The Dark l The Resleevables #6 l Magic: The Gathering History MTG


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Cedric Phillips and Patrick Sullivan are here for their deep dive on Magic’s fourth expansion — The Dark! The duo dissect Magic’s …

48 replies
  1. Derek Campbell
    Derek Campbell says:

    Diabolic Machine makes me think you should have a shout out or award section to reprints with new art because as good as Diabolic Machine is in the dark, the reprint art was legit enthralling for me when I first started playing. Deserves recognition. Maybe Cedric and Patric do a better or worse run down for new art reprint during Trivia when they become more common.

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  2. JaySay63
    JaySay63 says:

    I wish that I had played magic way back when, or even saw/collected some of the old cards, because when I got into magic I was always more into the art of the individual cards, and loved the beautiful landscapes, action scenes, etc… that were shown.
    I would have loved to have my hands on some cards from The Dark, with its horror themes and malevolent atmosphere. I think the only card from The Dark that I ever came across was Fountain of Youth!

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  3. Rothbox
    Rothbox says:

    Love the video. I thought I caught a mistake when you said water wurm was the only blue wurm. Reef Worm is a "worm" and not a wurm and you are 100% right. Love the research, love the insight, keep it up.

    Reply
  4. Raisins
    Raisins says:

    Patrick's bit at the end about how most people end up experiencing sets really hit for me. I have never "properly" experienced The Dark but for a long long time just thumbing through some of its art and designs either on scryfall or in person, it always resonated so well with me. I love the eclectic Halloween vibe everything has, I can't justify playing most of the cards but it makes me like looking at them.

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  5. Paolo Nicola Cerea
    Paolo Nicola Cerea says:

    I am Italian and I 100% confirm that The Dark was the first expansion we had. The Italian distributor Stratelibri wanted us to have the current expansion first, then go back and retrieve the previous one. Italian Legends was released in late 1995, right before Ice Age in Italy, which came in 1996.

    Safe Haven was "good" at the time, since being an interrupt effect you could use it to save a creature from lethal damage during the damage prevention step before it was actually destroyed (for those who remember the pre-6th Ed. rules).

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  6. Daniel Millen
    Daniel Millen says:

    The Dark was designed solely by Jesper Myrfors in the space of one month.
    He was the art director at the time.
    After Legends they were so busy trying to fix Revised with the Summer Magic edition and were working on Fallen Empires. At one point Jesper noticed they hadn’t created an expansion set for summer release so he got cracking.
    The card designs in this set were from a very rushed time schedule more so than from any take on design philosophy.
    This story is very easy to corroborate on line and I’ve even spoken with Jesper personally on the topic.

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  7. Pino Bluevogel
    Pino Bluevogel says:

    I'm only six minutes in and I already feel like this is going to be a series / channel definitely worth watching. (or listening podcast style) The editing quality, sound quality and professional narration / back and forth is excellent. Love the loose sports style banter between you guys, with almost a kind of play by play and color commentator setup going on. Thanks for posting, looking forward to more sets and picking up the ones that I missed!

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  8. Ladorb
    Ladorb says:

    Mulligan was only allowed with no land hands and all land hands. We had a local rule at my game shop that we called "sketchy land mulligan" wich allowed us to mulligan 1-landers.

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  9. WLDFLD
    WLDFLD says:

    loved this ep! so many great & clever insights.
    for best limited card, if we're talking triple The Dark, i say Ghost Ship. It's unbeatable in combat even without regeneration, and almost no noncreatures can deal with it either.

    Reply
  10. bekeleven
    bekeleven says:

    My vote for weirdest card in the set is blood moon.

    We don't think of it as weird now, but keep in mind that making a land "into a mountain" is different from the following:

    – Giving a land a land type
    – Giving a creature a creature type

    There's sections in the Comprehensive Rules that exists pretty much only for blood moon (and a few cards based on it). They specify that you can make a land into a mountain and there's a bunch of rules baggage that doesn't apply in other circumstances.

    Some of this, obviously, is present-day rules cruft. However, Blood Moon has been a rules nightmare at every stage of its existence, from changing interactions with shocks, to aether hub, to wasteland – The card has way more going on under the hood than you'd think from four words of rules text.

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  11. Pietari Majuri
    Pietari Majuri says:

    Regarding Goblin Rock Sled: Wizards seems to have rule in place nowadays that if there is a supported creature type in the name of a creature, the creature must be of that type, to prevent confusion. This is why Putrid Warrior, for example, with the original typeline of Soldier Zombie, is nowadays a Zombie Soldier Warrior.

