Catch me up on the last 12 years of "Magic: The Gathering"

The Game Room
1

This thread is inspired by a post by Enderw24 in the new Marketplace forum offering to buy people’s unwanted Magic: The Gathering cards, of which I have a staggering quantity (well over 125,000), all from 12+ years ago. That prompted me to dig out my cards from attic storage to look through them, which has made me think about the game as a game (instead of 50 lbs. of flammable schlepola) for the first time in a long time.

Forgive me if this topic has been discussed before, but I would have avoided a thread topic like this in an effort to keep from getting sucked back in.

Around August of 1994, my game playing friends got me into “Magic: The Gathering”. For those of you familiar with the game, this was when the “Revised” (Third Edition) rotation was current, and “The Dark” and “Fallen Empires” were the current expansion sets. Despite a feeling of resentment at having gotten in only about 9 months too late - missing out on the Unlimited, Arabian Nights, Antiquities and Legends sets being in print - I fell for the game and fell hard, as you can tell by the number of cards I eventually accumulated.

The skyrocketing popularity of the game caught a lot of attention in the gaming world, and by 1996 it looked like CCGs were the Next Big Thing In Gaming: people I knew were playing Shadowfist, Mythos (which won a prize for Best Game at Origins when it came out), a LotR CCG - even older gaming favorites like Steve Jackson’s “Illuminati!” were coming out with CCG versions. Yet by 1997 most of those CCGs had died out - Mythos in particular flamed out so fast I never even had time to unpack most of my cards from their shrink wrapping that still encases them - and it started to look like a bubble market: the craze had grown so fast that a lot of the so-called demand for the cards were not coming from actual gamers but from speculators. MtG was still the biggest CCG in terms of interest as it was the original one, but it did look quite possible that it was just a matter of time before the bubble caught up with it as well.

Also right around then - with the Alliances and Homelands sets and the introduction of the “Fifth” Edition of the core set - I started feeling very disappointed in the newer cards. I felt no real desire to build decks around them, and the 5E rotation dropped a lot of cards I had felt were the most interesting ones as well. As part of their goal of making the game balanced they kept creating new versions of older, more powerful cards but with new drawbacks added, which seemed at the same time uninteresting and limiting. In addition, they reorganized the tourney formats to separate games based on the “last 2 printed rotations” or “using the full history of MtG” - which meant I was doomed to either continually buy boxes of cards every year (obviously what they would like), while feeling dissatisfied with the new cards as weakened versions of old favorites I already had and preferred; or, to playing in the open games where I would probably need to get cards like Moxen, Lotuses, Libraries and whatnot to be competitive, which I had missed out on by getting into the game about a year too late.

If I felt that way despite dropping what must have been thousands of dollars over 3-4 years on the game, that didn’t bode well for the future of the game… So I bowed out. Yet now, I check back in after 12 years and it looks like MtG has survived and is still doing about as well as it was 12 years ago. How did it save itself?

The rules of the game seems to have changed not once but twice since then - no more “Interrupts”, “spell stacks” and whatnot, and new game features too? Do you think this has helped? Also, new powers have been addded along with rule changes that I’m not familiar with - for example, the Wikipedia article on MtG mentions White has often featuring creatures with First Strike (which I remember), but also “Lifelink” and “Vigilance”, and Blue featuring creatures with “Flying” (an oldie) or “Shroud” (wuzzat?).

I see if I want to get back into this, it will be almost like starting over again, except with 125,000+ cards in my closet, of course.

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I have been out of the loop for 6 years, but up until then was a very competitive tournament player, so I can address those 8 years since you “retired.”

The first thing I want to get out of the way is that Magic did not “save itself,” per se. It’s a common perception by people who played a long time ago that anything that changes in Magic means the game is dying; yet the game keeps chugging along as if nothing is wrong. (In fact, I wrote an article for a Magic-based “Onion”-esque site, which I titled “Magic Dying for 15th Consecutive Year”, but that’s neither here nor there)

Regarding the substantive changes, I believe they were for the better. The weakening of cards was necessary to promote the long-term health of the game, to make the game more interactive, and to ensure that formats like Extended were not completely unplayable. Of course it will irk people who grew up with the original, unfiltered power 9, but they really make for a better game.

Another change that was done very consciously was the shifting of the color pie. You can read Mark Rosewater’s columns on Magicthegathering.com regarding their constant efforts to shift mechanics from the colors where they were overpopulated (i.e. Blue and white) into the less represented colors (Red and Green, mainly). This has resulted in the need to play multi-color decks, which presents tension in deckbuilding (how much of each color do I need? What can I get away with?). Before, you could play mono-Blue and have answers to basically everything an opponent could offer.

