MTG Extended 1997 | Hacker News Reader

MTG Extended 1997

fabiensanglard.net

79 pointsibobev61 comments

Now we are talking. I just want to let anyone curious enough to get dragged into the rabbit hole... we are still playing these cards!

There are 2 main nostalgia formats, Oldschool 93/94 and Premodern. Here are some links:

- http://oldschool-mtg.blogspot.com

- https://premodernmagic.com

- https://www.coolstuffinc.com/a/michaelflores-05182022-north-...

- https://www.wak-wak.se

- https://alltingsconsidered.com

Find your way to discord, podcasts and eventually your local clubs and join us in the MTG Underground.

Interesting that they chose to use modern rules for premodern. I recently tried to play my oldschool Rock and Madness decks against one of my rather weak standard decks and got absolutely trounced. Partly due to power creep of course, but the rules change made these decks obsolete. I still find premodern intriguing, but it seems like the meta there can not be the same as it was before mirrodin.

Yes its not the same. For example a Mishra's Factory can block and then tap itself to pump and blocks as a 3/3. This was not the case back in the day.

I still very much prefer modern rules compared to the message they were in the early to mid 90s

I agree the modern rules are better.

Mogg Fanatic was massively nerfed in the modern rules though, which is sad, because it was such an iconic part of the monored deck. (It used to be able to sac itself and deal 1 in combat trade)

I played Tempest block, I remember! But it's still good enough nowadays to see play in the Sligh deck of Premodern

Back when the stack had been introduced to the game rules, and combat damage still used the stack to resolve/apply, is when the rules were the most fun to me.

No card has ever been nerfed as hard as that.

> we are still playing these cards! There are 2 main nostalgia formats, Oldschool 93/94 and Premodern.

A bunch of those cards still get played in the eternal formats and commander. Old magic had extremely weak creatures, but absolutely busted cards in other types.

For instance Necropotence is restricted in vintage, and banned in legacy.

Still hilarious to me seeing Ironclaw Orcs in there, when a 2/2 for 1R had to have a drawback, compared to the absolutely absurd power level of even red 1-drops now. I understand the rationale over the years of re-centering the game on creatures and so pushing their power level, but it does result in a lot of very dull Standard metagames (e.g. right now).

I've always had a deck that was famous for being able to drop a Craw Wyrm (4GG) 6/4 in turn 3. Later, the Yavimaya Wyrm (4GG) 6/4 Trample meant I had to replace that iconic card. Much more recently, I bought my son a box with cards, and his deck has an Aggressive Mammoth (3GGG) 6/6 Trample but gives all your other creatures trample too!

Modern creatures are just so much better than anything we had back then. But my red/blue direct damage deck is suddenly unfair with its lightning bolts and cheap counterspells.

Big creatures were overpriced in the beginning. Most of the creatures that cost more than 3 in Legends were underpowered

True. Some cheap old creatures still see a lot of play: birds, elves, the merfolk lords for example.

They mostly see it in tribal or for mana or oddball abilities though. Old magic really over-estimated stats and combat abilities, you’d get heavy downsides on anything even passing the vanilla test (cf mogg jailer or mogg squad), especially out of color. And under-estimated fast mana and card draw.

They were in a slow deck, but my big green deck could get them on the table fast enough to win. I think it was mostly the 3/3 creatures for 4 mana that were a poor deal. But it's not like in the 1990s nobody used creatures, or spell-focused decks always won, but I guess the recent changes do give creatures the more central role they were always meant to have.

Yeah, the big-creature decks I recall that didn't suck from that era were green.

Black had great mana advantage too, but Mind-twist and Hymn were both better ways to spend it.

You want to see broken old stuff? Anything involving mana:

https://scryfall.com/search?q=mana

The thing that frustrates me is that there are so many creatures that you have to remove or they basically end the game in 2-3 turns, alongside a bunch of creatures that provide value even if removed. That means removal is "bad" but you still need a certain amount (~6-8 minimum) or you'll just outright lose a lot of games to a single card. It makes the game feel like paper rock scissors + a coin flip, with maybe one or two decision points (one of which may be your choice to mulligan) being the limit of your player agency.

