Reviewing Magic The Gathering #1 - Unlimited Pt.1 [Black, Blue, Green]

So I did a batch of Magic: The Gathering card reviews all the way back in 2019 to 2020. And as the grandfather of all trading card games, I was quite pumped to talk about it... especially since at the original time of writing these articles, I had never actually sat down and took a long look at MTG. I played a lot of Hearthstone, Pokemon TCG and early Yu-Gi-Oh, but while I was familiar with MTG as a concept, I've never really seriously played the games and made decks for play until after writing these articles. 

And at that time, my MTG reviews just kind of went into a bit of a hiatus due to a combination of broken image links and a bit of a rush to get to later, 'new card format' expansions like Mirrodin, Kamigawa, Amonkhet, and especially Innistrad and Zendikar. But now that I've played a lot more MTG, I went back to take a closer look at these older articles and decided that they needed a bit of a revamp. Some of the content were a bit repetitive, a bit dismissive in other points, and I was clearly rushing through things in others.

So welcome, once more, to my coverage of Magic: The Gathering. I've always been about the art and flavour of TCG's, and as you can see from the contents of this blog, the fact that a huge chunk of MTG has been about monsters and creatures meant that there was plenty of content for me to talk about. 

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So here's some bookkeeping. The cards in Magic: The Gathering -- and indeed most TCGs -- come out in huge sets and expansions. And we are going to cover through the very first iteration of MTG, which is either called 'Alpha', 'Beta' or 'Unlimited'. There are multiple print runs of the first batch of cards, and subsequent expansions would tend to have some kind of theme or storyline going through them. 

Of course, there are a lot of cards in any given expansion, and I don't always have something interesting to talk about every single one of them. So here's what I'm going to do with all Magic reviews. I'm going to cherry-pick whichever cards I have a lot to talk about, and talk about them in the main body of the article with larger images. And later on, I'll talk more about the rest at the end of the page. 

Now being the very first expansion, Unlimited is going to take a bit more for me to go through, particularly since I plan to go through all the Creatures, while also explaining a bunch of stuff about the gameplay itself in hopefully a better way than I did a half-decade ago!

[originally published on May 2019; edited in October 2024]

• Click here for the next part.
• Click here for the index.

Before we start with talking about the monsters, let us talk about Lands and Colours, the core concept in Magic: The Gathering. The earliest set didn't exactly have story or lore tied to it, but the idea, the general fantasy, is that you and your opponent are magicians or sorcerers or wizards who draw power (or mana) from the lands. You use the mana to cast sorceries, summon creatures, and empower artifacts to do your bidding as you fight against the opponent.

And these Land cards are the five primary 'factions' in Magic. Any given deck has around half of its card number be made up of lands, and each player can play a land card each turn, and these lands serve as your resource -- allowing for the game to have some pacing as both players accumulate their mana pools. 

The five colours, in addition to characterizing specific terrains and specific fantasy types, would also correspond to the strategies of certain colours from a gameplay mechanic -- the type of ways they would win, the types of counter-abilities they could do, and the flavour of the characters associated with them. 

The five mana colours are:

• Black: Represented by Swamps, Black tends to be the home of evil, power-hungry, selfish and ruthless creatures. Flavour-wise, in early expansions they revolve around demons, the undead, villainous assassins and necromancers. They tend to do underhanded and nasty techniques to gain a one-up over their enemies.
• Blue: Represented by Islands, Blue was initially associated with aquatic creatures like merfolk and krakens, but would later be associated very heavily with intelligence, knowledge, illusions and manipulations. They tend to gain the upper hand by outsmarting and countering all of the spells that the enemy does, or to deny certain elements of their enemy's arsenal. 
• Green: Represented by Forests, Green is associated strongly with the wildlife. Treefolks, beasts, elves, and would be associated with the interconnectedness with nature and tradition. They tend to gain the upper hand by having the ability to 'ramp' up mana faster than their opponents, and then summon large creatures from the depths of the forest to crush their enemies.
• Red: Represented by Mountains, Red is associated with warfare and recklessness. Red tends to be associated with creatures like orcs, goblins and dwarves, who are berserking warriors intent on crushing the enemy with full martial might or summoning giant fireball and lightning storms. In  combat, they tend to deal with enemies in a direct and simple way -- overwhelming power.
• White: Represented by Plains, White is associated with holiness, law and order. They are associated with knights, angels and the forces of good. In combat, they tend to favour methods of punishment and judgement that represent uncompromising justice.

For something made decades ago, the system holds up quite well!  Click here, here and especially here for a more thorough explanation of each colour! Although earlier expansions would go through some growing pains (particularly 'Legends') in trying to figure out colour identity, a lot of the cards printed have been very good at trying to match the colour identity both flavour-wise (what the card art and name depicts) and mechanically (what the card does in the gameplay. Of course, originally the cards tend to lean with Black and sometimes Red as being always evil and reprehensible, while White tends to be good. As Magic grew as a franchise, this has thankfully been blurred a fair bit, particularly with over 25,000 cards in circulation and so many stories written about them. 

Anyway, in all of these reviews I'll tend to talk about cards from a single colour before moving on to the next. Once we get to multi-coloured cards, or expansions that have multi-coloured factions fighting each other, expect this rule to be relaxed a lot.

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BLACK:

We're going to start off with Black, which is the first colour listed in the official checklist for Unlimited. Which is nice, because as the expansions will go on, you'll find that Black and Green tends to give me the most to talk about in terms of monster and creature designs!

Again, being the first M:TG review I'm doing, I'll be a bit slower and more methodical in explaining the different types of cards. The main purview of these reviews are still the flavour, but I do think explaining how the cards play in a game does lead to a lot of important context. There has been a lot of changes over the evolution of the franchise and card game, which I thought would be interesting to highlight. 

And here is our first type of card, and the focus of a vast majority of this review series -- Creature cards. The idea is that the players in a Magic game are spellcasters summoning creatures to fight on their behalf. On the left is the original version, and on the right is a 'Modern' Magic card layout. I say Modern, but the change happened in like 2003 or something. Cards often get reprinted in subsequent sets as long as the name makes sense, and they tend to get brand-new art when they are reprinted. The Black Knight on the left is from the original Unlimited set in 1993, and the one on the right is from Magic 2010 from, well, 2010. 