The Sixth edition rules changes were another issue that had people up in arms, but they also had a positive effect on the game. Of course, some of those changes have been superseded by the most recent rules changes, but while I played the rules became much more intuitive. You have to admit, red elemental blast being played as an interrupt (when countering) or an instant (when targetting a permanent) is pretty screwed up. Stacking combat damage was a big change that affected a lot of cards, but once you got it down it was a piece of cake.

You seemed to notice a lot of the keyword additions, which I believe they have done in order to clean up the cards. Some mechanics are quite wordy (“whenever [this] deals combat damage, you gain that much life”) and can be easily represented by a single word (Lifelink). The same for “does not tap to attack” (Vigilance).

One final thing that you did not touch on was the introduction of Magic: Online. I played this for years as it was extremely convenient, although I must say that it’s fraught with problems, some of which are unfixable. You lose the person-on-person contact that makes games like Magic good, and instead are looking at an unnamed opponent on a computer screen. That makes losing more infuriating. The program is also (last I heard) prone to lagging, server crashes, and whatnot. You would think after several rewrites and years of tweaks they could get a version that works consistently, but apparently not. Still, if all you want to do is read up on the new cards, play a draft here or there, you could do a lot worse than drafting from the comfort of your own living room.

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The first thing I thought when I read the thread title was “Oh boy.” The game has changed in a lot of ways, most of which for the better, and it perhaps has never been stronger. While the basic concept of the game (lands, mana, spells, creatures, attacking, blocking) is the same, the rules have become far more streamlined (most of which happened in 6th edition). Instead of pages of rulings about special cases, there is a comprehensive document that lists all the rules; while some of these rules exist only for a very tiny subset of cards (often just 1), they serve as a guide to why the cards work like they do and provides a sort of “grand unified theory” behind how the game works.

As the game progressed, the developers came to understand the game better. Market research helped determine what was popular and why. They hired some of the top players to help them balance cards appropriately and make formats less degenerate. The existence of the Pro Tour let them identify those players much more effectively, and quite a lot of experienced players have went on to work for R&D.

Additionally, there was a major push maybe 8 years ago to make the flavor of the cards interact on a basic level with the mechanics of the cards. The interconnection of these had been rather minimal until around Kamigawa and Ravnica. Before the flavor of the cards may have influenced what the cards did individually, but now the ideas behind the sets and their settings are reflected in the mechanics. This makes the cards much more than just a bunch of pretty pieces of cardboard you play a game with; it becomes a universe you can immerse yourself in (if that’s your kind of thing).

If you really want to catch up on the last 12 years, well, there’s an absolute ton of cards out there, but a few things may be of interest:

  1. A new card type, Planeswalkers. These represent allies who your opponent can attack as if they were players. You can have them to cast one of their 3 (or 4) “spells” (abilities) each turn (at sorcery speed) that affect how much “loyalty” they have to you. They generally have one spell/abiility that costs far more than their starting loyalty (and has a devastating effect), one that gains them loyalty (for a small effect), and one that makes them lose just a little (for a decent effect). The opponent can damage them via spells and can attack them as though they are players (and you can block for them).

  2. Mythic rares. In theory a “rarer” kind of card, but in reality just as likely to get in a pack as the Rares used to be in large sets. This was accomplished partly by moving significant numbers of cards from large sets into the smaller sets, and normal Rares are easier to get than previous. Many players don’t like them because at first they said they would only be used for flashy spells, planeswalkers, and legends, but it’s been increasingly common that those cards have been pushed in power level and cards currently in print have gone up to $60 a piece on the secondary market.

  3. Magic Online. Very nearly the same as the paper game as long as you figure out how everything works. Now offers just about any tournament you can get in face-to-face games, and features very close to every card in the game now, and I believe all of them since Mirage. I don’t play it because you can very easily misclick, and knowing exactly what step you’re in and what is going on is a bit difficult to figure out sometimes - and the tournament games are timed like with chess clocks. I would either run out of time or make egregious blunders trying to play quickly, so I gave up.

As to the new keywords that you mention, most of the “evergreen” ones (ones used in most every set) you’re probably familiar with, but have been keyworded for brevity. Vigilance = “Attacking doesn’t cause this creature to tap”, shroud = “Can’t be the target of spells or abilities”, lifelink = “Gain life for each damage this creature deals”. Of course there’s also new ones that are set/block specific, but they’re all spelled out in reminder text and not used outside their block/set.

