How many times as a Magic player have you heard the word"broken?" It gets overused a lot, and some even use it as slang for"good." This brings us to my point: Card power, particularly concerning overpowered cards, is a highly subjective business. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking there are any cards, any at all, that are somehow so super-powerful that you'll win just by using them.

Everyone knows the argument."Black Lotus is broken! They'll never reprint it." Says who - Wizards? They just make the game, so don't expect anything from them that isn't driven by marketing. Wizards' chief problem with Black Lotus is that everyone wanted it. They have decided that anything that might just fit in every deck must be bad. Wizards' reasoning is that once everyone gets these cards, there won't be a market for them. This is precisely why they decided to discontinue a definitive dual land set in favor of fifty different kinds of semi-duals that they can rotate out of every block. By labeling a card like Lotus"broken," they are pretending that a card that does nothing more than give a temporary mana boost is somehow earth-shatteringly strong. Guess what; it is good, but it won't win you a game on its own.

In a way, Black Lotus is only great when you combo it with certain other restricted cards like Timetwister or Yawgmoth's Bargain. Proxy a Lotus into your Type 2 deck and see if you still think it's worth $400.

Black Lotus is good, Moxes are good, Wheel of Fortune and the rest are all good. I'm not trying to defend every single"Type 1" card (Underworld Dreams be damned!), but please understand where I'm going with this. Most restricted cards are really good in the right deck or with the right draw, but they are by no means"broken." The game doesn't just break down into degenerate nonsense when you play with a few of them; they make the game a little more haphazard, but that's actually what many people like about these cards.

Haphazard"randomness" may be bad when you've got $10,000 on the line at the Pro Tour... But in casual play, there's not much fun in straight, machine-like consistency. It's been said that unbalanced cards mean a limited environment, but this is true throughout the game. You cannot, in any game of Magic, just slap together any cards you want and make a deck that wins. Some cards are better, and the cream always rises to the top. The fact that you can't just win with any pile of cards is no different in Type 1 or Type 2, so it can't be said that one format is inherently better than the other. The formats are just different - and because of shrewd marketing like block rotations, Wizards makes more money with their Type 2 policy, so that is the one they support. Unless you are a pro deckbuilder with at least twenty to forty hours a week set aside just for Magic, you're going to have to build a netdeck to compete in either format, so the whole idea that one is inherently better than the other just doesn't hold up. If anything, there is an argument that Type 1 is the superior format; it just doesn't sell mass loads of cards like Type 2.

Which brings me to the conclusion: Type 1 cards can be very fun in casual play, because casual players enjoy doing crazy things. I'm not talking about first-turn Bargain-Combos; I'm talking about early Shivan Dragons and such. Reintroducing the old power cards would not turn casual magic into a mirror of Tournament-Grade Type 1; if it wasn't like that when the cards were easier to get, it won't be like that now. Many players started playing with these evil"broken" cards, and would still like to play with them.

Furthermore, the only reason cards like Black Lotus are so expensive is because of their tournament viability. If it were all about collectibility, then my Alpha Natural Selection would be worth more than $5. So I say to Wizards, hey! Show some respect to the old dinosaurs and reprint them. You can change the art, or the card backs, to preserve the originals' value. It is not necessary, at this point, that they be tournament legal. Although many, including myself, would prefer it, I'm betting that Wizards is worried it would cause"defections" from the all-important Type 2 - and hence their bottom line. In my opinion, the"Reserved List" is a crock anyway, as it unfairly applies only to the oldest sets. So Chronicles was a bad idea; it was because they reprinted cards like the Elder Dragons that only had value for being rare. No one plays that game anymore. Beta Birds of Paradise go for $60 because people want them for their Type 2 decks. I just bought an Alpha Timber Wolves cheap because no one uses it, and no one could care that it's just as rare. Wizards can talk all they want about never reprinting Urza's Saga rares, et cetera, but there are so many of those, in several languages, that an Academy or a Cradle will never in a hundred years be worth even a Mana Drain. All the sets from Fallen Empires on have been easy to obtain even years after release, so the reserved list just doesn't apply to them in the same way it does to, say, Unlimited or Arabian Nights.

At this point, someone is bound to say,"You can buy all those cards; just spend the money and shut up if you want them that bad!" I already own most of those cards that I'm interested in owning. I even own two Black Lotuses - how's that for extravagant spending? I want new players to know what Moxes are, and I want some of the old players to come back. I want my friends who aren't into spending big money on cards to know what it feels like to play with what many of us see as the original heart and soul of the game. I want Wizards to admit that cards like Moxes, and their meteoric rise in popularity right from the beginning, are at least partly to blame for magic being a success today. An"Anthologies" set that included almost none of the most popular cards from the time period was a slap in the face to what originally made this game great.

I don't have the exact figures, but including Collector's Edition, there are only about 35,000 of each"power" card in existence. Wizards claims six million players worldwide. Give these people something fun and different to mess around with in their spare time. It'll pique people's interest, give Type 1 players a few casual opponents, and it won't dent the originals' value much, if at all. Stop with the 1984 attitude that everything was a mistake; if people hadn't wanted those cards, the game wouldn't be where it's at today. Give us a boxed set! Or is Wizards afraid that people will like the old cards too much and will then forsake the all-important Type 2 for the incredible"brokenness" of older cards?

I know I'll catch hell for this, but I await my answer.

HengeWolf
Druid Anarchist