First Block: Ice Age
No.
There we go.
AncientH:
It's hard today to emphasize the impact of Ice Age on Magic: the Gathering fans. While Wizards of the Coast had put forth a number of themed sets, the world as a whole was still just a vague fantasy kitchen sink, only beginning to take on some general shape with the events of Antiquities and Fallen Empires, but Ice Age was...different. Bigger, certainly, and with a much more cohesive focus to the cards. It was also the first "expansion" that could serve as a real jumping-on point for new fans, due to the ability to buy entire decks instead of just boosters - and this is before you could buy constructed decks-in-a-box. It also helped that the theme extended to the boxes, which were incredibly distinctive compared to earlier boxes.
God these are sexy.
Ice Age really is the first "block" in Magic terms, even if people didn't quite understand the concept at the time, and as such it represents some important developments in defining what a block is and can be.
FrankT:
In June of 1995, Ice Age was the most ambitious expansion to date. It had its own starter decks, lands, and new art versions of basic staple cards. It was intended to be standalone playable. It had 383 different cards in it, which was 88 more than the original set. Basically we're looking at Magic attempting to reboot itself. New cards, new power level, new game design ideas. The company had also brought in the concept of the “Type 2” tournament format, where you were only allowed to use the latest few sets (this became Standard later on), so the intent to remake Magic into something with less craziness and sweep old mistakes under the rug is clearly there.
The general power level of Ice Age stuff is pretty low by the standards of the time, and pretty low by the standards of today. A Battle For Zendikar deck would stomp the fuck out of an Ice Age Deck. There are a lot less heavy hitter power cards in this set (no Timewalk or Mindtwist to be had here), but beyond that there seems to be a real attempt to scale back the power level on things that were just “kinda OK” from the original basic set.
The Djinn from the basic set is actually fairly marginal. It's very powerful, but the high cost makes it a questionable include in a deck. The Spirit from Ice Age is basically the same thing with a pretty horrendous drawback.
Sure, there are some cards which are over-the-top crazy nuts powerful, but those appear to be mistakes. The intention appears to have been for a format where things were kind of weak and shitty across the board.
Of course, some effects are simply very good, such that deliberately weaker versions of them are still awesomesauce.
These were intended to be weaker versions of Lich and Ancestral Recall. But the fact is these cards are still over the top nuts because putting the right cards into your hand is the difference between winning and losing.
AncientH:
The power of Ice Age cards has to be balanced against low expectations - this was the set immediately after Fallen Empires, which was noted for being a weak set, and then immediately followed by Homelands which was noted for being an abysmally weak AND OVERPRICED set.
So when Frank or I say Ice Age is "weak," you have to compare it to the closest real equivalents in play at the time: 4th edition and Fallen Empires. And the thing is that there's no Ice Age equivalent of a Shivan Dragon, Sengir Vampire, or Serra Angel, no real medium-level turn-four droppers. In fact, you can clearly see the kind of aesthetic in Ice Age compared to the other two by looking at the knights:
The White Knight is a prince among weenies. At WW for a 2/2 first striker, he's a second-turn drop to defend you against any of the piddly shit that the enemy might come out with. Hell, with first strike and 2 attack, he can drop a lot of critters that outpunch him in power, and he'll survive a 1 damage ping like you'd get from Prodigal Sorcerer. The Order of Leitbur, by contrast...well, he doesn't look more expensive, but you have to pay for first strike, he's vulnerable to pinging, and you can boost him. The boost is nice, but also relatively expensive. The Order of the White Shield is basically a clone, just in case you somehow wanted 8 Orders of Light Beer in your deck.
And where a critter wasn't less powerful than it's 4th edition equivalent, it was often overpowered. Consider:
You're probably not ever going to play a Seraph. There are better ways to spend seven mana. And if you do, by some miracle, get the Seraph on the table by turn 5 or 6, you're probably not going to be able to keep her around long enough for her army of resurrected minions to do you a vast amount of good. If she was 4 mana she'd be a bargain, and at 5 mana at par with the Serra Angel, but at 7 she's just way overpriced for the market. And this is the world that Ice Agers had to deal with. The Seraph was the Serra Angel for people that couldn't afford a Serra Angel.
FrankT:
The big design ideas of Ice Age, besides taking out all the powerful cards and even the upper-medium powered cards and replacing them with weaker versions were supposed to be Cumulative Upkeep and Snow Lands.
You never hear about either of these mechanics anymore because they were dumb and no one used them.
Cumulative Upkeep was simply a bad idea. The concept is that it makes “permanents” that are limited in duration. So things go into play, last a number of turns, and then go away again. Since the cost to keep it in play keeps ramping up, the card will always eventually fuck off. And... that's dumb. It's way too much accounting and there are much easier ways to track that sort of thing.