I play in a draft tournament every Friday at a local card store, and judge Pro Tour Qualifiers every once in a while. I’ve played on and off forever basically, and probably could answer just about any specific question you might have.

4

One thing I didn’t touch on, that I did the last time someone asked, is the push in the power level of creatures in the last few years at the expense of spells, particularly card drawing and counter spells. Burn spells have actually gotten better, with Lightning Bolt being reprinted in the base set again and a couple of cards strictly better than Shock in the expansions.

And that reminds me: they now print new cards in base sets. They felt they were hindered by the policy to include only reprints, and didn’t see the point in having to plant cards they wanted in base sets in expansions first. That the core sets have been black bordered for a while helped. This has greatly helped sales of the core set, which is currently being updated every year (instead of every two) and is currently called “Magic 2011”, named after the year the set gets replaced “like all the Madden video games”. Adding one to the two-digit year will give the current “edition” in the previous nomenclature.

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Hi.

I’m an old-time player as well. I suspect we started at about the same time, as The Dark was released within a couple of weeks of my buying my first card[del]board crack[/del]s. I’ve played mostly continuously, with a couple of breaks for personal reasons. I’ve been a certified tournament judge, and am still up on the rules.

The main thing that has kept Magic going as long as it has (the seventeenth anniversary of the initial release passed at the end of last July) is that it it continues to change the elements of the game while retaining the core principles. It’s continually presenting new problems for the players which build on the core elements of the game.

Put another way, it uses the familiar to explore the unknown.

Back when the game was originally designed, they didn’t have any info on what makes a balanced card. This led to some blatantly overpowered stuff being printed. The current belief is that the designers consistently overestimated the power of creatures, while underestimating the power of noncreature spells.

For example, when we started playing Gray Ogre was felt to be an appropriately balanced creature card. Nowadays, the designers recognise it as underpowered.

Serra Angel was “only just too powerful” according to the system WotC had in place to gauge power level in the mid-90s. That’s why it was removed from the core set (a move I forecast when I opened my first batch of Visions boosters and saw Archangel.) Nowadays, it’s regarded as weak.

Nowadays, it’s recognised that creatures are innately fragile, and the power level of creatures is markedly higher than it was. For example, you can get a vanilla 4/5 for three green mana, and the same mana cost as the Serra Angel will cast another Angel with higher power and more abilities.

The power level of noncreature cards has been weakened as they learned more about the dangers, particularly of creating “engine” cards that turn one resource into another. There are still bizarre things that can be done. For example, I played in a Legacy tournament last month. In one game, I drew my opening hand, and won. My opponent did not even get to draw a card. It’s just harder to do that than it was. (Legacy is a format that allows the use of cards from any set with legal face and back, but bans a long list of cards, including the Moxen, Big Blue and Balance.) I lost the match though.

There have been two major overhauls of the rules, but the game is still fundamentally one of resource management and reaction to your opponent’s moves. The implementation may have changed, resulting in some things no longer working but opening up other possibilities.

The continual rebalancing and redefinition of the game is what has kept it alive over the past few years. That and changing the design and development process.

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While researching this post, I realized one thing that a player that hasn’t played for 12 years will immediately notice about new cards: the new frame! Among other things, the cards’ names and power/toughness are much more readable at long distance. The frame was changed for 8th edition, which would be about 8 years ago.

I wouldn’t use “weak” there, because you’re apparently gauging it against the power level necessary to be played in serious constructed decks. In that metric, 90% of cards are “weak”. It’s still a force to be reckoned with in sealed deck or draft.

That said, there are similar recent white fliers that are generally better even if none could be said to be strictly better. Note that they’re all rare (or mythic) while Serra Angel is uncommon, despite WotC’s continual insistence that rarity doesn’t determine power level.

Baneslayer Angel - bigger, better abilities.
Indomitable Archangel - same size but cheaper, plus a potentially useful ability.
Emeria Angel - smaller, but can put out a good size air force just with more lands.
Battlegrace Angel - Has a potentially useful effect the turn it comes down.

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But sometimes they forget that.

A lot of the rules changes seemed to change things fundamentally, but really end up being a much simpler way to describe almost exactly the same thing happening. The biggest of these is the stack, which works much more cleanly than the hodgepodge of rules they used to have surrounding instants and interrupts. There are always a few corner cases that change with the new rules, but those are often things that needed changing anyway.

