The Dark | The Resleevables #6 | Magic: The Gathering History MTG
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- čas přidán 22. 07. 2024
- Cedric Phillips and Patrick Sullivan are here for their deep dive on Magic's fourth expansion - The Dark!
The duo dissect Magic's most unique world yet, with their thoughts on The Dark's horror tropes, the set's lack of new mechanics, and why Blood Moon was actually a good idea to print back in 1994.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
3:33 Facts
9:15 Lore
13:51 Mechanics
23:24 Cycles
37:27 Trivia
1:08:18 Awards Show
1:22:23 Final Grade
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Sponsors:
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Credits:
Directed by: Jonathan Choi
Produced by: Cedric Phillips and Jonathan Choi
Edited by: Jonathan Choi
Written by: Cedric Phillips and Patrick Sullivan
Graphics by: Ray Dill
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Information sourced from MagicTheGathering.com, TheSideboard.com, MTGWiki.com and numerous conversations with previous and current Magic players
#theresleevables #mtg #podcast #magicthegathering #commander #mtgcommander #mtgstandard #mtgmodern #mtglegacy #mtgvintage #mtghistoric #mtgalchemy - Hry
Their editor deserves a pay raise.
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.
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
That's "common" enough (approximately 1 in 5495 chance of winning for each player) that had this somehow become a popular part of the meta, we definitely would have heard stories about it happening! 🤣
I love how white’s philosophy was expanded in this set. My favorite part of Magic’s setup is that all 5 colors can be good and all 5 colors can be evil. There’s a direct line between Holy Light and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite.
Not all villains wear black … and not all heroes wear white.
Patrick out here practicing his defense of "The Dark" arts
Imagine the grief when you activate Flood to tap your opponent's Whippoorwill.
Shut that bird down!
A few comments and a small story I thought people would enjoy -
1. I'm loving this series even more on video. I was playing back then and really appreciate Patrick's insights into how the designs are interesting, even if the power level of the cards isn't.
2. I swear I have read in several places that the idea behind Blood Moon was to...wait for it... enable Mountainwalk. But my search-fu is weak right now and I can't find it.
3. When The Dark came out, the LCS owner collected four of every red card and that was it. Dark wasn't as rare as Legends, but still not in plentiful supply, so he didn't open any for himself. But myself and another person got a couple boxes each. He made us a deal, if we pooled our cards together and gave him four of each Red card from the set, we would each get a Beta Mox Ruby. An hour or so later of going back and forth over who would put in what to make it even between us, we walked away with our Rubies. Mine was played to death, with even a corner peeling off, before being lost to time when my collection was stolen at the Tempest prerelease.
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.*
Judging for the win channel answered a 28 years old question regarding Blood moon vs Conversion... When I starteded mtg, people would laugh at me for just asking the question, because it never happened (But could not answer it)
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.
John’s editing was fantastic
Any chance of the show becoming weekly?? I just can’t get enough!!
Unfortunately not, as the research + filming + editing is not a short process.
@@TheResleevablesthe quality is worth the wait. This stuff won't age at all.
“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.
Adding to the Elves - it's also cool that enchantment and creature tell the story together. Elves sacrifice life for dark magic - how do they offset that? By sapping life from the forests. No wonder they were cast out
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!
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.
You missed one of the most infamous misprints -- the "hairy" Runesword! Given that Runesword was a U2, half of them had this "feature" for a large part of the run. It was not in the whole run, from what I can tell, but I've seen hundreds of them. Scryfall has a good picture of one.
The one thing about The Dark that a lot of people didn't realize at the time, is that it was the first expansion to get the print run size correct. It didn't vanish in a few days. There was enough to meet demand for a few months, and then it was gone. WotC didn't get this right again for a long time.
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.
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.
Yeah the term is often used incorrectly, but the notion that you can NEVER say one card is better, in an apples to apples comparison, because there might be one corner case where that’s not true if you squint hard enough is just silly and pedantic.
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).
Would have liked to see at least a mention of Amnesia. It costs too much, but the effect is powerful and the art is so sick.
It was also a replacement in Type 1 decks after Mind Twist was banned.
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.
I remember when we saw electric eel, that it must have been a misprint, so we decided that we should just use blue mana instead of red. 😄
Goblin Rock Sled would be a vehicle today. It might even have "If you control a goblin, Goblin Rock Sled is an artifact creature".
“I don’t care, I just like to look at it” is one of my favorite reasons for having a thing
Best magic content on the internet.
Great coverage of my favorite set! I got back into MTG a few years ago and spent a year or so collecting the entire set. I still flip through it all the time.
I'd like to add some additions to the misprints: Runesword and Fountain of Youth both have "hair" misprint variants.
21:26 one big spin that gets overlooked is life for mana. Book of Rass and Standing Stones are more expensive up front and have reduced activation costs that are offset by a component of paid life. Wand of Ith is a new take on disrupting scepter.
