Card Talk 15

Arni Metalbrow card art

Today is the fifteenth post in my Card Talk series.

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 . . .

Plains

Hmmmm . . . Plains. A common land from Eighth Edition. How boring . . . how plain.

Well. Plains is one of the five basic lands in Magic. The initial symbol for white mana looked a little different, with "flowier" sun's rays:

Apparently, all mana symbols were updated for the Ice Age set, but the other four were minor tweaks compared to white's redesign.

In Magic, color matters. White stands for morality and order in the Magic universe.

Today, all basic lands have only the symbol which they produce when tapping them. But originally, there was more information. The evolution is shown below with Plains from Alpha, 3rd Edition, and Ice Age, respectively:

Finally, the random Plains shown on scryfall happens to be a rather unusual one: a foil and black-bordered version. Core sets used to be white-bordered only, and the 'normal' version of the 8th Edition Plains is. But that set had foil and black-bordered versions of cards, too.