Yes of course. What I meant was more of the sort, we are still "exclusively" playing these cards.

Non-sanctioned formats and mostly at pubs :)

Old magic had strong creatures too, e.g. Serra Angel and Sengir Vampire.

They are very weak for today's standards, while many of the spells are still extremely strong (bannably so).

They were very strong for the time, these days?

Essentially none of them is playable in any constructed format (unless they’re an oddball for an oddball deck). Compare Serra and Baneslayer, and that’s a 10 years old card, and keeping to non-legendaries (for legendaries see Ao the dawn sky).

Meanwhile many non-creature spells are strong enough to be restricted or banned.

The Walletslayer itself has been power creeped out of playability.

Serra Angel already became a draft deck uncommon when I last played over 10 years ago. Even creatures that were banned on this articles list for 1.5 wouldn't be particularly strong by 2012 standards.

I came back to MTG a few years ago and these 2 formats hit my sweet spot right in the center!

The only drawback is the cost of the cards, but some communities allow proxies.

Might be the nostalgia, but there is something beautiful in the apparently simple and yet complex old cards.

I'm nihilistic.tutor in case you see me somewhere come say hi

And if they don’t allow proxies, they are not worth the time it takes to shuffle up and play with them.

Give MTG Arena a try. It's not the same feel/experience as in person, but still fun, convenient, don't have to spend to build (can win packs/wildcards to get what you need), and have multiple play formats.

This is awesome. Underground is right, I had never done across this before.

I played Mtg starting around 1995 until 2001. I've often thought about getting back into it but I also knew I was drawn for a nostalgia of the game that doesn't exist in the modern context. I recently found Flesh & Blood and found it interesting though I didn't commit to buying and playing. I'll be checking this out for sure, though.

In a similar vein, I've recently moved my DnD over from 5e to primarily OSR play and it's completely reinvigorated my love of the game.

Chicago has an excellent scene for nostalgia MTG. We play a variety of old school formats and have a 93/94/95 event coming up in October. Most events put entry toward a charity (if there is any entrance fee) and are held at pubs around Chicago. Check out Eternal Central[0] for rules and some past event coverage and our local club page, The Lords of the Pit[1]. One thing slightly different about the Chicago (and Midwestern USA scenes in general) is friendliness toward proxies, esp hand drawn/painted versions. New players always welcome!

[0] https://www.eternalcentral.com/

[1] https://lordsofthepit.com/

I’ve always been sad that while MTGO does throwback draft formats, it never seems to offer old block constructed or Standard environments. Seems like it would be possible and if the prizes were right probably quite popular.

Also I will die repeatedly on this hill, but I hate that ‘Sligh’ came to be the name for any mono-red burn deck with a semblance of a manacurve, as opposed to the original anti-Necro weenie-control deck. I learned more about fundamental Magic theory from that deck than any other: yes the manacurve, but also the importance of board position, resource denial, different forms of card advantage like Orcish Artillery etc. It was such an elegant approach to the metagame at the time and so much subtler than just dealing 20 as fast as possible.

It’s done Flashback Standard a few times, with preconstructed decks. I forget whether you have a choice over decks. They’re really fun if you have the nostalgia, but for newer players who want know, for example, what Affinity or Caw-Blade Standard was like, I don’t think they’re that enjoyable.

Occasionally MODO does offer throwback constructed. It did a few years ago with Tempest (mono-blue Capsize format). The problem is that formats tend to be solved by the end of the year, and nobody really wants to play a solved format.

Limited is different because even though it tends to have very defined archetypes, there's still variance in the draft or deck construction part, unless the format is badly broken like 3xZEN or 3xAKH.

