Hello and welcome to the Blog Showdown!

This is where one of eight pilot blogs will be posted and the one that has the best engagement after three weeks from their posting will become the new permanent Monday blog!

Today we are going to be debuting Set Seeing, the blog where I go through a set of Magic, maybe other cards games in the future, and see as a whole what the theme of a set is, what works and what could be improved upon.

I wanted to start things off with the very first set of Magic, Alpha!

Let’s get started!

Humble Beginnings

When looking at Alpha, there has to be a bit of a caveat in the fact that it was the very first trading card game and what the game had to establish early on.

There were no other real points of reference that the early designers could look towards in how card games would be a much different beast in what makes a card game fun and interesting, though that doesn’t mean that there weren’t some ways to balance the game early on.

For example, the fact that colors exist in Magic is an important aspect of the design because it prevents everyone from playing with the absolute best cards because some of them require different colors to play with.

To go along with that, the resource system in the game has it so that you can only play one of the resource and to play some of the better cards of the game, you need more of that resource. While there have been a lot of complaints levied at the land system in Magic, I think that as a way to keep things in check helps even the odds for the game.

There is even the fact that the original Dual Lands exist in Alpha, showing that there was some forethought put into lands producing more than one color of mana, and that was a design principle that would become more and more apparent in the later sets of the game.

What the set also does pretty well is the original theming of the art.

Wizards of the Coast was a company that produced tabletop role playing games and supplements, and to help keep with that theme a fantasy like aesthetic would be easier to sell to its audience.

The art does have its quirks, but for the most part a good chunk of it sells that this game takes place in a fantasy world full of elves and goblins, angels and dragons, powerful spells and ancient artifacts.

There is also a lot of strong theming with the abilities of the cards, either invoking obvious features or defining what certain things would become in the future of the game, which is also very much guided by the color system.

What would a Lightning Bolt do in a game? Deal damage.

How do angels work? A decent sized creature that is hard to hit and can defend itself.

Walls can’t attack but they can defend well, elves can harness nature to make it easier to cast spells, we can use magic to stop other magic from happening, a lot of themes and mechanics would help set the tone in what the future of the game would become, and as a foundational piece Alpha works pretty well.

For the most part.

Stumbling Blocks

With the game being the first ever trading card game, there was really not a lot of thought put into certain aspects of the game because the designers didn’t understand how powerful certain cards in the game would be.

They knew that generating a lot of mana would be strong, which is why a lot of the bigger creatures in the game had a lot of specific mana pips, however there is a lot of ancillary mana generation available.

Not including the Moxen and Black Lotus, there are cards like Sol Ring, Basalt Monolith, Mana Vault, Dark Ritual, Birds of Paradise, Llanowar Elves, Gauntlet of Might, and Mana Flare which help make so much mana that having this much mana generation in future sets would be unlikely.

Sure some of these were balanced in the fact that mana burn existed, which meant that unspent mana would deal damage to you, but that really helps balance the cards that make colorless mana a little worse because of how color restrictive some of the more expensive to cast cards are.

But you may not even need to cast some of those mana intensive cards because a lot of them were not that great. I understand thematically why Lord of the Pit has you sacrifice a creature each turn or you take 7 damage, and for the time the stats and having flying and trample was pretty good.

That reasoning doesn’t really apply to Craw Wurm, a six mana 6/4 with no abilities. While a lot of creatures were not great, having Craw Wurm be a six mana vanilla body doesn’t do too much in making a game fun.

In fact it’s the cheaper spells that are a much bigger concern since there are cards like Ancestral Recall that let’s you draw three cards for one mana, Timetwister to have every player shuffle their hand and graveyard into their library and draw seven cards for three mana, Balance to bring everyone down if they are too far ahead for two mana, Demonic Tutor to get you anything from your library for two mana, and so many other cards that are cheap to cast that make them much more enticing to play.

Not to mention of course Black Lotus, the face of the game essentially, being a zero mana way to get three mana to have you have four mana as soon as turn one, and if you include to Moxen which also cost zero to cast, you could have a ton of mana on your first turn if you built your deck right.

Since we are also talking about Alpha specifically, there was also a lot of errors in what was printed and what was omitted. Circle of Protection: Black and Volcanic Island were intended to be in the set but were left off on accident, Douglas Shuler’s name was misprinted on all the cards he did art for, plenty of cards had the incorrect mana cost or no mana cost in the case of Cyclopean Tomb, and other errors that would be fixed in future printings.

In Conclusion

Alpha had a lot of things that were iconic and helped define a juggernaut in the gaming industry, but the first set is not as perfect as one would have expected.

There are some growing pains, as would be expected for the first game of its kind and there would be a lot of steering in terms of how the game would eventually become, but there is still plenty to enjoy and cards that would become icons of tabletop gaming.

Thank you for reading, see you next week with a new blog for the Blog Showdown! If you want to see more of this sort of blog, engage with it and we’ll see how it compares with the others!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

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