OSSR InQuest #1

[Ancient History]

In May 1995, the Collectible Card Game boom was well underway. Leading the pack was Magic: the Gathering, now on the Fallen Empires set - so overproduced that you could sometimes buy a pack for less than a couple of bucks, and thallid tokens were as common as Llanowar elves. Earlier Wizard had produced a special issue called "InQuest" devoted to this whole card-game nonsense, and it did so well they spun it off into its own ongoing magazine. This was a heavy - as big in its corner of the gaming field as Dragon or White Dwarf in their heydays, and it lasted until 2007 - but the foundations of the mag were laid very early on, while they were still finding their way.

On the cover: the byline is "The Future of Gaming"

Inside: A two-page spread on Rage, the Werewolf: The Apocalypse CCG from White Wolf. RPG companies had several advantages when they decided to plow into the CCG boom: a seemingly inexhaustible supply of decent art culled from their own publications, a setting and characters ripped straight from their own gamelines, and (presumably) a built-in audience. The results sometimes worked - I think people are still playing Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, and Netrunner got a reboot - but just as often it failed, sometimes spectacularly so, as with Spellfire. Knights of the Dinner Table is still making fun of that one.

Page 3 - I don't want to go page-by-page on this, but it's hard - an advert for INQUISITION(TM), the first expansion to the fucking Doomtrooper CCG. Who remembers that one? I swear InQuest came in just as CCGs were beginning - but had not quite - begun to reach critical mass; they were just proliferating so rapidly.

This is one of my favorite bits, the beginning of the first editorial:

Things sucked for a while.

I'm talking about the fantasy gaming genre, and the atmosphere of a lot of the fantasy-oriented stores I visited. Don't get me wrong: I'm a huge fantasy buff, and I've loved this stuff for the past 15 years, but c'mon, the industry was sucking wind. Then--boom--a li'l card game from Wizards of the Coast called Magic: The Gathering popped up, and after a while, it not only became the hottest thing going, it breathed new life into this industry.

Suddenly, in stores that had quietly been watching dust pile up on old gaming items, things were up and jumping again. I can't walk into any fantasy hobby shop nowadays without half a dozen people milling about, playing, buying, or trading Magic with friends--or making new friends playing Magic. And while I admit I was skeptical at first, I'm now a bona fide Magic gamer and collector

The sad part is, I can't walk into any fantasy hobby shop nowadays because they've all fucking closed. In '95 we were still on AD&D, the Encyclopedia Magica was out in all its glory, and though nobody knew it would help spell the demise of TSR. The boom-and-bust cycles that followed for CCGs, RPGs, and (especially) comic books would be more than the sedate hobby shops of the 90s could easily cope with.

pg.5 - I owned this! Oh gods I owned this. I sat down and made a list of every spell that fucker cast and tried to see how he built his deck.


Next up is the Letters page. This being 1995, they got letters by soliciting them through America Online "a national on-line computer service linking up about a gajillion people." Since this was mainly populated by nerds, the first letter includes algebra jokes and reverence to Gen13.

Stumpers! A section about answering Magic rules lawyering questions! This is shit even I could answer.

Q: I'm at one life and I have one swamp left, with just a Scathe Zombei in play. My opponent comes stomping in for 17 points of damage. Can I tap the swamp, cast Dark Ritual, and play Simulacrum, directing all damage to my Zombie--including the one point of mana burn?
- K. Reilly, Harlingen, TX
A: Mana burn only happens when the mana pool clears. This is at the end of every phase and at the beginning and end of combat. You'll take the mana burn at the end of combat and piff, you're dead.

Man, I miss mana burn.

p10: An ad for REDEMPTION, the first Christian fundie CCG. Amazingly, this still exists.

And now, the news. Some highlights:
* MTG 4th edition is on the way!
* Decipher is putting out Star Wars and Star Trek Customizable Card Games!

By late 1996, TSR hopes to realize a Dungeons & Dragons live-action movie, a Dragonlance animated movie, and a live-action Wildspace TV special and series.

Man, they had some good drugs in '95.

TSR is revamping Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook and AD&D Dungeon Master Guide. The rules, still in the second edition, won't be heavily altered, just updated and clarified for newcomers. Those who dislike change needn't fret: the old format will remain in print.

Specturm HoloByte and FASA are foring a company to make electronic games based on FASA's roleplaying products. Through the agreement, Specturm HoloByte, publisher of popular games like Tetris, will buy a minority share in FASA, which makes Battletech, Shadowrun, and Earthdawn. The games are being designed for high-end personal computers and gaming systems. Players will be able to compete alone or with others via modem. The earliest game, due in mid-'96, will adapt Battletech as a CD-ROM for Pentium-based computers and new Sega and Sony high-end gaming systems.