Many cards in later sets had some sort of count down mechanic for leaving play, or were inherently once-off effects that went off more than once, both of which obviously are much more intuitive.
But simple clumsiness aside, the real issue here is that the cumulative upkeep cards just weren't very good. I could imagine wanting to pay one mana, then two mana, then three mana to keep a card around for three turns (especially if said card was going to make me win in three turns); but I'm not going to go through that kind of crap for a glorified Jump.
I could imagine this card making you win, but I'm having difficulty imagining a deck that would rather draw
this than draw a halfway decent flying creature instead.
And really the big bottom line is that games don't actually last very long. If you have even a single unanswered creature, you are going to take your opponent apart in a few turns. So it really doesn't matter if something lasts “forever unless your opponent destroys it” or “several turns or your opponent destroys it, whichever comes first.” Because in most cases those are going to be pretty much the same thing.
AncientH:
Cumulative Upkeep is the mathematical counterpart to the "interest" counter mechanics from Fallen Empires; except instead of being rewarded for not untapping your Icatian Store or cannibalizing your saprolings, you were paying compound interest for playing a card. This might have worked in concept, if the cards were good enough, but even then you're most likely only going to play a CU card when you're planning to win this turn or the next anyway, so that consequences be damned.
Let's be honest, five lands in three turns is not a terrible price to pay for winning the game. Provided you can win the game in three turns.
The thing is, Magic already had upkeep as a workable concept, especially with critters like Lord of the Pit - and the LotP worked because if you didn't feed it, it broke your legs. And keep in mind, Ice Age featured two watered-down versions of LotP, without cumulative upkeep. No, Black's CU critter in Ice Age was this:
This is actually really bizarre for a CU critter. It's a turn three drop (probably) for a 2/2 that (probably) cannot be blocked. But by turn six, it's done 4 points of damage and cost you so much that you might as well let it die and cast it again from your hand for the same price.
Incidentally, it occurs I have no idea what happens when you combine Cumulative Upkeep and Indestructible.
FrankT:
In the Fallen Empires OSSR, I had a bit of a rant about how little design space the game had left itself with Lands. A Basic Land makes one monad of one colored mana every one turn, and neither mana nor color are divisible concepts. A forest doesn't have anything to give up to pay for other things it might do besides its status of coming into play untapped, its privileged status as a card you are allowed to have more than 4 of in your deck, and its name. That's... not very much. The Snow Covered Forest was actually the perfect answer to that problem. A Snow Covered Forest is exactly a Forest, it just happens to also have the tag “Snow Covered.” Other cards care whether lands are Snow Covered, but the Snow Covered Forest itself does not.
This brings up the possibility of all kinds of craziness with factional tags on lands. The design space is actually huge, because cards could really do anything at all with the information that a land does or does not have a specific tag. You could have opposing factions (like the Phyrexians vs. Myrrans or Zendikari vs. Eldrazi) and make an opportunity cost for putting them in a deck together by having them get triggers off of different land tags. You could even make them really hard to mash together by giving them killswitches on their abilities based on having the wrong kind of land. So for example: the Eldrazi could have “blighted” lands, while the Zendikari have “liberated” lands, and if you want to use the high end Eldrazi and Zendikari abilities together, you have to balance having blighted and liberated lands in the same deck. Which means that most people would pick a faction and if both factions had playable tournament quality decks, you'd enhance theme in the tournament scene.
There's no limit to where you could go with this. You could have “haunted” lands, “primal” lands, “city” lands and “infernal” lands. Once you've introduced the idea of lands having name-tags that can themselves be used as a resource or target for hate, you can really fine tune what kinds of factions and cards work together. You can even give cards alternate costs that are payable with lands with certain tags. So you could have a specter that was playable in a Black deck or any color of deck with Haunted Lands in it – moving cards beyond color conscription and into archetype dominated formats. My god, it could have been beautiful.
But instead what happened is this:
Oh, come on!
The cards that were in there to trigger off of snow lands were so garbage and the hate cards targeted against snow lands so garbage that they basically weren't worth using. You were not going to play Arctic Foxes. Even if your opponent had Snow Lands for your Foxes to care about, they still weren't worth playing. 2 mana for a 1/1 with weirdly conditional Evasion isn't actually very good at all, and if that's your plan for hating out the snow faction I simply feel sorry for you. Not that you cared about hating out the snow faction, because the snow faction cards were so bullshit you didn't even notice.
This of course caused lessons to be learned, but I think they were the wrong lessons. WotC learned the lesson that people thought Snow Lands were bullshit and they never made any more factional basic lands. Which is a shame, because I really think that's a pretty deep design space that could be a lot of fun.
