I played back then, but i was little and did it very casually. Could anyone help me out?
“It's possible. But it involves... {checks archives} Nature's Revolt, Opalescence, two Unstable Shapeshifters (one of which started as a Doppelganger), a Tide, an animated land, a creature with Fading, a Silver Wyvern, some way to get a creature into play in response to stuff, some way to get a land into play in response to stuff (a different land from the animated land), and one heck of a Rube Goldberg timing diagram.”
-David DeLaney
Wow, I really hope you whipped that up as an ad hoc response in *checks time stamps* eight minutes.
awesome
Hahahah...
Magic is complicated, but that flow chart looks more confusing than some parts of ACLS (any medical people here?). I'm glad they simplified things to where they are now.
I seem to remember there being the concept of "FILO", aka "first in, last out". It's pretty similar to the idea of the stack. I started playing circa Ice Age, so my memory about that may be a bit hazy.
also, what was a 'fast effect' and 'forced effect'?
It was pretty close to what it's like now. It played a lot like "the stack". If you played a spell, your opponent had a chance to respond, then you had a chance to respond to whatever he played and so on. There wasn't any responding to spells ealier in that chain. When everyone was done, you resolved them one by one "Last played, first resolved" or "last in, first out" as we said back then.
For example, today if I played Balance and wanted to sac all my lands to a Zuran Orb so the Balance wiped out lands also, I would have to respond to my own spell first. By the Revised rules, I don't have to, the opponent has to decide if he wants to do anything about it first. If he doesn't, I get priority back and can respond to the spell now. It's almost backwards from the way it is now.
Interrupts were simple. Try to imagine Split Second where you can only play Split second spells in response. Oh yeah, they printed a crap load of Split Second spells too. That's interrupts.
Ok, I lied, Interrupts weren't that simple. When there was a bunch of instants being cast in response to each other and someone decided to toss an interrupt in there, it built an "Interrupt Bubble". You had to resolve the Interrupt Bubble first and then go last in first out with the rest of the instants. That's the main reason people hated interupts. Wusses.
You could hit zero life until the end of the "phase" or "step" by today's wording. Negative life was common.
Banding was confusing still. I'm not going into that unless you really want to know.
Damage Prevention was confusing also. Honestly, I never really got it down exactly how it worked, but it's close to our "clean up step" now. You basically removed all damage from creatures and did COP's and such at the end of turn. The order was the confusing part.
Mana Abilities are pretty close the way they are now. It changed several times, but it seems to have came back to the old way.
There was Mana Burn.
Mono Artifacts were ones you could use once a turn.
Continuous Artifacts were like Winter Orb, always on.
"Fast Effects" were just anything faster than an instant speed coming from a creature or artifact. Activated ability in simpler terms. We had a lot of timing issues.
"Forced Effect" is the old way of saying Triggered ability now.
What's funny is a lot of M10 rules changes they did actually just reverted back to the original way it was done. Like "Damage on the stack", that didn't exist in revised rules. So it's actually comforting to see that back to normal. Well, normal for me.
Now if they only would actually use Enchant World, Banding, Rampage, and all those other cool abilities again.
Go download Microprose's Magic the Gathering PC game and play Shandalar. It's an old game, now abandonware that uses all the old rules. It's a ton of fun also.
This card was a counterspell with a built in Time Walk because your opponent couldn't respond to Interrupts except with more Interrupts.
For a brief period of time, this card couldn't even be responded to, because it was a Mana Source.
Under the original Alpha rules, once a stack of instants was built up, all spells resolved simultaneously!
I played from 1994 - 1996 (then from 2003 to now). Timing and batch-related stuff was mainly determined by consensus of the players around the table. The rule book was only helpful to a minimal point (play one land a turn, untap your mana once a turn, etc.); the WotC Customer Service phone line was helpful in ruling on cases where we couldn't agree (if I untap your attacking creature with Jandor's Saddlebags, does it still do damage like Maze of Ith?) but wait times could be pretty long and long-distance actually cost money back then. Consistency from group to group was way the fuck off, but the discovery was fun. WotC didn't publish spoilers for a long time, so it was a mess / totally fun trying to figure out what was in the set. I remember pulling a Jester's Cap from an Ice Age pack, casting it later that day and folks were like, "Fuck, that's awesome." Good times. Over all, not very much different, but the information overload has kinda stolen some of the fun moments of discovery that made the game special and a lot different than it feel today.
Counterspells were less strong under fourth and fifth edition rules because the trick of casting Brainstorm to find Counterspell/Force of Will did not work. You could find the card, but the time to cast it had already passed.