Spectrum-owned MicroProse is making a computer version of Wizards of the Coast's Magic: the Gathering.

* Dragon Dice.

* New CCGs out: Spellfire: Artifacts*, Highlander, Doomtrooper: Inquisition, Power Cards, Rage, SimCity, Shadowfist.

Here's the Deal: You Spellfire crazies think you deck is working great now, but wait until you see the new expansion set. Look for this to fill in gaps in the Dark Sun cards, and for artifacts from the AD&D Book of Artifacts. The set has 50 common, 25 each uncommon and rare, and 20 very rare chase cards. The Wand of Orcus, Mace of Cuthbert, and Ur Draxa await you

Strange Things in the Night is the cover article, a brief history on vampires, from Anne Rice to Vampire: The Eternal Struggle. I'm only moderately joking, this article does the best to suck the blood out of Rein*Hagen's cock, stupid fucking dot in the middle of his name and all. This really was the day where if you were a serious gamer journalist dude, and you wanted a go-to on the history of the undead, you'd call up White Wolf in Atlanta and ask for an interview and get it.

Killer Decks was a feature article, all about deck-building. They weren't particularly good then and haven't aged terribly well given the shakeup in the game (not that theme decks seem to last more than a season anyway). Case in point, this article opens wiht:

Hmm, it's not a bad opening draw: three mana, one Llanowar Elves, Thallid, Fungal Bloom, and Thicket Basilisk...

I cringe when I sww my opponent's opening: a Sapphire Mox, a Ruby Mox, a dual land--oh, and a Black Lotus. Boom. Sacrifice the Black Lotus, tap the rest, and voila--Shivan Dragon.

I'm not even sure Llanowar Elves are still legal at this point.

InQuest Interview - I don't think this was a regular feature every issue, maybe semiregular. This interview is with Tom Wanerstrand, an early WotC Magic production manager, remembered today mainly for his artwork on Blood Moon.

p.28 - And advert for somebody to win a complete set of Magic: The Gathering. Woo!

Casting Call - Another semiregular feature that was phased out, this one tries to cast a gaming-based movie by matching up pictures of actors and actresses to gaming art, in this case Dragonlance. Seeing a pre-LotR (and pre-pubescent) Elijah Wood fantasy-cast as a kender is freaky.

Ultimate Chaos - The zany InQuest crew decide to play a silly mash-up CCG game, basically everybody bringing a deck from a different game to the table and playing Calvinball to decide which is best. Sample of play:

After chucking down a Blue 7, Uno giggled gleefully. "Uno!" He was on turn away from winning. Could anyone stop the Uno juggernaut? Unworried, Illuminati irritated Magic by using the almighty Al Gore card, capable of stealing one green group, to take a forest.

Among the games in question are Dixie (Civil War CCG) and Super Deck! ("The Super Hero Trading Card Game")

Magic Armada - A feature on Acclaim making comic books for Magic: the Gathering - I loved those things. I loved that they were bagged with cards. I love how cheesy they were, because back then Magic hadn't sorted the mythology or the setting mechanics very well and they could do almost anything. I love how they chose to go with Acclaim of all companies. Haahahaha! I bought copies of those books still in the original bags last Hallowe'en and handed them out to befuddled kids for tricks or treats...

Like Rats on Cocaine - A market watch piece about the dangers of becoming addicted to collectible cards, and pricing them. Some sample wisdom:

* Enchantment Alteration, long ignored, is creeping into the $2 range. Undo your opponent's plans and enhance our permanents with his enchantments!
* Elder Dragons won't appreciate much: they're rare and neat as heck, but they're so difficult to play with that they're stuck at $25 each.
* The game-breaking Black Lotus may soon reach the $200 level as easily as the $100 mark it surpassed only too recently.

These rules are true for other games as well. Why are Star Trek: The Next Generation Customizable Card Game's Data, Picard, and U.S.S. Enterprise cards moving into the $60-$80 range? Because when you bring them out, you an complete your missions lickety-split.

(Also, it's great to say, "I'm launching my U.S.S. Enterprise under the command of Captain Jean-Luc Picard! Yee-hah!" Trekkies eat this up, which is one reason Star Trek cards are gaining value.)

Then: $60
Now: $30. Not a great investment.

Now the big attraction of InQuest, like Wizard, was the Price Guide. The fun and informative articles and industry news were great, but people wanted to see what cards were worth...or, like me, wanted to see what the fucking cards were in the days before Gatherer and spoiler lists were an actual thing. This being early on, InQuest had several price lists - Magic, Star Trek, and Illuminati - and divvied them up by sets.

