors when they're pissing them off, where the Chub Toad will eat them.
Green is the color of growing things. It comes from the forests and is in touch with the land and masters the wildest of creatures. Elves live there, and so do beasts and druids and fairies and tree people and shit. Green is a creature heavy color and the creatures write themselves. You could put a couple teenagers in a room with notebooks and pens and Mountain Dew and they'd be able to write down enough Green creatures to get you through the next twenty years of magic sets in a few hours.
But while Green writes itself, it doesn't balance itself. Green has subthemes of “making mana” which has often made it a mandatory include in many formats. On the other hand, WotC has often really ballsed it up when trying to make a “creature color.” The biggest issue is rarity. WotC wanted to make the best creatures rare, but you got to be the “big creature color” by having a lot of big creatures at common. This put Green in a position where there were a lot of big dumb creatures taking up common and uncommon card slots that you would never use in constructed decks because the rare creatures were better. The Craw Wurm was a good draw in sealed deck, but you were never going to see it in a constructed deck tournament because the Shivan Dragon was the same thing for the same cost with firebreathing and flight.
This basic issue hasn't really gone away. When Green has good color fixing and mana acceleration (as it did in Theros), it completely dominates the tournament scene. And when it doesn't... it doesn't. In Ice Age, Green is just a really shallow suit, because exactly half the cards are creatures and most of them are bullshit.
These cards aren't as dire as the shit in Big Blue or Big Black, but they are still shit and you got a lot of them because two of these are commons.
Traditionally, Green has also been a strong haven for tribal decks. This is more accident than design: in the early days of Magic, they didn't put "Human" on anything, but they did put "Elf" on fucking almost everything. So even before Fallen Empires, you had about enough elves to make an Elf deck. Granted, the elves didn't have a particular schtick, so putting all the cards with "Summon Elf" in a pile didn't mean you could declare victory. But the designers had this idea that Green had Elves, so they continued to make Elf cards.
Fallen Empires was no different.
Beyond the pointy-eared Master Race, Green also toyed with some other tribal inclinations...to greater or lesser success. For example, the Elephant Deck was an early tribal deck.
Careful note here: the Woolly Mammoths are not actually elephants, despite other mammoths being elephants. This is kind of typical to the idiosyncratic bullshit of early Magic, and one of the major impediments to early tribal decks. Here's another example:
Not a Gorilla, not an Ape, but a Gorilla Pack. They later errata'd it as an Ape, but this was terrible when it was first released.
This guy is an Ape too, if you care. Which you might!
Magic took a long time to get its color wheel hate into order. And most of Ice Age's color hate cards were pretty much shit. As we mentioned earlier, you could have a Green sorcery that literally destroyed all islands in play out of the basic set, so if a newly printed Green color hate card didn't string your opponent up by their testicles you were not going to play it. Yes, those cards were horrible for the game, and color hate cards that didn't make your opponent unable to play the game at all were things that should have existed. But when the available cards included crazy shit that shut your opponent all the way down for being the wrong color, color hate specific cards that merely gave you a boost were never going to see play.
Ugh. You were not going to play these things.
Now what they also looked into was cards that “hated” one color, but were still playable if your opponent didn't have that color. So they were better against one color rather than being a thing that lived only in sideboards and got whipped out to make people cry in game two.
That's more like it.
These cards are not very good. They are 2/2 creatures for 3 mana that become unblockable if your opponent has the wrong kind of land. This is the first interesting use of the “landwalk” ability, which for those of you who never played before Origins was an ability where the creature became unblockable if your opponent had the right kind of land. A creature had “mountainwalk” to be unblockable by mountain-having players or “forestwalk” to be unblockable by forest-having players, or whatever. Before Ice Age, landwalk was given internally – so the creatures with Swampwalk were Black and the creatures with Islandwalk were Blue (mostly, there are a few exceptions). And honestly, it's pretty hard to tell what that ability was even for. It's not really a disincentive or an incentive to play a color to have a card in that color that hates the same color. While a Bog Wraith (or Moor Fiend in Ice Age) makes it painful to have Swamps, you need Swamps to play it in the first place. It's more complexity for its own sake at that point.
But this cross-factional landwalk was something else entirely. It was a creature that served some utility regardless of the opposition, but had enhanced utility if your opponent was specifically playing the faction you hated. That is by far the slickest thing ever done with Landwalk, which makes me wonder why it took until 2015 for Landwalk to be officially retired from the game. Pale Bears and Pygmy Allosaurs are almost playable, and if they were 3/2s or cost 1G they would probably see play if they came out today. But that's really marginal for an ability that takes up space in the fucking rulebook.
A lot of the basic complaints from the other colors apply: there's a lot of repeats from 4th edition here...
...and variants of established 4th edition cards...
...and cards that were slightly altered riffs off of 4th edition standards...
...and then you got into the Ice Age-specific mechanics.
Some of these are actually interesting snow-covered land mechanics. I mean, you're never going to play Whiteout, but if more Ice Age cards let you dredge by sacrificing a snow-covered land, that would have been really interesting as a core mechanic. Hell, Thermokarst and "minor bonus for snow-covered land" isn't a bad thing - if they'd had that on more cards in the set, it would have made people much more inclined to play snow lands.
On the other hand, this is almost useless:
This is, in fact, so useless, I wonder why Ice Age didn't have a card that let you turn a regular land into a snow-covered land. Just put a snow counter on it or something. Enchant Land. Anything.
Cumulative upkeep cards aren't much better:
Ritual of Subdual is actually kind of interesting, although overpriced for the effect. Green is actually poised to handle that kind of situation well with a couple G-producing elves, but at six mana when the fuck are you going to play it? By the time Green gets six mana out, Blue has countered the spell three times.
Green only got three cantrips in Ice Age. And while you'd never use any of them, they were the kind of thing that was very nearly playable.
These effects are pretty useful in a lot of circumstances. One turn of Vigilance and Haste is definitely worth some mana. We would absolutely pay some mana and zero cards for a 1/1 creature. And of course, paying some mana to kick a creature out of combat makes total sense. The thing is... none of these cards are worth three mana and delaying the card replacement until next turn's upkeep. But while the prices are too high, these are the kinds of things people want.
The same concept for 2 mana with no delay on the redraw and a creature type people care about and you had yourself a tournament quality card.
So basically what we're saying is that Ice Age was way too cautious from a design standpoint. Which is pretty much what we've been saying all along.
All of the colors overlap in some of their effects, to greater or lesser extant. Green tends to be a very strong color for early players because it's often second-best at a lot of things, and there are a lot of cards in it for doing things you might not expect of Green. For example, digging cards out of the graveyard, dealing direct damage, manipulating cards in your library, or fucking with enchantments and stuff. It's not as good at these things as any of the other colors, generally - if Red gets three good direct damage spells, Green might get one decent one; if White gets some really good ways to bring out land or destroy enchantments, Green will get one or two.
But that's enough to give Green a surprising bit of flexibility - but let's talk about what Ice Age Green doesn't have, as a core deck by comparison with 4th editon.
For starters, they're missing a fair number of the basic utility cards like Channel and Sylvan Library. For second, they're missing a couple "killer app" cards like Basilisk and Cockatrice, which were great for critter removal, especially when combined with Lure - these were a couple of the basic early combos that lots of young Magic players cut their teeth on, and Ice Age doesn't really have anything comparable.
More than anything though, a lot of the Ice Age critters are just overpriced and complicated compared to their 4th edition counterparts - 4th edition Green has six critters it can play for just one mana, while Ice Age Green has five - and generally, the 4th edition equivalents are better, because they fill more tactical gaps.
Generally. Tinder Wall is pretty cool, especially compared to Wall of Wood.
One of the big constants in Magic tournament rules is the idea of a four card limit. You can't play more than four copies of any card that isn't a basic land. Ice Age produced cards that were functionally exactly the same as cards that already existed, but which had new names. This was completely meaningless at the time, because you didn't actually want 5+ copies of Ley Druids in your deck. If they had made virtual copies of cards people actually wanted extra copies of (like Lightning Bolt or Dark Ritual), people would have cared more.
Of course, years later there came the Commander format, where you were only allowed one copy of each card. And then it suddenly mattered that you could have a second Llanowar Elf, because the number of mana dorks you want to own is much higher than one. You still don't care about having access to an extra Grizzly Bear though.
Speaking of mana dorking, Ice Age gave a lot of options for ramp.
It's rather easy to ramp to 6 or more green mana on turn three if that's what you wanted to do. I don't know why you'd want to do that in Ice Age because there is literally nothing worth ramping to in the set, but it was an option. Green hadn't really been given a satisfactory answer to the question “And then what?” with their ramp. So in Ice Age you pretty much just had a ramp to nowhere.
At least there was design space for future expansions.
Color-wise, Green tried to play nice with White and Red...sortof.
Bros.
These were...eh. Okay. Not enough to build a deck around, by any means, but Green had some decent buffs which could complement a Red or a White deck, and I think combining Forgotten Lore and Orcish Lumberjacks, you could ramp up some mana really quick.
Tap forest for G, sacrifice tapped forest to Orcish Lumberjack, cast Forgotten Lore to reclaim Forest...
In what I think must have been a designer oversight at the time, Ice Age Green only has one sideboard card each for Blue and Black (not counting the Bears and Allosaurs).
I think this was actually a good thing. While it sounds fun to kill all of the islands on a board with a single spell, it's unwieldy because that's all the spell does. At least when you throw a critter on the board you can attack with it, defend with it, enchant it, use it's ability (if any), and sacrifice it.
Weird note: eventually there was a big revision of what creature types were about. So instead of having the Elven Riders be “Summon Riders” and similar such bullshit, you had standardized creature types and also gave out multiple creature types so that you had Human Druids and Elf Druids and not just Druids and Elves. This is the kind of obvious shit that needed to happen that was so obvious that it didn't actually happen until 2007 and required the errata of 1197 cards. When they did this, they decided to have all the gnomey-fey creatures be “Ouphes.” So the Pyknite and the Brownie became “Ouphe” type. No one knows why they decided to keep that subtype rather than merge into Brownie or Fairy. Fucking nobody even knows how to pronounce Ouphe. It's a bullshit word.
The Brownie is now an Ouphe, while the Elder Druid is now an Elf Cleric Druid.
What both of these cards have in common, aside from having been errataed with new subtypes that are hard to say, is that they are fucking useless outside a situation where you are winning the game with a bizarre combo. There is no way that untapping a normal creature is worth 3 mana, let alone 4. But while useless in this set, they were part of various dumb infinite combos.
Play Elder Druid, win game.
"Orphan" critters were a thing for a while. These were critters that only had one card of the given critter type. Which was usually fine, except in this case where quite obviously it would have benefited from being part of a tribe. Unfortunately, we didn't actually get more Aurochs proper until fucking Coldsnap, at which point no-one really wanted to make an Aurochs deck.
People used to get quite obsessed with pseudo-tribal bullshit for this kind of thing, like Shapechangers that assumed a particular creature type. Unfortunately, it was usually just theoretical thinking, kind of like fairy chess variants - you weren't going to have an Aurochs deck in Ice Age because there weren't enough Aurochs, and you weren't going to have an Aurochs deck in Cold Snap because the Aurochs fucking suck. Seriously, the average cost of an Aurochs is 4.25 mana - getting one out is questionable, getting enough out that the bonuses add up is highly unlikely.
And yet Cold Snap wasted three cards on this Aurochs tribal concept, for a card that at 4 mana for a 2/3 trampler was underpowered compared to a War Mammoth.
One of the things that Green has always been supposed to do was to give out temporary buffs to its creatures. The standard was Giant Growth.
Not so much a gold standard as like a copper standard.
The problem of course is that Giant Growth isn't very good. It's a pretty shit card all things told. It can be used on an unblocked (or trampling) creature to do 3 damage to your opponent or it can be used as a combat trick to kill an enemy creature that your opponent thought was going to survive. That's not the end of the world, but it simply isn't very good. Designers building around that as the standard made a bunch of other cards in the same vein... that also aren't very good.
All of these have higher costs than Giant Growth. And they are all garbage.
Part of the thing with buffs like Giant Growth is, again, the early focus on Magic as a game where you summon critters to do combat, as opposed to one where you do lots of clever things involving drawing many cards and tapping all your opponent's shit etc. So as a combat trick it looks very good to the early player. It can save a critter from a Lightning Bolt, it can let a weenie kill a medium-sized card, it can maybe even tip the scales on a big creature. The buff is, in fact, so successful that it is the standard feature of Munchkin combat (and, indeed, one of the best Green control things to do in a multiplayer game is for Green to use its buffs to fuck with the flow of combat between other players, to their own advantage).
Other buffs are, as Frank pointed out...not great. Early Green had a bit of a thing for Enchantments of all types, which I think was supposed to reflect the whole fairy sub-theme, but got dropped later on in favor of Big Green Things With Teeth.
Like with Big Red and Big Blue, Big Green was always searching for something Bigger, Greener, and with More Teeth. It didn't really work, because unlike a lot of other colors, Green tended to have answers to its own critters in its make-up. You'll notice none of those assholes has Trample as standard, and all of them except for the Scaled Worm can be blocked repeatedly by a 3-mana Wall of Ice. For four mana Green can field a Wall of Brambles and basically tell their Green opponent to fuck right off.
We would be remiss if we didn't talk about Green's power cards in this set. Unlike many of the colors, they actually got power cards.
These cards are kinda nuts for the time, and you'd happily put them in decks today if that was allowed. Get off a few Stunted Growths and your opponent basically doesn't get to play the game. Goyfs are weird, but they are frequently 8+ power for 4 mana and are the kind of game ending threats that require immediate answers. The thing that makes Goyfs so neat is that if you end up drawing them late in the game so that you'd have enough mana to play something much more expensive you'd still rather draw the Lhurgoyf, because there is so much more in graveyards at this point that the Lhurgoyf is going to be stupidly tremendous.
What's odd of course is that these cards aren't really attached to any “themes” that Green was supposed to be working with. These cards aren't part of Ramp or Wurms or Elves or anything. Both of these cards could have been Black and no one would have batted an eye. I think these cards are so much better than other cards in the set precisely because they are “out of theme.” They weren't directly comparable to other cards in the format, and therefore they never got hit with the nerf stick during the design process. Over and over again, Ice Age presents cards that are either literally exactly the same as a previously available card, or like a previously available card hit with the nerf stick. The Lhurgoyf and Stunted Growth weren't like a previously available card, so they didn't “need” to be toned down.
Next up: White.
I wasn't forgetting this one, but I hate it and didn't want to talk about it. This is a card which has an interesting survival-of-the-fittest mechanic would could be really interesting...but. As it is, it's a 6/6 (5/5, really, since it has summoning sickness) for 6 mana that has an inherent turn limit. So you're not only never going to play this, but even if you could play it, it's not likely to survive long enough to build up into a game-ending threat. What you wanted with this kind of card is to start it off as a 3/3 for 3 mana, and let it eat a bunch of knights for breakfast and build up into a sizable critter (keeping in mind that the first upkeep is probably going to come before it gets a chance to attack).
This is the kind of critter that Lure was basically designed for, and yet by the time you get it out, Lure is too little, too late. Bah, humfuck.
Green
Green is the color of Growth. And also sideboob.
FrankT:
This piece is late and it is my fault. It was snowing here and I went to California for a week and a half. But what really delayed things was that I left my laptop's power converter in Europe, so I couldn't finish my half until I got back. Mea culpa.
AncientH:
S'right, I've been dragging my ass too. I don't think we'll see Space Madness before 2016.
For many a young Magic: the Gathering player, this is one of the first Ice Age cards that they saw, because it was released for free bagged with InQuest magazine. It's not horribad, but it is sort of indicative of the set: a card that would be awesome for 1 mana or acceptable for 2 mana is really overpriced at 3 mana. Really, it's a little disheartening when you think about it: the poster child for Ice Age, one of the cards they used to advertise the fucking set, was a fat-ass frog that didn't interact with any of the set's special rules.
Also, that rhyme doesn't make any sense: if the Chub Toad is at the door, why the fuck are you running, and where are you running to? It doesn't have trample. It doesn't have opposable thumbs! Keep the fucking door locked and you're golden. Parents should threaten kids with sending them out of doors when they're pissing them off, where the Chub Toad will eat them.
FrankT:
Green is the color of growing things. It comes from the forests and is in touch with the land and masters the wildest of creatures. Elves live there, and so do beasts and druids and fairies and tree people and shit. Green is a creature heavy color and the creatures write themselves. You could put a couple teenagers in a room with notebooks and pens and Mountain Dew and they'd be able to write down enough Green creatures to get you through the next twenty years of magic sets in a few hours.
But while Green writes itself, it doesn't balance itself. Green has subthemes of “making mana” which has often made it a mandatory include in many formats. On the other hand, WotC has often really ballsed it up when trying to make a “creature color.” The biggest issue is rarity. WotC wanted to make the best creatures rare, but you got to be the “big creature color” by having a lot of big creatures at common. This put Green in a position where there were a lot of big dumb creatures taking up common and uncommon card slots that you would never use in constructed decks because the rare creatures were better. The Craw Wurm was a good draw in sealed deck, but you were never going to see it in a constructed deck tournament because the Shivan Dragon was the same thing for the same cost with firebreathing and flight.
This basic issue hasn't really gone away. When Green has good color fixing and mana acceleration (as it did in Theros), it completely dominates the tournament scene. And when it doesn't... it doesn't. In Ice Age, Green is just a really shallow suit, because exactly half the cards are creatures and most of them are bullshit.
These cards aren't as dire as the shit in Big Blue or Big Black, but they are still shit and you got a lot of them because two of these are commons.
AncientH:
Traditionally, Green has also been a strong haven for tribal decks. This is more accident than design: in the early days of Magic, they didn't put "Human" on anything, but they did put "Elf" on fucking almost everything. So even before Fallen Empires, you had about enough elves to make an Elf deck. Granted, the elves didn't have a particular schtick, so putting all the cards with "Summon Elf" in a pile didn't mean you could declare victory. But the designers had this idea that Green had Elves, so they continued to make Elf cards.
Fallen Empires was no different.