How you gonna talk about The Dark and not mention Goblin Wizard!? That card is frick’n fire gentlemen, and every time they print a chonky goblin it gets better! Otherwise fun trip down memory lane.
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.
Loved slotting Dance of Many into my Muldrotha EDH deck as a 2 mana enchantment that copies a creature.
Also, those creatures on the art are absolutely certified Little Guys.
I was just rewatching the Legends Ep last night and was like "dang cant wait til the next one" and here it is!
Someone with a better understanding of mathematics than me is likely to give you an exact answer using the convergence of an infinite geometric series.
What I can quickly give you is a numerical simulation, took about 5mins to code that up and run it.
Running 10 million mana clashes, simulating the results I get.
Player A damage: 0: 3333102, 1: 2220577, 2: 1481314, 3: 988618, 4: 659954, 5: 439281, 6: 292395, 7: 195363, 8: 129224, 9: 87329, 10: 57691, 11: 38636, 12: 25365, 13: 17065, 14: 11190, 15: 7575, 16: 5193, 17: 3343, 18: 2345, 19: 1493, 20: 988, 21: 626, 22: 451, 23: 294, 24: 197, 25: 125, 26: 90, 27: 66, 28: 34, 29: 26, 30: 16, 31: 15, 33: 4, 32: 4, 37: 3, 34: 3, 36: 2, 35: 2, 38: 1
Player B damage: 0: 3333898, 1: 2218757, 2: 1481719, 3: 988768, 4: 658985, 5: 440484, 6: 292258, 7: 194653, 8: 130528, 9: 86715, 10: 57828, 11: 38789, 12: 25391, 13: 17172, 14: 11340, 15: 7500, 16: 5141, 17: 3266, 18: 2367, 19: 1477, 20: 988, 21: 660, 22: 431, 23: 301, 24: 203, 25: 127, 26: 93, 27: 54, 28: 44, 29: 20, 30: 14, 33: 8, 31: 7, 34: 6, 32: 4, 37: 1, 38: 1, 39: 1, 40: 1
So, out of 10 million attempts, player A died turn one 2,947 ( 0.02947% ) times, and player B died on turn one 2967 ( 0.02967% ) times. On zero occasions did both players take > 20 damage.
This gives a chance higher than my intuition of a player dying on turn one of around 1 in every 1690 mana clashes.
Thanks!
Oh, I guess my maths was right, it's 1 in 1647.5.... ish.... I think
I'll bet mana clash has been cast well over 3000 times in all games of magic played which means this has almost certainly actually happened to someone
Sorrow's Path only has a home in decks that donate permanents to other players; but even then, forcing that player to tap it is not easy. The bands with other Legends lands have gotten a positive home in Legendary matters decks, of which there are now a few in commander: Dihada, Binder of Wills and 5-color Jodah. There's also a ton of Legendary matters cards in the new Lord of the Rings set. In that context, those lands actually can do something pretty useful, particularly with Dihada since you can band with an indestructible creature and really make attacking you hard. But I think this is a recent development, that those lands can be played somewhere.
Sorrow's Path is actually good in exactly one Commander deck: dinosaur tribal. Er, typal. Trypal? But in that one deck, it's very good.
I mean for story, there’s The Gathering Dark with Jodah which came later, like Antiquities and The Brothers War.
Rag man, all the goblins, persecution of magic…etc
There's also the prerevisionist novel "Dark Legacy", which fleshes out some flavor text characters (like Vervamon the Elder and Maeveen O'Donagh) and cards (most notably Living Armor).
my favorite card in the set has to be gaea's touch, it's such an overlooked ramp power card :> Used it in my 2nd turn force of nature deck.
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
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!
I love cards from The Dark and also kind of forget it exists as a set. I'm excited to see how you all break this down.
The Whippoorwill / Goblin Rock Sled thing is so funny thinking about it now. Back in the day, I believe my local group either just assumed it was the logical interpretation without thinking too much about it, or saw that the keywords weren't right and figured we were missing something and went with it. But if we'd have been teenagers instead of elementary school kids, I can imagine fisticuffs! lol
Coal Golem art is like a classic Scooby Doo villian
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.
Great job editing John.
just had this in my inbox, fantastic pod and I can't wait to listen to the other episodes
The Dark was an elegantly designed set. Not over powered, but plenty of useful cards for the time we were playing. I feel that all the new stuff is WAY OVERPOWERED. When this set came out the game as so much more fun to play. Balanced and beautiful cards in the Dark, I loved this set and still remember it fondly.
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.
Nice production. Love these shows!
king ced and lord pat droppin knowledge on the planes of dominaria
So glad to listen to hear you guys talk about The Dark. I love the art in the set. Very visually evocative and had some cool cards in it. One of my all time favorites.
I can listen to you guys all day. Love the videos!
Love you guys. When I talk about a perfect pair in content, you two are always at the forefront of that discussion.
Like half the reason I check my youtube feed so often is to check for new episodes these days!
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!
