Okay so this video is about Invasion
block, the first-ever block where the cards were designed around having a
bunch of colors but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the first time
multicolored cards appeared in Magic, and that was in Legends back in 1994. Legends
is uh well it's a little uneven. Some of the cards were stupidly good. Others were
bad beyond belief. The common thread the two groups of cards
shares that they're pretty underdeveloped. The cards are wordy but
not in a way that's particularly enjoyable. What Legends cards are - and
this is what helped make it one of the most revered sets of all time - is
evocative. They are cool! Nether Void is pure misery to play against but it's got
a vibe to it. Kobalds are pretty doofy but they're free. Presence of the Master
is a train wreck all its own, depicting a real-world human being that actually
walked the earth for dubious payoff. The multicolored cards are similarly
confusing. Famously based on Dungeons and Dragons characters created by Richard
Garfield classmates at Penn, the multicolored cards and legends weren't
exactly consistent. For example Kay Takahashi, a white green two two for
four prevents damage. Lady Caleria who is also white and green and is a
three six for six, deals damaged to attacking or blocking creatures. They
didn't really have color pair identities figured out at this point so they based
multicolored cards on things one of the colors did and went from there. I could
go deeper on the absurdity of the 90s but that's a topic for another day.
Invasion debuted in September 2001. Big sets hit in the fall back in the day,
just like they do now. Fun fact: Invasion was my first ever
prerelease. I kind of remember it. I was twelve so you know a few of the locals
kindly built my deck for me which I appreciate in hindsight. I remember a few
of the cards I had in my deck. I had an Elfame Palace, a Quirion Elves, and a Reya
Dawnbringer that I thought was the best card ever! My buddy Joe opened a foiled
Jade Leech, we all thought he was the luckiest dude on the planet which I mean
can you imagine getting excited about opening this card now? Guh! I mean look
at this cycle of cards. They're like Moxes but in reverse! Get it?
These are bad, but they give an idea of just how bad
creatures were back then. A one-three for one needed a drawback. Incredible!
Here's a cycle that really drove the multicolored midsts of Invasion home. By
current standards they are unplayable on rate but they also have a drawback built
in. These cards were designed to be splashed: you can't really play Halam
Djinn in a mono red deck. It needs to be the only red card in play or you need to
be either way ahead or way behind your opponent.
So the Djinns are either win more or lose less - not great! You'd never know it by
looking at the multicolored cards and legends but as we've mentioned in past
videos, restrictive mana costs are a way to justify printing more powerful cards
and forcing a two-color minimum on a card counts as a restriction. The actual
degree of restriction something like Fires of Yavimaya imposes is up for
debate but on paper it's harder to cast than Fervor is so it gets to do more stuff.
That philosophy extends to all the multicolored cards, hence the baseline
power level going up. When people talk about getting hyped for the next Ravnica or whatever the multicolored set is, that fact is where the hype is born
from. The other thing that sticks out in my mind from the Invasion pre-release is
that it was the first set with split cards and no one had any clue what they
were or what was happening. Everyone at my store thought they were printing
errors until the shop owner who was older and way better at Magic than
anyone else in the room calmly pointed out that the tournament pack came with a
little pamphlet inside that explained what split cards were how they worked
and that they were in fact awesome. But yeah this was way before the internet
became ubiquitous so there weren't things like preview seasons and
exclusive spoilers, you just got sets and sometimes you got two cards on one piece
of cardboard that made you think there had been a mistake at the printers. Who
among us hasn't experienced that old chestnut, am I right? I remember the chase
rares in Invasion pretty well. They're only fun to talk about because they're
so silly compared to the standards of rares these days. For example the most
expensive card in the set was this thing, which is hysterical because a lot of my
contemporaries were recently whining about Precision Bolt. Imagine Precision
Bolt but with the kicker cost of a bajillion and a $20 price tag and you
basically have Urza's Rage. No complaints though, this card was genuinely good back
then. Two more cards that were pretty sweet: Absorb and Undermine.
