Subject: magic-rarity Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 17:02:21 +0100 From: "Øydis Pedersen" To: "Frank \"The Dojo\" Kusumoto" , Last night i for some reason got to think about the cards in Rathcykle I still need. Then it hit me, the big reason that people are complaining that magic is getting boring. A few years ago, during revised, the environment wasn't as competetive as it is today. Deck weren't as tuned, combos as optimal as they are today. Bad cards (by todays standard) found their way into winning decks, and I mean cards that realy sucked (you know what I mean). Nowadays, you got to have 4 of every major card. And that's just becouse players make better decks. Competition. But thats all right, so we have to buy more cards. WOTC can't do anything about it. But there is a second problem, that they can fix: In revised several of the best cards were uncommon: serra, sengir, StP, tutor, counterspell, sol ring, the knights. I know, braingayser, ballance and several other powercards were rare, BUT THEY WERE RESTRICTED. The serendibs and duals were hard to get, but green and red commondecks were powerfull. The rathcycle took the level of creaturepower to new levels. Mogg fantastic, tradewind, jackal pup. But the rathcycle was also crammed of powerrares, while the number of NEW (not reprinted) playable commons dropped (compared to MirViLight). So, I tried to count the number of cards from rathcycle that frequently see play, including rathcontructed. Feel free to do your own counting. The point isn't the exact numbers, but rather the overall ditribution. Played in maindeck sidebord Rare 32 8 Uncommon 20 11 Common 17 2 Hopefully WOTC will change this during US, printing better commons and holding back on the powerrares. Yes, it sucks to get a bad rare, but the tournament environment sucks even more when everyone's got to have moxes, cursed scrolls and tradewinds. janusz maxe