One other thing I’ve seen in recent sets, that I think improves the game, is cards which tend to punish players who spend too much on their decks. For instance, the version of “dual lands” found in the current core sets, like Sunpetal Grove: It produces green or white mana, and comes into play tapped unless you control a forest or plains. For a casual player who’s playing green and white, most of their lands will be basics, so they’re almost guaranteed to have a forest or plains out when they play that, and so it’ll be almost as good as the original dual lands like Savannah, but for a player who spends a lot of money, many of their lands will be nonbasic, and Sunpetal Grove will often come into play tapped (a significant drawback).

Another thing they’re doing to make the game more affordable is selling preconstructed decks, where you can pay $10 or whatever (I don’t know what the current prices are like) and get a playable deck where you know exactly what’s going to be in it. A lot of the rarer cards in any given edition show up in one of these preconstructed decks, and the price of that card is therefore capped by the price of the deck (probably somewhat less, since there will be some value in the other cards, too).

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I remember there already being a “stack” for resolving instants and I think creature damage, but interrupts somehow bypassed the stack and ended up having a stack of their own or something. So I guess now all things that used to be “Interrupts” are now plain ol’ Instants and they resolve on the same stack? Makes much more sense.

As for creature damage - I read the current rules guide and the net effect of stacking is that something like rescuing a 'Bolted Elf with Giant Growth still works, but 'Bolting an Elf that’s getting targeted by Giant Growth now results in said Elf getting zapped before getting the Growth. Is that one of the changes? I seem to remember the Elf surviving both scenarios in the past.

I like that description of a dual land, it seems quite balanced, but let me guess, Sunpetal Grove is still a Rare. Though not a “Mythic Rare” which is evidently the “real” Rare these days.

I also very much like the idea of buying pre-canned decks for $10, and being able to tailor the deck with a few boosters. Much nicer for kids, newbies and casual gamers to get into the game, and for someone like me to get a flavor of the various sets without going nuts. Who determines the decks’ contents? Are they patterned after tourney winning decks or just what WotC decides are exemplars of the set? How many decks are there? (I guess I’ll go Google a bit and find out)

I looked over the list of Restricted and Banned cards for Vintage and Legacy formats, and it seems my stuff would fit reasonably well in Legacy, though perhaps be lacking some of the more powerful cards from sets after Homelands. I find it interesting that former standbys like Demonic Tutor and Black Vise(!) are banned alongside the Lotus, Mind Twist and Moxen, though… And even Balance and wheel of Fortune? I guess table-resetting cards were found to be much more unbalancing than they used to be considered (I do recall them being limited to one per deck) - or is it just easier to say “if it’s restricted (one per deck) for Vintage it’s banned for Legacy, there are no restricted cards per se for Legacy format decks”?

OH NO … HERE WE GO AGAIN …

9

The term used back then, IIRC, was “batch.” One big change between the two is that you couldn’t add spells or effects to the batch once the stuff already in it began resolving. You can with the stack. It makes things a little more complex, but a lot more interesting.

This is one reason I like the word “stack”; it offers a visual metaphor for resolution order.

Imagine an Elf. Imagine someone placing a Bolt on the table physically to zap it. Imagine another player responding with a Giant Growth, physically placing it atop the Bolt to represent him that response. Imagine no one wants anything else to happen. So now we resolve the spells? How? By simply putting the visible spells into effect. So the Giant Growth is atop the stack, so that resolves first. Elf is a 4/4. So now we remove the Growth from the stack, and lo and behold, now we see the Bolt. It does 3 damage to a 4/4, and the Elf survives.

If it had been done the opposite way, of course, the opposite would’ve happened.

Is this what you were asking about?

Yes.

Usually 4 per set. From what I can tell, R&D themselves make theme decks, in order to exemplify various themes, strategies, and abilities introduced in that particular set. So they may not do very well in a serious tournament, but they do give a pretty good look at what a particular color or ability is all about.

Have to think about your other questions when dinner is done. :slight_smile:

10

True, but if a casual player should happen to get one in a pack (I think each booster is guaranteed to have one Rare or Mythic Rare, and some number of uncommons), he can generally put it to better use than the powergamer can.

And I said that the preconstructed decks were playable, not that they’re good. You can almost always make a better deck by tinkering with it (if nothing else, buying two copies of the same deck and doubling up on the better cards, since they don’t usually do the “four of each” thing you see in most good decks).