> ‘Sligh’ came to be the name for any mono-red burn deck

Did it? A generic mono-red is most often just called "mono-red". Sligh does imply a denial theme. Also, modern aggressive decks tend to incorporate more complexity (see the steamkin/frenzy decks), they're not really 7x Lava Spike.

Well, for example the deck in the post. No true Sligh player would play a Ball Lightning because it's card disadvantage. It was used for a long time for "red deck with a mana curve", but all decks respect the mana curve now so maybe it's fallen out of favour.

Depends on the available card pool and other considerations, decks don't exist in a vacuum, they live and die in a metagame. You wouldn't usually play it, no, but it can occasionally be useful. More often than not you have better options.

My favorite example is how Infect in Mirrodin/M12/Innistrad Standard used to sideboard Melira. Its only purpose was to kill an opposing Melira (this was with the old legend rule). Would you normally play that card? No. Would you situationally play that card? Yes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ve found it very interesting to compare Garfield’s game to those of another prolific Baird game designer, Reiner Knizia. They’re both doctorate level mathematicians, and I think this shows on the structure of many of their games.

I gave up on MTG very early on when I saw people who really couldn’t afford it drop hundreds, and even thousands of pounds into the game. Still, it’s a fascinating design well worth playing, and early era formats like this look like a great way to enjoy the game without getting sucked into a pay to win cycle.

It’s been interesting to me getting dragged into things like Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokémon now I have kids of my own. I find them hugely inelegant compare to Magic, and I’ve always struggled to get into modern board games because they have so many moving parts and different resources. I always liked that in Magic you brought a deck and we’re good to go.

I do take the point about the expense… although I also wish I’d invested in duals when I was 14, whatever the cost then.

You can play “draft” at your local store most weeks; you buy three packs worth of cards, and build a deck (no bringing in OP cards from outside).

Early era stuff is not really an improvement in terms of affordability: while you do avoid needing to keep up with rotations, the initial investment can be huge as the older cards are in general very expensive. To the extent that most groups who play eternal formats actively encourage proxying (printing your own cards)

My local game store began hosting Pauper games, which is an eternal format where only common cards are allowed. Due to the age of some of the legal cards it can still get "expensive", but top meta decks can be bought for about 50€ including sleeves. It's a great way to make the game accessible for everyone.

Funny how I can look at these zoomed out decks from 20 years ago and know exactly what every card does. The sets featured here are burned into my brain.

Lots of great MtG memories from the sets featured in this blog post. I had many similar decks back in the day.

Unfortunately, Wizards reprint ban killed old magic.

The reprint ban means a vintage deck will cost over $100,000 using the "cheap" Unlimited cards and somewhere around $500,000-1,000,000 using just Alpha cards.

Even going to Legacy, the cheapest (heavily-played) lands that you need are $300-400 (almost double for good-condition). You need 15-20 of these for most decks which is $4,000-12,000 just in lands before considering any other cards.

You can switch to digital MTG for cheaper prices, but you'll still spend thousands on cards you don't actually own.

I don't play legacy, but because of fetches, I wouldn't expect you to need more than 2-3 duals, right?

Optimally a lot of decks will have 4 fetches if they are dual colored, and 10+ if they are multicolored. You could have a single fetch and some shocks to save money but you'll lose some percentage of games from the damage.

risky when Wasteland is a thing, and decks run way to make it come back and loop.

Yes but the perfect manabase and the synergy with brainstorm make it up for it. At least, form some quick unscientific investigation it seems that many legacy decks run more fetches than duals.

Wizards may have killed old magic, but my printer and the plethora of proxy sites are slowly bringing it back to life.

I'd note that this is copyright infringement and also unusable in tournaments.

They didn’t, the current WotC team is killing magic by killing competitive formats.

I definitely meet many new players who would aim for the holy grail of owning a dual lands and other old cards. Without them, magic is dead.

