The Greatest Set Never Made
Building a Better Magic: the Gathering
by Jeff Zandi


I believe Magic needs a new set of cards and a couple of new formats in
which to play with them. This new set would be a collection of between 350
and 400 of the best Magic cards of all time. This would be the greatest set
of Magic cards ever. The point of this new set would be to provide a set of
cards that could supply a constructed and a limited format for years to
come.

Many have argued that one thing that keeps Magic from becoming one of the
classic games of all time is the awesome expanse of the game, the fact that
over six thousand different cards have been created and that these cards
cycle through a continually changing game environment. Of course, I would be
one the people who would argue that continued card set evolution is one of
the things that makes Magic a great game. The "classicists" have a point,
however. More than one player has lost interest in Magic because they found
it difficult to keep up with five hundred new cards published each year. A
fair argument can be made that Wizard of the Coast's pace of development
leaves lots of gamers unable to keep up, strategically and financially.

Continual updates may be advantageous in some ways, but are certainly not
necessary to make a game great. Chess has continued to enjoy popularity even
limiting itself to the same six types of playing pieces. Poker continues to
be a great card game, year in and year out, even with the same fifty-two
cards. When you play Poker, you can be comfortable with the knowledge that a
pair of aces is good today, was good yesterday and will be good tomorrow.

More than ten years ago, when Richard Garfield and Peter Adkison created
Magic: the Gathering, they weren't thinking about three new sets each year.
They were thinking about creating one great card game. When they began work
on the first expansion to Magic, they even thought each expansion should
have different card backs to keep the sets separate. I have always thought
that even if the first edition of the game, the very rare and much hallowed
Alpha Edition, were the only cards ever created for this game, Magic would
STILL be one of the greatest games ever created. Does that mean that I think
the Alpha Edition is the best set of Magic cards ever printed? Far from it.
The original set is very uneven, with a lot of incredibly powerful cards and
a lot of really poor cards as well. Even though the Alpha Edition includes a
lot of cards everyone remembers very fondly, like Black Lotus, the Moxes and
so on, the most recent "stand alone" set, Mirrodin, is probably a much more
balanced set. So does that mean that Mirrodin would be a good candidate for
the best set of Magic cards ever printed? I doubt it.

Magic needs to take around 350 of the finest cards in the ten year history
of the game and create a special "best-of" set. This set should be
well-balanced for use in limited play, as well as diverse enough for
constructed play. This set of cards should be produced with the idea being
that this set would stay almost exactly the same year after year. The purist
in me would like to make this new set completely static with its contents
never changing year after year. However, I can also be realistic. Ten years
of Magic has made me understand that no amount of careful card and set
design can avoid occasional problems caused by strategies and card
combinations. No matter how carefully this new Master Set was put together,
there is no way of knowing what problems might be found by players using the
set. Changes would likely be needed at one point or another. Additionally,
the idea of a completely static set may simply be unrealistic. Since new
cards are being continually created by Wizards of the Coast, this new set
would need to have access to the new cards of the future as well as the best
cards of the past.

The goal of this Master Set, ultimately, would be to provide an extremely
stable group of cards that people could play with and enjoy for years to
come. If the set came out this summer, it could initially contain, for
example, 350 different cards from Alpha all the way through last year's
Onslaught block. Then, each year, once a new block had been out for an
entire year, a small number of cards, as few as one, as many as five, could
be added to the Master Set. My initial vision would be to have the new card
additions to the Master Set announced each year at the World Championships.
Worlds has been the traditional end of the Pro Tour season each year, and
could be a good time to make the annual additions to the Master Set. If the
new set came out this summer with 350 cards in it, and even if the maximum
five cards were added to the set each year, this Master Set would still be
extremely stable with only four hundred cards in it ten years from now. This
new stable set of cards could be a very popular addition to the many sets
and formats that Wizards of the Coast has already produced.

What's so good about having a stable set of cards?

Beyond the economic question (you wouldn't have to invest hundreds of
dollars into Magic each year to stay current in this new format) and the
classicist's arguments for stability, playing with a set of almost the exact
same cards for a long period of time would have other advantages. For a long
time in Magic, there has been a desire for a good system of short hand for
describing what happens in a game. Newspapers can print the play of a bridge
hand, or include all the important statistics of a baseball or football game
into a box score. A game of Magic is very difficult to describe in short
hand. It has been challenging to develop short hand for the names of Magic
cards because the card pool is so vast and ever-changing. A stable set of
cards would more easily lend itself to short hand. Over time, a stable
collection of cards like the Master Set we're discussing lends itself to
classic strategies that can be enjoyed year after year. Chess has hundreds
of classic moves and strategies that have become part of the regular
training of players in that sport. Magic players today gain very little from
the knowledge of how to use Hypnotic Specter, Necropotence or, for that
matter, Lightning Bolt. These cards, no longer legal in most competitive
formats, are all but unknown to newer players. Magic would be a better game
if there was a more stable format available for players. Type I, or Classic
Magic, does include many of the oldest, most powerful and most interesting
cards in the game of Magic, but Type I is far from a stable environment.
Moreover, the cost of entry into serious Type I play is prohibitive for most
Magic players.