Undermine was a more expensive one especially after Psychatog came along
in Odyssey but this two card cycle did a good job clearly illustrating the
different directions that different colors can pull an idea toward. They
weren't particularly elegant but they were simple and they resonated with
people. The idea was easy to grok: the double blue part countered the spell but
with a different complementary color comes a different secondary effect.
Invasion was all about allied color pairs. If you don't know what those are
take a look at the back of a Magic card. All five colors are accounted for. Each
color has two colors next to it. Those colors are allies. The colors that aren't
next to it are enemy color pairs, and Invasion focused on allied pairs and
what each allied color combination should do with some clever reprints of
cards that did just that in the past. Did you know Fact or Fiction used to be
restricted in Vintage? That is true! That's really funny to think about.
Obviously its unrestricted now but yeah, Fact or Fiction used to be on the same
restricted list as Yawgmoth's Will, Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus etc Boy!
It was unrestricted in September 2011 but for ten years (at least four or five
too many) an Invasion card was restricted in Vintage. Like Undermine, Fact or Fiction
saw the most play in standard after Psychatog got printed but the thing
about Fact or Fiction is that it takes the skill difference between two players
and it lays it bare on the battlefield. If you're playing against someone newer
to Magic and you cast Fact or Fiction they might arrange the cards in a way
that basically ensures that they lose on the spot. There are more cards in
Invasion that involve making piles but the only one that saw any play was the
blue one you could play at instant speed. There hadn't been a Jokulhaups since,
well, Jokulhaups but Invasion featured the mother of all board sweepers:
Obliterate. What a card! Can't be countered, can't do anything about it for
the low low cost of eight mana all of everything can just go away. Once they
realize that people generally want to play their spells they stopped making
cards like this. What a shame right? The real stars of the show, so to speak, were
the primeval dragons of Dominaria harking back to the original elder
dragons from Legends. None of these cards saw a ton of play but remember: Invasion
came right after Prophecy and despite the fact that Prophecy is one of the
worst sets in the game, its cycles of rares resonated with the casual crowd.
With the primeval dragon cycle WotC attempted to bottle lightning twice, and
it was successful. You got to remember this was pre eldrazi. These dragons used to
pass as ginormous back then. Planeshift continued the allied color theme
but with some hosers strewn in. As we've noted before, Magic mechanics used to be
internally competitive within blocks. They were like that for a long time
which is shocking considering what a negative effect it has on gameplay, but
yeah Magic used to do that. Invasion rewarded lots and lots of colors and
Planeshift punished colors. It also rewarded lots of colors too but I don't
know, Planeshift was weird. The set didn't have much to offer competitive
play but there are a couple cards worth talking about, but before we get to the
good cards I would like to talk for a moment about Singe. Singe is my least
favorite card of all time. I hate it. I have no idea how it played out in
limited because Invasion block limited was stupidly complex and I was 11 when
Planeshift came out. All I know is that I didn't get why Singe had to exist. I
hate to bring up the whining about Precision Bolt again but I ask you,
person complaining about Precision Bolt for engagements on social media, why
don't you try opening Singes and Aurora Griffins in a booster pack and then get
back to me about the acceptable level of crap a Magic card should be? Do you know
how many Sea Snidds I could have killed if I had Precision Bolts instead of
stupid Singe? The thought of it literally keeps me awake at night.
But enough about the cards that haunted me when I was in sixth grade. Let's get
to the good stuff Planeshift had to offer.
Meddling Mage isn't known for its tournament pedigree but it's currently
dominating modern as the part of the human deck. that makes it good against
combo. Terminate's a player in modern - albeit in jund which we all know is not
a real deck anymore no matter how badly you want it to be. When Planeshift
first came out, Quirion Dryad was busted in extended, a format that was
kind of like how legacy is now but doesn't really exist anymore, and vintage.
There weren't enough cheap card draw spells and reliable mana fixing to make
the card very good in standard but Quirion Dryad alongside Gushes fueled
by Tropical Islands made for big creatures really quickly.