My first old school deck (B/u aggro with dark ritual, black knight, hypnotic specter, sengir vampire, etc and recall, walk, and psionic blast from blue) cost me $60 off tcgplayer. I took acetone to some misc commons and made proxies for dual lands, city of brass, strip mine, and power. Nobody batted an eye about my hand drawn proxies in the MTG Underground of the Midwest. I've seen Kinkos printed decks, 75 card proxied decks, no power, as well as fully powered, signed, and altered decklists. We're there to hangout and play games, not gatekeep whether you show up with a down payment on a house in a deck box.

I bought a "deck" of counterfeit "proxies" of a bunch of the best old mtg cards from AliExpress. Once I have enough friends that would be into it, I'd love to organize an alpha booster draft that includes the moxes and timewalks and demonic tutors.

I played MtG during the 1990s. Not at tournaments or anything, just at the university. My decks had generally been fairly standard (with my fast-big green that would often play a Craw Wyrm in turn 3 as my staple). At some point I got a bit annoyed at all these new game-breaking cards that people used to build game-breaking decks, so I went to look for a game-breaking card to build a deck around, and I found the Tombstone Stairwell.

I still have that Tombstone Stairwell deck, and it's nuts. It's a bit fragile because it's easy to disrupt if you can counter or disenchant, but when it gets going, it's marvelous to behold. It has tons of cheap black creatures that die easily, the Tombstone Stairwell that creates zombies for every creature in my graveyard (every turn of every player again and again, which makes this even more effective in multiplayer), and lots of stuff to sacrifice creatures to. Ashnod's Altar and Soul Net can rapidly give me ridiculous amounts of life, which Necropotence turns into more cards in hand. Fallen Angel for big killing blows. Sadistic Glee to pump up any other creature for a killing blow. Or I just swamp them in an endless mass of zombies of course.

But if you can just counter that Tombstone Stairwell, I'm a bit stuck. Well, as a black weenie deck it's not bad either.

8 out of 10 photos are worth more than a used car, for those not in the know. Loved the nostalgia kick, odd too, not seeing many magic related posts on HN and having gotten out my box a couple nights ago. Great array of decks!

About 90 seconds after I closed this tab I discovered this "Magic the Gathering 1997 (Shandalar)" tutorial video that introduces Rhea Seahorn from Better Call Saul.

Wow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jp4tMSIr_U

Given the value of some of these cards (alpha/beta duals) I'd actually be wary to play these decks. My way of shuffling leaves the card a little bent after a while.

If these were actual alpha/beta dual lands, they'd easily be worth more than a decent new car. Given that some of them are collector's edition cards (sharp corners), it's unclear whether the other cards are real or just had their corners clipped.

Shout out to Canadian highlander! it's a 1v1 format where you play with a 100 card singleton deck with 20 life, so aggro is viable. The power levels of the decks are checked by points system and not a banlist. It's a format where Time Vault sometimes kills at turn 3, but players are still terrified by a Goblin Guide on turn one.

Is this a software that generates these pictures from a deck list, with all the cards neatly aligned? I see similar ones here:

https://www.eternalcentral.com/old-school-magic-93-94-all-in...

Look at the pictures of sample hands in the link you posted. From the position of the hand and fingers it's unlikely they are software generated, but they have the same "neat" aesthetic as the other pictures.

I think what you're seeing is just pictures taken by someone with attention to detail.

Yea it takes a while but I have a playmat to guide.

Also, the Lightning bolt is wrong in the upper left corner (https://fabiensanglard.net/mtg_extended_1997/deck_necro2.png) but it gives a little "artisanal" feel to the overall so I am going to leave it this way.

One friend of mine has what we've called "The battle box". It contains 11 decks with only cards printed in Ravnica related sets (the decks are guild themed except one that is 5 color portals). We are MTG diehards and we always have a blast playing this non-competitive yet fun format.

I played extended in 1997 and it was fantastic. Four necro in one deck was broken but I loved it.

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