Beyond the pointy-eared Master Race, Green also toyed with some other tribal inclinations...to greater or lesser success. For example, the Elephant Deck was an early tribal deck.
Careful note here: the Woolly Mammoths are not actually elephants, despite other mammoths being elephants. This is kind of typical to the idiosyncratic bullshit of early Magic, and one of the major impediments to early tribal decks. Here's another example:
Not a Gorilla, not an Ape, but a Gorilla Pack. They later errata'd it as an Ape, but this was terrible when it was first released.
This guy is an Ape too, if you care. Which you might!
FrankT:
Magic took a long time to get its color wheel hate into order. And most of Ice Age's color hate cards were pretty much shit. As we mentioned earlier, you could have a Green sorcery that literally destroyed all islands in play out of the basic set, so if a newly printed Green color hate card didn't string your opponent up by their testicles you were not going to play it. Yes, those cards were horrible for the game, and color hate cards that didn't make your opponent unable to play the game at all were things that should have existed. But when the available cards included crazy shit that shut your opponent all the way down for being the wrong color, color hate specific cards that merely gave you a boost were never going to see play.
Ugh. You were not going to play these things.
Now what they also looked into was cards that “hated” one color, but were still playable if your opponent didn't have that color. So they were better against one color rather than being a thing that lived only in sideboards and got whipped out to make people cry in game two.
That's more like it.
These cards are not very good. They are 2/2 creatures for 3 mana that become unblockable if your opponent has the wrong kind of land. This is the first interesting use of the “landwalk” ability, which for those of you who never played before Origins was an ability where the creature became unblockable if your opponent had the right kind of land. A creature had “mountainwalk” to be unblockable by mountain-having players or “forestwalk” to be unblockable by forest-having players, or whatever. Before Ice Age, landwalk was given internally – so the creatures with Swampwalk were Black and the creatures with Islandwalk were Blue (mostly, there are a few exceptions). And honestly, it's pretty hard to tell what that ability was even for. It's not really a disincentive or an incentive to play a color to have a card in that color that hates the same color. While a Bog Wraith (or Moor Fiend in Ice Age) makes it painful to have Swamps, you need Swamps to play it in the first place. It's more complexity for its own sake at that point.
But this cross-factional landwalk was something else entirely. It was a creature that served some utility regardless of the opposition, but had enhanced utility if your opponent was specifically playing the faction you hated. That is by far the slickest thing ever done with Landwalk, which makes me wonder why it took until 2015 for Landwalk to be officially retired from the game. Pale Bears and Pygmy Allosaurs are almost playable, and if they were 3/2s or cost 1G they would probably see play if they came out today. But that's really marginal for an ability that takes up space in the fucking rulebook.
AncientH:
A lot of the basic complaints from the other colors apply: there's a lot of repeats from 4th edition here...
...and variants of established 4th edition cards...
...and cards that were slightly altered riffs off of 4th edition standards...
...and then you got into the Ice Age-specific mechanics.
Some of these are actually interesting snow-covered land mechanics. I mean, you're never going to play Whiteout, but if more Ice Age cards let you dredge by sacrificing a snow-covered land, that would have been really interesting as a core mechanic. Hell, Thermokarst and "minor bonus for snow-covered land" isn't a bad thing - if they'd had that on more cards in the set, it would have made people much more inclined to play snow lands.
On the other hand, this is almost useless:
This is, in fact, so useless, I wonder why Ice Age didn't have a card that let you turn a regular land into a snow-covered land. Just put a snow counter on it or something. Enchant Land. Anything.
Cumulative upkeep cards aren't much better:
Ritual of Subdual is actually kind of interesting, although overpriced for the effect. Green is actually poised to handle that kind of situation well with a couple G-producing elves, but at six mana when the fuck are you going to play it? By the time Green gets six mana out, Blue has countered the spell three times.
FrankT:
Green only got three cantrips in Ice Age. And while you'd never use any of them, they were the kind of thing that was very nearly playable.
These effects are pretty useful in a lot of circumstances. One turn of Vigilance and Haste is definitely worth some mana. We would absolutely pay some mana and zero cards for a 1/1 creature. And of course, paying some mana to kick a creature out of combat makes total sense. The thing is... none of these cards are worth three mana and delaying the card replacement until next turn's upkeep. But while the prices are too high, these are the kinds of things people want.
The same concept for 2 mana with no delay on the redraw and a creature type people care about and you had yourself a tournament quality card.
So basically what we're saying is that Ice Age was way too cautious from a design standpoint. Which is pretty much what we've been saying all along.
AncientH:
All of the colors overlap in some of their effects, to greater or lesser extant. Green tends to be a very strong color for early players because it's often second-best at a lot of things, and there are a lot of cards in it for doing things you might not expect of Green. For example, digging cards out of the graveyard, dealing direct damage, manipulating cards in your library, or fucking with enchantments and stuff. It's not as good at these things as any of the other colors, generally - if Red gets three good direct damage spells, Green might get one decent one; if White gets some really good ways to bring out land or destroy enchantments, Green will get one or two.
But that's enough to give Green a surprising bit of flexibility - but let's talk about what Ice Age Green doesn't have, as a core deck by comparison with 4th editon.
For starters, they're missing a fair number of the basic utility cards like Channel and Sylvan Library. For second, they're missing a couple "killer app" cards like Basilisk and Cockatrice, which were great for critter removal, especially when combined with Lure - these were a couple of the basic early combos that lots of young Magic players cut their teeth on, and Ice Age doesn't really have anything comparable.
More than anything though, a lot of the Ice Age critters are just overpriced and complicated compared to their 4th edition counterparts - 4th edition Green has six critters it can play for just one mana, while Ice Age Green has five - and generally, the 4th edition equivalents are better, because they fill more tactical gaps.
Generally. Tinder Wall is pretty cool, especially compared to Wall of Wood.
FrankT:
One of the big constants in Magic tournament rules is the idea of a four card limit. You can't play more than four copies of any card that isn't a basic land. Ice Age produced cards that were functionally exactly the same as cards that already existed, but which had new names. This was completely meaningless at the time, because you didn't actually want 5+ copies of Ley Druids in your deck. If they had made virtual copies of cards people actually wanted extra copies of (like Lightning Bolt or Dark Ritual), people would have cared more.
Of course, years later there came the Commander format, where you were only allowed one copy of each card. And then it suddenly mattered that you could have a second Llanowar Elf, because the number of mana dorks you want to own is much higher than one. You still don't care about having access to an extra Grizzly Bear though.
Speaking of mana dorking, Ice Age gave a lot of options for ramp.
It's rather easy to ramp to 6 or more green mana on turn three if that's what you wanted to do. I don't know why you'd want to do that in Ice Age because there is literally nothing worth ramping to in the set, but it was an option. Green hadn't really been given a satisfactory answer to the question “And then what?” with their ramp. So in Ice Age you pretty much just had a ramp to nowhere.
At least there was design space for future expansions.
AncientH:
Color-wise, Green tried to play nice with White and Red...sortof.
Bros.
These were...eh. Okay. Not enough to build a deck around, by any means, but Green had some decent buffs which could complement a Red or a White deck, and I think combining Forgotten Lore and Orcish Lumberjacks, you could ramp up some mana really quick.
Tap forest for G, sacrifice tapped forest to Orcish Lumberjack, cast Forgotten Lore to reclaim Forest...
In what I think must have been a designer oversight at the time, Ice Age Green only has one sideboard card each for Blue and Black (not counting the Bears and Allosaurs).
I think this was actually a good thing. While it sounds fun to kill all of the islands on a board with a single spell, it's unwieldy because that's all the spell does. At least when you throw a critter on the board you can attack with it, defend with it, enchant it, use it's ability (if any), and sacrifice it.
FrankT:
Weird note: eventually there was a big revision of what creature types were about. So instead of having the Elven Riders be “Summon Riders” and similar such bullshit, you had standardized creature types and also gave out multiple creature types so that you had Human Druids and Elf Druids and not just Druids and Elves. This is the kind of obvious shit that needed to happen that was so obvious that it didn't actually happen until 2007 and required the errata of 1197 cards. When they did this, they decided to have all the gnomey-fey creatures be “Ouphes.” So the Pyknite and the Brownie became “Ouphe” type. No one knows why they decided to keep that subtype rather than merge into Brownie or Fairy. Fucking nobody even knows how to pronounce Ouphe. It's a bullshit word.
The Brownie is now an Ouphe, while the Elder Druid is now an Elf Cleric Druid.
What both of these cards have in common, aside from having been errataed with new subtypes that are hard to say, is that they are fucking useless outside a situation where you are winning the game with a bizarre combo. There is no way that untapping a normal creature is worth 3 mana, let alone 4. But while useless in this set, they were part of various dumb infinite combos.
Play Elder Druid, win game.
AncientH:
"Orphan" critters were a thing for a while. These were critters that only had one card of the given critter type. Which was usually fine, except in this case where quite obviously it would have benefited from being part of a tribe. Unfortunately, we didn't actually get more Aurochs proper until fucking Coldsnap, at which point no-one really wanted to make an Aurochs deck.
People used to get quite obsessed with pseudo-tribal bullshit for this kind of thing, like Shapechangers that assumed a particular creature type. Unfortunately, it was usually just theoretical thinking, kind of like fairy chess variants - you weren't going to have an Aurochs deck in Ice Age because there weren't enough Aurochs, and you weren't going to have an Aurochs deck in Cold Snap because the Aurochs fucking suck. Seriously, the average cost of an Aurochs is 4.25 mana - getting one out is questionable, getting enough out that the bonuses add up is highly unlikely.
And yet Cold Snap wasted three cards on this Aurochs tribal concept, for a card that at 4 mana for a 2/3 trampler was underpowered compared to a War Mammoth.
FrankT:
One of the things that Green has always been supposed to do was to give out temporary buffs to its creatures. The standard was Giant Growth.
Not so much a gold standard as like a copper standard.
The problem of course is that Giant Growth isn't very good. It's a pretty shit card all things told. It can be used on an unblocked (or trampling) creature to do 3 damage to your opponent or it can be used as a combat trick to kill an enemy creature that your opponent thought was going to survive. That's not the end of the world, but it simply isn't very good. Designers building around that as the standard made a bunch of other cards in the same vein... that also aren't very good.
All of these have higher costs than Giant Growth. And they are all garbage.
AncientH:
Part of the thing with buffs like Giant Growth is, again, the early focus on Magic as a game where you summon critters to do combat, as opposed to one where you do lots of clever things involving drawing many cards and tapping all your opponent's shit etc. So as a combat trick it looks very good to the early player. It can save a critter from a Lightning Bolt, it can let a weenie kill a medium-sized card, it can maybe even tip the scales on a big creature. The buff is, in fact, so successful that it is the standard feature of Munchkin combat (and, indeed, one of the best Green control things to do in a multiplayer game is for Green to use its buffs to fuck with the flow of combat between other players, to their own advantage).
Other buffs are, as Frank pointed out...not great. Early Green had a bit of a thing for Enchantments of all types, which I think was supposed to reflect the whole fairy sub-theme, but got dropped later on in favor of Big Green Things With Teeth.
Like with Big Red and Big Blue, Big Green was always searching for something Bigger, Greener, and with More Teeth. It didn't really work, because unlike a lot of other colors, Green tended to have answers to its own critters in its make-up. You'll notice none of those assholes has Trample as standard, and all of them except for the Scaled Worm can be blocked repeatedly by a 3-mana Wall of Ice. For four mana Green can field a Wall of Brambles and basically tell their Green opponent to fuck right off.
FrankT:
We would be remiss if we didn't talk about Green's power cards in this set. Unlike many of the colors, they actually got power cards.
These cards are kinda nuts for the time, and you'd happily put them in decks today if that was allowed. Get off a few Stunted Growths and your opponent basically doesn't get to play the game. Goyfs are weird, but they are frequently 8+ power for 4 mana and are the kind of game ending threats that require immediate answers. The thing that makes Goyfs so neat is that if you end up drawing them late in the game so that you'd have enough mana to play something much more expensive you'd still rather draw the Lhurgoyf, because there is so much more in graveyards at this point that the Lhurgoyf is going to be stupidly tremendous.
What's odd of course is that these cards aren't really attached to any “themes” that Green was supposed to be working with. These cards aren't part of Ramp or Wurms or Elves or anything. Both of these cards could have been Black and no one would have batted an eye. I think these cards are so much better than other cards in the set precisely because they are “out of theme.” They weren't directly comparable to other cards in the format, and therefore they never got hit with the nerf stick during the design process. Over and over again, Ice Age presents cards that are either literally exactly the same as a previously available card, or like a previously available card hit with the nerf stick. The Lhurgoyf and Stunted Growth weren't like a previously available card, so they didn't “need” to be toned down.
Next up: White.
AncientH:
I wasn't forgetting this one, but I hate it and didn't want to talk about it. This is a card which has an interesting survival-of-the-fittest mechanic would could be really interesting...but. As it is, it's a 6/6 (5/5, really, since it has summoning sickness) for 6 mana that has an inherent turn limit. So you're not only never going to play this, but even if you could play it, it's not likely to survive long enough to build up into a game-ending threat. What you wanted with this kind of card is to start it off as a 3/3 for 3 mana, and let it eat a bunch of knights for breakfast and build up into a sizable critter (keeping in mind that the first upkeep is probably going to come before it gets a chance to attack).
This is the kind of critter that Lure was basically designed for, and yet by the time you get it out, Lure is too little, too late. Bah, humfuck.
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Whipstitch
- Prince
- Posts: 3660
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Good ol' Goyf. One of the first decks I ever did that wasn't a complete embarrassment was a bunch of elves, tinder walls, lumberjacks, goyfs and ramped lava bursts right to the face.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Fri Dec 04, 2015 7:55 am, edited 1 time in total.
bears fall, everyone dies
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Ancient History
- Serious Badass
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- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
OSSR: Ice Age: Colons: Colors
White
White magic is basically “stuff D&D Clerics might use.”
This was another card that appeared in InQuest, another early glimpse into Ice Age for the casual gamer. And it is...not bad. Because it's a versatile spell, it can work against any color. White isn't always known for its flexibility, so that came as a bit of surprise; but it falls neatly into the White domain of protection, and has some interesting uses.
Generally speaking, White does its domains - healing, protection, weenies, life gain - very well. Unfortunately, putting those together into a winnable deck can be difficult; you can gain as much life as you want and you're not going to win the game (in most sets). So it is in Ice Age, White was really struggling to fulfill its traditional roles and still bring something to the table that would win the game...
White in those days got the smallest design space left to them of all the colors. In the days of Ice Age, White achieved its “protection” theme by getting enchantments that protected them from each color. That means that for every kind of protection design they got, five cards got used up on the print sheet. And they didn't get any more cards on the print sheet than any other color, so they just plain got less unique cards overall. By a pretty significant amount – remember that there's only 56 cards of each color, so when these cards:
...use up ten slots on the fucking print sheet, there isn't a lot of remaining cards. It's pretty much exactly like getting 8 less unique cards, and since the whole set gives 56 total to each color, that's like having 14% less cards than the other colors.
And that would be OK if the rest of the cards went off into radically different design directions. But they don't. There are no less than seven different cards that are a “Kjeldoran [Thing]” that a smallish creature that to one degree or another sticks to other creatures to make a bigger thingy.
These cards are different, but no one cares.
Even the cards that aren't literally exactly in the two previously mentioned categories mostly might as well be.
Banding was White's Big Thing™ in Ice Age. There are 8 White cards that do Banding, literally 1/7th of the set's White cards. It was needlessly complicated, and I think the couple of creatures that tap to give +X/+X to another creature until end of turn and then die if that creature dies was an experiment in making Banding simpler. The problem being that those creatures costed way too much for what they did. Honestly, Banding should have just been “Tap to give +X/+Y to another target creature until end of turn, where X is this creature's power and Y is this creature's toughness.” from the very beginning. As is, they eventually gave up on the keyword, and removed it from the game in 1999.
To sort of add insult to injury, a lot of White's cards in Ice Age deal strongly with interacting with other colors...and not in good ways. Basically, there were supposed to be weak alliances with Green and Blue, and antithesis to Black...and, bizarrely, anything Ice Age related.
The anti-snow land stuff in Ice Age White is just bizarre. I think the intention was that White was supposed to represent the more temperate part of the climate, fighting against the glaciers and all that, but it just comes across as weird, to the point you wonder why Snow-Covered Plains are a thing.
The two themes came together in one absolutely bizarre card:
This is the Farrelite Priest of the Ice Age set. White doesn't get a lot of mana dorks to begin with, having a multi-colour mana dork would be impressive...if it didn't cost three mana...and if you could use the mana for anything except cumulative upkeep. As it is, the Adarkar Unicorn is almost a postchild for how badly designed Ice Age White was.
There are twenty three Enchantments in Ice Age White. That's as many cards as White gets creatures (and twenty out of those 23 creatures have a power of 2 or less, making the incredible sameness of the faction pretty hard to miss). Enchantments come in two kinds: Auras (which at this time were called “Enchant Creature” or “Enchant Land” or “Enchant Your Mom” depending on what they stuck to) and Enchantments which didn't stick to anything at all, called “Enchantments.” That may seem like needlessly confusing and redundant nomenclature, and it is.
Now Auras are fundamentally problematic from a card advantage standpoint, because if the card they are attached to goes away for any reason, the Aura dies. This means that whatever the fuck it is that the Aura does needs to be good enough to account for the fact that your opponent is going to inevitably kill two of your cards at the same time and gain a tempo advantage. The Auras in Ice Age were generally speaking not up to that quite high standard and were thus a giant pile of monkey assholes.
So much monkey asshole.
Battlefield Enchantments were inherently more resilient. They didn't have toughness and didn't take damage from anything. People could blow them up, but only with specialized spells. Since many decks had no enchantments at all, those enchantment targeting spells weren't always used, which often made your Enchantments very resilient indeed. But to be worth anything, an Enchantment still had to do something good. And preferably not commit seppuku. For whatever reason, Ice Age really liked making Enchantments that were garbage because they hurled themselves off a cliff like they were lemmings in the hands of Disney producers.