Another clever idea is duel decks: This is two preconstructed decks sold together, with cards drawn from the entire history of the game, with traditional-rival themes. For instance, there’s one with a white angel-based deck vs. a black demon-based one, or a red direct damage deck vs. a blue deck full of counterspells and control. These decks also aren’t all that great on their own, but the two decks are balanced pretty carefully against each other, so if two folks want to try out the game, they give good competitive possibilities.

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I found a place online that sells some of these pre-made decks and will be buying some for my kids (and myself) for Xmas. I also visited their “cards we want” section and was amazed at some of the changes in value in cards from what I remember them being. For example Lion’s Eye Diamond from Mirage is a $25 offering price, which means the selling price would be that much higher, and they’d pay $35 for a NM Force of Will (an Alliances Uncommon), which I have to think I have a bunch of as I have 1,000s of Alliances cards barely sorted. Huh.

12

The store I go to pays $7 for a uncommon from Mirrodin block (Darksteel to be precise), which to me is like, just a few years ago (ok, 8 now): Aether Vial. The theme here, and with the above cards mentioned, is that they are heavily played in competitive Legacy decks. The Vial is used in any many creature based strategies in order to play out a handful of creatures faster and without allowing them to be countered. If you’re playing blue and Force of Will is legal, you’re playing it; the format will in essence almost be balanced around its existence. Lion’s Eye Diamond is used in a couple of ways, but the most popular is to combo it with Infernal Tutor. The drawbacks of the two cards “negate” each other (activate the Diamond in response to casting the tutor) if all you care about is casting the card you’re tutoring for, leaving you with effectively Black Lotus and Demonic Tutor. Add a bunch of other fast mana, and you’re glad Force of Will is in the format to give people a chance to fight it.

13

The set of dual lands in Magic 2011 are interesting, and were definitely designed with new and casual players in mind. However, they are still quite heavily played in competitive decks; despite them playing a large number of non-basics in even a two color deck, they still play a decent number of basics. Plus, the drawback of coming into play tapped isn’t huge and can be planned for. It takes seriously awful dual lands to not have them be played by competitive multicolor decks, and those aren’t half bad. Of course to a more casual player, just having a dual land that nrmally comes into play untapped is likely a huge deal.

“Real” booster packs “should” have a rare or mythic; mythics are in around 1/8 of the packs but there’s far fewer of them per set. Beware the official “fake” ones you may see in Target or similar; they contain fewer cards and do not usually have rares. I’m not sure what the smaller ones are called, but they’re likely designed to get parents to have a smaller option to buy their kids and are designed to be bought one at a time.

14

This is one of those changes that have been forgotten in the game’s prehistory. Once upon a time, damage was not checked until after the entire batch resolved. Consequently, responding to a Giant Growth with a Bolt would not destroy the Elf. It was changed in 1995 (I think).

Mythic Rares are supposed to be big and splashy. Utility cards such as manafixing lands are not considered splashy enough.

Taking M11 numbers, there are 53 rares and 15 mythic rares. They’re printed mixed together on an 11*11 sheet. Each rare occurs twice on the sheet, and each mythic once.

Two things follow from this; firstly, that overall one pack in 8 should contain a mythic rare, and secondly that the chances of you finding a Sunpetal Grove in an M11 pack is exactly twice that of finding a Banselayer Angel (or any two specific named cards). Small sets have lower numbers of cards but preserve those two ratios.

Someone mentioned Duel Decks. They are built by WotC staff. Recently they have started producing specialist products with cards drawn from Magic history. One recent one reprinted Demonic Tutor, to great shock - that’s been out of print since March 1995.

Vintage is the original tournament format. WotC use a Restricted list in Vintage so that all cards (or almost all cards) have a sanctioned format. The ones that don’t fall into three main categories. Cards which mention ante, cards which require manual dexterity and cards which create subgames are all banned in every format (including Vintage). That means Chaos Orb is now banned, sadly. They also abandoned the use of restricted lists for all other formats in about 1996.

Legacy, as a format, started off with a banned list that comprised the Vintage banned and restricted lists.

Balance got banned in about March 1995. Someone was using it with Bazaar of Baghdad to wreck everyone’s gameplan. Black Vise was banned because it was too easy to win, an action that led to Black Summer (1996; everyone played Necropotence decks, or decks designed to beat Necropotence.)

“Might as well face it
you’re addicted to ink.”