What cards would go into this Master Set?

Think of this new set as a kind of Hall of Fame for the game of Magic.
Selecting the cards to go into a set of this kind would be almost as
challenging as designing a set of completely new cards. It is a huge mistake
to imagine that it is an easy task to put together 350 cards in such a way
that promotes lots of different yet balanced constructed deck ideas. For
this reason, the idea of calling this set the Hall of Fame set is probably
misleading, because there are cards that spring to mind as great Magic cards
that might be too powerful to include in this Master Set. Is Time Walk too
powerful? What about Balance, or Hypnotic Specter? In a limited group of
cards, powerful cards in any color would have to be balanced by equally
useful cards in opposing colors. Just as importantly would be the issue of
controlling the availability of different colors of mana to the new set.
Everyone would love to have Black Lotus, Moxes and dual lands back in their
life, but the Master Set wouldn't be very balanced if all you had to do was
build decks with all the most powerful cards from all five colors.

Just to get the ball rolling, here's twenty-four solid gold hits from the
Alpha Edition that I would love to put into the Master Set:
Braingeyser - lots and lots of cards, at Sorcery speed and basically
non-splashable
Time Walk - original wording was hilarious: "opponent loses next turn"
Demonic Hordes - big black creature with land destruction built in
Ankh of Mishra - land destruction deserves a future in a long-term stable
set
Armageddon - I guess we've covered the land destruction thing well enough
now
Birds of Paradise - the classic creature way to access additional colors
Hypnotic Specter - lets bring back the fun and danger of random discard
Black Knight - the MAN let White Knight return, but what's up with Black
Knight?
Blue Elemental Blast - stopping red used to be blue's job, let's bring it
back
Counterspell - this is classic Magic, pure and simple
Disenchant - don't start with me about the "color wheel", the only pie I'm
hearing is chocolate
Disintegrate - Fireball gets reprinted in Darksteel, but this card is far
less "broken"
Earthquake - why doesn't red get mass removal, is there a "Strategy Wheel"
at WOTC too?
Force of Nature - relatively inexpensive trampler for green decks only,
perfectly fair
Mahamoti Djinn - fat flying blue creature, no more classic example than Fat
Moti
Mana Short - Trixie McTrickerson says this card is ALL ABOUT BLUE
Millstone - alternate routes to victory are desirable
Northern Paladin - I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light
Pirate Ship - perfectly balanced, should have been reprinted by now
Paralyze - black removal, fast if not always wieldly
Reverse Damage - exactly the right kind of trick to include in white's bag
Spell Blast - efficient counterspell technology
Tsunami - if you think Islands are bad, you should like this one
Winter Orb - colorless scene control in a big way

These cards are just thoughts I have looking back at Alpha, I assure you my
goal for this set would not be to simply dredge up old cards. I want to
bring back some of the best cards in the history of the game, but also take
every possible card into consideration. Mark Rosewater has explained in the
past why there are bad cards in most sets. The basic explanation has to do
with the idea that beginners to Magic need the bad cards to be included for
their individual learning curves. The Master Set, being sort of a best-of
set, sort of a Hall of Fame set, would by definition contain less of these
kinds of cards.

Would this new card set actually have to be produced separately, or is it
just a list of cards for use in a new format? This is a very interesting
question for two reasons. If the Master Set was not printed in a new
official edition, but simply a list of cards to be allowed in some new
formats, players could easily use the cards they already have. On the other
hand, if the Master Set was a special stand alone set of cards, possibly
even printed with different backs than normal Magic cards, it might just be
possible for Wizards of the Coast to see their way clear to reprinting some
of the most powerful and collectible cards in Magic. If the Master Set was
available as a "factory set", all in one piece, with "commemorative" card
backs that did not match standard Magic cards, Wizards could conceivably
reprint cards that they have promised never to reprint for the regular game.
Cards like Black Lotus, Juzam Djinn and Library of Alexandria could be
reprinted for this special Master Set, playable only in Master Set games.
Interested? I don't think you and I are the only people that would buy such
a set. Imagine the fun of ripping packs in search of rares like Mox Jet or
Time Walk.

The creation of this set is a long term project that I am very interested
in. I hope some of you will be interested enough in this project to help me
with ideas for the Master Set. Let me know what you think about this concept
and tell me what cards you would like to see included in such a set. Is WOTC
going to take this kind of idea and run with it? Who knows. I do know that
they have considered such a set in the past. One thing I know is that
Wizards of the Coast can use all the good ideas that they can get.

Jeff Zandi
Texas Guildmages
Level II DCI Judge
jeffzandi@thoughtcastle.com
Zanman on Magic Online