Nineteen years after this card came out, they issued an official clarification that colorless cards didn't count for making this card go away, which means that at least it didn't instantly vaporize because of fucking lands. It's still terrible though.
For fuck's sake, this was legal at the time. Why would you ever use Call to Arms?
And while the vast majority of Enchantments in this set were one varietyor another of coaster, there were some winners.
Enduring Renewal is obviously extremely powerful. It's like, whoa. But unlike Necropotence, which was immediately dominating once it started going into decks but roundly panned by the feeble minded when packs were first opened, Enduring Renewal required more tech to come out before it started owning people in the face. People could see immediately that it was a powerhouse, but the cards to make a functional Enduring Renewal deck simply didn't exist at the time. It comboed well enough with Necropotence (ironically), but what really made it go was that two years later they printed Goblin Bombardment and there were enough zero cost creatures that you could go infinite pretty reliably.
This may not look like much, but it won the first pro-tour.
Hallowed Ground is a card that is quite unlike Enduring Renewal in that it doesn't do anything good on its own. There are some dumb ways to go infinite with this, but this card was mostly used to fine tune the number of lands you had in play in order to really fuck people with Land Tax and Balance.
It is unreal how fucked you are at this point.
The real question of Hallowed Ground is: where the hell did they find Christians in Kjeldor? Magic's art department got a lot better about enforcing the fantasy world part. But remember, this is back when the core set just had Jews in it.
It was much later that they realized that their Christian analogs should be analogs rather than actual real world Earth people.
Ice Age White suffered from a lot of leftover thinking from Fallen Empires - that's most explicit in clone cards like Order of the White Shield, which was basically a new name for the Order of Leitbur. But Caribou Range and Fylgia are basically the same kind of weird counter-banking mechanic you saw in FE cards like Icatian Moneylender.
And these things...it's really hard not to see these as the Ice Age equivalents of Hand of Justice. The cost is sort of incredible, and the only thing I can figure is that they thought that with Banding, these things were going to be huge, amorphous blobs like the critters in Hecatomb.
White gets like armies and shit. So they were given all those creatures with low power and piles of weird abilities. And there is a lot of weird abilities. There is not a single creature in this color for this set that lacks rules text. Now, some of that rulestext is extremely shitty. In order to make some point about “theme” or something, White gets a 3/3 for four mana with a drawback.
Fucking seriously?
There is no justification for this. You will never ever use this card. When Red gets a 3/3 for four mana, it doesn't play that card. Because a 3/3 for four mana is not very good. Even at the time it was not very good. Now I'm sure that some dumb asshole thought “Hey, this is in a color that doesn't normally get 3 power creatures, so maybe they should pay a premium for it?” and tragically no one in the design team back then punched him in the dick for saying something that retarded. Here's the deal: you wouldn't play a 3/3 for four mana with no upside in any color. Hell, you wouldn't pay four mana for a 3/3 with no upside in no color at all. We know this because there actually are 3/3 Artifact creatures that cost 4 mana, and people don't play them. Back when this came out, for four mana (any one of which could have been White, were you to care), you could get a Clay Statue or a Primal Clay. And that's a lot better than Mercenaries and people still normally did not bother doing that.
If you had nothing but White mana and had four of it and wanted to play a 3 power creature with it, you could do that.
Nowadays of course, the default level of Creature goodness is higher. And so the various 3/3 Artifact Creatures for 4 mana all have upsides. But even in Ice Age, a 3/3 for four with a drawback was already bullshit.
![Image]()
People generally only play these in draft formats.
This isn't to say that White doesn't have decent cards. But these are probably the best critters in the deck:
Ice Age White doesn't lack a "killer app" - it has Enduring Renewal. But other than that, there's no really standout awesome cards that weren't ported over directly from 4th edition. I'd say they carried that through in Alliances, but to tell the truth White in Alliances was worse. Let that sink in a bit. White in Ice Age was shit, and in Alliances it looks like the lesson they took away was that White's creatures weren't bad enough.
Ice Age in general is very weak about selling its new mechanics, which is probably why Ice Age's special mechanics have all been relegated to the dustbin of historically bad ideas. But looking through White is really kind of amazing. There is literally no card in White that benefits from you having a snow covered land. I don't know why snow covered plains even exist. There are only four White cards that care about snow covered lands at all, but all of them hate or are hated by snow lands. The card that uses the new mechanics the most (which is to say that it uses Cumulative Upkeep and gives a shit about snow lands) is Cold Snap. It's a card they thought was so cool that they named an entire expansion after it.
Thus proving that all their taste is in their mouth.
Cold Snap is... well it's terrible. You are not going to play Cold Snap because it hates on all-snow land decks which don't actually exist. But if they did exist, Cold Snap would hit them so hard that they probably would stop existing. Against its chosen foe (enemies with snow lands), it's a burn card with buyback. The first turn you can burn your opponent for their land total by spending 3, the second turn you can burn them for their land total by spending 2, the third turn you can do it again for 4, and the fourth turn you can do it again for 6. Almost certainly you can keep it up for 3 turns, which is like burning your opponent for like 12 to 15 damage with one card. It's basically the game. And it's a burn spell. In White.
But with hate that severe and the upside to snow lands being so weak and lame (and as noted, completely absent from this color), snow lands weren't used at all. Which means that Cold Snap was just another coaster.
These two are all the other cards in White that cared about Cumulative Upkeep in any way. Which of course meant that no one ever used any Cumulative Upkeep in White because it was all shit.
The only conclusion I can reach about Ice Age White is that it must have been incomplete by design, specifically because it was the designated anti-Ice Age faction. They must have figured you'd take these weak cards and then go rifle through 4th edition starters to build a complete deck.
This is sort of Ice Age White in a microcosm. This spell is not going to win the game. Don't get me wrong, it will fuck up a Red deck and some Black and Green decks. But all it does is prevent direct damage from spells. It doesn't prevent critters from attacking you, it doesn't stop spells from destroying or crippling or exiling your lands, creatures, enchantments, or artifacts. For the cost, you're much better off pulling an appropriate Circle of Protection out of your ass.
The problem with Mono-White in Ice Age becomes even more apparent when you measure it against the other colors. What has basically no meaningful mana ramp-up, and nothing much to ramp up to. There are two critters it could play first turn, and six on the second turn. That's not bad compared to the other colors, which generally lack low-level critters...but that's about the beginning and end of the mono-white deck, trying to draw more critters and band them together for attack and defense. When you consider that a well-put together Green deck could easily drop six mana on turn three, a Green/Red deck could drop eleven... and there's absolutely nothing that Ice Age White can drop to match a Shivan Dragon on turn six, much less turn three.
Okay, point of order: you can block a Scaled Wurm with a Blinking Sprite and return it to your hand before it goes to your graveyard. Still.
If White had card advantage from cantrips, it could maybe put forth a solid weenie army. If White had mana ramp so that it could afford its overpriced bastards sooner, maybe it could match up with some of the bigger critters that the other colors could play. But it doesn't have any of that.
There is a tendency for cards in Ice Age to be over priced. Overpriced by like whoa. White's creatures are particularly laughable, because they are small. So you're being asked to pay like 5 mana for a 2/2. That's not even a joke.
A 2/2 would have to have some pretty boss abilities to get me to pay even 3 mana for it. Let alone four or five. One creature that did see play (possibly the only one, unless you count the reskinned Benalish Hero and Order of Leitbur) is the Blinking Spirit:
This was in the deck that won the first pro tour. It's actually kind of shitty, but it's immune to almost all forms of removal and can infinitely chump block a creature that doesn't have Trample or Flight. Living as it did in a control deck with four Wrath of Gods going on, it was a small but real win condition. Mostly, the creatures in this color are just offensively bad.
If you halved the cost of every creature in White, you still might not play them.
So if mono-white is out, all we're really looking at is White as an allying color - and that is perhaps its natural Ice Age role. White can band with anything, boost anything, heal anything, prevent damage from anything, and remove some sticky enchantments and critters using Disenchant and Swords to Plowshares. That's...okay. You can see how those kinds of decks work in principle: White runs interference with CoPs and such while the other color does the work of winning the game. But even here, so much of White's cards are dedicated to dicking with one color or another, you're left with a relatively small margin of cards to actually draw upon for your decks...and none of them is as game-changing as, say, Armageddon or Wrath of God.
Most of White's Instants (White mysteriously has no Sorceries in this set) are arguably not spells at all. With names like “Battle Cry,” “Formation,” “Rally,” and “Warning,” I don't think these are thematically supposed to be things a Wizard is doing at all. They are like mundane tactical commands given by a human general. It's a very different feel from the cards in other colors. There are some that are a bit on the magical side:
But even these are what D&D would call “divine magic” rather than arcane. Coming at it from the standpoint of a fantasy game player, White really sticks out like a sore thumb. It simply doesn't use the same metaphors that the other colors do. The cards don't look or feel like they are cards from the same game.
A short one, I know. We're going to look at multicolor, and probably artifacts and lands in the next one.
Lower your expectations! LOWER!
White
White magic is basically “stuff D&D Clerics might use.”
AncientH:
This was another card that appeared in InQuest, another early glimpse into Ice Age for the casual gamer. And it is...not bad. Because it's a versatile spell, it can work against any color. White isn't always known for its flexibility, so that came as a bit of surprise; but it falls neatly into the White domain of protection, and has some interesting uses.
Generally speaking, White does its domains - healing, protection, weenies, life gain - very well. Unfortunately, putting those together into a winnable deck can be difficult; you can gain as much life as you want and you're not going to win the game (in most sets). So it is in Ice Age, White was really struggling to fulfill its traditional roles and still bring something to the table that would win the game...
FrankT:
White in those days got the smallest design space left to them of all the colors. In the days of Ice Age, White achieved its “protection” theme by getting enchantments that protected them from each color. That means that for every kind of protection design they got, five cards got used up on the print sheet. And they didn't get any more cards on the print sheet than any other color, so they just plain got less unique cards overall. By a pretty significant amount – remember that there's only 56 cards of each color, so when these cards:
...use up ten slots on the fucking print sheet, there isn't a lot of remaining cards. It's pretty much exactly like getting 8 less unique cards, and since the whole set gives 56 total to each color, that's like having 14% less cards than the other colors.
And that would be OK if the rest of the cards went off into radically different design directions. But they don't. There are no less than seven different cards that are a “Kjeldoran [Thing]” that a smallish creature that to one degree or another sticks to other creatures to make a bigger thingy.
These cards are different, but no one cares.
Even the cards that aren't literally exactly in the two previously mentioned categories mostly might as well be.
Banding was White's Big Thing™ in Ice Age. There are 8 White cards that do Banding, literally 1/7th of the set's White cards. It was needlessly complicated, and I think the couple of creatures that tap to give +X/+X to another creature until end of turn and then die if that creature dies was an experiment in making Banding simpler. The problem being that those creatures costed way too much for what they did. Honestly, Banding should have just been “Tap to give +X/+Y to another target creature until end of turn, where X is this creature's power and Y is this creature's toughness.” from the very beginning. As is, they eventually gave up on the keyword, and removed it from the game in 1999.
The bottom line is that there's just less to review in this color than there is in other colors. The same couple of concepts get printed over and over and over again, and that heavy repetition leaves very little room for anything really innovative.Mark Rosewater wrote:Banding was flavorful and effective if used properly, but it was confusing. The story I always tell was about judging the 1995 World Championships, where the number one question I got from the top players in the world was "How does banding work again?"
AncientH:
To sort of add insult to injury, a lot of White's cards in Ice Age deal strongly with interacting with other colors...and not in good ways. Basically, there were supposed to be weak alliances with Green and Blue, and antithesis to Black...and, bizarrely, anything Ice Age related.
The anti-snow land stuff in Ice Age White is just bizarre. I think the intention was that White was supposed to represent the more temperate part of the climate, fighting against the glaciers and all that, but it just comes across as weird, to the point you wonder why Snow-Covered Plains are a thing.
The two themes came together in one absolutely bizarre card:
This is the Farrelite Priest of the Ice Age set. White doesn't get a lot of mana dorks to begin with, having a multi-colour mana dork would be impressive...if it didn't cost three mana...and if you could use the mana for anything except cumulative upkeep. As it is, the Adarkar Unicorn is almost a postchild for how badly designed Ice Age White was.
FrankT:
There are twenty three Enchantments in Ice Age White. That's as many cards as White gets creatures (and twenty out of those 23 creatures have a power of 2 or less, making the incredible sameness of the faction pretty hard to miss). Enchantments come in two kinds: Auras (which at this time were called “Enchant Creature” or “Enchant Land” or “Enchant Your Mom” depending on what they stuck to) and Enchantments which didn't stick to anything at all, called “Enchantments.” That may seem like needlessly confusing and redundant nomenclature, and it is.
Now Auras are fundamentally problematic from a card advantage standpoint, because if the card they are attached to goes away for any reason, the Aura dies. This means that whatever the fuck it is that the Aura does needs to be good enough to account for the fact that your opponent is going to inevitably kill two of your cards at the same time and gain a tempo advantage. The Auras in Ice Age were generally speaking not up to that quite high standard and were thus a giant pile of monkey assholes.
So much monkey asshole.
Battlefield Enchantments were inherently more resilient. They didn't have toughness and didn't take damage from anything. People could blow them up, but only with specialized spells. Since many decks had no enchantments at all, those enchantment targeting spells weren't always used, which often made your Enchantments very resilient indeed. But to be worth anything, an Enchantment still had to do something good. And preferably not commit seppuku. For whatever reason, Ice Age really liked making Enchantments that were garbage because they hurled themselves off a cliff like they were lemmings in the hands of Disney producers.
Nineteen years after this card came out, they issued an official clarification that colorless cards didn't count for making this card go away, which means that at least it didn't instantly vaporize because of fucking lands. It's still terrible though.
For fuck's sake, this was legal at the time. Why would you ever use Call to Arms?
And while the vast majority of Enchantments in this set were one varietyor another of coaster, there were some winners.
Enduring Renewal is obviously extremely powerful. It's like, whoa. But unlike Necropotence, which was immediately dominating once it started going into decks but roundly panned by the feeble minded when packs were first opened, Enduring Renewal required more tech to come out before it started owning people in the face. People could see immediately that it was a powerhouse, but the cards to make a functional Enduring Renewal deck simply didn't exist at the time. It comboed well enough with Necropotence (ironically), but what really made it go was that two years later they printed Goblin Bombardment and there were enough zero cost creatures that you could go infinite pretty reliably.
This may not look like much, but it won the first pro-tour.
Hallowed Ground is a card that is quite unlike Enduring Renewal in that it doesn't do anything good on its own. There are some dumb ways to go infinite with this, but this card was mostly used to fine tune the number of lands you had in play in order to really fuck people with Land Tax and Balance.
It is unreal how fucked you are at this point.
The real question of Hallowed Ground is: where the hell did they find Christians in Kjeldor? Magic's art department got a lot better about enforcing the fantasy world part. But remember, this is back when the core set just had Jews in it.
It was much later that they realized that their Christian analogs should be analogs rather than actual real world Earth people.
AncientH:
Ice Age White suffered from a lot of leftover thinking from Fallen Empires - that's most explicit in clone cards like Order of the White Shield, which was basically a new name for the Order of Leitbur. But Caribou Range and Fylgia are basically the same kind of weird counter-banking mechanic you saw in FE cards like Icatian Moneylender.
And these things...it's really hard not to see these as the Ice Age equivalents of Hand of Justice. The cost is sort of incredible, and the only thing I can figure is that they thought that with Banding, these things were going to be huge, amorphous blobs like the critters in Hecatomb.
FrankT:
White gets like armies and shit. So they were given all those creatures with low power and piles of weird abilities. And there is a lot of weird abilities. There is not a single creature in this color for this set that lacks rules text. Now, some of that rulestext is extremely shitty. In order to make some point about “theme” or something, White gets a 3/3 for four mana with a drawback.
Fucking seriously?
There is no justification for this. You will never ever use this card. When Red gets a 3/3 for four mana, it doesn't play that card. Because a 3/3 for four mana is not very good. Even at the time it was not very good. Now I'm sure that some dumb asshole thought “Hey, this is in a color that doesn't normally get 3 power creatures, so maybe they should pay a premium for it?” and tragically no one in the design team back then punched him in the dick for saying something that retarded. Here's the deal: you wouldn't play a 3/3 for four mana with no upside in any color. Hell, you wouldn't pay four mana for a 3/3 with no upside in no color at all. We know this because there actually are 3/3 Artifact creatures that cost 4 mana, and people don't play them. Back when this came out, for four mana (any one of which could have been White, were you to care), you could get a Clay Statue or a Primal Clay. And that's a lot better than Mercenaries and people still normally did not bother doing that.
If you had nothing but White mana and had four of it and wanted to play a 3 power creature with it, you could do that.
Nowadays of course, the default level of Creature goodness is higher. And so the various 3/3 Artifact Creatures for 4 mana all have upsides. But even in Ice Age, a 3/3 for four with a drawback was already bullshit.
People generally only play these in draft formats.
AncientH:
This isn't to say that White doesn't have decent cards. But these are probably the best critters in the deck:
Ice Age White doesn't lack a "killer app" - it has Enduring Renewal. But other than that, there's no really standout awesome cards that weren't ported over directly from 4th edition. I'd say they carried that through in Alliances, but to tell the truth White in Alliances was worse. Let that sink in a bit. White in Ice Age was shit, and in Alliances it looks like the lesson they took away was that White's creatures weren't bad enough.
FrankT:
Ice Age in general is very weak about selling its new mechanics, which is probably why Ice Age's special mechanics have all been relegated to the dustbin of historically bad ideas. But looking through White is really kind of amazing. There is literally no card in White that benefits from you having a snow covered land. I don't know why snow covered plains even exist. There are only four White cards that care about snow covered lands at all, but all of them hate or are hated by snow lands. The card that uses the new mechanics the most (which is to say that it uses Cumulative Upkeep and gives a shit about snow lands) is Cold Snap. It's a card they thought was so cool that they named an entire expansion after it.
Thus proving that all their taste is in their mouth.