But yeah, I picked the Black Knight as the first creature we start of as because flavour-wise, it's relatively simple. It's a knightly dude riding a horse, which is extremely easy to understand. The top right corner is the 'cost' that a player would need to spend to summon a Black Knight (two black mana from Swamps, in this case). The text below the picture is "Summon Knight" in the original, which is just mostly weird flavour until later sets placed more emphasis on types and tribal synergies, leading a lot of old creatures to be retconned in subsequent printing. The base set 2010 version on the right, for example, has "Human Knight" as the creature type. 

Below it is what the card does. Some creatures have keywords ("First Strike" and "Protection From White" in this case), and some cards also have flavour text in italics, which on the original printing of the card describes just what a emo badass wandering knight the Black Knight is. Pretty neat! And on the bottom right you see the stats of the creature, 'power' being equivalent to attack and 'toughness' being equivalent to HP. 

I don't have a whole ton to say about Black Knight, which is why I picked it as the card to introduce Creature types to readers who need a primer on MTG. But I have no complaints about it -- as a creature in the Black colour, it fits quite well as a regular badass evil knight. 

While we're at it, let us talk about some other card types before we delve into the many Black-mana creatures in Unlimited. The second type of card type is the Sorcery, which we're representing here with Raise Dead. Sorceries are played once, its effect happens, and then the Sorcery is discarded. It's a pretty simple spell that works with Black's "necromancer" vibe, allowing them to dredge up the dead bodies to reuse them again. 

Animate Dead, meanwhile, is a card-type called an 'Enchantment', or specifically an 'Enchantment - Aura'. In this earlier set, however, it is just called 'Enchant X'. The wording isn't exactly streamlined like modern MTG would be, either. The idea of Enchantment spells is that they are attached to something, whether that be the battlefield, the creature (like this enchantment), the player or anything in the field. Animate Dead basically allows the summoner to summon a slightly weakened creature on the battlefield as long as the aura is 'haunting' it, and if the aura should be countered in any way the creature goes back to the graveyard. Pretty cool artwork on Animate Dead, I really like the ground cracking beneath it like glass. 

In addition to necromancy, Black also has the flavour of really not giving a shit about its creatures. Spells like Sacrifice essentially has the effect of betraying your own creatures, killing them in a profane act just to gain a little bit of advantage over your enemy. Don't worry, though, the Black player would probably just resurrect them from the dead later on. 

Simulacrum is an interesting one, where this purple-robed wizard seems to create a duplicate of himself that's glowing brilliantly. Reading the effect gives us the flavour of the wizard creating a simulacrum of himself... around one of his creature minions, allowing them to take the damage in stead of the player. Nasty!

You could see that these two cards are even more different types of cards, by the way, 'Interrupts' and 'Instants'. Later Magic sets would streamline both card types into 'Instants', which are essentially sorceries that can be played at any time... including your opponent's turn. This basically allows some interactivity and some mind-games as both players have options to counter each other. 

Let's go with creatures now, starting with the Scathe Zombies. (Scathe is an archaic word that means 'injuring', and the root word for the more common 'scathing') They are what we call a 'vanilla' monster in TCG terms -- a creature with no effect, just showing up in the battlefield as a body. A 2/2 that can attack and block, but not much else. Scathe Zombies here are just a bunch of pretty nasty looking zombies. The flavour text for Scathe Zombies is actually taken from a real-world poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. While later expansions would retcon most of MTG to happen in a fantasy plane called Dominaria, clearly the older sets are still not really sure about the identity of the game in general, leading to the designers to just put in what they thought looked cool. 

Zombie Master is a creature that empowers a specific type of creature, in this case Zombies. He's only considered a 'Lord' in the first printings, but subsequent reprintings would make him just a 'Zombie'. Zombie Master essentially makes all other zombies a bit more powerful. Visually he's not super-interesting, and that's going to be a common thread across a lot of these early expansions since the novelty of this card game even existing is the whole point of the game. But I do like the flavour text here, telling us implicitly that the Zombie Master used to be a necromancer who controlled zombies and was betrayed and probably consumed by his zombie minions... before he rose as a zombie himself.

Scavenging Ghoul doesn't have much in terms of flavour text, and the artwork is just a starving, flesh-and-bones dude. Through its effect, Scavenging Ghoul does sell the fantasy of a cannibalistic ghoul that gains power by 'eating' recently-deceased corpses. At some point, M:TG did a huge 'standardization' of older monsters called the Grand Creature Type Update, and in that update the 'ghoul' type was retconned into 'zombie' for Scavenging Ghoul. It's consistent throughout their website and subsequent reprintings of this card, although it does require some internet work to figure out what changed. 

Another classic 'evil undead' trope is the walking skeletons, and we've got the Drudge Skeleton here! I love that where the zombies are pretty basic depictions of the walking dead, the Drudge Skeleton is led by someone riding a skeleton horse. A skeleton with a cape! I really like this artwork. The flavour text describes someone fighting the Drudge Skeletons watching in despair as the skeleton is bashed repeatedly into pieces, but they keep reforming. You can do that in the game, too, with the 'Regenerate' keyword -- by paying the mana cost, the skeleton can survive fatal damage in combat! 

Another classic horror movie monster is the vampire, and you've got to have one of those in the starting set! Sengir Vampire here opts to go for the more animalistic trope, as opposed to the posh, aristocratic Count Dracula. A naked vampire with blood streaking from his eyes and mouth, licking a gigantic artery. Where did that giant artery come from? The later artwork which I'm more familiar with used in reprints marries the 'brutal beast' and 'well-dressed noble' archetypes, but I'm trying not to talk too much about later printings. There's a lot, and I might do an episode of this series that's basically just "new artworks of Unlimited creatures".

The other iconic Black creature from the original set is Lord of the Pit, representing the Demon race. As a 7/7, he sure is mighty! Keen-eyed TCG enthusiasts would recognize Lord of the Pit as being the big demon that summoned Yu-Gi-Oh's Summoned Skull, whose name is a roundabout reference to 'Summon Demon' in the original version of this card. Lord of the Pit is a pretty fun take on a demon, with most of his body being fleshy and looking like a flayed body. A pair of muscular hands seem to just merge with those bat-wings, and his torso has a lot of anatomically-impossible-in-living-things holes. I do really like the ":o" expression that the Lord of the Pit has, though. 90% of him is a terrifying horror of flesh, but his expression looks a wee bit comedic.  