Highlights:
* An unopened booster back of M:tG Alpha was $90
* I completely forgot they had a five-dot rating system for how good a card was, and that even by Fallen Empires the big 5 and the moxes and Black Lotus had already been banned/restricted.
* The card combo advice sprinkled throughout this section is dire:

Icatian Town is a bit costly, but when you plop down four 1/1 guys and suddenly crank them up to 2/2s (with Crusade) or more, it's certainly worth it. The townspeople are also great as defensive sacrifices

* Miscellaneous - these are the five M:tG cards you could get by mailing in a form from the back of the old novels, ranging from $5 for the Nalathani Dragon to $7.50 for the Swears of Estark. Giant Badger, Arena, and Windseeker Centaur all $6 each. Today, the Giant Badger (reprinted) is worth ~$1, while the Nalathni Dragon is worth ~$135.

p.77:

We'd like to take the time to thank several of the retailers who helped make this price guide the best it can be:

Five. There are five of them, including the Charity Fellowship Gaming Hotline and B& R Baseball Cards.

Swan Song - One of my favorite bits of the magazine, Rick Swan's humor column where he takes a poke at gaming. In this one, he pokes fun at the rampant consumerism of gamer culture, as epitomized by Waldo:

Waldo held out his Gen Con Game Fair Ceramic Coffee Mug (TSR, $7). "Fill 'er up!"

The game progressed smoothly. Waldo let us borrow his Sprawl Mapss (FASA, $15) t lay out the city and his [i}Car Wars Lapel Pins[/i] (Steve Jackson Games, $4.50 each) to mark the trap doors. Unfortunately, Waldo had to go home ealy because he spilled pepsi on his Wraith: the Oblivion T-shirt (White Wolf, $15).

Back cover: Alexander Cross painting advertising Ice Age(TM). "The fire sings, the glaciers call, the Ice Age comes. Magic: the Gathering." "Ice Age(TM) is designed to be played by itself, or as a standard expansion for Magic: the Gathering(TM)."

It did get better. A lot better. The issues quickly broke a hundred pages, with more articles than card lists and price guides (which were eventually broken into separate sections). A lot of the covers were brilliant and spot on the pulse of the gamer zeitgeist. I try not to think of InQuest in its later years, when it switched to InQuest Gamer in a bid to cover more games but seemed to focus mainly on Pokemon cards. Magic was always the heart and soul of the magazine, and I think the game lost a good organ when InQuest finally folded - though it had a good run of it.

[Red_Rob]

Inquest! That takes me back. Where the hell did you find a #1?

This was right around the time we first got into Magic, so this review was pretty much a nostalgia bomb. I think we bought some of just about every game you mentioned, so I was squeeing like a fangirl the whole way through.

Magic: the Gathering, now on the Fallen Empires set

Fallen Empires was the next set released after we got into Magic, and is legendary for being overprinted due to previous stock issues. For Wizards this was a disaster, but for gamers in high school it was great! Suddenly after having to search for cards there were packs in every game store, prices were slashed, and we bought 'em by the bucket. Our decks were stuffed with Thallids, Merfolk and Thrulls and we loved it. Of course now they are all worthless, but just seeing a Fallen Empires card brings a little smile to my face.

Spellfire. Knights of the Dinner Table is still making fun of that one.

Spellfire was one of the games we never tried (and we even bought Blood Wars!), but it was the punchline to every joke in Inquest and beyond. I wonder how much it contributed to TSR's demise? I know Mythos almost did for Chaosium.

* Decipher is putting out Star Wars and Star Trek Customizable Card Games!

My brother and I were just talking about these games yesterday and how terrible they were at representing the stories they were based on. Not that that stopped us at 14 years old from buying boxes full of them. Both were fascinating train wrecks in different ways. Star Trek was almost entirely noninteractive, with rare cards that were literally 3 or 4 times as good as common cards that did the same thing. It also had expansions that completely changed the way the game played, but that didn't require both players to be using. Star Wars had a weird site control mechanic that never really worked, along with the fantastic idea of having half the cards reference the characters from the film, and then making all those characters rare. Gee, thanks, I have a ton of cards referencing Luke but my chances of seeing him are minute.

I bought copies of those books still in the original bags last Hallowe'en and handed them out to befuddled kids for tricks or treats...

Now the big attraction of InQuest, like Wizard, was the Price Guide. The fun and informative articles and industry news were great, but people wanted to see what cards were worth...or, like me, wanted to see what the fucking cards were in the days before Gatherer and spoiler lists were an actual thing.

It's weird now to think that the rarity of cards was hidden information and even the cardlists were not given out by the companies as a default. One of the most important things when getting into a CCG was having someone you could trust that was aware of the relative value of cards, otherwise you risked having all your rares traded away for splashy looking but ultimately worthless commons from a set you hadn't seen. Looking back now it seems like madness that this would be a companies intentional business model.