Cold Snap is... well it's terrible. You are not going to play Cold Snap because it hates on all-snow land decks which don't actually exist. But if they did exist, Cold Snap would hit them so hard that they probably would stop existing. Against its chosen foe (enemies with snow lands), it's a burn card with buyback. The first turn you can burn your opponent for their land total by spending 3, the second turn you can burn them for their land total by spending 2, the third turn you can do it again for 4, and the fourth turn you can do it again for 6. Almost certainly you can keep it up for 3 turns, which is like burning your opponent for like 12 to 15 damage with one card. It's basically the game. And it's a burn spell. In White.
But with hate that severe and the upside to snow lands being so weak and lame (and as noted, completely absent from this color), snow lands weren't used at all. Which means that Cold Snap was just another coaster.
These two are all the other cards in White that cared about Cumulative Upkeep in any way. Which of course meant that no one ever used any Cumulative Upkeep in White because it was all shit.
AncientH:
The only conclusion I can reach about Ice Age White is that it must have been incomplete by design, specifically because it was the designated anti-Ice Age faction. They must have figured you'd take these weak cards and then go rifle through 4th edition starters to build a complete deck.
This is sort of Ice Age White in a microcosm. This spell is not going to win the game. Don't get me wrong, it will fuck up a Red deck and some Black and Green decks. But all it does is prevent direct damage from spells. It doesn't prevent critters from attacking you, it doesn't stop spells from destroying or crippling or exiling your lands, creatures, enchantments, or artifacts. For the cost, you're much better off pulling an appropriate Circle of Protection out of your ass.
The problem with Mono-White in Ice Age becomes even more apparent when you measure it against the other colors. What has basically no meaningful mana ramp-up, and nothing much to ramp up to. There are two critters it could play first turn, and six on the second turn. That's not bad compared to the other colors, which generally lack low-level critters...but that's about the beginning and end of the mono-white deck, trying to draw more critters and band them together for attack and defense. When you consider that a well-put together Green deck could easily drop six mana on turn three, a Green/Red deck could drop eleven... and there's absolutely nothing that Ice Age White can drop to match a Shivan Dragon on turn six, much less turn three.
Okay, point of order: you can block a Scaled Wurm with a Blinking Sprite and return it to your hand before it goes to your graveyard. Still.
If White had card advantage from cantrips, it could maybe put forth a solid weenie army. If White had mana ramp so that it could afford its overpriced bastards sooner, maybe it could match up with some of the bigger critters that the other colors could play. But it doesn't have any of that.
FrankT:
There is a tendency for cards in Ice Age to be over priced. Overpriced by like whoa. White's creatures are particularly laughable, because they are small. So you're being asked to pay like 5 mana for a 2/2. That's not even a joke.
A 2/2 would have to have some pretty boss abilities to get me to pay even 3 mana for it. Let alone four or five. One creature that did see play (possibly the only one, unless you count the reskinned Benalish Hero and Order of Leitbur) is the Blinking Spirit:
This was in the deck that won the first pro tour. It's actually kind of shitty, but it's immune to almost all forms of removal and can infinitely chump block a creature that doesn't have Trample or Flight. Living as it did in a control deck with four Wrath of Gods going on, it was a small but real win condition. Mostly, the creatures in this color are just offensively bad.
If you halved the cost of every creature in White, you still might not play them.
AncientH:
So if mono-white is out, all we're really looking at is White as an allying color - and that is perhaps its natural Ice Age role. White can band with anything, boost anything, heal anything, prevent damage from anything, and remove some sticky enchantments and critters using Disenchant and Swords to Plowshares. That's...okay. You can see how those kinds of decks work in principle: White runs interference with CoPs and such while the other color does the work of winning the game. But even here, so much of White's cards are dedicated to dicking with one color or another, you're left with a relatively small margin of cards to actually draw upon for your decks...and none of them is as game-changing as, say, Armageddon or Wrath of God.
FrankT:
Most of White's Instants (White mysteriously has no Sorceries in this set) are arguably not spells at all. With names like “Battle Cry,” “Formation,” “Rally,” and “Warning,” I don't think these are thematically supposed to be things a Wizard is doing at all. They are like mundane tactical commands given by a human general. It's a very different feel from the cards in other colors. There are some that are a bit on the magical side:
But even these are what D&D would call “divine magic” rather than arcane. Coming at it from the standpoint of a fantasy game player, White really sticks out like a sore thumb. It simply doesn't use the same metaphors that the other colors do. The cards don't look or feel like they are cards from the same game.
AncientH:
A short one, I know. We're going to look at multicolor, and probably artifacts and lands in the next one.
Lower your expectations! LOWER!
Last edited by Ancient History on Sat Dec 05, 2015 1:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Josh_Kablack
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Blinky was a penguin, it couldn't chump block a Shivan.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Ancient History
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Yeah White and Green have always been the unfavorite children. But wow white got off poorly there were what 3 cards that you'd actually play and the didn't even go in the same decks. Blinky is a finisher/blocker in a control deck, Enduring Renewal is a combo piece, and the pump knight goes in white wennie. That's sort of always been the problem with white it does a bunch of thematic things but they don't naturally gel together into obvious strategy like the other colors.
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Josh_Kablack
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I am eagerly looking forward to the artifact part of this review. Artifacts were the craziest part of Ice Age - for multiple senses of the word crazy.
Crazy Good
Crazy Combo Potential
Crazy that they thought anyone would use this under any circumstances
Crazy forgettable
Crazy Cray Cray, WTF, can we fit more text in there
Crazy Good
Crazy Combo Potential
Crazy that they thought anyone would use this under any circumstances
Crazy forgettable
This is, in fact, so useless, I wonder why Ice Age didn't have a card that let you turn a regular land into a snow-covered land. Just put a snow counter on it or something. Enchant Land. Anything.
Crazy Cray Cray, WTF, can we fit more text in there
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Sat Dec 05, 2015 5:53 am, edited 2 times in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Ancient History
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I did forget about that. Still think it would have been better as an instant, though. "What the hell are you going to do with snow-covered landwalk?" <zap!> "Oh noes!"Josh_Kablack wrote:
Crazy forgettable
This is, in fact, so useless, I wonder why Ice Age didn't have a card that let you turn a regular land into a snow-covered land. Just put a snow counter on it or something. Enchant Land. Anything.
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Hadanelith
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GreatGreyShrike
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It took me three readings to be willing to hazard a guess.
My guess is:
1. You pay any amount you want, tap the cauldron and put a card (probably from your hand, but it doesn't specify) on the cauldron
2. Next turn, tap the cauldron again, and use the mana from the first time to help pay for the card on the cauldron from before along with mana from this turn
You could theoretically play the cauldron turn 4, put 5 mana into the cauldron turn 5, then use the cauldron turn 6 and get an 11-drop out on turn 6 - at a cost of two cards, all your mana for three turns, and painfully telegraphing what you're doing. Also, this is even more stupid because all the high-cost creatures are painfully overpriced, the better creatures tend to cost 5-6 mana anyways, and therefore practice you don't gain anything worthwhile from running this stupid cauldron.
If the cauldron was cheaper it might have a point - a 1-drop to let you put a 5-mana drop on the table turn 3 seems potentially like something that might matter, or at least be interesting.
My guess is:
1. You pay any amount you want, tap the cauldron and put a card (probably from your hand, but it doesn't specify) on the cauldron
2. Next turn, tap the cauldron again, and use the mana from the first time to help pay for the card on the cauldron from before along with mana from this turn
You could theoretically play the cauldron turn 4, put 5 mana into the cauldron turn 5, then use the cauldron turn 6 and get an 11-drop out on turn 6 - at a cost of two cards, all your mana for three turns, and painfully telegraphing what you're doing. Also, this is even more stupid because all the high-cost creatures are painfully overpriced, the better creatures tend to cost 5-6 mana anyways, and therefore practice you don't gain anything worthwhile from running this stupid cauldron.
If the cauldron was cheaper it might have a point - a 1-drop to let you put a 5-mana drop on the table turn 3 seems potentially like something that might matter, or at least be interesting.
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RadiantPhoenix
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Actually, one card. You may play the card on the cauldron as though it were in your hand, you're basically just revealing a card from your hand.
It feels like you're supposed to pay the casting cost of the card as the X, but it doesn't actually say that.
But yes, it basically lets you bank mana across turns so you can spend two turns of mana on one card, and enters the game past when you'd probably want to do that. Maybe if you're casting an X spell and can spend two turns worth of mana on making it slightly more than twice as good.
EDIT: Oh, you can only spend the mana on the card on the cauldron, missed that my first read. Still good for fireball or whatever.
It feels like you're supposed to pay the casting cost of the card as the X, but it doesn't actually say that.
But yes, it basically lets you bank mana across turns so you can spend two turns of mana on one card, and enters the game past when you'd probably want to do that. Maybe if you're casting an X spell and can spend two turns worth of mana on making it slightly more than twice as good.
EDIT: Oh, you can only spend the mana on the card on the cauldron, missed that my first read. Still good for fireball or whatever.
Last edited by name_here on Sun Dec 06, 2015 2:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
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Ancient History
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OSSR: Ice Age: Colons: Colors?
Brown & Gold
Colorless and multicolored in this schema.
Before we get too deep into this, Magic made a strategic error with its color nomenclature at the beginning. To be blunt: Black and White are not colors. They are hues, or metals if you want to get all heraldic on this shit. Red, Blue, and Green are all colors, and the obvious colors to use for the other two are Yellow and Purple, not Black and White. If you thought it was really important that all the color names be single syllable in English, you could have them be Gold and Mauve (or Corn and Puce or whatever). An obvious advantage of using Yellow and Purple is that your single letter codes for mana wouldn't have to use “U” for Blue. But it actually goes way deeper than that.
Time and time again, Magic has busted out some kind of Prism metaphor. No surprise there, prisms convert uncolored light into colored light. But you notice how those pieces of art look like shit, and are way worse than a fucking Pink Floyd album cover? That is because there is no way to graphically represent “uncolored” power that is distinct from White and Black. You can't fucking do it, because White and Black are what things fucking look like when they don't have a color. Things on the white/black spectrum of grays should have been reserved for colorless things. But instead, the colorless things in the first set were Brown. Which is itself a color.
In the original set, there were no cards that were more than one color. Multicolored cards came into being in Legends, and at the time all the multicolored cards were Legends, and they got a gold background because they were special. That was a dumb idea, but it got grandfathered in and when later sets had two color minor spells at common, they kept being Gold because that chicken had already been fucked.
Feel the specialness!
Obviously, multicolored cards should have just had split backgrounds, like they eventually did for cards with split mana costs. And whatever weird ass metallic background should have been reserved for cards with 3+ colors in their cost.
Multi-colored spells should have looked like this. Not the part where they are fucking terrible, the part where someone used the “fade” tool in Photoshop on the background.
Anyway, Ice Age had 68 colorless cards and 25 multicolored cards. Each color had 11 multicolored cards, as they appeared in 3 of the five three-color cards and four cards in two of the five two-color combinations (only allied colors are represented and each allied color combination gets exactly 4 cards). We could do this in 2 pieces, but these bits aren't really interesting enough to do that.
It's worth noting that Fallen Empires had zero gold cards, and Homelands had zero gold cards - and, for that matter, 4th edition had zero gold cards. So you have to ask why Ice Age and Alliances had gold cards, and the apparent answer is that Ice Age was the first set implicitly designed to appeal to multicolor deck construction. That's actually a rather impressive design step, and as much as we bitch about how each individual color's cards for interacting with the other colors suck, and how the cards designed to let them interact don't really play to each other's strengths, this is still huge. Keep in mind that in 4th edition, you had a fairly nice stack of sideboard cards for fucking with decks of different colors, and were...unsubtle.
And in Fallen Empires, you can see that the designers were still thinking primarily of mono-color decks, even trying to set up a thematic struggle within the colors between two different factions. Now, they never gave enough cards to realize that, but you can clearly see in FE that they're not throwing any bones to players that want to play multicolor decks.
But Ice Age is different. Every color has cards that interact favorably with its "allied" colors. The cards aren't always good on an individual level, and you might never play them in a deck, but it shows a very different approach to "classic" Magic in 4th edition, where the individual colors usually have very generic spells and don't have a strong placement in the M:tG setting of Dominaria. In Ice Age, there are relatively few "generic" spells, particularly critters - they really tried to ground the set into the setting. And beyond that, they tried to establish the colors to work with and against each other, and part of that was the multicolor cards.
I didn't say they worked together well. Baby steps.
So as much as we call Ice Age a weak set whose novel mechanics were largely crap and forgotten, it was really important in changing the way the average Magic player understood how decks and cards could be designed.
I should probably talk about the Lands first, but before I do that I want to talk about the Baton of Morale.
Just for starters: yes, that's a dildo. That is not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the Helm of Chatzuk.
Despite initial appearances, the Baton of Morale isn't strictly inferior to the Helm of Chatzuk. Due to the shitty early nomenclature of the basic set, the Helm actually taps to do its thing, while the Baton does not. So you are paying twice as much to play and use the Baton for the privilege of being able to use it a second time for even more mana. But the real bottom line is that the Helm wasn't terribly good and mostly people didn't use it. So making a new version that was slightly more powerful but massively more expensive was not a thing that was going to go over well. But giving out standard creature abilities on artifacts for way too fucking much mana was totally a thing in Ice Age.
You will not use these because they cost way too fucking much.
In general, Artifacts in Ice Age cost more than they should. Often by a lot.
I have no idea why I'd want to pay 6 man for this sword. Considering that it costs 3 mana and kills a creature to use the fucking thing, I would rarely put it into a deck if it came out for free.
The first thing to remember about artifacts in Ice Age is that they were coming off of Fallen Empires, and it shows.
This is not a good card. This is a better card, but it is also not good.
I think the idea goes back to Antiquities that maybe artifacts were overpowered. Some artifacts were, in fact, overpowered for their cost, and they generally didn't participate in the color wheel shenanigans, which meant that more than one player really liked artifacts, especially in sealed deck tournaments where the color of mana can be really tricky. So around the time of FE, most of the artifacts were pitifully underpowered and/or overpriced...and not necessarily intentionally.
Probably the most obvious example are the "booster" artifacts, which Ice Age has a passel of. These...aren't great. It's not just that they generally cost too much for what amounts to a combat trick, but it speaks to how the designers thought some individual abilities were worth and who would use them. Aegis of the Meek, for example, is the kind of thing that works if you're looking at a Benalish Hero surprising and overcoming a Knight of Stromgald and maybe surviving; there's just not a lot of 1/1s running around in Ice Age, so this thing is primarily designed for a White weenie deck. By contrast, Celestial Sword is an overpriced Giant Growth; Green will never use it because they have a way cheaper alternative.
The artifacts cost more and do less because they're colorless and can be used by any player, but the designers were still thinking in terms of colors when they were designing these things. It was thematic design all the way down.
The other thing about artifacts is that Ice Age was a continuation of the Antiquities storyline, something they would push further in Alliances and which would eventually lead to the Urza Block. This was the first really significant metaplot push in M:tG, and would basically shape the game for over a decade.
Ice Age gave us Pain Lands and Depletion Lands. These were frequently used in tournaments but only after the original multilands were taken out of the format. Pain Lands and Depletion Lands are, quite simply worse than the original dual lands. The design team felt that the original dual lands were too powerful, so they made new dual lands that were shittier. And this got exactly zero traction until the second part of that came down from above “By the way, you also can't use your older, better cards, go fuck yourself.” This all goes back to the problem we talked about earlier, where lands didn't have enough moving parts for any kind of balanced anything to be made. Obviously you're going to need dual lands, and those dual lands should be as simple as possible. The dual lands from the original basic set were the simplest a dual land could be, so those should have been the standard. The logical conclusion is thus that basic single-color lands aren't good enough and need to have secondary effects. But instead we got these shitty things, which were way more complicated than they needed to be. Look at that wall of text on the depletion land. Fuck. That.
What you also see here is a fundamental lack of confidence in the Ice Age mechanics. Those Adarkar Wastes and Timberline Ridges are graphically covered in snow, but game mechanically they lack the “snow covered” tag. Why? Why even fucking bother with having “snow lands” if your special lands aren't going to carry the tag? It's not just the experimental “shitty versions of dual lands” that fail to interact with Ice Age's land tags.
These lands are fucking made out of ice and snow, and they lack the “snow” tag! Wharrgarbl!
Broadly, there just wasn't mechanical support for the snow tag at any level of this set. There was stupid shit like Arcum's Sleigh that cared if your opponent had Snow Lands, but damn few cards that actually gave you any tangible benefit for having snow lands yourself. Ice Age needed to present a complete package of playable snow lands and a complete set of enticements for doing so. Making special lands people would want to use that carried the snow tag needed to be the start of it, but every color needed to have enough positive snow cards to make snow lands a viable life choice for that color. As is, there are no shit only fifteen cards in the entire set that present any benefit for having snow lands at all. And let's not beat around the bush, none of those cards are particularly good.
Arcum's Sleigh was so expensive for what it did that even if you discovered that your opponent had Snow Lands for whatever reason, you still wouldn't put it in your deck.
These two cards are the only cards in the entire set that benefit from you having snow lands and also aren't completely worthless. They even go together. You could maybe make a turbo fog grind deck. But no one ever did that because even with the ability to convert lands to fog you still needed a fucking win condition. I mean, I could totally see a deck with Crevasses, Sun Stones, and Land Tax that stonewalled for a long ass time and won with like Wracks and Black Vices or Millstones or something. But that is literally the only deck I can even think of that would use snow lands for fucking anything. Fuck.
The history of Magic design is often the designers learning the wrong lesson from a lot of problems that cropped up. With Pain Lands, I think they wanted to avoid the landwalking/spell interaction issues that would come with making new Dual Lands that were Forest/Mountains and shit.
To prove they didn't learn this lesson, they repeated it in Cold Snap
Depletion Lands were even worse, but you can sort of see that they were based off of the tap lands in Fallen Empires; the idea in both cases is that you sacrifice smooth mana production for added versatility. Unfortunately, the mana curve is just too fucked when depletion counters come into play, especially with the mana ramp-up available in Ice Age. With a complicated mechanic and too little payoff, these things were doomed from the get-go.