Both the Sengir Vampire and the Lord of the Pit has the 'Flying' keyword, which is a little bonus given to creatures with wings that meant that they can only be blocked with other creatures with 'Flying', or 'Reach'. This gives a cute little dynamic to winged creatures that gave them air superiority in the battlefield. Lord of the Pit also had 'Trample'. Normally, when creatures do combat and they kill each other, combat just resolved. Really large creatures like this big demon here, however, will trample over the creature assigned to battle him, and deal the remainder of the damage to the opposing player. Oh, and the Lord of the Pit also has the very Black-mana flavour of demanding a sacrifice or it'll punch you, the summoner, in the face. 

The other Demon in this set is Demonic Hordes, who has the ability to destroy lands. It also demands that you pay 3 black mana every turn, or they will do the bidding of the enemy to destroy your lands. I like the artwork being a bit more abstract and silhouette-y in early MTG. For better or for worse, artwork will be a lot more standardized later on, but I do find this early variation to be quite a bit charming. We also get the first mention of the setting of the first decade or so, Dominaria -- or 'Dominia', an alternate spelling used here. 

I would also like to point out that thanks to all the religious hullaballoo and censorship in the late '90s and early '00s, the Demon creature type would actually be soft-retired for a while and replaced with 'Horror', which is... it's going to be interesting to eventually discuss the differences in flavour and style of a 'Demon' versus a 'Horror'. 

Imps in most fantasy tends to be depicted or look like little demons, but are treated as a different race here. Nettling Imp is just curled up on top of some wizard's spellbook and is grinning quite devilishly as it clearly schemes something. And that something is a mechanic that the game would later on call 'goading', forcing one of your opponent's creatures to attack. I do like the artwork -- design-wise it's the most basic imp demon you could think up of, but that expression really does sell the flavour of the creature.

We take a break from all those cool undead and demons to bring you... Royal Assassin, who's just a dude. He's lurking outside someone's window, about to kill that wine-drinking fellow behind the window. It's meant to represent a specific profession that often shows up in fantasy or fantasy-adjacent fiction. In the future, of course, a lot of these 'human' enemies won't really give me a ton to say about.

The Bog Wraith is a bit of bog-standard (heh) wraith monster, a creepy cloaked figure hanging out ominously in a place that doesn't look like a bog. I like the artwork making him looking like a statue, though. There is a lot of these "hooded ghostly figure" monsters in early Magic, and I also don't tend to have a whole ton to say about them. Bog Wraith has 'Swampwalk', which is a bit of a rarer keyword nowadays, but the idea is that the Bog Wraith has such power over bogs swamps and can move freely through them. So if your opponent controls a swamp, Bog Wraith can't be blocked. 

Told you there's going to be a lot of spooky ghosts! Nether Shadow is a ghostly, sentient shadow-creature (later retconned to a 'Spirit') with relatively more stylized artwork -- a simple cloak body, and a very simplified jack-o-lantern skull, but that makes the detailing of the quasi-reflection of anatomically accurate bone structure work so much better here. Nether Shadow is a creature that can pop out back from the graveyard once most creatures have died, and it has an ability that would be keyworded to 'Haste' -- almost all creatures need to take a turn after being summoned before they can attack, but Nether Shadow can just do it the moment it pops in the battlefield. 

The Frozen Shade, who keeps her (yes, later artwork establishes the Frozen Shade as a her; I really should do a 'comparison' for the Unlimited creatures and modern printing) creature type of Shade in subsequent reprintings. I like how her lower body trails off into a small whirling tornado of snow. She also has a Edgar Allan Poe poem as her flavour text. Despite all the talk about 'freezing', Frozen Shade's effect has nothing to do with freezing. 

Among all the zombies, ghosts and demons, are these Will-o-the-Wisp. They feature another quote from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Interesting to see that Will-o-Wisps are considered evil, though I suppose they are considered a form of undead, and real will-o-the-wisps are a phenomenon that happens in swamps. 

Our last 'ghostly enemy' here is the Hypnotic Specter. It always is hard for fantasy settings to really differentiate between ghosts, specters, spirits, shadows, shades, banshees, revenants, wisps, etc, etc. Magic is particularly bad with some of them, particularly throughout different settings and artists, but at least the card effects is a nice flavourful way to tie things together. Hypnotic Specter here is a suit of armour with the gaps filled with wispy treads, and the end result looks a bit more goofy than hypnotic. But Specters in MTG would be associated with a mind-numbing effect that forces enemies to discard cards upon contact.

Plague Rats starts off a fun recurring theme that we'll see in future sets, many times among 'Rat' cards. Plague Rats has '*/*' as stats, and the *'s will increase depending on the amount of cards called 'Plague Rats' in battle. This is meant to simulate an ever-growing (or ever-shrinking) swarm, and this is back before the '4 cards limit' to any type of card in a deck was established. Very fun and flavourful effect! I also really like the artwork here showcasing these plague-infected rats, with a face that's half sloughed off, showing a bloody skull beneath; and even part of its back is torn off and revealing a somewhat cyst-looking yellow organ beneath. 

Nightmare is also a creature whose stats are */*, which changes depending on the Swamps you control. I never realized, I think, until I was doing these monster reviews, that Nightmare as mares. As in a female horse! Ha! I don't think I've ever gotten the pun on the 'Nightmare' monster before! This Nightmare, in addition to being a jet-black demon horse, is also partially on fire. You run, demon Rapidash. You run! 

Our last Black creature in Unlimited is the Wall of Bones. They have essentially been all but phased out of modern Magic, but the Walls are a subtype of monsters that are essentially giant walls with much higher toughness and very little, if any, power. They're intended to defend you and stop attackers from coming through, and the Wall of Bones, just like the Drudge Skeletons above, can regenerate with a small injection of mana. The Wall of Bones has pretty great art, and I just really like the fantasy flavour of a necromancer just creating a giant castle wall of femurs and skulls and ribcages that constantly regenerates as armies of orcs and dwarves try to break through it.

And now we'll move to non-creature cards! The original 'Magic: The Gathering' as it was conceived really wanted players to become any kind of magician or sorcerer they want. And in addition to summoning monsters, they could do some really cool stuff like Deathgrip here. I really like the artwork here, with fingers squishing a heart. I like that the palm and thumb seems to have grown some extra spikes to pierce the heart more. Is this the Sengir Vampire's hand? The artist for both pieces of artwork is the same guy! It's a haunting picture, and even if it's probably more symbolic than literal, I really like the art here. 