Highlights:
* An unopened booster back of M:tG Alpha was $90

I remember thinking these prices were ridiculous back then. If only I'd known...

* I completely forgot they had a five-dot rating system for how good a card was, and that even by Fallen Empires the big 5 and the moxes and Black Lotus had already been banned/restricted.

They famously gave Necropotence 1 star and called it "the worst card in Ice Age". Because who would trade life for cards, right?

* Miscellaneous - these are the five M:tG cards you could get by mailing in a form from the back of the old novels

I remember back when they used to print unique cards for promo purposes or magazine issues. Then there was a stink because one became a tournament staple and they switched to just using preview cards from the next set. I kind of missed those wacky promo's.

Wow, that really brought back some memories. I only caught Inquest once it was an established magazine, interesting to see how it started. The thing that struck me with Inquest was it's focus on humour - it had actually funny articles and joke cards, and being independent could poke fun at things that the official magazines were loath to. I don't know if there's anything like that around at the moment, which is kind of a shame.

[Ancient History]

Inquest! That takes me back. Where the hell did you find a #1?

Many years ago in St. Louis, I bought a stack of InQuest magazines - 1 through 75 or something - at an auction for about $25. I just uncovered where I'd had them hidden in a bin and brought them up from obscurity.

This was right around the time we first got into Magic, so this review was pretty much a nostalgia bomb. I think we bought some of just about every game you mentioned, so I was squeeing like a fangirl the whole way through.

You and me both. The real value in this thing is nostalgia - like I said, this isn't even one of the good issues, like the ones with the Contest of Champions.

Wow, that really brought back some memories. I only caught Inquest once it was an established magazine, interesting to see how it started. The thing that struck me with Inquest was it's focus on humour - it had actually funny articles and joke cards, and being independent could poke fun at things that the official magazines were loath to. I don't know if there's anything like that around at the moment, which is kind of a shame.

It was a fun 'zine, it didn't take itself too seriously - the pages have little jokes scattered all over the place, usually pretty juvenile stuff, but just for shits and giggles, y'know? And I think it was important because the cardset at the beginning was quite small, and the setting not firmly entrenched, so there were a lot of stand-out iconic images and things (Serra Angel, Hurloon Minotaur, Lord of the Pit, Shivan Dragon, &c.) which really stood out and everybody was familiar with.

[Username17]

They famously gave Necropotence 1 star and called it "the worst card in Ice Age". Because who would trade life for cards, right?

When Dr. Praetorious and I invented Necrodisk, we got an enormous amount of pushback. "Why would you cast Underworld Dreams on yourself?" people would demand of us. It was a strange time.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

When Dr. Praetorious and I invented Necrodisk, we got an enormous amount of pushback. "Why would you cast Underworld Dreams on yourself?" people would demand of us. It was a strange time.

-Username17

There really was no excuse for not realizing that Necropotance was the the sweetness. The mana curve hadn't been invented yet but card advantage had been an established thing even before ice age.

[RobbyPants]

Magic: the Gathering, now on the Fallen Empires set

Fallen Empires was the next set released after we got into Magic, and is legendary for being overprinted due to previous stock issues. For Wizards this was a disaster, but for gamers in high school it was great! Suddenly after having to search for cards there were packs in every game store, prices were slashed, and we bought 'em by the bucket. Our decks were stuffed with Thallids, Merfolk and Thrulls and we loved it. Of course now they are all worthless, but just seeing a Fallen Empires card brings a little smile to my face.

Same with me. I started in the fall of 95. I had lots of Fallen Empire cards. I liked the other sets better, but for an unemployed highschooler, I couldn't beat that price. I think the boosters sold for $1.50 or $1.75, whereas the Revised edition boosters clocked in around $2.50.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

The other magic players at my school used to mock me incessantly because I pronounced "thrull" with a -uh sound. The consensus of the group was the word was "thrall".

[JigokuBosatsu]

If it was thrall, they would have spelled it thrall. Now I'm off to listen to Jethro Thrull.

[Whatever]

Good times. I was never big on InQuest, but I had a bunch of old Duelist magazines for the longest time. Re-reading those was always a blast.

[Ancient History]

Duelist never really grabbed my fancy, at least Scrye had the comics...heh, and isn't it weird that there were enough CCGs to support more than one major magazine back then, damn.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

If it was thrall, they would have spelled it thrall. Now I'm off to listen to Jethro Thrull.

I made that argument. The group decided that I needed to shut my fucking mouth before someone stuck a dick in it.

[JigokuBosatsu]

You spend time with some unpleasant people, Count.