Two of the three "special" lands that don't fall into Pain Lands, Depletion Lands, Snow Lands, or Basic Lands manage to both use the Cumulative Upkeep mechanic...and, they're rubbish. Weirdly, they're both focused on preventing combat, and of the two I think Glacial Chasm might have gotten the most play, because some players realized the Necropotence lesson, and it basically shuts down creature decks cold while it's in play.
The only thing I can really say is good about Ice Age's lands is that it got the basics out of the way. No-one was going to use Depletion lands if they had any other choice, and there was little-to-no reason to use snow lands unless you literally didn't have any other lands, but it was still a more diverse set-up than in 4th edition, and it included all the mandatory basic lands and the not-mandatory-but-fuck-it-there's-nothing-better Pain Lands. Which freed up Alliances to go cray-cray.
Alliances lands were not always good. But some had their place.
This is the Jester's Cap. It was restricted almost immediately, and it was one of the first cards to hit $50. It was the face of this set, allusions to it were made in many subsequent sets, and people just generally freaked the fuck out about it. And looking at it, it's a bit hard to understand why. I mean, if you could put this into your deck, you still probably wouldn't. It simply isn't very good. If you're up against a combo deck, you might be able to remove three copies of a key portion of their deck (say: three copies of Enduring Renewal in an Enduring Renewal deck), but so what? It doesn't hit any of the copies in their hand or discard pile, and in any case it only takes out three. The number of Enduring Renewals in their deck is four. Even if they haven't drawn it yet and your cap goes off without a hitch, they still have one more copy and all their means of deck sifting to get to it.
However, while Jester's Cap is obviously a bad card, it was actually somewhat better at the time. Deck searching was really insanely good back then, and there were combo decks that used restricted cards for their win condition. Lobster Quadrille, for example, put all their cards from their deck into play and then had a deck small enough (and mana pile large enough) by turn 5 to simply play Time Walk, Time Twister, and Regrowth on the Time Twister several times in a turn even though you could only have one of each of those cards in your deck. Jester's Cap could in theory pluck several of the necessary components of such a shenanigans deck and then leave them to flounder. Even so, you're still paying 4 mana and then 2 mana for something that has literally no effect on the board state. It's difficult to imagine a matchup where you wouldn't rather have a counterspell.
So that's Jester's Cap. Literally the most overrated card that has ever been printed. There was a Jester's Mask too, and even though it was mostly a better card, no one cared. Jester's Cap was the first card that really did things to your opponent's deck. And that made people feel naked and afraid. And this card inspired fear way out of proportion to how good it actually was.
If your opponent obliges you by having a number of bad cards in their deck, this is almost as good as making your opponent discard their hand.
Zuran Orb found its ways into a number of hypothetical "zero cost" decks. These were the kind of novelty decks that twelve-year-olds dream up when they lose a lot because they can't afford really good cards, or when they do, find out they don't know how to play them right. That said, Zuran Orb is a really decent card, because all it does is increase functionality. As an effect, you would expect this to be an instant or maybe an ability on a critter that you'd pay 3 mana for and have to tap to use. But you don't have to do any of that with the Zuran Orb. You lay it down, and boom, it's ready for use.
Another zero-cost artifact, though less beloved than Zuran Orb, and it's easy to see why. This is a pretty solid first-turn draw, if you don't have any one-mana cards to play. It basically lets you save one mana from turn to turn, which isn't bad, but isn't as handy as a mana dork like Fyndhorn Elves and becomes progressively less useful in the late game (which, in Ice Age games is about turn 6). This is also one of those cards where later nomenclature ironically can change the nature of the card.
Really, Jeweled Amulet is just an excuse not to have mana batteries.
Frank hasn't talked about it, so I suppose it's up to me to rant about talismans.
There was one of these for each color. Magic does that from time to time. Sometimes, this works (mana batteries, moxes), a lot of the time, it doesn't. It's not just that the effects aren't great for the price, it's that the different colors have very different needs for their given themes, and not all of them give a tenth of a shit about untapping to the same degree. White just doesn't care that much about its critters untapping, unless it's the Seraph, and for three mana will tell you to go fuck yourself. Blue, on the other hand, likes having the ability to untap things, and has enough mana ramp it could swing it.
These are two artifacts which saw a surprising amount of play at the time. They're not awesome, but they're not terrible either. They both accomplish their jobs fairly well for the cost, and have a surprising amount of utility. The reason they're not rated more highly overall is that the best uses of both are kind of marginal, especially in the Ice Age block. For example, you can use Crown of Ages to increase your card draw:
...but that's a pretty expensive way to do that in a set that has Necropotence. You're not going to build a deck around these cards, except maybe the Scepter if burying shit becomes critical, and they won't win the game on their own (seriously, it would take ten direct hits from the Skull Catapult - that's just not going to happen; maybe if you're playing Blue/Black with lots of tokens and untapping, but there are more efficient ways to piss away mana for damage). And the lack of crippling flaws mean these were some of the better artifacts in this set!
Ice Cauldron
Sorry... here it is:
Ice Cauldron
OK, Ice Cauldron has the tiniest and most confusing text of any card that wasn't from Unglued or something.
This had more text, but it was also a joke. Ice Cauldron was “serious.”
What Ice Cauldron actually does is let you play a card by spending mana over two turns. The cauldron taps to put the mana (and the card you intend to play) in, and then it taps again the next turn to pop the card out (and you can spend mana from the new turn). There's some weirdness about how the charge up turn the mana is technically an artifact activation (so you could use the limited mana from a Machinist, but couldn't use the limited mana from a Beastcaller), and on the discharge round it's a regular spell casting (so you could use the Beastcaller, but couldn't use the Machinist), but the card is not conceptually difficult to grasp.
What it is is incredibly, incredibly slow. It takes 4 mana to put it into play, then a turn to put a spell onto your layaway plan, then another turn to pay it off. You put the damn thing into play on turn 4 and you don't see anything actually come out of it until turn six. The saving rate is 100%, so that's kinda cool. Unlike the Iceberg we talked about in Blue, you do have to reveal what you're saving up for before you cast it (and you can lose that card if someone disenchants your Ice Cauldron before you let the dogs out). However, like we said with our review of Big Blue and Big Black, there actually isn't any reason to save up this much mana for anything. A R/G ramp deck can put a Shivan Dragon onto the battlefield on turn 3, nothing that costs more than that was actually worth using under any circumstances in the play environment the Ice Cauldron was released into. The only thing vaguely worth doing with it was saving up for a turn to drop really big X damage spells on your opponent as a finishing move – but in most cases you'd rather just have replaced the Ice Cauldron itself with more burn.
So all in all a weird card and a failed design. Too many moving parts, and too confusing for what was a simple and not terribly useful niche function. This sort of poor rules writing wasn't just the Ice Cauldron. Nor indeed was it the only such card to be kind of shitty and use funky charge counters.
Tap it to put a mana in, or tap it to take a mana out. This card takes 68 words to explain that.
Someone on the design team really liked this charge up nonsense, and they were incapable of writing concise prose.
I don't know what Ice Age had against artifact creatures. I think it distrusted them because they were colorless. It's the only way I can explain it. Most are just overpriced and underpowered for the cost, and like the used cards of the world, you have to keep pouring more resources in them to get anything like the expected performance. I think part of the problem was the mana ramp-up; you could push out Soldevi Golem on turn 2 if you were playing mana ramp, and that's not bad.
I swear, the designers thought that games must last 20+ turns or something. Which makes sense if you're a brand new player, who doesn't expect to get a 1/1 critter out until the second turn and thinks that they're going to ping the enemy to death with it.
I mentioned earlier that some of these artifacts were explicitly about giving the other colors overpriced access to abilities from the other colors. Maybe I didn't spell it out as explicitly like that, but there you go. This is maybe the most bizarrely blatant example. I can't really conceive why you would want two cards in this set with this effect. I mean, you fuck up once, fine, it's a learning curve. Fuck up twice, and somebody needs to get busted down to proofreading the Portal rulebook.
So what makes a good multi-colored spell? Thematically, a multicolored spell should feel like it's all the colors that go into it. That's a tough nut to crack, and was basically not a thing that could happen back in Ice Age because none of the colors really had the pieces together to tell you what they “feel like.” If you gave me 10 card proposals from this era and asked me to tell you whether they were Black or Green, I would probably only do a bit better than a coin flip.
Structurally though, a card is multicolored because it can only be played by decks that can put together specific combinations of multiple kinds of mana. A card is White and Blue because it goes into White/Blue decks and not into Mono-White or Red/Blue decks. So for a multicolored spell to be good, it has to be a card that is useful to a deck archetype that uses all of its constituent colors. That was way beyond where the magic design team was operating at this time, because they had no idea what an “archetype” was or what kinds of decks any particular color combination might support.
Chromatic Armor is garbage, because White/Blue decks do not want to spend multiple cards on a single creature. They are control decks, who try to use card advantage and removal to take out all enemy threats and then punch through with a Serra Angel (or even a Blinking Spirit, you know, whatever). Diabolic Vision is actually moderately OK, because Blue/Black decks like to fuck with their decks and sift through for the right kind of threat or answer for the job. I mean, it never saw a lot of play because Brainstorm was about as good and cost 1 less mana, but it wasn't dire.
The archetypical multicolored card is Lightning Helix. It “feels” Red, it “feels” White, it's used in Red/White decks because it's good, but also because it fits in with the game plan that Red/White decks probably have. But this also came out a decade after Ice Age was a thing. When Ice Age happened, the designers had no idea what a Black/Red or a Green/White deck was doing or cared about. So all the multicolored spells are pretty much written by the Hamlet Typing monkeys, and are only useful to anybody on accident.
One thing that does stand out is that the designers thought that gold cards were somehow “special” so they aren't hit with the nerf bat as much as you'd think. Oh sure, all the cards that cost 6 mana are a heap of wet garbage, but that's because the designers seemed to have no idea how much 6 mana actually is.
There is nothing special about these cards. But they don't stand out as terrible because the designers mostly counteracted their irrational desire to nerf everything to a lower balance point with their irrational desire to make gold cards better than the standard balance point.
This is just insane. Ain't nobody going to pay 6 mana for a 3/3 flyer.
There was clearly a procedure to all this. It's all rotationally symmetrical and shit. There's exactly one card of each supported 3 color combination. Most allied two color combinations gets a 4 mana hate card to shit on the color they mutually despise. But brutal hate cards targeted at a single color were bad design in the first place. And since you could jolly well use the poorly designed ones from the basic set that only required one color, there was little incentive to branch out into the other colors.
Red and Black are missing their anti-White card, but I think Ghostly Flame is supposed to be it. Because bypassing Circle of Protection is like the dickest thing the designers could imagine to do to White. That's
cleverish, but it's still stupid.
I would like to point out that I love the art for this card. That is all.
I still think this should be BU.
The Ice Age crew's "lessons learned" obviously didn't include gold cards, you can tell that because in Alliances, you get a very similar setup, even though there's only like ten of them.
I can't say Big Gold ever really caught on.
It's hard to really get into the nitty-gritty with the gold cards, because there's not much there. Take out the fuck-you-opposite-colors and the spells and critters just don't really go together much at all with either of their parent colors.
Case in point, this isn't a great card for Black or Blue individually. A 0/3 pinger for 5 mana is just not something either wants. Even when you get something marginally useful:
...this is basically only going to be played as a sideboard card against White. And that's pretty much every gold card you would want to talk about. The three-colors are sometimes marginally better, but you're not going to build a deck around them.
At a 3-mana casting cost, that's a terrific ability. The problem is, natch, the three-mana casting cost. You could conceivably play MRB on turn two if you have the right pain lands and appropriate shenanigans with Jeweled Amulet or something, but ignore pain lands for a second and look at how you would play this critter with basic lands: one land drop per turn, with a different land each turn. That's going to severely crimp whatever else you're going to play for your first two turns, and on down the line...for a card that's eminently pingable. Don't get me wrong, she's a great control card, but there's an opportunity cost for getting her out.
I do appreciate impressionistic and surrealist art, and believe there should be more of it in Magic today.
A bunch of cards in Ice Age count down or count up or get more expensive over time or some fucking thing. I bring up the Infinite Hourglass and the Time Bomb because they can only be justified in very very long games. If you blow the Time Bomb on the third turn, it only does 2 damage – hardly enough to wipe your ass with, let along spend four mana to bring it into play (and one more to blow it up). But that's your sixth turn. How long did the Ice Age design team think games were going to last?
I hate the decks that like this card.
The reality is that you only want a certain amount of land in play. Whatever your deck needs to run, it needs those land, but any land after that are just dead draws. The Zuran Orb lets you convert those extra land into life at the rate of 2 life each. That's not nothing, which is what you were going to get for drawing an extra land. There are also decks with truly elastic mana sinks (such as any deck with Firebreathing creatures), and they don't mind drawing and using more lands, but for everyone else there's Zuran Orb.
But that's not why people cared about Zuran Orb. The reason people cared about Zuran Orb is that there was Balance and Land Tax and Tithe and shit that let you get card advantage for having less land than your opponent, so being able to spend nothing and gain a bunch of life to pop your lands out of play at a moment's notice was a pretty big deal.
Also a turn one infinite combo in Vintage.
I feel maybe we haven't talked about everything here, but nobody gives a shit about Fyndhorn Bow, Elkin Bottle, and Goblin Lyre, much less Centaur Archer and Mountain Titan. We're at the dregs of the Ice Age set here, and I think it shows...and I think it also shows that the design team was very split up. I don't think the same people working on Red were working on White, much less collaborated on the Red/White gold cards; I don't think any of them were consulted by the cheetos nerd working on artifacts. There's just too much stuff in Ice Age that doesn't seem to speak to the other cards...the mechanics are more complicated and impressive than 4e, but there's no real symmetry like you saw in 4e either, except for some really incidental stuff like Pyroblast/Hydroblast. That might be why, with all the innovations, Ice Age is such a doomed set: not because everything was hit with the balance stick like in Fallen Empires or Homelands, but because a lot of the cards just don't work together like they should.
Next up...uh, we're either going to close this down or move into talking about Alliances and/or Coldsnap. I dunno. We're gonna play this by ear.
[/edit]I posted this and realized we never talked about the other major artifact:
The Icy Manipulator wasn't new to Ice Age, but it was I think the only card from the first three sets that wasn't published in 4e but was published in Ice Age. If you told me that the design team did this because it had "Icy" in the title, I might believe you. The thing about the Icy was, well, control. It allowed colors that didn't have a lot of control to dabble with control, which they liked very much, but it also allowed Blue which specialized in control to have even more control, which it liked even better. That said, Blue already has a fair amount of tapping/untapping nonsense going on in Ice Age, so the Icy is, strictly speaking, surplus to requirements in addition to having inscrutable art.
Brown & Gold
Colorless and multicolored in this schema.
FrankT:
Before we get too deep into this, Magic made a strategic error with its color nomenclature at the beginning. To be blunt: Black and White are not colors. They are hues, or metals if you want to get all heraldic on this shit. Red, Blue, and Green are all colors, and the obvious colors to use for the other two are Yellow and Purple, not Black and White. If you thought it was really important that all the color names be single syllable in English, you could have them be Gold and Mauve (or Corn and Puce or whatever). An obvious advantage of using Yellow and Purple is that your single letter codes for mana wouldn't have to use “U” for Blue. But it actually goes way deeper than that.
Time and time again, Magic has busted out some kind of Prism metaphor. No surprise there, prisms convert uncolored light into colored light. But you notice how those pieces of art look like shit, and are way worse than a fucking Pink Floyd album cover? That is because there is no way to graphically represent “uncolored” power that is distinct from White and Black. You can't fucking do it, because White and Black are what things fucking look like when they don't have a color. Things on the white/black spectrum of grays should have been reserved for colorless things. But instead, the colorless things in the first set were Brown. Which is itself a color.
In the original set, there were no cards that were more than one color. Multicolored cards came into being in Legends, and at the time all the multicolored cards were Legends, and they got a gold background because they were special. That was a dumb idea, but it got grandfathered in and when later sets had two color minor spells at common, they kept being Gold because that chicken had already been fucked.
Feel the specialness!
Obviously, multicolored cards should have just had split backgrounds, like they eventually did for cards with split mana costs. And whatever weird ass metallic background should have been reserved for cards with 3+ colors in their cost.
Multi-colored spells should have looked like this. Not the part where they are fucking terrible, the part where someone used the “fade” tool in Photoshop on the background.
Anyway, Ice Age had 68 colorless cards and 25 multicolored cards. Each color had 11 multicolored cards, as they appeared in 3 of the five three-color cards and four cards in two of the five two-color combinations (only allied colors are represented and each allied color combination gets exactly 4 cards). We could do this in 2 pieces, but these bits aren't really interesting enough to do that.
AncientH:
It's worth noting that Fallen Empires had zero gold cards, and Homelands had zero gold cards - and, for that matter, 4th edition had zero gold cards. So you have to ask why Ice Age and Alliances had gold cards, and the apparent answer is that Ice Age was the first set implicitly designed to appeal to multicolor deck construction. That's actually a rather impressive design step, and as much as we bitch about how each individual color's cards for interacting with the other colors suck, and how the cards designed to let them interact don't really play to each other's strengths, this is still huge. Keep in mind that in 4th edition, you had a fairly nice stack of sideboard cards for fucking with decks of different colors, and were...unsubtle.
And in Fallen Empires, you can see that the designers were still thinking primarily of mono-color decks, even trying to set up a thematic struggle within the colors between two different factions. Now, they never gave enough cards to realize that, but you can clearly see in FE that they're not throwing any bones to players that want to play multicolor decks.
But Ice Age is different. Every color has cards that interact favorably with its "allied" colors. The cards aren't always good on an individual level, and you might never play them in a deck, but it shows a very different approach to "classic" Magic in 4th edition, where the individual colors usually have very generic spells and don't have a strong placement in the M:tG setting of Dominaria. In Ice Age, there are relatively few "generic" spells, particularly critters - they really tried to ground the set into the setting. And beyond that, they tried to establish the colors to work with and against each other, and part of that was the multicolor cards.