AncientH:
I'm struggling to add anything to Frank's rant on the matter, because it really was a case where snow lands just weren't worth the pains of playing with them, and it didn't need to be that way. I mean, if you look at the Balduvian Conjurer:
Having a wizard that can basically turn any land into a Mishra's Factory Worker isn't terrible at all - overpriced, maybe, because at U it would make for a better pacing, but not bad. And they could have made more cards that gave you advantages to playing snow-covered lands. But instead...well, it reminds me of this:
I think part of the problem was that even though there were lots of cards in Ice Age, there probably weren't enough cards. Because they were trying to fill all the spell-niches for a standard deck and do all the work of an expansion set, and the result was that none of the mechanics was developed as much as they could have been.
FrankT:
Cards don't exist in isolation. Each card exists in a deck and it interacts with the other cards you draw and the cards your opponent has at their disposal. So card design only really makes sense in terms of the formats they are intended to be played in. If a card is Red or Blue, how is it supposed to work in the decks that are to be played that will have the Red or Blue mana to play it? These are complex and important questions. And it doesn't really look like the designers of Ice Age took much time pondering them. Cards in this set are mostly done up “story first,” and there doesn't seem to have been any attempt to support any particular play styles or builds.
Did anyone seriously think we were going to make Red stall decks?
There are demonstrable factions and they do... stuff. There are Krovikan wizards who are Black and Blue and there is the nation of Kjeldor that's White and Green. But you'll note that no one calls GW decks “Kjeldoran Decks” nor do they call UB decks “Krovikan Decks.” These don't happen because there's no attempt to sell the players on any kind of vision of what a deck of Kjeldoranites would look like.
These cards aren't terrible for the period. But there's no obvious synergy here. The Banding Deck, the Stalling Deck, and the Deathtouch deck aren't necessarily the same deck.
It doesn't help that the number of “coasters,” the term at the time for cards that were unplayably bad, was quite high.
I fucking love Drew Tucker's water colors, but there is no way in hell that you would ever attempt to play these cards.
AncientH:
I will say that this is an advancement over Fallen Empires, in that you have some cards that are patently designed to use or benefit other colors, and there is a plethora of "gold" cards, so you can tell that the designers were trying to encourage multi-color decks to play nice with each other - you'll notice that these cards almost all go for "companion colors," where Black allies with Red and/or Green, White with Blue and/or Green, etc. and they tried to follow this up a bit in Alliances, but it's equally clear that nobody was still thinking in terms of play style yet. It's the thematic issues of Fallen Empires all over again. The best we can say is that they meant well.
Man, I miss the Folios.
Aside: This matching flavor text isn't unique to Ice Age, but it does show that they were starting to get much better at it. It's a long way away from quoting classical literature in 4th edition to building your own fantasy world.
FrankT:
Ice Age is of course the place where we saw “Cantrips” really come into their own as a thing. A Cantrip is a card that replaces itself and does some other thing – in effect it costs mana but not a card slot. Technically, horse shit like Time Walk and Ancestral Recall were Cantrips, and Ice Age didn't have any keywords or standardized nomenclature for cantripping. So cantrips can't really have been said to be from this set in any meaningful way. But this is the set where the design team actually started noticing that card costs were a real thing and that cards could cost more or less “card” in addition to costing more or less of more numeric currencies like life points or mana. Most of the early Cantrips are... well... awful. Because while they had kind of wrapped their mind around card costs, they still hadn't really wrapped their mind around Tempo costs.
These cards use up too much of your turn for how little they actually do. Even though you end up having spent zero cards, it's still too slow to see play.
This is the modern version of Infuse. The turnaround is much faster, but it still only sees play in weird fringe cases.
AncientH:
To go into that a little more, it took the designers at Wizards of the Coast a while to work their way around the difference; you can sort of see that in Mirage with the "charm" cards that combine bundles of small effects for a low price. Ice Age cards are decidely weaker in that regard, usually only having some small, bullshit effect...and that was by design. Compare this:
Heal is the Ice Age answer to Healing Salve being determined to be overpowered; the card-draw bit was supposed to help alleviate what was otherwise a decidedly underpowered card. So they knew both that they were watering-down a card and that card draw was desirable, but they hand't really put the different mechanical repercussions together yet. Which is part of the reason why Blue has so many cantrip cards in Ice Age.
One thing Frank hasn't touched on (yet) but which I think deserves a bit of ranting is that Ice Age cards tend to be more complicated than their 4th ed. equivalents; it's not just that the optimum text size hadn't been decided yet, but so many Ice Age cards have just paragraphs of text. It's not a stripped-down set at all, rulewise, it's more like they approached a basic set with the mentality of an expansion set.
FrankT:
Next up: We go through the colors and talk about how much of the shaft they got.
AncientH:
I seriously miss when Magic cards were more impressionistic.