On the other side of the spectrum from Lord of the Pit, we have Demonic Tutor, who's the goofiest, doofiest looking demon man you've ever seen. Look at him! He's just pissed off that he has to tutor... somebody, and he's like holding a textbook that probably says "Arithmetic 101" in infernal. Demonic Tutor isn't actually a creature, but a sorcery (magic/spell/action cards for those who are more familiar with other TCG's), and... and, come on, this dude is so fun! He's a fucking demon dude that apparently gives lessons or some shit. The sheer concept of this dude is just utterly fun in a set that otherwise takes itself pretty seriously.

Of course, this is apparently where the TCG lingo "Tutoring" comes from, which is a handy word for "drawing a specific card from your deck", which is easily one of the most powerful effects in any given card game. Could you imagine if Demonic Tutor has been given a more serious name like "Demonic Artificer" or "Demonic Sorcerer" or something along those lines? Nope, we get Tutor instead, which is just... just pretty hilarious. I truly am glad they chose to do this. 

Of course, the Demonic Tutor didn't stay a dork for too long, and later printings (like this Ultimate Masters reprint in 2018) reinterprets the Demonic Tutor as this lurking shadow-demon with massive wings that give the impression of large tapering claws, apparently tutoring that one sailor dude on a boat on where to go. "That is the way to get your combo piece, ooooo!" One thing that I've learned from going through these older cards is that at some point, it would really be fun to see what happened to the reprints of these older creatures and how they have changed over the years. 

Yeah, the enchantment is called Fear! But, honestly, what other reaction would you have other than "OH GOD, A WALL OF FLOATING SKULLS! AND THEY ARE SMILING!" 

With all the more whimsical pieces of art in early MTG, Terror is a pretty great art. Ron Spencer's illustration here is someone so wretched, so vulnerable, twisted upon himself. A lot of these earlier art skim on the background for budgetary purposes, but with Terror here it's really effective in the usage of negative space, which makes it ambiguous what this person is afraid of. Are they afraid of the darkness? Something lurking in the darkness? Or is he scared of nothing at all? It's honestly a great representation of terror in general. 

Magic is a game that's gone for almost three decades, and many mechanics have risen and been forgotten thanks to the fluctuating power levels of the cards printed by the developers. Some, however, have been actively banned -- in particular a set of cards that revolve around an 'ante' rule, where you bet several cards in your collection with your opponent. it's generally unfun, and gives a whole sense of pressure to a game that should've in theory be a nice, competitive bit of game between friends. Also, y'know, gambling. 

It's also worse with cards like Darkpact, where, despite its pretty artwork, has the pretty assholish effect of swapping the card you're ante-ing with something you might not even want to bet at the same time. The effects of Demonic Attorney essentially also forces your opponent to concede, or else another card gets ante'd up. It does reflect the general early days of MTG and how they really are treading uncharted waters here with how they are handling a lot of these mechanics and what would stick and what wouldn't. 

Demonic Attorney is really fun as a concept, though. Probably graduating from the same Demonic University as the Demonic Tutor, Demonic Attorney is making a case to a Demonic Judge. The end result is so surreal for a game that, for the most part in this stage of its lifetime, wanted to be a fair bit more super-serious in terms of tone. It's the Victorian-era formal court wigs that do it for me. Ante's a weird thing that MTG swept under the rug as soon as they could, but I adore the artwork for this one. It's so silly. 

The original versions of these reviews didn't really talk too much about the actual things the cards did, but I'll try to include some of the cooler ones. Like Pestilence here. The artwork in Pestilence is cool enough, being a rather nasty, pockmarked person with every inch of his skin filled with sores. He's dribbling some spittle and his clothes are marked with blood. A nice showcase of a nonspecific plague infecting someone. But the effect just has Pestilence potentially spread throughout the battlefield every turn if mana is paid to keep up the plague... but as an enchantment, it itself gets destroyed when there are no creatures left to spread the disease. That's a cool extra bit that tries to replicate the fantasy of a magical plague!

And we'll end this coverage of Black cards with another cool enchantment, Lich. Lich isn't actually a way to summon a mere lich monster into the battlefield, no. The wording of these old cards are kind of badly formatted, but basically the spell Lich turns all the permanents you have in play into your life total, making you immortal since your life points can't be damaged by conventional means. The idea is to duplicate how fantasy liches tend to have their souls tied to an unholy tether called the phylactery, which is all the cards you have on the battlefield, including the 'Lich' card itself. And once these are destroyed, or the spell itself is broken, the lich-ified player dies. That's cool!

And with that cool card, we're done with Black in Unlimited. There are some twenty-odd cards that I don't have much to talk about that I'll leave for after the break, and I'll briefly say some words about them. This is going to be the format of all MTG reviews in the future, which would really help when we get to some sets where I don't find a lot of interesting creatures to talk about!

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BLUE 

We're going to Blue now, and I think it's a bit clear that early on in development, we didn't really have the 'colour pie' be fully defined just yet -- at least in terms of flavour. I would also like to point out the love-hate relationship I have with the classic Blue border, where I like the texture a lot... but it makes the text a bit hard to read sometimes. 

We'll start off, as I often do, with creatures. And we'll start off with Elementals, which would later on lean much more towards Green and Red, but Blue gets its share of elementals! Anyone who's done anything in RPGs knows elementals -- manifestations of natural elements that take the form of mostly vaguely-human forms. Air Elemental is a pretty basic take on this, being a womanly figure made up of... well, it's supposed to be air, but the artwork does admittedly make it look more like watery waves. Air Elemental also has the 'Flying' keyword I described above, which originally was a keyword that's quite associated with Blue. 

Water Elemental, in contrast, looks so much cooler.  Instead of just portraying the congealing of water into a semi-humanoid form, the Water Elemental manifests into an old man's face made up of the roiling waves, surprising that sailor. It's a lot more... mythical, I think, to have these features be baked into actual parts of nature instead of "this guy is made up of wind/flame/mud".

Every single colour gets walls in Unlimited, and will continue getting more walls throughout the early expansions. Again, this plays nicely into the mentality of a defensive magical spell, and just like the elements above, Blue played a fair bit with the element of water and air -- which, coincidentally, are blue-coloured in art. The fantasy is neat, and the art is nice enough for how stylized they are. Wall of Water has the ability to become a bit stronger temporarily with a surge of mana (and potentially drown a weaker attacker) and Wall of Air can fly and block flying creatures. 