I was told there was some way of making your spells practically uncounterable with Zuran Orb? How did that work?
The seven cardinal sins of Legacy:
1. Discuss the unbanning ofLand TaxEarthcraft.
2. Argue that banning Force of Will would make the format healthier.
3. Play Brainstorm without Fetchlands.
4. Stifle Standstill.
5. Think that Gaea's Blessing will make you Solidarity-proof.
6. Pass priority after playing Infernal Tutor.
7. Fail to playtest against Nourishing Lich (coZ iT wIlL gEt U!).
Lands only came in starter decks, which also contained tiny rulebooks, the whole game summed up in ~10 pages! Dual lands were $10, Balduvian Horde was awesome, and we walked uphill to school both ways with plastic bags for shoes.
Also artifacts with constant effects could be "turned off" by tapping them. Much fun was had with Icy Manipulator and things like Winter Orb and Howling mine.
Fast effects and FILO worked a lot like the stack does now, but I believe once everyone was done adding fast effects, everything resolved. You couldn't do tricks like with Izzet Guildmage and add something, let it resolve, then add something else before other spells/effects resolved.
Banding wasn't really that complicated, it had two functions: first, if at least one blocking creature has banding, defending player gets to distribute damage. Second, you can band attackers (including one w/o banding) they're all blocked as a group, and you get to distribute damage among them. I think the idea was that you could team all your little guys up to take out your opponent's mighty Shivan. Of course, if there's banding on both sides then you just agree to a draw and go get a sandwich.
I seem to remember that lands were in boosters in the beginning. I think their removal was a later thing - much later. First in, last out, was the rule of thumb. But then there was the crazy thing that damage happened afterward.
So, if you Giant Growth a Lord of Atlantis, and I respond with Lightning Bolt, he is not killed. But if you Giant Growth a Lord of Atlantis, and I respond with Sword to Plowshares, you only get 2 life. And amazingly there were pretty big hurt feelings when they changed the rules to make sense.
Anecdotally, our house rule for a very long time was "direct damage could only target a player if he/she had no creatures". We did this because Fireball had the word "target" on it, and the rule book defined target as "a particular kind of card in play" or some such. It seemed like it should be able to hit players, but the rules said otherwise. So we winged it.
Oh, and I once convinced the table that my Tranquility would cause everyone to discard any enchantments they had in hand because the revised printing actually said "all enchantments are discarded". I even believed it myself.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
Don't forget that tapping a blocker meant it didn't deal damage in combat - which made cards like Mishra's Factory WAY worse, and cards like Master of Arms WAY better.
Wait, weren't fast effects equivalent in speed to instants and interrupts (and mana source every now and then) the only even-faster part? That's how I always played it.Originally Posted by dahcmai
Adam, did you notice the added text to Master of Arms? That was a pretty recent addition - like 2 years ago or something. I don't imagine they are likely to reprint that any time soon, so I wonder why they went and put power-level errata on it. I mean, sure it did very little without it, but that seems to fly in the face of Gottlieb's policy.
At any rate, yeah Mishras have been much better ever since then.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
I know exactly what you mean. I remember buying some Nemesis boosters when I started, trying to figure out which cards were the best ones. Then my friend took his deck from "way back" and beat me with D'Avenent Archers. I was shocked. This card, typical art I didn't recognise from any of my Nemesis cards, from a set the store didn't even sell boosters of! I remember thinking "My god, how friggin' big IS this game".
Nowadays I browse through spoilers and conclude that 99.9% is unplayable. I pick up the fatty for EDH, the single good card for Legacy, all from Ebay. I remember I searched for an Arcanis for my deck for months. It felt so good to finally trade one. That's gone, I guess.
This message has been deleted by Nightmare. Reason: Boo fucking hoo
WHAT! I did not notice that, and it makes NO sense to me whatsoever.
There's more than one policy. See: Mox Diamond.
“It's possible. But it involves... {checks archives} Nature's Revolt, Opalescence, two Unstable Shapeshifters (one of which started as a Doppelganger), a Tide, an animated land, a creature with Fading, a Silver Wyvern, some way to get a creature into play in response to stuff, some way to get a land into play in response to stuff (a different land from the animated land), and one heck of a Rube Goldberg timing diagram.”
-David DeLaney
@ Master of Arms errata: makes sense to me if you consider errata are usually applied to make cards function the way they were intended to function and as Nightmare said, the card used to function the same way: prevent the damage of tapped blockers.
Who says the Internet isn't full of <3?
In that case I want every pre M10 creature with a sacrifice ability on it to have the following errata:
"Damage still stacks for this creature. Fuckers."
Its either that or Master of Arms needs to lose that line of text!
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