This June marks five years since I graduated from high school. It's not something I'm hung up on; I got over high school a long time ago. I don't think about it. I don't visit it; I don't care.

However, the Extended rotation brings it up again in my mind.

It was about a year and a half ago that during one random Friday Night Magic tournament, I was up at school. I was playing against a friend of mine. He was in his first year of college, while I was in my fourth. He destroyed a land of mine with a land destruction spell. I asked him which one he wanted me to kill; he said"the old-school one."

He meant that to mean the Tempest mountain with the text that actually said that it added a red mana to my mana pool - as opposed to the non-"old school" mountain, which had the Portal big mana symbol thing going on.

And so, of course, I had to go off on him.

I explained, with not undue exasperation, that indeed Tempest was not"old school," after all; Weatherlight came out as I was graduating from high school.

See, Tempest isn't old to me. The Dark? That's old. Legends is old. Antiquities is ancient. Tempest is not old. So here was this boy telling me that Tempest was somehow"Old School."

But you see, now Weatherlight is old school. Weatherlight, the set that came out as I was graduating, is rotating out of Extended because it's too old. Wow.

And it dawns on me that at some day in the near future - and that day may already be here - that there will be a generation of kids picking up the game who won't know what an interrupt is. They won't know what a summon spell is, or what summoning sickness is. They'll wonder what banding is; they'll puzzle over phasing. They won't know what a Reef Pirates is, or what an Orcish Lumberjack is. They won't appreciate how bothersome it is to see all basic lands having been Portalized. And they'll have no idea what LIFO stands for.

Indeed some of those kids might be reading this right now. If you are, email me, and I'll explain this all to you.

Do I mean to complain? No. Despite a healthy and interesting Extended environment this past season, maybe this needed to be done. The environment was defined by two cards: Force of Will and Swords to Plowshares, both of which could have been wiped out with just rotating the Ice Age Block. But it was good to rotate the Mirage Block too, if for nothing else than the sake of consistency. Also, 5^th Edition certainly should have been in there.

We all saw this coming, too. More than once I thought about unloading my forty Dual lands before their value decreased 50%. However, I've been assured that they'll never only be five-dollar cards, so I'm not worried as much.

But indeed, all the signs were there. Extended was getting too many sets. They replaced the duals with playable replacements - not only in pain lands, but the faux duals from Invasion.

So what does the Extended rotation do exactly? Well, it rewrites a lot of things. First, there is a brand new metagame, which we wont even see for six months, because no one will be innovative at the Extended portion of Worlds.

Secondly, it rewrites the pricing book. I'm not as sure about unloading Invasion Block rares like I had planned to do; the power level of Extended has just shifted. I was going to hang onto my off-colored pain lands anyway, betting that they would be in 8^th Edition (wow, that makes me feel old, too...), but now the pricing structure is going to change. Usually, Type 2 rares take a big hit in value as they leave Type 2 - but now, since the power level in Extended is very different, it is very possible that many of those rares will continue to be played, and so they may no longer take as big of a hit.

And if they're not played this November, they might when the next rotation hits, and who knows how they may interact with the next few blocks' cards for Extended purposes.

One final note on the rotation and the metagame: When I first read the announcement, I started to say initially that the metagame would probably just turn into Rath Cycle-Urza Block Type 2 decks. Actually, I've come to think now that won't be the case at all.

While I expect to see more Tradewind Riders and Masticores played come November, I think there's also room for Nether Spirit, Rebels, Blue Skies and kinky Invasion block stuff. Between Mercadian Block, Invasion Block, and Odyssey Block, there's enough interesting stuff to give the Rath Cycle-Urza Block people a run for their money. Not to mention the block for this fall and the Hybrids that can and will be made, as new experiments are done and new decks made viable because of the shift in the power level. We've already seen debate about playing Tinker with Upheaval.

If you have questions, comments, or ideas, feel free to e-mail them to me.

Fred Cole
fredcoleaa@hotmail.com