Part of the original rules noted that creatures with the 'Wall' type can't attack, which is a bit unintuitive with both Blue walls having power (or some ability to gain power), and retroactively MTG would add the keyword 'Defender' (i.e. 'can't attack') on all walls to emphasize this. 

Wah-hoo, what is this meant to be? Phantom Monster is a creature with Flying, and has a Poe poem as its flavour text. "Phantasm", as I discussed in Black, is ambiguous enough that it could mean anything. Later retcons in the great creature update would reclassify Phantom Monster as an "Illusion", which tends to mean that the Blue Mage is creating an artificial flying thing. I'm not sure if there is more to the Phantom Monster other than the eyeball-covered irregular maw that we're seeing here. Is it just this horrid Cthulhu-y maw that's the whole thing, or is there some larger body beyond it? Pretty creepy!

The other 'Phantasm' (and later on 'Illusion') in this original set are the Phantasmal Forces, who is a squadron of knights with parrot wings. The flavour text explain a bit more about these specific beings, who are essences of dead heroes 'summoned from the dreamrealms'. The effect, later on keyworded as 'Cumulative Upkeep', forces the caster to pay a certain cost every turn to maintain the Phantasmal Forces in the battlefield or else it's destroyed. It's a nice fantasy of the caster presumably having to exert some force to remember the form of these beings, like a channeling magic in video games. Unfortunately, cumulative upkeep as a game mechanic is probably one of the most unpopular ones, even when attached to stronger cards down the line. 

Let's go for the more boring cards. Prodigal Sorcerer is our obligatory 'generic human' that sets the tone of the colour. In this case, Blue is your more traditional magicians who studies in arcane institutions, are researchers and have formal titles like 'sorcerer' and 'wizard'. This guy reminds me of Ra's al Ghul from Batman. He's... quite boring. He's not even doing anything particularly sorcerous. Cast a spell or something, Prodigal Sorcerer! 

Probably the best candidate for an 'iconic' Blue creature from Alpha is Mahamoti Djinn. Again, he's a bit of a simpler creature that combines the fantasy of 'djinn coming out of the lamp' from the myths of the 1001 Arabian Nights stories (which, incidentally, will be relevant in the next expansion) and the 'djinns are air elementals' from Dungeons & Dragons. Not a whole ton to really say here, it's a rather basic interpretation of a genie.


The other iconic Blue creature would be the Merfolk, who would expand to one of MTG's earliest tribal strategies in these early set. The original Merfolk card is the very humble vanilla card, the Merfolk of Pearl Trident. It's not the most interesting of mer-person design, just a couple of pointy-eared guys with a fishy lower body. I am actually surprised, if we're talking about game design, that they didn't make a similar 'terrain-based' ability equivalent of Flying for aquatic creatures, like 'Swimming' or something. 

The Lord of Atlantis gets his own race in this first printing, but would later be retconned to just be a regular merfolk. Again, as you can see by the name 'Atlantis' being thrown around on both of their flavour texts, the actual fantasy setting of Magic hasn't been solidified yet, and wouldn't be for quite some time. This does imply that an underwater merfolk city called Atlantis does exist in Dominaria, though. Again, it is early artwork, but I do appreciate the amount of effort they make in the Lord of Atlantis's design, with a much more regal purple-and-red colouration and a much more impressive eel-tail and a lot of fins and ridges on his upper body compared to his Pearl Trident peasant friends. The flavour text also describes the 'lord' mechanic quite nicely -- when one of these leaders arrive, they bolster their troops and this increase in morale translates to +1/+1 stat boosts and Islandwalk! 

Sea Serpents are another pretty cool creature to put in Blue, and... well, it really does show that while a vast majority of the original cards received by Blue used to be 'smart, tricksy stuff', they also added a whole bunch of creatures just because they are aquatic, and the sea is blue. The Sea Serpent is quite a simple depiction of one, being a giant coiling eel-serpent crushing a ship. It has a mechanic later on called "Islandhome", which tends to be put on creatures that can only exist if the summoner controls Islands (where the giant serpent can swim), and can only attack the enemy if they control Islands (so they can swim there). It is a cute mechanic, but the Serpent's stats are nowhere powerful enough to justify a crippling mechanism, and it does highlight how the flavour of the fantasy sometimes needs to be balanced with actual playability. 

Likewise, the Pirate Ship has a version of Islandhome, although unlike the Serpent it has the ability to launch 1 damage blasts even when the enemy doesn't have an Island for the Pirate Ship to sail through. Those are the cannons, yeah? Shooting cannonballs on a coastal village or something? 

Years later, they would actually add vehicles as a separate card type with its own interactions, leading the 'ship' race to be retconned away and this old card is now considered a 'Human Pirate', cheekily representing the crew instead of the ship.

As mentioned above, Blue is all about smart stuff. And smart stuff includes illusions. Both Clone and Vesuvan Doppelganger take this to a fun degree, being */* creatures that switch and transform into other creatures on the battlefield, just like the Pokemon Ditto. The artwork for both cards are pretty fun, with the two soldiers in 'Clone' looking bamboozled, though the two elves depicted in Vesuvian Doppelgangers seem pretty chill with each other. 

Both of these guys would be retconned to have the 'Shapeshifter' tribe. The Clone can just enter the battlefield as a straight-up clone of any creature on the battlefield. Vesuvan Doppelganger, being a bit more expensive, continues to have the ability to transform into another target creature -- whereas the Clone is just stuck with whatever it turns into the first time. 

We'll go into the spells of Blue now, and I'm going to pick some of their more iconic ones. Counterspell and its many variations are still being played. Love the artwork of this magician subjected to Counterspell having his magical lightning bolts just... uh... yeah, that effect happens to men over a certain age, I'm afraid. The fantasy of Blue is that they're the smartest magician, and so they can find loopholes in all magical spells and they are able to chant the exact counter-magic to stop Black from resurrecting the dead or for Red to cast their lightning bolts. 

With the deck meant to represent the Mage's spellbook or memory, a spell like Ancestral Recall has the fantasy of the Blue Mage being able to use the power of good memory to remember ancient magic spells. Like this King Nebuchadnezzar guy being able to remember some things by proximity to those ziggurats!