    Goblin Rock Sled is nowadays a goblin.

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  12. dcnole
    dcnole says:

    For MTG boomers, one of the great things about the Dark is that it's a really easy vintage set to collect even now, Small number of cards. No $500 or $1000+ cards. Lots of great art and good memories. As an Ice Age/4th Ed. MTG debutant, finding cards from the Dark in trade piles was always exciting to 15 year old.

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  13. Evan Sunn
    Evan Sunn says:

    Thanks guys. Been listening and reading ya since StarCity Opens. Your friendship and approach have kept my attention as formats have come and gone. Very glad to have 're'-discovered you

    Reply
  14. Hermod Nitter
    Hermod Nitter says:

    As a little more input on the lore, a fun fact is that Rasputin Dreamweaver (from Legends) aided Tivadar and the Knights of Thorn in temporarily restoring civilization to Terisiare by throwing back the Goblin Invasions with their Crusade. They led a campaign against the goblins and orcs of Terisiare, which brought a close to the Dark Age. Tivadar is only depicted through the card Tivadar's Crusade in The Dark, but later got his own card in Time Spiral. Also, the new card "Rasputin, the Oneiromancer" from the Legends Retold cards in Dominaria United, shows Rasputin between two Knights of Thorn. And also provides goblins to your opponents, so that they can be destroyed. Maximum flavor here!

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  15. espeon200
    espeon200 says:

    “I’m the person who would tell you it’s a rock sled.” Is the quote that sums up why I love this dynamic and this series so much. Keep up the awesome content.

    Reply
  16. Idiot Doom Spiral
    Idiot Doom Spiral says:

    I love this set. So many cards are super lame and the set went all around the place on in way too many aspects in my opinion, but the themes, the printing and the Art combinations will always be a big win for me. Plus it's also attached to the witch hunt those freaking evangelists and ultra cathos brought upon D&D and more generally RPGs and MTG and basically anything they thought would be an easy target for their despicable way of "thinking". The "Seasons of the witch" part of the nineties.
    Plus this crescent moon on card like Elves of deep shadow or Blood Moon could be the perfect combination I have ever experimented on a Magic card. Homerun. Nearly 30 years after I cherish these cards so much. Huge nostalgia part for sure, but there's way more, the way they presented White to us was like a reminiscence of the early Renaissance then Religion/ 30 years wars. Sexist, xenophobic and intolerant
    Fallen Empires coming, wow that's a thing! Cheers <3

    Reply
  17. Peter Dierauer
    Peter Dierauer says:

    Here's how Maro describes the term Strictly Better.

    Strictly Better – Either a card that's identical to another card but at a lower mana cost or a card at the same mana cost with all the rules text plus additional (positive) rules text. For example, Goblin Chariot (2R 2/2 with haste) is strictly better than Gray Ogre (a 2/2 with no rules text). With over 20,000 cards in existence, you can almost always find an example of how any one card is better than another. For instance, Gray Ogre doesn't die to Tivadar's Crusade (it destroys all Goblins), but R&D uses the term if, in almost all practical cases, it's better.

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  18. ArmadilloAl
    ArmadilloAl says:

    Re: The Dark adding reminder text to multicolor cards–Remember that Legends had a rules card in every pack covering the new rules, and this rules card included a paragraph stating the multicolored cards counted as each color.

    The Dark didn't have rule cards, and at this point they couldnt assume everyone buying The Dark had also seen or bought Legends packs, so they must have felt the need to put that reminder text on the cards themselves.

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  19. BigBand
    BigBand says:

    Been looking forward to this episode since I first saw the ABU episode. I'm a very new player and was looking through sea creatures to add to my merfolk deck and saw the original leviathan, I was mesmerized. Glad to see it got mentioned at least for being a very big boy.

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  20. Stephen Wood
    Stephen Wood says:

    While the math on Mana Clash is certainly way too hard for me to figure out, it's pretty straightforward to write a program to simulate it being run. If both players start at 20 life, each one has a 0.018197% chance of being the only player to reach 0 or less life, and both players reach 0 or less life 0.012078% of the time. This was found over 100 million simulations
    Put another way, if you cast Mana Clash on turn 1, you have a 0.018197% chance to win the game, 0.018197% to lose the game, and a 0.012078% to tie the game

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  21. B. H. Abbott-Motley
    B. H. Abbott-Motley says:

    Dance of Many deserves some love. It's one of the cheapest ways to copy a creature in the game, on par with Phantasmal Image in that regard. It also has a number of amusing combos & fun interactions, such being able to copy itself an arbitrary number of times if Opalescence is on the field.

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