I didn't say they worked together well. Baby steps.
So as much as we call Ice Age a weak set whose novel mechanics were largely crap and forgotten, it was really important in changing the way the average Magic player understood how decks and cards could be designed.
FrankT:
I should probably talk about the Lands first, but before I do that I want to talk about the Baton of Morale.
Just for starters: yes, that's a dildo. That is not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is the Helm of Chatzuk.
Despite initial appearances, the Baton of Morale isn't strictly inferior to the Helm of Chatzuk. Due to the shitty early nomenclature of the basic set, the Helm actually taps to do its thing, while the Baton does not. So you are paying twice as much to play and use the Baton for the privilege of being able to use it a second time for even more mana. But the real bottom line is that the Helm wasn't terribly good and mostly people didn't use it. So making a new version that was slightly more powerful but massively more expensive was not a thing that was going to go over well. But giving out standard creature abilities on artifacts for way too fucking much mana was totally a thing in Ice Age.
You will not use these because they cost way too fucking much.
In general, Artifacts in Ice Age cost more than they should. Often by a lot.
I have no idea why I'd want to pay 6 man for this sword. Considering that it costs 3 mana and kills a creature to use the fucking thing, I would rarely put it into a deck if it came out for free.
AncientH:
The first thing to remember about artifacts in Ice Age is that they were coming off of Fallen Empires, and it shows.
This is not a good card. This is a better card, but it is also not good.
I think the idea goes back to Antiquities that maybe artifacts were overpowered. Some artifacts were, in fact, overpowered for their cost, and they generally didn't participate in the color wheel shenanigans, which meant that more than one player really liked artifacts, especially in sealed deck tournaments where the color of mana can be really tricky. So around the time of FE, most of the artifacts were pitifully underpowered and/or overpriced...and not necessarily intentionally.
Probably the most obvious example are the "booster" artifacts, which Ice Age has a passel of. These...aren't great. It's not just that they generally cost too much for what amounts to a combat trick, but it speaks to how the designers thought some individual abilities were worth and who would use them. Aegis of the Meek, for example, is the kind of thing that works if you're looking at a Benalish Hero surprising and overcoming a Knight of Stromgald and maybe surviving; there's just not a lot of 1/1s running around in Ice Age, so this thing is primarily designed for a White weenie deck. By contrast, Celestial Sword is an overpriced Giant Growth; Green will never use it because they have a way cheaper alternative.
The artifacts cost more and do less because they're colorless and can be used by any player, but the designers were still thinking in terms of colors when they were designing these things. It was thematic design all the way down.
The other thing about artifacts is that Ice Age was a continuation of the Antiquities storyline, something they would push further in Alliances and which would eventually lead to the Urza Block. This was the first really significant metaplot push in M:tG, and would basically shape the game for over a decade.
FrankT:
Ice Age gave us Pain Lands and Depletion Lands. These were frequently used in tournaments but only after the original multilands were taken out of the format. Pain Lands and Depletion Lands are, quite simply worse than the original dual lands. The design team felt that the original dual lands were too powerful, so they made new dual lands that were shittier. And this got exactly zero traction until the second part of that came down from above “By the way, you also can't use your older, better cards, go fuck yourself.” This all goes back to the problem we talked about earlier, where lands didn't have enough moving parts for any kind of balanced anything to be made. Obviously you're going to need dual lands, and those dual lands should be as simple as possible. The dual lands from the original basic set were the simplest a dual land could be, so those should have been the standard. The logical conclusion is thus that basic single-color lands aren't good enough and need to have secondary effects. But instead we got these shitty things, which were way more complicated than they needed to be. Look at that wall of text on the depletion land. Fuck. That.
What you also see here is a fundamental lack of confidence in the Ice Age mechanics. Those Adarkar Wastes and Timberline Ridges are graphically covered in snow, but game mechanically they lack the “snow covered” tag. Why? Why even fucking bother with having “snow lands” if your special lands aren't going to carry the tag? It's not just the experimental “shitty versions of dual lands” that fail to interact with Ice Age's land tags.
These lands are fucking made out of ice and snow, and they lack the “snow” tag! Wharrgarbl!
Broadly, there just wasn't mechanical support for the snow tag at any level of this set. There was stupid shit like Arcum's Sleigh that cared if your opponent had Snow Lands, but damn few cards that actually gave you any tangible benefit for having snow lands yourself. Ice Age needed to present a complete package of playable snow lands and a complete set of enticements for doing so. Making special lands people would want to use that carried the snow tag needed to be the start of it, but every color needed to have enough positive snow cards to make snow lands a viable life choice for that color. As is, there are no shit only fifteen cards in the entire set that present any benefit for having snow lands at all. And let's not beat around the bush, none of those cards are particularly good.
Arcum's Sleigh was so expensive for what it did that even if you discovered that your opponent had Snow Lands for whatever reason, you still wouldn't put it in your deck.
These two cards are the only cards in the entire set that benefit from you having snow lands and also aren't completely worthless. They even go together. You could maybe make a turbo fog grind deck. But no one ever did that because even with the ability to convert lands to fog you still needed a fucking win condition. I mean, I could totally see a deck with Crevasses, Sun Stones, and Land Tax that stonewalled for a long ass time and won with like Wracks and Black Vices or Millstones or something. But that is literally the only deck I can even think of that would use snow lands for fucking anything. Fuck.
AncientH:
The history of Magic design is often the designers learning the wrong lesson from a lot of problems that cropped up. With Pain Lands, I think they wanted to avoid the landwalking/spell interaction issues that would come with making new Dual Lands that were Forest/Mountains and shit.
To prove they didn't learn this lesson, they repeated it in Cold Snap
Depletion Lands were even worse, but you can sort of see that they were based off of the tap lands in Fallen Empires; the idea in both cases is that you sacrifice smooth mana production for added versatility. Unfortunately, the mana curve is just too fucked when depletion counters come into play, especially with the mana ramp-up available in Ice Age. With a complicated mechanic and too little payoff, these things were doomed from the get-go.
Two of the three "special" lands that don't fall into Pain Lands, Depletion Lands, Snow Lands, or Basic Lands manage to both use the Cumulative Upkeep mechanic...and, they're rubbish. Weirdly, they're both focused on preventing combat, and of the two I think Glacial Chasm might have gotten the most play, because some players realized the Necropotence lesson, and it basically shuts down creature decks cold while it's in play.
The only thing I can really say is good about Ice Age's lands is that it got the basics out of the way. No-one was going to use Depletion lands if they had any other choice, and there was little-to-no reason to use snow lands unless you literally didn't have any other lands, but it was still a more diverse set-up than in 4th edition, and it included all the mandatory basic lands and the not-mandatory-but-fuck-it-there's-nothing-better Pain Lands. Which freed up Alliances to go cray-cray.
Alliances lands were not always good. But some had their place.
FrankT:
This is the Jester's Cap. It was restricted almost immediately, and it was one of the first cards to hit $50. It was the face of this set, allusions to it were made in many subsequent sets, and people just generally freaked the fuck out about it. And looking at it, it's a bit hard to understand why. I mean, if you could put this into your deck, you still probably wouldn't. It simply isn't very good. If you're up against a combo deck, you might be able to remove three copies of a key portion of their deck (say: three copies of Enduring Renewal in an Enduring Renewal deck), but so what? It doesn't hit any of the copies in their hand or discard pile, and in any case it only takes out three. The number of Enduring Renewals in their deck is four. Even if they haven't drawn it yet and your cap goes off without a hitch, they still have one more copy and all their means of deck sifting to get to it.
However, while Jester's Cap is obviously a bad card, it was actually somewhat better at the time. Deck searching was really insanely good back then, and there were combo decks that used restricted cards for their win condition. Lobster Quadrille, for example, put all their cards from their deck into play and then had a deck small enough (and mana pile large enough) by turn 5 to simply play Time Walk, Time Twister, and Regrowth on the Time Twister several times in a turn even though you could only have one of each of those cards in your deck. Jester's Cap could in theory pluck several of the necessary components of such a shenanigans deck and then leave them to flounder. Even so, you're still paying 4 mana and then 2 mana for something that has literally no effect on the board state. It's difficult to imagine a matchup where you wouldn't rather have a counterspell.
So that's Jester's Cap. Literally the most overrated card that has ever been printed. There was a Jester's Mask too, and even though it was mostly a better card, no one cared. Jester's Cap was the first card that really did things to your opponent's deck. And that made people feel naked and afraid. And this card inspired fear way out of proportion to how good it actually was.
If your opponent obliges you by having a number of bad cards in their deck, this is almost as good as making your opponent discard their hand.
AncientH:
Zuran Orb found its ways into a number of hypothetical "zero cost" decks. These were the kind of novelty decks that twelve-year-olds dream up when they lose a lot because they can't afford really good cards, or when they do, find out they don't know how to play them right. That said, Zuran Orb is a really decent card, because all it does is increase functionality. As an effect, you would expect this to be an instant or maybe an ability on a critter that you'd pay 3 mana for and have to tap to use. But you don't have to do any of that with the Zuran Orb. You lay it down, and boom, it's ready for use.
Another zero-cost artifact, though less beloved than Zuran Orb, and it's easy to see why. This is a pretty solid first-turn draw, if you don't have any one-mana cards to play. It basically lets you save one mana from turn to turn, which isn't bad, but isn't as handy as a mana dork like Fyndhorn Elves and becomes progressively less useful in the late game (which, in Ice Age games is about turn 6). This is also one of those cards where later nomenclature ironically can change the nature of the card.
Really, Jeweled Amulet is just an excuse not to have mana batteries.
Frank hasn't talked about it, so I suppose it's up to me to rant about talismans.
There was one of these for each color. Magic does that from time to time. Sometimes, this works (mana batteries, moxes), a lot of the time, it doesn't. It's not just that the effects aren't great for the price, it's that the different colors have very different needs for their given themes, and not all of them give a tenth of a shit about untapping to the same degree. White just doesn't care that much about its critters untapping, unless it's the Seraph, and for three mana will tell you to go fuck yourself. Blue, on the other hand, likes having the ability to untap things, and has enough mana ramp it could swing it.
These are two artifacts which saw a surprising amount of play at the time. They're not awesome, but they're not terrible either. They both accomplish their jobs fairly well for the cost, and have a surprising amount of utility. The reason they're not rated more highly overall is that the best uses of both are kind of marginal, especially in the Ice Age block. For example, you can use Crown of Ages to increase your card draw:
...but that's a pretty expensive way to do that in a set that has Necropotence. You're not going to build a deck around these cards, except maybe the Scepter if burying shit becomes critical, and they won't win the game on their own (seriously, it would take ten direct hits from the Skull Catapult - that's just not going to happen; maybe if you're playing Blue/Black with lots of tokens and untapping, but there are more efficient ways to piss away mana for damage). And the lack of crippling flaws mean these were some of the better artifacts in this set!
FrankT:
Ice Cauldron
Sorry... here it is:
Ice Cauldron
OK, Ice Cauldron has the tiniest and most confusing text of any card that wasn't from Unglued or something.
This had more text, but it was also a joke. Ice Cauldron was “serious.”
What Ice Cauldron actually does is let you play a card by spending mana over two turns. The cauldron taps to put the mana (and the card you intend to play) in, and then it taps again the next turn to pop the card out (and you can spend mana from the new turn). There's some weirdness about how the charge up turn the mana is technically an artifact activation (so you could use the limited mana from a Machinist, but couldn't use the limited mana from a Beastcaller), and on the discharge round it's a regular spell casting (so you could use the Beastcaller, but couldn't use the Machinist), but the card is not conceptually difficult to grasp.
What it is is incredibly, incredibly slow. It takes 4 mana to put it into play, then a turn to put a spell onto your layaway plan, then another turn to pay it off. You put the damn thing into play on turn 4 and you don't see anything actually come out of it until turn six. The saving rate is 100%, so that's kinda cool. Unlike the Iceberg we talked about in Blue, you do have to reveal what you're saving up for before you cast it (and you can lose that card if someone disenchants your Ice Cauldron before you let the dogs out). However, like we said with our review of Big Blue and Big Black, there actually isn't any reason to save up this much mana for anything. A R/G ramp deck can put a Shivan Dragon onto the battlefield on turn 3, nothing that costs more than that was actually worth using under any circumstances in the play environment the Ice Cauldron was released into. The only thing vaguely worth doing with it was saving up for a turn to drop really big X damage spells on your opponent as a finishing move – but in most cases you'd rather just have replaced the Ice Cauldron itself with more burn.
So all in all a weird card and a failed design. Too many moving parts, and too confusing for what was a simple and not terribly useful niche function. This sort of poor rules writing wasn't just the Ice Cauldron. Nor indeed was it the only such card to be kind of shitty and use funky charge counters.
Tap it to put a mana in, or tap it to take a mana out. This card takes 68 words to explain that.
Someone on the design team really liked this charge up nonsense, and they were incapable of writing concise prose.
AncientH:
I don't know what Ice Age had against artifact creatures. I think it distrusted them because they were colorless. It's the only way I can explain it. Most are just overpriced and underpowered for the cost, and like the used cards of the world, you have to keep pouring more resources in them to get anything like the expected performance. I think part of the problem was the mana ramp-up; you could push out Soldevi Golem on turn 2 if you were playing mana ramp, and that's not bad.
I swear, the designers thought that games must last 20+ turns or something. Which makes sense if you're a brand new player, who doesn't expect to get a 1/1 critter out until the second turn and thinks that they're going to ping the enemy to death with it.
I mentioned earlier that some of these artifacts were explicitly about giving the other colors overpriced access to abilities from the other colors. Maybe I didn't spell it out as explicitly like that, but there you go. This is maybe the most bizarrely blatant example. I can't really conceive why you would want two cards in this set with this effect. I mean, you fuck up once, fine, it's a learning curve. Fuck up twice, and somebody needs to get busted down to proofreading the Portal rulebook.
FrankT:
So what makes a good multi-colored spell? Thematically, a multicolored spell should feel like it's all the colors that go into it. That's a tough nut to crack, and was basically not a thing that could happen back in Ice Age because none of the colors really had the pieces together to tell you what they “feel like.” If you gave me 10 card proposals from this era and asked me to tell you whether they were Black or Green, I would probably only do a bit better than a coin flip.
Structurally though, a card is multicolored because it can only be played by decks that can put together specific combinations of multiple kinds of mana. A card is White and Blue because it goes into White/Blue decks and not into Mono-White or Red/Blue decks. So for a multicolored spell to be good, it has to be a card that is useful to a deck archetype that uses all of its constituent colors. That was way beyond where the magic design team was operating at this time, because they had no idea what an “archetype” was or what kinds of decks any particular color combination might support.
Chromatic Armor is garbage, because White/Blue decks do not want to spend multiple cards on a single creature. They are control decks, who try to use card advantage and removal to take out all enemy threats and then punch through with a Serra Angel (or even a Blinking Spirit, you know, whatever). Diabolic Vision is actually moderately OK, because Blue/Black decks like to fuck with their decks and sift through for the right kind of threat or answer for the job. I mean, it never saw a lot of play because Brainstorm was about as good and cost 1 less mana, but it wasn't dire.
The archetypical multicolored card is Lightning Helix. It “feels” Red, it “feels” White, it's used in Red/White decks because it's good, but also because it fits in with the game plan that Red/White decks probably have. But this also came out a decade after Ice Age was a thing. When Ice Age happened, the designers had no idea what a Black/Red or a Green/White deck was doing or cared about. So all the multicolored spells are pretty much written by the Hamlet Typing monkeys, and are only useful to anybody on accident.
One thing that does stand out is that the designers thought that gold cards were somehow “special” so they aren't hit with the nerf bat as much as you'd think. Oh sure, all the cards that cost 6 mana are a heap of wet garbage, but that's because the designers seemed to have no idea how much 6 mana actually is.
There is nothing special about these cards. But they don't stand out as terrible because the designers mostly counteracted their irrational desire to nerf everything to a lower balance point with their irrational desire to make gold cards better than the standard balance point.
This is just insane. Ain't nobody going to pay 6 mana for a 3/3 flyer.
There was clearly a procedure to all this. It's all rotationally symmetrical and shit. There's exactly one card of each supported 3 color combination. Most allied two color combinations gets a 4 mana hate card to shit on the color they mutually despise. But brutal hate cards targeted at a single color were bad design in the first place. And since you could jolly well use the poorly designed ones from the basic set that only required one color, there was little incentive to branch out into the other colors.
Red and Black are missing their anti-White card, but I think Ghostly Flame is supposed to be it. Because bypassing Circle of Protection is like the dickest thing the designers could imagine to do to White. That's
cleverish, but it's still stupid.
AncientH:
I would like to point out that I love the art for this card. That is all.
I still think this should be BU.
The Ice Age crew's "lessons learned" obviously didn't include gold cards, you can tell that because in Alliances, you get a very similar setup, even though there's only like ten of them.
I can't say Big Gold ever really caught on.
It's hard to really get into the nitty-gritty with the gold cards, because there's not much there. Take out the fuck-you-opposite-colors and the spells and critters just don't really go together much at all with either of their parent colors.
Case in point, this isn't a great card for Black or Blue individually. A 0/3 pinger for 5 mana is just not something either wants. Even when you get something marginally useful:
...this is basically only going to be played as a sideboard card against White. And that's pretty much every gold card you would want to talk about. The three-colors are sometimes marginally better, but you're not going to build a deck around them.
At a 3-mana casting cost, that's a terrific ability. The problem is, natch, the three-mana casting cost. You could conceivably play MRB on turn two if you have the right pain lands and appropriate shenanigans with Jeweled Amulet or something, but ignore pain lands for a second and look at how you would play this critter with basic lands: one land drop per turn, with a different land each turn. That's going to severely crimp whatever else you're going to play for your first two turns, and on down the line...for a card that's eminently pingable. Don't get me wrong, she's a great control card, but there's an opportunity cost for getting her out.
FrankT:
I do appreciate impressionistic and surrealist art, and believe there should be more of it in Magic today.