Another flavour of Blue is to play 'mind games' on the opponent, which tends to be reflected in-game to screwing around with stealing cards from their deck or their card effects. However, flavour-wise and in art, they get represented by brains, like Sleight of Mind here. It's just a brain! But you're rooting around in any card on the battlefield and changing the effect of certain colours affected by spells in play. Neat!

Magical Hack does something similar but with land types, but I also like the fantasy here that unlike the other colours, Blue gains all of its power from rigorous studying. He's not a hack, but he's learning how to hack. Even if it takes him lots and lots of caffeine and lonely nights in his laboratory. 

Some of the more badass spells given to Blue are time manipulation. Timetwister has the great artwork of the Blue Mage standing in front of an hourglass, and casting a spell that immediately rusts that warrior's metallic equipment. It really looks quite neat! In gameplay, it reverses time more than accelerates it, twisting the hand, graveyard and deck into a brand-new deck and resetting those fields for both you and the opponent. 

Time Walk just very casually lets you take another turn. For two mana. It is, very obviously, banned in almost all formats because of the sheer power of taking a bonus turn. Nowadays, Blue still has some ways to cheat out an extra turn but they would involve absurdly complex combos. I love just how little they valued an extra turn at this point in the game's development. 

And beyond that, I just utterly love how absurdly surreal the artwork in Time Walk is. What are those? Skeletons with... no faces? Some musculature on their upper body? Traffic cones? They're walking to some kind of stone structure under the starry sky? It's so abstract, so bizarre. I love it. It barely has anything to do with time. 

Speaking of some fun artwork, have Stasis! Stasis is an almost cartoonish looking piece of art with a guy and a blindfolded beast-person standing on a see-saw. There's a palette floating in-between them. I'm not sure what's going on here, but Stasis kind of follows the time manipulation theme of the previous cards in that it 'freezes' time and prevents the untapping of cards (which includes your resources, the Land cards)... but only for as long as Stasis's caster can keep paying its cost.

The artwork's still really strange, and apparently there is some anecdotal explanation that Stasis's art was commissioned last minute from someone's relative that they slapped onto the card last-minute. 

"Twiddle" is another one that isn't particularly descriptive of what it does. It juts sounds so abstract! You usually twiddle your thumbs or something, but I'm not sure what's going on in that artwork. Is that piece of island jutting out of the water... twiddling with those... tendrils that lead to a stony fist? Is that what's going on? Or did a wizard walk past this island and 'twiddle' it, resulting in this strange phenomenon? I'm not sure what this card is about, honestly, but I kind of like it. 

The original version of this article had me talk about a lot more cards in Blue, but they're... quite repetitive. Again, the main point of these articles are flavour, and while that involves some mechanistic and thematic flavour, I don't think having multiple lines in the main body of the article describing the various elemental blasts are particularly interesting to read about. I did expand on a bit more of what I thought after the break, though!

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Green

And we're going to finally go into Green, the third colour we are covering in this article. Red, White and the handful of colourless and land cards in Unlimited will go to a second article. Green fills in the 'druid' or 'shaman' class of traditional RPG games, as well as a place where a lot of nature-related spells reside.

And there are some always very prominent creatures in all of fantasy settings. Throughout all of my monster-reviewing in this blog, it's always boars, wolves and bears. We've got two of them here! Grizzly Bears is a vanilla 2/2, but it's a very iconic card that has became a bit of a measuring stick among the MTG community, and is one of the few creatures that has had multiple variations of its statline printed over the years. 

Timber Wolves is a pair of wolves, and it's got the 'Banding' mechanic, which is a primarily White keyword that allows a bunch of smaller soldiers to attack and combine their stats to, in theory, take down a big monster. It's flavourful for a pack of wolves, too! It's just kind of a shame that the way Banding worked was utterly confusing, unintuitive and often not that interesting and is one of the few original mechanics to be essentially abandoned by the designers. 

The War Mammoth is a big elephant with "Trample". I've discussed Trample a bit before, but it's something found on larger creatures. The idea is that after dealing combat damage to an opponent creature it killed, something as powerful as a mammoth tramples over the defender and deals the rest of its power to you, the player. It... it's a lot more flavourful when the mammoths are bigger than 3/3, though.

And we now have probably one of my favourite cards in the original Green, Giant Spider. It is one of the most-reprinted cards in the various base sets in the future. The Giant Spider grandfathered the keyword that would later be known as 'Reach'. This is a truly big spider, as you can see in comparison to the buildings it's next to. And it's spinning a massive web to catch all of those pesky flying eagles and angels and thopters and what-have-you. Creatures with Reach essentially can block flying creatures, but are themselves not able to fly. 

I just love this. I love that even the flavour text lampshades that they could focus on a more common ability associated with fantasy spiders, which is the venom... but no. Intercepting flying creatures with their web, that's what they associate giant spiders with. Glorious. 

Elves are very prominent in Green. I would be very dismissive of them if they didn't show up so much, and if they weren't so damn good. Elvish Archers is a rather boring take on one, just being a regular pretty-boy elf with bows. He's got 'First Strike', a keyword that allows it to deal damage first before the enemy, potentially killing an enemy while surviving himself. Neat, but kinda boring. 

Llanowar Elves, meanwhile, will set the tone for most of the memorable elves in MTG history, with the ability to tap for green mana. Mana-ramping is insanely powerful, and having a creature -- with all the benefits of the creature -- also double as a way to generate resources is really good! The flavour text explains that this ties to a whole 'respect the nature' vibe from the elves of Llanowar, allowing the lands to continue flourishing even as they survive from nature's boons. I actually really like the 90's-Xtreem look that the Llanowar Elf here has, with fangs, tattoos, and a headgear that screams more Dune or Warhammer than what you expect the very first elf in a fantasy expansion would have. That's amazing! I didn't appreciate it enough at the time, but as the glut of 'regular' elves start showing up, I appreciate the slight edge that the Llanowar Elf has.

Two 'mythological' creatures now. The first is the Thicket Basilisk, which is a multi-legged iguana creature. A fun interpretation of 'basilisk' for sure, and one that feels a bit more grounded in real-world animals... though of course, MTG would have a lot of different kinds of basilisks. Thicket Basilisk has an ability that a lot of MTG players would recognize to now be 'Deathtouch', or at least an early variation thereof. To represent the Basilisk having the petrification stare of mythological lore, any creature that fights the Basilisk directly gets instantly killed. 

