The Sets of Old

This post continues reflecting on Magic's days of old. Last time, I looked at art. Today, the sets themselves.

I've spent the last month or so dwelling fondly on Magic's sets of ages past- specifically, Fourth Edition, which (as near as I can remember) was the release on the shelves when I began playing the game in 1995. I liked Ice Age, too, though in hindsight it was for the theme but not the mechanics (those weren't great). As I love core sets (see last month's posts), Fourth Edition has been most on my mind.

Though the game has certainly become more polished and streamlined, it is impressive how much they got right early on. I like Fourth (4ed) in particular because it is when they started cleaning up the rules text. See example below; in this case the wording switched from passive voice to active, respectively, in the 3ed and 4ed versions of Disenchant:

The wording changes were welcome, and the set also retained many of the original cards (~75% of the cards in Alpha are still around in 4ed), which I also liked. Why? 

I've debated exactly what it is I miss about these old core sets. Is it simply looking back fondly on the past? Is it more about those memories than the quality of the cards (their stats/abilities) themselves? Perhaps. But I definitely miss the cards as well. They were just . . . simpler.

Over the years, Magic has increased in complexity and and experienced "power creep" (the tendency of a card's abilities at a given cost and rarity to become comparatively more powerful as the years progress). This can be proved, and I plan to look at it next year in a quantitative analysis. For now, I limit myself to a few examples. In the four below, I look at common cards of equal casting cost; the left-hand column has cards from 4ed, and the right cards from M21 or another modern set:

See what I mean? In each case, the modern version is superior. Outside of a handful of overpowered cards, the early sets don't hold up to today's (which is why, as an aside, you can pick up many old cards for less money than you'd think).

Though these newer cards outclass the old in most respects, I still miss those sets of yore. The games went longer, the creatures had fewer abilities, and the combinations of or interactions between cards weren't as significant or likely to produce a chain-reaction instant win. In particular, I've been bizarrely obsessed with the Hurloon Minotaur:

The creature is not great . . . but back then, a 2/3 creature wasn't as easily removed as today. 

In our remaining time here in Europe, I'm collecting some of these old cards and intend to assemble a core set or cube using a good deal of them. Magic is many things, but ultimately, we play because it is satisfying, which does not necessarily equal having the best cards or most powerful decks. There is value in the old and simple.