A bunch of cards in Ice Age count down or count up or get more expensive over time or some fucking thing. I bring up the Infinite Hourglass and the Time Bomb because they can only be justified in very very long games. If you blow the Time Bomb on the third turn, it only does 2 damage – hardly enough to wipe your ass with, let along spend four mana to bring it into play (and one more to blow it up). But that's your sixth turn. How long did the Ice Age design team think games were going to last?
I hate the decks that like this card.
The reality is that you only want a certain amount of land in play. Whatever your deck needs to run, it needs those land, but any land after that are just dead draws. The Zuran Orb lets you convert those extra land into life at the rate of 2 life each. That's not nothing, which is what you were going to get for drawing an extra land. There are also decks with truly elastic mana sinks (such as any deck with Firebreathing creatures), and they don't mind drawing and using more lands, but for everyone else there's Zuran Orb.
But that's not why people cared about Zuran Orb. The reason people cared about Zuran Orb is that there was Balance and Land Tax and Tithe and shit that let you get card advantage for having less land than your opponent, so being able to spend nothing and gain a bunch of life to pop your lands out of play at a moment's notice was a pretty big deal.
Also a turn one infinite combo in Vintage.
AncientH:
I feel maybe we haven't talked about everything here, but nobody gives a shit about Fyndhorn Bow, Elkin Bottle, and Goblin Lyre, much less Centaur Archer and Mountain Titan. We're at the dregs of the Ice Age set here, and I think it shows...and I think it also shows that the design team was very split up. I don't think the same people working on Red were working on White, much less collaborated on the Red/White gold cards; I don't think any of them were consulted by the cheetos nerd working on artifacts. There's just too much stuff in Ice Age that doesn't seem to speak to the other cards...the mechanics are more complicated and impressive than 4e, but there's no real symmetry like you saw in 4e either, except for some really incidental stuff like Pyroblast/Hydroblast. That might be why, with all the innovations, Ice Age is such a doomed set: not because everything was hit with the balance stick like in Fallen Empires or Homelands, but because a lot of the cards just don't work together like they should.
Next up...uh, we're either going to close this down or move into talking about Alliances and/or Coldsnap. I dunno. We're gonna play this by ear.
[/edit]I posted this and realized we never talked about the other major artifact:
The Icy Manipulator wasn't new to Ice Age, but it was I think the only card from the first three sets that wasn't published in 4e but was published in Ice Age. If you told me that the design team did this because it had "Icy" in the title, I might believe you. The thing about the Icy was, well, control. It allowed colors that didn't have a lot of control to dabble with control, which they liked very much, but it also allowed Blue which specialized in control to have even more control, which it liked even better. That said, Blue already has a fair amount of tapping/untapping nonsense going on in Ice Age, so the Icy is, strictly speaking, surplus to requirements in addition to having inscrutable art.
Last edited by Ancient History on Sun Dec 06, 2015 2:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
I did expect more commentary on the art.
http://www.mtgoacademy.com/two-jesses-f ... rt-safari/
but, you know, meaner.
This one has me in hysterics:
T: You might be wondering how this wall has first strike. The answer is, it’s an illusion. The real wall looks nothing like the wall you see. In fact, that isn’t a wall at all. It’s a painting, and you’re looking at it on a computer screen. The real wall is already behind you.
http://www.mtgoacademy.com/two-jesses-f ... rt-safari/
but, you know, meaner.
This one has me in hysterics:
T: You might be wondering how this wall has first strike. The answer is, it’s an illusion. The real wall looks nothing like the wall you see. In fact, that isn’t a wall at all. It’s a painting, and you’re looking at it on a computer screen. The real wall is already behind you.
Last edited by DrPraetor on Sun Dec 06, 2015 3:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
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Ancient History
- Serious Badass
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I would be interested in the sort of decks that came out of Ice Age once they tried to restrict the crazy of the basic set.
virgil wrote:Lovecraft didn't later add a love triangle between Dagon, Chtulhu, & the Colour-Out-of-Space; only to have it broken up through cyber-bullying by the King in Yellow.
FrankTrollman wrote:If your enemy is fucking Gravity, are you helping or hindering it by putting things on high shelves? I don't fucking know! That's not even a thing. Your enemy can't be Gravity, because that's stupid.
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Josh_Kablack
- King
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- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
- Location: Online. duh
My involvement in tournament Magic peaked around Ice Age.TiaC wrote:I would be interested in the sort of decks that came out of Ice Age once they tried to restrict the crazy of the basic set.
There were several things to keep in mind:
1. Nobody seriously played Ice Age only
2. Type 2 (What you kiddies call Standard now) was in it's infancy, having been created earlier in the same year that Ice Age came out. Even so, a lot of events were very fuzzy about the rules for such.
3. So you would have some mix of Ice Age + Fourth Edition with The Dark, Fallen Empires, Chronicles, Alliances
4. The restricted list was in a lot of flux
With those in mind, some things I can remember:
I was most of the way to what later became the Power Nine then, and ran a knockoff of Bernard Lestree's Zoo as my "main" deck in Type I (what later became Vintage) events. Ice Age's big contribution here was Incinerate replacing Chain Lighting as the secondary bolt. I briefly used Binding Grasp in place of Control Magic on the theory that the single Blue made for easier casting. Several of my buddies were convinced that running the a 12 bolt + 4 Psi Blast deck would have been strong in Type I - but that was actually vulnerable to the sort of Ernhan Geddon decks that were a viable Type 2 archetype post Chronicles. There was one event where my Type I deck lost against a novel Eureeka Deck which counted on an opponent playing fast efficient creatures and then Eureeka'ed out a mix of Mahamoti Djinn's, Control Magics and Scaled Wurms.
Force of Will was huge in the Type I metagame, but that was Alliances, not directly Ice Age.
So everything else I have to say is about Type 2.
With Ice Age offering Thermokarst and Icequake, and Chronicles reprinting Ernham Djinn, my initial Ice Age type 2 deck was an attempt to rebuild the classic three-color land-destruction deck. With Land Tax being reprinted in 4th edition, this was rapidly revealed to be an unwise choice.
Eric Lower thoroughly trashed me and won a couple local type 2 tournaments with a Stasis deck that ran multiples of Stasis, Zuran Orb, Despotic Sceptre, Land Tax, Brainstorm, Enervate, Counterspell / Memory Lapse and Boomerang. I forget if it killed you with Serra Angels or just Black Vises, but it pretty thoroughly locked an opponent out of playing until key components got restricted.
Land Tax being in the mix made Zuran Orb crazy-go-nuts, and Land Tax turned Brainstorm into a just slightly weaker Ancestral Recall which you got to play with 4 of in a deck, so there were a lot of white/blue control decks. In the initial Ice Age release, people drooled over Deflection as a way to make burn players Fireball themselves - but in practice a 4-cost counter specced mainly against burn just wasn't worth the space in your deck.
I had a while I cheesed people off in multiplayer games by running a Land Tax / Brainstorm deck that packed so much board sweep that it won by Feldon's Cane and Island Sanctuary decking everyone else. This was post Z. Orb and Balance resurrections, but 4 Wraths and 4 Armageddons in a cantrip heavy deck with no offensive threats to draw attention in multiplayer.
Obviously, Necropotence was big. There was a lot of overlap, but the two basic archetypes were Necro-weenie and Necro-hand destruction. Someone had a memorable morphing sideboard where they would either switch from all-in discard (4 Hypno Spectre, X Absyall Spectres, X Hymn to Tourach, Racks) to all in anti white (12 Knights, no targets for Swords to Plowshares)
Enduring Renewal saw more than a fair amount of play. The easy trick was repeatedly sacrificing a 0-cost Ornithopter for some benefit. The more involved combo involved Fastbond, Glacial Chasm, Zuran Orb, Living Land and Enduring Renewal. Then you wanted a Concordant Crossroads and you cast Hurricane for infinity damage to win. Since this was a combo deck that needed a white component, Zuran Orb and a bunch of land, you ran Land Tax, and white sweep spells here too.
I spent way way too much time and effort trying to make Zur's Weirding work. It was a nifty card that drastically changed card valuations during play. Unfortunately ways to "put cards into your hand" rather than "draw" them got around it - making it less than worthwhile in the same set as Necropotence.
I briefly ran an Elkin Bottle type 2 deck. It was basically a kurd ape / elf girzly bear/ bolt / fireball deck built around a minimal mana curve - only Elkin Bottles and X spells cost more than 2 CMC, so at 5 mana I could safely use the bottle to draw. This was a moderately efficient burn/swarm deck in that it was fast, but a 3 cost artifact that gave extra draws for 3 just didn't keep up against either Necropotence nor Land Tax card ratios. It barely kept even against more standard White Sweep + Blue Control streamlined via Ice Age cantrips, and had to hope for the fast win.
I had a casual highlander deck that frequently made great use of Dreams of the Dead and many of the weirder big White critters. Dreams of the Dead's re-animation sending a critter directly to Exile made Personal Incarnation a whole lot better, and it actually won multiple games with an Akron Legionnaire- which was never a good card, but I did always wonder how powerful the entire Akron Legion would have to be if just a single member of it had the same Power/Toughness as an entire Crash of Rhinos.
Oh yeah, and not directly deck related: but in non-tourney matches my buddy Dave would mock Jester's Cap so hard that he would let his opponent remove 3 cards from his deck *before* the match for free.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Ancient History
- Serious Badass
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- Joined: Wed Aug 18, 2010 12:57 pm
OSSR: Ice Age: Colons: Fallout
The Block
No idea why this came up in the image search, but it's funnier than what I was going to use.
Ice Age is the only set to have been part of a block with four expansion sets in it, though they were not in the block at the same time. In 1997, WotC declared Homelands to be part of the Ice Age block, and in 2006 they declared it to be not part of the block any longer to make room for Coldsnap. Homelands was thus retconned twice, and people might have been really upset about that if it hadn't been for the fact that Homelands was fucking awful. It's difficult to really wrap your mind around how terrible Homelands was. But I think that the story of Serrated Arrows might do the trick.
Serrated Arrows is a card in the running for card used in the most Standard tournament decks. Looking at it, this may surprise you because it is not in fact a very good card. You can imagine circumstances when you'd want it, but you wouldn't maindeck it under any circumstances. The key was that at the time, Standard rules required that your 75 cards had a certain minimum number of cards from every legal set. And Homelands was so terrible, the cards so universally overpriced and under powered, that people were literally popping in a questionable sideboard card that cost colorless mana to fill up their Homelands card requirements.
For every deck archetype, for every color or combination of colors, there existed no cards in your colors that you'd want in your deck. None. Zero. Actually, that's slightly an exaggeration because there were archetypes that might want Ihsan's Shade or Eron the Relentless. But both of those were Legends, which at the time meant you were only allowed to have one in your deck and you still needed Serrated Arrows to hit the card requirements.
These cards aren't great, but you can imagine putting them into a deck and not crying tiny tears.
There is no universe where there is a deck you would play that would include these on purpose.
And this was before tie-in novels were a major source of revenue, so I can only assume that this came from the tie-in comic book:
So in addition to not caring about the cards because they suck, you don't care about the setting for the cards because they chose not to use the parts of it you cared about.
Homelands is really amazing. The set, the entire set, is made out of durdle cards that fuck around doing very little. Everything costs way too much, and basic effects don't exist. There's no real direct damage, there's no real removal, there's no real card draw, there's no effective sweeping, there's no real deck searching. None of the creatures are fast or bombs. None of the lands are competive sources of mana, nor do they provide other effects you would consider giving up mana production to have. There are only two real threats in the set, and they both cost 5+ mana. Such that any cards are an answer to anything, they are bizarrely specific answers to things that really didn't need answers in the first place.
You know what else answers a Pit Scorpion? Lightning Bolt.
Homelands was never intended to be played stand alone, but I'm not sure what it was intended to be played with. None of the cards are good. They range from “not very good” to “excruciatingly awful.” With 115 cards in the set, your thesaurus will fail you trying to explain how poorly all the cards match up to any strategy you could imagine having.
It wasn't even thematically good. A lot of stuff mentions places that were mentioned on other cards, like half the White cards come from Serra and half the Black cards have something to do with Sengir. But there's no story you care about. Frankly, Serra is cooler when it's just the angel.
Later sets agreed, and basically retconned Serra to just being about sexy flying warrior women.
And the big reveals of the major characters are about as boring and predictable as you can imagine.
This is Baron Sengir. He is a Sengir Vampire that is slightly bigger and he has the Sengir Vampire power twice. Apparently people worked on this guy for months if not years. And... it's exactly what I would write down if you gave me 60 seconds to write up the leader of the Sengir Vampires. Except for the part where for no reason he costs eight fucking mana instead of six. The writing here isn't good. It's just the kind of crap that any random DM would think up off the top of their head if the players went in a surprising direction and they had to pop some NPCs out of their ass.
What's really amazing is that this came out when Duelist Magazine was a thing, and we actually do have a fair amount of insight into “what were they thinking?” And apparently the Homelands designers thought they were writing Lord of the Fucking Rings and had weird visions of a deep strategic game. And just to blow your damn mind, it is public record that the original proposal was considered “underpowered” by the people who ended up greenlighting the final capitulative waste pile. The final version had you spending six fucking mana for an enchantment that made white creatures unblockable by players who had plains (and presumably had white creatures to send back at you, also unblockably). WTF?!
If this card does anything at all, it's because your opponent has access to the mana required to make creatures that would shove it right back in your face. It costs more than genuine bombs. And the original version of the set was somehow less powerful than this.
Things to appreciate about Homelands: some of us didn't have very much choice except to try and get some use out of these cards. If you started playing around Fourth Edition - or ghost help you, Fallen Empires or Ice Age - you were already largely behind the power curve as far as the sets were going. The Moxes and Black Lotus were already legends; shit like Fork pretty much only existed on the pages of InQuest as far as I was concerned, and no-one on my block have ever seen a Mishra's Workshop.
Spoilered for appropriateness.
So yeah, people looked for ways to get something, anything out of this set. I knew people that threw Mammoth Harness into Elephant/Mammoth decks just because it had the word "Mammoth" on it, even though this wasn't Legend of the Five Rings and that shit doesn't work. I played Ebony Rhino in an all-artifact deck powered by Strip Mines and reprinted Urza Lands from Chronicles.
One is the loneliest number...
I saw the worst players of my generation driven to madness trying to cobble together a fucking Dwarf deck with Fallen Empires and Homelands cards. I saw Green players bicker over Autumn Willow.
Arguably the best Green card in the set; still overpriced.
I PLAYED ORCISH MINE.
I could have just said "I have sinned." Same difference.
Was it really that bad? Well...yeah. There are some cards that don't out-and-out suck. Carapace, Merchant Scroll, Willow Priestess or Didgeridoo if you're going to make a tribal Faerie or Minotaur deck, respectively; Drudge Spell because proper dredge hadn't been invented yet and Feast of the Unicorn because we didn't know any better. But there are basically no stand-out good cards, and most of these are only here because, like younger me, you had little choice.
We couldn't play for ante in my school because then it would be gambling.
Mechanically, you can sort-of see the lingering RNA of Ice Age and Fallen Empires on this set, like the crusted aftermath of a busy prostitute's evening on the seat of a cab. Shit like Trade Caravan was straight-up FE-style counter economy nonsense.
...and there are a couple cantrips...
...but that's really about it. I think it's telling that Homelands seems to have not learned Fallen Empire's mistakes about tribal bullshit, in that while it really pushes tribal nonsense - Minotaurs, Faeries, Dwarfs, Vampires, Falcons (yes, really) - it doesn't give you enough tribal bullshit to actually build a deck with. Even if you raid 4th edition, Fallen Empires, AND Ice Age for spare parts.
Errata changed this to "Bird," which makes it much, much more useful now that Aven are a thing. This is pretty much a set MADE for errata.
So you can sort of see why the design team, if they were scrabbling around for ideas, might feel like disavowing the bastard Homelands set and replacing it with Coldsnap.
Unlike Homelands, Alliances makes a real effort to tie into the storyline of Ice Age. The storyline of Ice Age is pretty thin gruel and I don't care about it, but you definitely see the repeat of some organization names like Stromgald and the Juniper Order. There are even two whole cards that present an advantage of sorts for having snow lands in your deck.
When you get through all 66 words on the Gargantuan Gorilla, the inescapable conclusion is that they are in fact totally terrible and in no way worth putting into any deck, and thus the minor affinity they have for snow lands is totally meaningless and still represents no real incentive to include those things in your deck.
So for better or worse, Alliances was an extension of Ice Age. But it didn't extend it very far or very well.
Many of the cards are literally a joke.
The power level in Alliances is not very high. Most of the cards teeter on the edge of being at the low end of playable and well... being not as good as that. Even the ones that are playable at all tend to be incredibly niche.
If you are playing a Red/Black deck full of Pump Knights and Frozen Shades, then the Agent of Stromgald is slightly better at mana fixing than the Initiates of the Ebon Hand. Which as we mentioned in the Fallen Empires Review was a thing that was marginal but playable. I mean, unlike the Initiates, he can't paint the colorless mana from a Sol Ring, but also unlke the Initiates, he can take you from 0 to 1 Black Mana rather than just from 1 to 2. So that's a thing. But if you were BRG or BUR or something, the Agent of Stromgald is much worse than the Initiates. So he's a marginal card for an incredibly specific deck. A deck that happened to be playable at the time, but even so.
Alliances feels super unfinished; like it's a bunch of leftovers from the design floor of Ice Age that they finished off over a couple of beers. But it was welcomed after Homelands, both because of the more dynamic artwork and simply not being Homelands.
This card actually got some play.
Hell, even these cards got some play.
This card was just Elf porn.
Looking back at it now, I think one of the major disadvantages of Homelands - and the reason that Alliances seems like such a more dynamic and useful set - is that Alliances interacts much more directly with the fundamental game mechanics in a way that Homelands pretty much did not. I mean, look at these cards:
These aren't terribly great cards, but they speak directly to producing mana or manipulating your library in a useful or effective fashion. I'm looking at the Homelands cards and they have no non-land cards that actually fiddle with mana production in any way, and only a few that interact with the library in any way (and not ones you really care about).
Well, if I have to have some Homelands cards in my deck, and I'm playing Blue anyway...I guess...