Strictly better than the basilisk is the Cockatrice, who has the quasi-Deathtouch ability but is also able to fly. That is a very charming iteration of a cockatrice, by the way -- a lot of Cockatrice interpretations, if they even remember that the creature's supposed to be a chicken, go all-in on making a creepy scary bird. And that's fine! Creepy cockatrices are fine! But this one is also great. It plays up the goofiness of a cartoon chicken for all it's worth, and I love that the body is still the body of a serpent with a bunch of chicken anatomy stuck onto it.

We go from a fantastical bird to a regular one, in the Birds of Paradise. Urban legend has it that this was actually an artwork commissioned for a land card, but the designers liked Mark Poole's brightly-coloured birds so much that they created this creature card. And thus was born the gloriously-memorable Birds of Paradise, who, like the Llanowar Elves above, is a creature that can be tapped for mana. I am nowhere close to knowing the ins and outs of MTG meta, but I do know that Birds of Paradise is one of the most enduring cards that hasn't been banned (like Time Walk above) but is still powerful enough to see gameplay even now. You rock, bird friends. 

The 'big stick' for Green in this game is the Craw Wurm. Wurms would be a staple creature in Green eventually, representing big, serpentine worms or snakes or dragons that coil around forests and underground terrain. 'Wurm' is technically a variant spelling of 'wyrm', which modern fantasy players would associate heavily with dragons and dragonkin. While Craw Wurm is quite draconic, I like that later on MTG would be able to carve a bit of thematic fun with them. Also, note the three regular humans on the tip of the Wurm's snout. I have a feeling they won't survive for too long. 

Haha, Fungusaur! I love this guy. It's a bizarre, puffy-looking dinosaur that's presumably made up entirely by fungi. It's got such a weird head that's like a veiny, squished hammerhead shark's head, but with a maw from a creature out of Berserk or something. Where most of Green's monsters in this starter set has been quite mundane in terms of just adapting regular animals or fantasy tropes, Fungusar is a nice breath of fresh air. It grows stronger as it survives damage, and the flavour text even notes that Fungusaur parents would even injure their own young to ensure their growth. Brutal! Love this modernized take on the Fungusaur as well, which keeps a lot of the funky proportions of the original artwork. 

And of course, you can't have Green in fantasy without adapting Ents. Or as the trademark-friendly version in MTG, Treefolk. Ironroot Treefolk is kind of a dorky introduction to the race, though. It literally is just a bored cartoon face painted onto a tree, and the most basic branch-arms. The Ironroot Treefolk's expression is honestly hilarious on all fronts, especially when you read that mini-paragraph of flavour text that describes... the truly absurd mating habits of these things. That is not a mental image I want, Ironroot Treefolk!

Let's go with the obligatory regular people here. Ley Druid is just a Gandalf-lookalike who's looking at some leaves. Not the most interesting, but appropriate for Green. 

Likewise, the Verduran Enchantress is just some lady who goes full-on Poison Ivy, with her fingernails extending to form a series of thorny vines. Pretty neat artwork, all around, I like the focus on the rose.

Another common trope is faeries and the fair folk that live in the forests. We're going to have a couple of expansions that revolves all around them, but in the meantime we have Shanodin Dryads. Dryads as wood spirits are pretty common in fantasy, and Shanodin Dryad here is a much nicer (if more anthropomorphized) 'human plant' than goofy ol' Ironroot Treefolk up above. I like the flavour text describing juts how stealthily the Shanodin Dryads move, which you can totally believe with the artwork, yeah? The pose that the dryad is having, and how her arms is mimicking a tree, really makes you believe that the Shanodin Dryad can sneak around like a stealth game, freezing up into a tree when spotted. It even fits her 'Forestwalk' ability!

The Scryb Sprites are a bit of a typical take on fairies, making them little humanoids with bug wings. The scale on this art to the berries around them is also nice. But as the flavour text implies, the Scryb Sprites aren't here to frolic, but to furiously defend their realm. And I like that this translates to a more badass-looking fairy design, with pale purple skin, red war-tattoos and insect antennae. 

We've got another big creature here, the Force of Nature, who's a mighty 8/8 with Trample -- a much more deserving statline than the mammoth! The Force of Nature is essentially Swamp Thing from DC comics (or Man-Thing if you prefer Marvel), being a giant muscular humanoid made up of swampy muck. Later retcons would classify Force of Nature as an 'Elemental', which... makes perfect sense. I like that the Force of Nature isn't something that could be controlled wily-nily, and you need to keep feeding him forest mana or it turns around and punches you in the face before facing the enemy. That's normally a Black creature thing, but I feel like the flavour here makes sense. 

Gaea's Liege reminds me of the elf druid Malfurion from World of Warcraft. He's a bearded guy with antlers, and while this card doesn't give much of a context to what he is, he's essentially a creature that grows stronger and stronger the more forests you have played, and it itself can transform other lands into forests with its ability. The Great Creature Type Update would give Gaea's Liege the classification of an 'Avatar', making Gaea's Liege a manifestation of some greater being called Gaea. 

We're almost done with Green creatures, with only the three walls to talk about. We've got Wall of Wood and Wall of Brambles here, and... pretty self-explanatory, aren't they? After explaining the wall cycle and the Defender mechanic, there's not much for me to really say other than to acknowledge that it fits the whole 'nature's wrath' flavour that Green has. I like the flavour that Brambles has some power value since it's got a bunch of spiky thorns. 

It's a bit less obvious with most of its cards, but Green -- at least initially -- also represents more natural phenomenon than just forests. Wall of Ice is our third Green wall, and alongside the sorcery Tsunami here, show that Green does have some flavour of other types of nature's wrath beyond just plants and animals. I think most expansions would lean more towards the biological aspects of nature's wrath, but Green does have a lot of weather and climate manipulation in the initial sets.

I am not sure what's going on with Lure here, and I'm really trying to figure out what's going on here. Is it like a worm-dragon thing pretending and camouflaging itself to be an apple, to... lure something bigger? But then does the apple-dragon have a way to kill the bigger opponent? I like the artwork, whatever it's supposed to be. It reminds me of the Pokemon Applin.

