I've put together a reboot of MTG Alpha:
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/alpha-rebooted
This is pretty similar to the simplicity cubes, but in this one I'm thinking of it more like an actual MTG set list. In its current form, it has too many cards for an actual set, but I think the list is finally interesting enough to at least bump my cube thread.
I started playing back in 1994 when Revised edition was still widely available. I busted a number of Revised boosters and starters, and I remember how much fun it was to see a rare that I hadn't ever seen before. For example, the first time I ever saw
Nevinyrral's Disk was when I pulled one in a pack. I was in disbelief the first time I read the text. I had to reread it a couple of times to convince myself that my blue deck could now blow everything up in a way that I thought only a white deck could. And blow up the board I did, many times...
With this set, I'm imagining a bit of that thrill of seeing new cards and realizing that Magic has some surprising effects on the rare cards like doubling your mana, killing any tapped creature, or taking an extra turn. So I've paid attention to the distribution of rares and the types of rares that I included.
I also wanted to put at least some of the original themes from Alpha. I have tribes, a few auras, and more artifacts than a normal set. I saw fit to include a handful of the original cards, but mostly they weren't what I wanted. I included a few defenders, but no walls. No color hosers - there just aren't very many color hosing cards that appeal to me. So yes, there are aspects of alpha that I've completely abandoned.
Many of the cards that we've gotten over the last 30 years look like the
could have been in Alpha. That includes cards like
Blinding Mage,
Skilled Animator,
Gravedigger,
Wildfire, and
Rampant Growth. I wanted these types of cards as much as possible, with regular fantasy flavor and no references to legends and planeswalkers.
I am keeping a typical (for me) set of simplicity requirements here. I left out stuff that I would be saving for future sets. Legendary cards and gold cards don't come out until legends. Split cards didn't show up until Invasion. And so on. I obviously went with a different set of inaugural keywords than the real Alpha Edition, but it's similarly limited.
Alpha only has one card that makes tokens (
The Hive) and only three cards received +1/+1 counters. But I used more cards with those features, because they have become so ubiquitious that they're hard to avoid, and they're not very hard to grok. I did limit the types of tokens.
I'd like to keep everything to a 2015 frame, but I allowed in a few 2003 that I really wanted in the list.
Anyway, this was a project was chance to try to correct some of the mistakes of the first few editions. And there were so many!
The worst mistake, in my opinion, was watering down White with ten ward and circle of protection cards - yuck! White deserves better. There are some other striking problems, too. For example, blue has just three common creatures, none of which would ever be included in a modern day set. I can tell you from experience that if you were just starting out as a blue player, it was a bummer that you had to put
Phantasmal Terrain in your deck so you could attack with your
Sea Serpents and various other creatures with "islandhome." My signature plays were to walk in with t
Fishliver Oil on a fat creature or to use
Animate Artifact on
Aladdin's Lamp, because that's what I had. It was sick tech.
Other mistakes are bad cards that didn't need to be there or overpowered cards that overshadowed everything else. I tried to fix some of that.
There are imbalances that I'm aware of, and I'd like but I'm getting closer. Among other things, I've looked at the elo balance, now that CubeCobra lets you sort by that. This is an imperfect metric, but the results are interesting. That made me improve the power of red, because it was lagging. If you haven't ever sorted your cube by color and then by elo as a secondary sort, that might be worth a look.
Anyway, enjoy if you take a peek. If you think of any cards that would be great for this project, please post.
