Card Talk 25

Cactuar card art

Time for Card Talk! Reminder how this 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 . . .

Island Sanctuary—a rare enchantment from Fourth Edition Foreign Black-Bordered.

Intriguingly, scryfall didn't have the image of the foreign card (hence the banner in the image above). The actual card is in Spanish; below is the Fourth Edition English equivalent

The first thing I notice about Island Sanctuary is the wording. Oracle is the official Magic database for the most recent wording (Wizards regularly tweaks official card wording for clarity and simplicity; the Oracle wording takes precedence over what is written on the card). If this card was released today, it would read:

If you would draw a card during your draw step, instead you may skip that draw. If you do, until your next turn, you can’t be attacked except by creatures with flying and/or islandwalk.

This is an unusual ability; they don't make many cards with an optional/ongoing cost of skipping your draw. Card advantage is important in this game, so anything that minimizes that needs to be really powerful. I'm not sure Island Sanctuary hits the mark; it would be great against certain decks, but any deck featuring flyers would render this card useless.

I love the art here; the game's early years featured generally softer painting styles that evoked a feeling of escape, fun, and fantasy. The modern style is more realistic and often darker.

On the set: Fourth Edition Foreign Black-Bordered speaks to the game's increasingly worldwide appeal from the onset. Magic came out in 1993 but in English only; they started producing sets in other languages in 1994. Revised (AKA Third Edition) was released then in French, German, and Italian. From here, "The original release of a Core Set in a new language was usually black bordered, and is thus easily identifiable." So those cards had black borders though the English equivalents had white. Wizards expanded again for Fourth Edition, adding Chinese (traditional), Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish and following the same approach (black-bordered for those languages, white-bordered for everything else).

The languages Magic cards are printed in is evolving. There were 11 at its height (the above plus Russian and Chinese (simplified)), but have since contracted to six: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. And even then, not every product gets printed in every language; these sites are good references to show what is available for releases from 1993-2010 and 2011-present, respectively.

Fourth Edition (in English) is one of my fondest early Magic memories, as I discuss more here. 

Until next time . . . keep exploring.