Speaking of guarantees, the only one I am aware of is “The booster contains [a set number] of cards.” They don’t guarantee a particular rarity distribution. I remember buying a Mirage starter once, that I could not have returned if I wanted to. It held 60 cards (the promised number). The collation had gone badly wrong, and there were no basic lands instead of the normal 22. They’d all been replaced by rares. Such a shame…

The single most important driver in secondary market card prices (after whether the card was rare, common or uncommon) is how viable the card is in a competitive tournament environment. Force of Will is, and has been for over a decade, the primary defence against one-turn kills in Vintage and Legacy.

LED was finally restricted in 2003, because someone worked out that you could cast LED, then respond to the casting of Burning Wish by cracking LED for black mana, then fetching Yawgmoth’s Will with the Wish, cast it and use the LED again. It made a potent Vintage cocktail with Tendrils of Agony. (The Storm ability may be the most broken keyword ever.)

15

Huh… That does sound familiar. It also explains why I have a Bazaar of Baghdad (two actually), which I sort of remember acquiring for a lot of cards and/or money at some point, but which even after reading the card text didn’t seem obvious as to what I was going to do with it.

I think I must have realized something about Force of Will back then because I can’t find any in a couple of sort-of-labeled boxes of Alliances cards, and given its status as an Uncommon and the number of Alliances cards I have I would think I’d have a bunch of them. But they’re not in my set-aside cache of key deck-building cards either, so it must be hiding somewhere, maybe mixed in with random cards or even some of my old decks I haven’t pulled out and scanned yet.

I find it interesting to see what the current asking/offering prices on cards in my “golden cache” of about 50 cards are now. Many of them seem to have fallen far out of favor or perhaps have become diluted in value/demand by being reprinted, such as Balduvian Horde, Helm of Obedience and Jester’s Cap. The Cap in particular seems like such an effective counter to a deck based around a killer combo, which is to say most decks, that it seems like it should be in nearly any deck - yet I see I can get only $2.50 or so for an OOP Ice Age one, versus the $35 I could get for a Force of Will, from the same online store. Huh.

Overall though I think it’s a very good thing that the MtG secondary market has gone more skewed to game play than collecting. I remember even relatively bad or unplayable Rares like Pirate Ship or Personal Incarnation commanding a premium not too far off from something like a dual land even while Revised/3E was in print. Like being $5-7 for the Incarnation vs. $10-12 for the dual land.

I particular I remember “Sorrow’s Path” being one of the last cards I needed to finish my complete set of The Dark. I couldn’t find it anywhere, nor did I trust USENET based postings from strangers (yet) in rec.games.magic or whatever it was. So I impulsively bought a stupid number of Dark boosters - at 3x the original MSRP too, as The Dark had finished its run - to get that card… only to find that it really and truly sucked. Though I got a bunch of duplicate for cards like Witch Hunter, Deep Water and Barl’s Cage in the mix. Man that set sucked (except for the artwork).

Nonsense. I can stop any time I want to. Or at least, I can restart any time I want to, which is pretty much the same thing, eh? :slight_smile:

16

So I read up on the current rules of Magic last night and just realized that “mana burn” was not mentioned. Mana not used by the end of the turn doesn’t have any ill effect any more? I remember a friend once using “death by mana burn” as a backup strategy for a deck but I don’t remember how he intended to effectuate it. Too bad.

17

Mana burn was removed from the rules in July 2009. Some people miss it.

18

I think the problem with Jester’s Cap is, by the time you can get it out and use it, your opponent has probably already pulled off their killer combo. This is partly because of a change in the mulligan rules: You know how you used to be able to ditch your opening hand and replace it if you didn’t have any lands? Well, under the current rules, you can do that with any starting hand, with the only restriction being that each time you take a mulligan, you get one less card. So if your first seven cards don’t have your killer combo in them, you re-shuffle, take six cards, and see if you have the combo there, and so on. This and the removal of mana burn are the only rules changes I really regret. I think this rule was put in to decrease the impact of luck of the draw, but back in my day, one of the measures of a good deck was how well it coped with the occasional run of bad luck, and I miss that.

19

As I recall, the other problem with the no-land mulligan was in the mox-legal formats it gave a significant advantage to land-light decks.

20

That’s terrible. I can see expanding the mulligan rule to include “only one/all but one mana-producing land” instead of being 0-or-7, but by definition a mulligan is a one shot deal. Even choosing to mulligan for an arbitrary reason isn’t nearly as bad as allowing multiple mulligans, especially at the relatively light cost (for 1 or 2 or maybe even 3 tries depending on the deck) of reshuffling and drawing one less card. It’d be more reasonable if the cards involved in such a non-land-related mulligan were removed from the game instead of shuffled back in (or at the very least, put in the Graveyard).