Quirion Dryad decks went by the moniker Miracle Grow back in the day, even though
literal miracles wouldn't be a thing in Magic for another 11 years after Planeshift
hit. The Planeshift card I probably cast the most personally is
Phyrexian Scuta. It's like Juzam Djinn but easier to cast and this drawback is
upfront. Phyrexian Scuta is awesome. I know Juzam Djinn cooler and its
art is better but I don't care. Scuta never let me down. He was my best
friend. But it's hard to argue that the most influential Planeshift card isn't
Flametongue Kavu, or FTK as it was known back in the day. Were there cards like
FTK before I came along? Sure. Nekrataal is a pretty obvious
comparison point, Ukatabi Orangutan, Cloudchaser Eagle, and even Man O'War
are similar but none of those present very threatening clocks. FTK on the other
hand is a Giant Cockroach. Only five hits from that thing and you're dead! Its impact
on players is clear to me. When Ravenous Chupacabra was revealed during Rivals of
Ixalan preview season it wasn't referred to by players as another Nekrataal. It was another FTK! Which brings us to Apocalypse. Conventional wisdom states
that third sets are usually pretty bad: they are the house guest that has
overstayed their welcome. By the time a third set rolls around, everything's
wrote. The setting is boring, the mechanics are stale. Apocalypse is the
exception to the third set rule. This set was awesome! Maybe part of it is that the
flavor of the two sets actually built towards something and Apocalypse was the
culmination of all of it. This is barely scratching the surface of the lore stuff
but the Weatherlight saga that began in Weatherlight wrapped up with Apocalypse
and by extension the story of Urza and the entire brothers war stuff that
kicked off in friggin Antiquities. It all ends in Apocalypse so you could say
there was a lot of pressure on Apocalypse to be a proper send-off and I
think it was. Instead of honing the functions of allied color pairs
established in Invasion and Planeshift, Apocalypse flipped the script
and shone a spotlight on enemy color pairs instead and in so doing completed
a cycle of lands from six years earlier. Players were pretty hype about the
callback to Ice Age but this is just the tip of the iceberg of sweet cards
Apocalypse had to offer. I had to start here. It's impossible to quantify
why exactly Spiritmonger rules but I'm gonna give it a shot. The art is
difficult to parse but it's weirdly satisfying anyway. It looks like
something out of Hell Boy. Let's talk about the rate. This thing is a six six
for five with no drawback. That was straight-up
unheard of 17 years ago. I opened a SpiritMonger at the Apocalypse
pre-release and thanks to the wonderful gift of hindsight I can confirm beyond a
shadow of a doubt that it was a life-altering event. I know I liked Magic
at that point but opening Spiritmonger, Devouring Strossus,
and Blazing Specter and kicking people's teeth in with my rares, that is when
Magic sunk its teeth into me for life. I love how clean this card is. It's a
one-word name, the art's simple, the rules text is just three words and the flavor
text is straight and to the point. A representation of the moment the
reluctant hero avid flavor text readers love to hate for half a decade finally
embrace the events Urza set in motion for him millennia ago. It also
helped that the card was extremely good at the time totally unlike any card
printed before it. Just a clean answer to anything. One of the rare times in Magic
where form matched function. When Apocalypse hit, Pernicious Deed was
correctly identified right away as ludicrously powerful and still sees
fringe play in legacy to this day. The place you're most likely to see it these
days though is in cube drafts. Unlike Vindicate and Pernicious Deed,
Prophetic Bolt didn't really break new ground. It was just a Lightning Blast and
an Impulse stapled together but that's pretty good!
Similarly, Suffocating Blast wasn't a groundbreaking card that did something
new but not all cards have to be that you know? Sometimes a hyper-efficient
two-for-one is all you really need. The truth is I could go on about Apocalypse
and Invasion block forever but I can't so instead I'll point out that I write a
newsletter for TCGplayer every week and if you want to subscribe to that the
links in the description. Let us know what your favorite old-school block is
and then like and subscribe to the TCGplayer channel because y'all are
basically the reason we get to do this. With that said thank you so much for
watching and I will see you next time!