Speaking of cool art, how's Living Artifact there, huh? That's a card art I'd expect to see in Black, and even then in one of those Phyrexian sets with horrors and stuff. What an art! What a hideous monster! The idea, I think, is to animate your artifacts with temporary life that you can consume to heal yourself, but juts look at this thing. It's got two eyes arranged vertically, a tongue, multiple misshapen tentacles, bug legs, wings, tails... it's an abomination is what it is. And why is it suspended in a cage in the sky? Explain!

Another flavourful Green spell thing is to manipulate the lands themselves, since they commune so well with nature. A bunch of the spells after the break reinforce this, but the coolest of them all has to be Living Lands, which animates all forests in play as 1/1 creatures -- something that would be very muhc played upon in the Zendikar blocks. I really like the wretched face of that mass of plant matter that's suddenly alive, too! Pretty appropriately nasty-looking stuff. 

Giant Growth has a rat that's been transformed into a massive size and has been apparently snacking on a bunch of humans. Look at that pile of bones next to it! I like how wretched and slightly malformed the rat is, with an overly-skinny arm and jagged, angular whiskers. Green is also the colour of buffing spells, and a lot of them involves expanding animals to ridiculous sizes. 

I am not sure why Lifeforce shows an embryo with open eyes in a green orb. It's such a haunting but slightly creepy piece of art. I'm not sure why the embryo enchantment can destroy Black spells as they are cast, but there you go. 

And I want to end this segment before we go to the break with my favourite, most silly card art. 'Natural Selection' is a pretty common theme in any fantasy work with wildlife and animals and whatnot, but look at this guy. he's got a bird head and a tiger-human body. He's holding a peach. This is apparently Dominaria's natural selection, and... you know what? That explains so much of the weird animals and beasts we'll see in the future. And on that guy's blank expression, you can almost see him squawk "I select this. Naturally."

Anyway, this has been fun! Click the break for a bunch of cards that I really don't have much to say about, with a couple of brief commentaries for some of them. But ultimately, I did have fun. If I ever decide to do the other pre-Mirrodin sets, I probably would be far, far more concise, it's just that as the first M:TG set, I feel like I'm sort of obliged to talk a bit more.

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And here are the rest of the cards in the expansion. They all have cool art, some may have importance in the metagame, but I don't have a whole ton to say about them in the main body of the article: 


I find the concept of "Sinkhole" as an ability to be pretty fun in a card game that revolves so strongly around manipulating land. Contract from Below is a hilariously fun flavour, and the third of the 'ante' cards in Unlimited. 

Look at Howl from Beyond! RAWR ME DEMON ME SO ANGRY RARR! I like the idea of Cursed Land or Warp Artifact as a mechanical flavour, corrupting the enemy's most useful resources. 

Word of Command is literally just a blank screen with two sleepy eyes... which feels like a last-minute art addition. I know that the first MTG set is done on a very shoestring budget, but come on! Compare how intricate the art of Evil Presence or Deathlace are! 

Some more nice, flavourful 'evil sorcerer attacks' for Black to have. I like the large amount of negative space in Mind Twist while the poor guy is being scared out of his mind. Take note of the angry skull in Bad Moon! The moon is angry at you!

Blue has a bunch more counterspells in its arsenal, like Blue Elemental Blast and Spell Blast. Those artwork really looks a bit more violent than their effects, yeah? Unsummon is a specific counterspell for creatures. 

We have some more 'mindfuckery' cards here. Phantasmal Terrain and Thoughtflare another one that changes card properties; Control Magic straight-up takes control of another creature and Braingeyser with its cool brain artwork is another 'memory and draw' spell. Look at that perfect cerebral cortex in the artwork for Braingeyser!

I really like the strange spirit-creature in Lifetap, which based on its effect seems to imply that it's some kind of forest spirit whose power is being drained by the pale elf? Invisibility has a really nice piece of art on it. I like it! 

Flight and Jump were originally in the main body of the article. Both cost 1 mana, but the effects are radically much more powerful for Flight. It also amuses me to no end that the very intellectual Blue has a spell... that makes you jump high for a single turn. Time manipulation, counterspelling, transforming the inherent properties of permanents... and JUMP.

Also likewise, a gloriously mundane spell for the highly-intelligent Blue is Steal Artifact. We've had so many other Blue spells manipulate land, unsummon monsters, cause enemy permanents to deal magical feedback... and then there is Steal Artifact, having the mage just casually stroll in and steal some Indiana Jones looking item. (In contrast, Copy Artifact and Animate Artifact feel a bit more wizard-y)

The poor wizard in Power Sink's artwork really looks like he had a bad accident with mustard, which is probably not the intended audience reaction. Psychic Venom has nothing to do with snakes, but I like the symbolic piece of artwork of how the Blue Mage is making one of the opponents' cards poisonous to them. 

Green has a lot of spells that showcase the wrath of nature, as I mentioned above with Tsunami. We've got Fog, Ice Storm and Hurricane to showcase just how devastating nature can be. 

But Green is also the colour of communion and peace with nature, represented with the most healing, ramping and drawing effects. Wild Growth there is undoubtedly the reason why Hearthstone's most iconic mana ramping card is also called Wild Growth. 

Web is the Giant Spider's webbing, and essentially gives any creature it enchants the Reach ability. I just find it interesting that you can theoretically put this to like, a goblin or a human paladin and they suddenly gain the ability to become Spider-Man. Camouflage is also a pretty cool card art and effect... which led to a whole ton of ruling headaches because it 'puts cards face-down'. Years later, this would inspire the creation of the Morph mechanic, which defines face-down cards as 2/2's.

I am not sure why Wanderlust deals damage, but I guess it makes the creature it's enchanting get so antsy about going all Bilbo Baggins that it's attacking its controller in an attempt to do so. Kudzu is a pretty bad way to go, wrapped around by kudzu vines and consumed. 

We'll end this off with Channel and Fastbond. I didn't take much notice of them the first time through, not helped by the small paragraphs on the cards. But these two are some of the potential imbalanced combo cards, with both of them banned in almost all formats due to how cheap they are. Channel just gives you additional mana any time you activate a mana ability, allowing for ridiculous mana bursts, and Fastbond allows you to vomit out as many lands in a turn with the measly cost of 1 damage per land. Just like the 1-mana Time Walk above, the cards in the original set are not at all balanced. It's a nice reminder of how MTG used to be, and the sheer amount of work that the developers are actually doing to maintain the game all the way to the present day.