 |
| Arni Metalbrow card art |
Reminder how Card Talk works:
- I go to Scryfall and select 'Random Card'
- I present and blog about the card. I could discuss any aspect: the art, abilities, cost, set, impact on the game, and so on. Stream of consciousness.
Card Talk is a fun, uncurated way to look at Magic's cards, mechanics, history, art, sets, and so on. And of course it exposes some of my own preferences, biases, and memories of the game.
Today's card is . . .
Solidarity
Hmmmm . . . Solidarity. A white common instant from Eighth Edition.
This version of the card is foil. Foils are now commonplace in Magic packs; they used to be far less prevalent. As of this writing, the foil version of Solidarity goes for $2.93, while its non-foil counterpart sells for $0.25. Every Eighth Edition card had a foil variant, which were black-bordered to boot (Core sets had white borders until Magic 2010, so the black borders for a core set back in 2003 were a big deal).
White is often about defense. This instant buffs up the toughness of *all* creatures you control, enabling you to either 1) withstand an attack, or 2) survive an assault of your own. That makes sense and pairs well with the commonplace 'white weenie' deck: a deck that got many small creatures onto the battlefield. And in this expansion, 12 of white's 31 creatures had toughness greater than power to begin with; this card makes them even tougher.
Eighth Edition was released in July 2003—Magic's ten year anniversary year. To celebrate, they included at least one card from all prior non-reprint Magic expansions that had never been reprinted before. And this edition heralded a lot of changes, from cards included to rules tweaks to card frame changes. That last one is probably the biggest deal: the card frame was overhauled, and font and symbols changed (see below example of a card from Seventh and Eighth Edition, respectively)
The Card frame change upset a lot of people, but it did make the text easier to read.
No comments:
Post a Comment