Homelands just doesn't break any new ground. It's fucking boring. Alliances may have some cards that were getting contact highs off the stuff the Necropotence dude was smoking, but at least people played them.
Don't knock Foresight. Getting rid of three cards you don't need means that the cards you do need are three cards closer in the stack.
Alliances tried to make discarding cards from your hand as a thing to pay for playing other cards. There was a “5 cost” spell of each color that you could alternately play by ditching another card from your hand of the same color. Mostly, these made relatively little impact and the mechanic never exactly caught fire. The big exception of course:
Force of Will became a staple in ridiculous formats where people were expected to do some kind of stupid combo kill on turn one or two. The cost is high (you are two-for-oneing yourself), but if it lets you stop your opponent from winning before you even get a turn, then that's a must have. Unlike the other versions, Force of Will has seen a shit tonne of play – but it only ever sees any play because of fundamental design failures. Force of Will is used because degenerate decks can end the game before it becomes practical to leave one blue mana open for a Force Spike (or Stubborn Denial), and where capstones are so ridiculous that trading two of your cards for their one finisher card is such a good deal that you'd pay a life point for the privilege. The designer of Force of Will is lauded for making a card that sees so much play in so many formats, but only because obviously so many other designers over the years have shat the bed.
Alliances tried to use Homarids. Those were the mud-bugs that went over like a slightly-cool bowl of horse semen back in Fallen Empire days. I don't know why they are here, except maybe they had some already paid-for art left over and decided to use it.
Thematically and setting-wise, Alliances also double-downed on the Urza and Mishra stuff, reinforcing the Antiquities War connection and (re)introducing the Phyrexians.
Weeee'rrrree baaaaaack!
Some of this stuff you would actually use; a 3/4 for 3 mana wasn't considered bad back in the day.
And there's some WTF.
No, seriously, who gave him the drugs?
Was Alliances great? No. But it at least dovetailed Ice Age, which was the pseudo-core set, and it had cards you weren't embarrassed to put on the table in casual play.
Keep in mind that at the time, there was still a heavy roleplaying element to the whole Magic: the Gathering experience, and the game was still heavily grounded in D&D/Sword & Sorcery tropes over the slick, almost science-fiction approach that came in later. And the theme of an Ice Age, and of the Ice Age eventually ending was a strong narrative appeal to players and collectors, even if the cards weren't as good as the shit your older brother got because he got one of the last packs of Revised at the comic book store six months before you got into the game.
And Ice Age (with Alliances) did move the game forward. For all of its mistakes - and they were many - I think it did largely pull Magic out of the rut of "generic fantasy" where it had been wallowing for the first four editions, and enabled it to really look forward to some long-term planning of both the sets and the setting. It's no accident that the novels and tie-in comics and stuff really took off during Ice Age, where before they had been mostly standalone novels and anthologies that were later ignored. And the format probed successful enough that WotC would try it again:
Hah. I bet you thought I was gonna say ColdSnap.
The Block
No idea why this came up in the image search, but it's funnier than what I was going to use.
FrankT:
Ice Age is the only set to have been part of a block with four expansion sets in it, though they were not in the block at the same time. In 1997, WotC declared Homelands to be part of the Ice Age block, and in 2006 they declared it to be not part of the block any longer to make room for Coldsnap. Homelands was thus retconned twice, and people might have been really upset about that if it hadn't been for the fact that Homelands was fucking awful. It's difficult to really wrap your mind around how terrible Homelands was. But I think that the story of Serrated Arrows might do the trick.
Serrated Arrows is a card in the running for card used in the most Standard tournament decks. Looking at it, this may surprise you because it is not in fact a very good card. You can imagine circumstances when you'd want it, but you wouldn't maindeck it under any circumstances. The key was that at the time, Standard rules required that your 75 cards had a certain minimum number of cards from every legal set. And Homelands was so terrible, the cards so universally overpriced and under powered, that people were literally popping in a questionable sideboard card that cost colorless mana to fill up their Homelands card requirements.
For every deck archetype, for every color or combination of colors, there existed no cards in your colors that you'd want in your deck. None. Zero. Actually, that's slightly an exaggeration because there were archetypes that might want Ihsan's Shade or Eron the Relentless. But both of those were Legends, which at the time meant you were only allowed to have one in your deck and you still needed Serrated Arrows to hit the card requirements.
These cards aren't great, but you can imagine putting them into a deck and not crying tiny tears.
There is no universe where there is a deck you would play that would include these on purpose.
Mark Rosewater on Homelands wrote:It wasn't very innovative. It didn't introduce any strong mechanics. It didn't have good synergy. It wasn't particularly elegant. It didn't have many of the qualities that we now judge a set's design by.
AncientH:
That is from the Wikipedia entry for Homelands. I have no idea if any of it is true, because I never cared deeply about the background of Homelands and neither do you - nor did anyone. It wasn't a set you cared about because it didn't seem to have much in common with the rest of the Magic: the Gathering setting as had been established - there were a couple familiar names, in the Sengir family and the Serra...cultists, but that means that the only recognizable setting elements of the set were riffing off of two cards from 4th Edition, not Ice Age or even Fallen Empires.The set takes place in a plane known as Ulgrotha. Homelands begins 600 years ago, during a war between the Tolgath, planeswalkers who desire knowledge, and the Ancients, wizards who are prepared to be cruel to defend 'their' mysteries. A Tolgath planeswalker named Ravi used an artifact called the Apocalypse Chime, given to her by her master, to destroy all life and mana on Ulgrotha. The plane became a prime battleground for wizards, until the planeswalker Feroz happened upon it. He wished to protect the plane, so he, along with the planeswalker Serra, created a ban to keep other planeswalkers out. Feroz later died in a lab accident while studying a fire elemental trapped in ice. Serra later allowed herself to be killed by a mugger that wanted to take her wedding ring.
And this was before tie-in novels were a major source of revenue, so I can only assume that this came from the tie-in comic book:
So in addition to not caring about the cards because they suck, you don't care about the setting for the cards because they chose not to use the parts of it you cared about.
FrankT:
Homelands is really amazing. The set, the entire set, is made out of durdle cards that fuck around doing very little. Everything costs way too much, and basic effects don't exist. There's no real direct damage, there's no real removal, there's no real card draw, there's no effective sweeping, there's no real deck searching. None of the creatures are fast or bombs. None of the lands are competive sources of mana, nor do they provide other effects you would consider giving up mana production to have. There are only two real threats in the set, and they both cost 5+ mana. Such that any cards are an answer to anything, they are bizarrely specific answers to things that really didn't need answers in the first place.
You know what else answers a Pit Scorpion? Lightning Bolt.
Homelands was never intended to be played stand alone, but I'm not sure what it was intended to be played with. None of the cards are good. They range from “not very good” to “excruciatingly awful.” With 115 cards in the set, your thesaurus will fail you trying to explain how poorly all the cards match up to any strategy you could imagine having.
It wasn't even thematically good. A lot of stuff mentions places that were mentioned on other cards, like half the White cards come from Serra and half the Black cards have something to do with Sengir. But there's no story you care about. Frankly, Serra is cooler when it's just the angel.
Later sets agreed, and basically retconned Serra to just being about sexy flying warrior women.
And the big reveals of the major characters are about as boring and predictable as you can imagine.
This is Baron Sengir. He is a Sengir Vampire that is slightly bigger and he has the Sengir Vampire power twice. Apparently people worked on this guy for months if not years. And... it's exactly what I would write down if you gave me 60 seconds to write up the leader of the Sengir Vampires. Except for the part where for no reason he costs eight fucking mana instead of six. The writing here isn't good. It's just the kind of crap that any random DM would think up off the top of their head if the players went in a surprising direction and they had to pop some NPCs out of their ass.
What's really amazing is that this came out when Duelist Magazine was a thing, and we actually do have a fair amount of insight into “what were they thinking?” And apparently the Homelands designers thought they were writing Lord of the Fucking Rings and had weird visions of a deep strategic game. And just to blow your damn mind, it is public record that the original proposal was considered “underpowered” by the people who ended up greenlighting the final capitulative waste pile. The final version had you spending six fucking mana for an enchantment that made white creatures unblockable by players who had plains (and presumably had white creatures to send back at you, also unblockably). WTF?!
If this card does anything at all, it's because your opponent has access to the mana required to make creatures that would shove it right back in your face. It costs more than genuine bombs. And the original version of the set was somehow less powerful than this.
AncientH:
Things to appreciate about Homelands: some of us didn't have very much choice except to try and get some use out of these cards. If you started playing around Fourth Edition - or ghost help you, Fallen Empires or Ice Age - you were already largely behind the power curve as far as the sets were going. The Moxes and Black Lotus were already legends; shit like Fork pretty much only existed on the pages of InQuest as far as I was concerned, and no-one on my block have ever seen a Mishra's Workshop.
Spoilered for appropriateness.
One is the loneliest number...
I saw the worst players of my generation driven to madness trying to cobble together a fucking Dwarf deck with Fallen Empires and Homelands cards. I saw Green players bicker over Autumn Willow.
Arguably the best Green card in the set; still overpriced.
I PLAYED ORCISH MINE.
I could have just said "I have sinned." Same difference.
Was it really that bad? Well...yeah. There are some cards that don't out-and-out suck. Carapace, Merchant Scroll, Willow Priestess or Didgeridoo if you're going to make a tribal Faerie or Minotaur deck, respectively; Drudge Spell because proper dredge hadn't been invented yet and Feast of the Unicorn because we didn't know any better. But there are basically no stand-out good cards, and most of these are only here because, like younger me, you had little choice.
We couldn't play for ante in my school because then it would be gambling.
Mechanically, you can sort-of see the lingering RNA of Ice Age and Fallen Empires on this set, like the crusted aftermath of a busy prostitute's evening on the seat of a cab. Shit like Trade Caravan was straight-up FE-style counter economy nonsense.
...and there are a couple cantrips...
...but that's really about it. I think it's telling that Homelands seems to have not learned Fallen Empire's mistakes about tribal bullshit, in that while it really pushes tribal nonsense - Minotaurs, Faeries, Dwarfs, Vampires, Falcons (yes, really) - it doesn't give you enough tribal bullshit to actually build a deck with. Even if you raid 4th edition, Fallen Empires, AND Ice Age for spare parts.
Errata changed this to "Bird," which makes it much, much more useful now that Aven are a thing. This is pretty much a set MADE for errata.
So you can sort of see why the design team, if they were scrabbling around for ideas, might feel like disavowing the bastard Homelands set and replacing it with Coldsnap.
FrankT:
Unlike Homelands, Alliances makes a real effort to tie into the storyline of Ice Age. The storyline of Ice Age is pretty thin gruel and I don't care about it, but you definitely see the repeat of some organization names like Stromgald and the Juniper Order. There are even two whole cards that present an advantage of sorts for having snow lands in your deck.
When you get through all 66 words on the Gargantuan Gorilla, the inescapable conclusion is that they are in fact totally terrible and in no way worth putting into any deck, and thus the minor affinity they have for snow lands is totally meaningless and still represents no real incentive to include those things in your deck.
So for better or worse, Alliances was an extension of Ice Age. But it didn't extend it very far or very well.
Many of the cards are literally a joke.
The power level in Alliances is not very high. Most of the cards teeter on the edge of being at the low end of playable and well... being not as good as that. Even the ones that are playable at all tend to be incredibly niche.
If you are playing a Red/Black deck full of Pump Knights and Frozen Shades, then the Agent of Stromgald is slightly better at mana fixing than the Initiates of the Ebon Hand. Which as we mentioned in the Fallen Empires Review was a thing that was marginal but playable. I mean, unlike the Initiates, he can't paint the colorless mana from a Sol Ring, but also unlke the Initiates, he can take you from 0 to 1 Black Mana rather than just from 1 to 2. So that's a thing. But if you were BRG or BUR or something, the Agent of Stromgald is much worse than the Initiates. So he's a marginal card for an incredibly specific deck. A deck that happened to be playable at the time, but even so.
AncientH:
Alliances feels super unfinished; like it's a bunch of leftovers from the design floor of Ice Age that they finished off over a couple of beers. But it was welcomed after Homelands, both because of the more dynamic artwork and simply not being Homelands.
This card actually got some play.
Hell, even these cards got some play.
This card was just Elf porn.
Looking back at it now, I think one of the major disadvantages of Homelands - and the reason that Alliances seems like such a more dynamic and useful set - is that Alliances interacts much more directly with the fundamental game mechanics in a way that Homelands pretty much did not. I mean, look at these cards:
These aren't terribly great cards, but they speak directly to producing mana or manipulating your library in a useful or effective fashion. I'm looking at the Homelands cards and they have no non-land cards that actually fiddle with mana production in any way, and only a few that interact with the library in any way (and not ones you really care about).
Well, if I have to have some Homelands cards in my deck, and I'm playing Blue anyway...I guess...
Homelands just doesn't break any new ground. It's fucking boring. Alliances may have some cards that were getting contact highs off the stuff the Necropotence dude was smoking, but at least people played them.
Don't knock Foresight. Getting rid of three cards you don't need means that the cards you do need are three cards closer in the stack.
FrankT:
Alliances tried to make discarding cards from your hand as a thing to pay for playing other cards. There was a “5 cost” spell of each color that you could alternately play by ditching another card from your hand of the same color. Mostly, these made relatively little impact and the mechanic never exactly caught fire. The big exception of course:
Force of Will became a staple in ridiculous formats where people were expected to do some kind of stupid combo kill on turn one or two. The cost is high (you are two-for-oneing yourself), but if it lets you stop your opponent from winning before you even get a turn, then that's a must have. Unlike the other versions, Force of Will has seen a shit tonne of play – but it only ever sees any play because of fundamental design failures. Force of Will is used because degenerate decks can end the game before it becomes practical to leave one blue mana open for a Force Spike (or Stubborn Denial), and where capstones are so ridiculous that trading two of your cards for their one finisher card is such a good deal that you'd pay a life point for the privilege. The designer of Force of Will is lauded for making a card that sees so much play in so many formats, but only because obviously so many other designers over the years have shat the bed.
AncientH:
Alliances tried to use Homarids. Those were the mud-bugs that went over like a slightly-cool bowl of horse semen back in Fallen Empire days. I don't know why they are here, except maybe they had some already paid-for art left over and decided to use it.
Thematically and setting-wise, Alliances also double-downed on the Urza and Mishra stuff, reinforcing the Antiquities War connection and (re)introducing the Phyrexians.
Weeee'rrrree baaaaaack!
Some of this stuff you would actually use; a 3/4 for 3 mana wasn't considered bad back in the day.
And there's some WTF.
No, seriously, who gave him the drugs?
Was Alliances great? No. But it at least dovetailed Ice Age, which was the pseudo-core set, and it had cards you weren't embarrassed to put on the table in casual play.
Keep in mind that at the time, there was still a heavy roleplaying element to the whole Magic: the Gathering experience, and the game was still heavily grounded in D&D/Sword & Sorcery tropes over the slick, almost science-fiction approach that came in later. And the theme of an Ice Age, and of the Ice Age eventually ending was a strong narrative appeal to players and collectors, even if the cards weren't as good as the shit your older brother got because he got one of the last packs of Revised at the comic book store six months before you got into the game.
And Ice Age (with Alliances) did move the game forward. For all of its mistakes - and they were many - I think it did largely pull Magic out of the rut of "generic fantasy" where it had been wallowing for the first four editions, and enabled it to really look forward to some long-term planning of both the sets and the setting. It's no accident that the novels and tie-in comics and stuff really took off during Ice Age, where before they had been mostly standalone novels and anthologies that were later ignored. And the format probed successful enough that WotC would try it again:
Hah. I bet you thought I was gonna say ColdSnap.
Last edited by Ancient History on Mon Dec 07, 2015 1:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
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RadiantPhoenix
- Prince
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I saw Diminishing Returns in a Vintage Goblin Charbelcher deck recently. It won game 1 against Dredge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmDtTzFuXisAncient History wrote:
Hell, even these cards got some play.
And, of course, Merchant Scroll fetches a bunch of good and/or restricted blue cards in Vintage, like Ancestral Recall, Time Twister, Time Walk, Tinker, or Mystical Tutor.Ancient History wrote:
Well, if I have to have some Homelands cards in my deck, and I'm playing Blue anyway...I guess...
I would say Tempest block. Consistent art, reasonably solid mechanics, pretty well balanced for its time, if still weaker than some of the things of the past.
virgil wrote:Lovecraft didn't later add a love triangle between Dagon, Chtulhu, & the Colour-Out-of-Space; only to have it broken up through cyber-bullying by the King in Yellow.
FrankTrollman wrote:If your enemy is fucking Gravity, are you helping or hindering it by putting things on high shelves? I don't fucking know! That's not even a thing. Your enemy can't be Gravity, because that's stupid.
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Username17
- Serious Badass
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I think you can make a good case that Magic didn't get their shit together until they stopped printing cards with coin flips. The last bullshit coinflip card cycled out of Standard in September 2015.
I think you can make a good case that Magic didn't get their shit together until they came out with solid explicable color identities such that you could look at a card's effects and do considerably better than 25% at guessing what color it was supposed to be. And I don't think that happened until Mirrodin. There's a lot to not like about Mirrodin (like how Affinity is broken), but the White cards feel White, the Blue cards feel Blue, the Black cards feel Black, and so on and such like.
-Username17
I think you can make a good case that Magic didn't get their shit together until they came out with solid explicable color identities such that you could look at a card's effects and do considerably better than 25% at guessing what color it was supposed to be. And I don't think that happened until Mirrodin. There's a lot to not like about Mirrodin (like how Affinity is broken), but the White cards feel White, the Blue cards feel Blue, the Black cards feel Black, and so on and such like.
-Username17
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RobbyPants
- King
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Melissa Benson seems to have a thing for creatures with gigantic wings or horns on their helmets.
Edit:
Edit:
Shadow?TiaC wrote:I would say Tempest block. Consistent art, reasonably solid mechanics, pretty well balanced for its time, if still weaker than some of the things of the past.
Last edited by RobbyPants on Mon Dec 07, 2015 7:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.