Been waiting for this one! I started playing MTG when The Dark was in print
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.
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.
Were I played (all multiplayer games), we had a rule where if one player took a mulligan the other players could “ride” that mulligan. So if one player could mulligan the rest of us could as well. This rule worked really well in big games allowing people to not be stuck with really bad hands.
Great work guys
I started playing around Mirage I think; but I had no idea how many of the "old" cards were from this set! I wonder, did a lot of these get re-printed in 4th Edition? Anyway, this is bringing back a lot of good memories!
I also read the MTG novel of the series The Gathering Dark, back in the day that was my jam, and it really adds to how fond I am of the cards in this set!!!
@calvinball1 I read that book by Jeff Grubb when I was a kid and still routinely quote the insult "one-trick hedge mage". Am also watching old episodes of The Resleevables in Current Year. Cheers!
Loving this series.
This channel is the best thing in all of MTG, as a YGO player I feel confident to say that and I'm learning so much
Yay new episode!
No mention of the hairy Runesword in the misprint section!?
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.
Have a strong Abzan legends-matter commander deck that makes very effective use of the Legends banding lands. Imho, they have far more use and possibility space than Sorrow's Path. At least, they are much easier to create opportunities for them to be good.
Goblin Rock Sled is now in fact a goblin.
today Goblin Rock Sled is actually a Goblin.
I AM SO EXCITED
Calculating the probability of a turn 1 win when using Mana Clash is a Multinomial problem. Tossing two coins is the same as rolling a four sided die and each toss (roll) is independent with equal probability. We don't care about the order of the events (except that the last event is the other player taking damage), so we just have to add the Multinomial results that satisfy winning on turn 1. I calculated the win (or lose) probability to be 0.0002358133, and the draw probability to be 0.00001108612. These results were validated using a Monte Carlo simulation.
Cedric, You forgot about Reef Worm!!!
They actually closed the system by giving black enchantment destruction. So now it's black can destroy everything but artifacts; red can destroy everything but enchantments; green can destroy everything but creatures; white can destroy everything; blue cannot destroy anything.
1:35:17 can’t wait for Fallen Empires. That’s how I got introduced with MTG. Then it’s nothing but up. Lol.
I think I did the maths on Mana Clash wrong because I got the odds of winning on turn 1 as around 1 in 1647... Which is much more likely than I expected
Crosis's Attendant is also freaking Iron Man...
54:33 I think I’m the first one to mention, apologies if not, but I know there is at least one other blue worm in magic: Reef Worm, originally from Commander 2014
Oh, Wurm with a U. Forgot that was a seperate type.
could the scoreboard include the sets you did in the past version of the show? I seem to remember you trashed Coldsnap
god i love this show
Loving this series!
Question, are you not counting Warping Wurm as a blue wurm because it also has green?
That is correct
@@TheResleevables Cool. I just remember the Warping Wurm and Water Wurm because it convinced my 13 year old brain that I should make a U/G wurm ‘tribal’ deck. My friends and I had only recently figured out that 150+ 5-color decks with all of our favorite cards weren’t exactly good. Water Wurm was sadly the star of my wurm deck as it gave me an early drop to hit with Giant Growths and could just be pitched to Force of Will in the late game (which we all ran because it was a $1.50 uncommon)
Absolute gem!! My favorite set, favorite card in knights of thorn
I thought Tormod's Crypt was originally supposed to be a book or something, but when the artist submitted the art they changed the card design
You're thinking of Alchor's Tomb, which was submitted as Alchor's _Tome;_ a reference to a designer's DnD character, a wizard. The art came back as a tomb because the artist misread it and accidentally "killed off" that character.
Was ball lightning the first creature with haste?
No. Nether Shadow in Alpha had haste
I lost several games to attacking Carnivorous Plants.
I always interpreted the art on Maze of Ith as a person trapped in a “maze” of intestines…. Being slowly digested.. even more horrifying than what you said. 1:21:28
Regarding Mana Clash:
This card's coin flip has no winner or loser.
2004-10-04, Gatherer Rulings
Ain’t that the truth?
Wooot!
Best show on CZcams! 👌 One thing though, pleeease don’t have the mic in your face like that! 🤪
Jimmy Fallen was an underrated joke
Why is Cedric's face at 00:01:02 not a meme? 👁️👄👁️
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
The opening music goes way harder than it has any right to
A lot of Tron representation in this video, T-Shirt wise that is
The Dark was created in part as a commentary on the satanic panic morons who made my younger gaming years more complicated then they needed to be.
Sleeves!
Sorrow's path is also very aggregious looking at the art for "we do know that we shouldn't call it the Trail of Tears we are clearly referencing"
Neither the art nor the mechanics represents an indigenous nation being forced into exile. Both the mechanics and the art represent two groups of blockers, suddenly mismatched against their switched opponents.
I need that easy as 1-2-7 shirt
🐕🦺 🤘Life is too sweet brother.
John is a legend
Not sure if it's just that I subscribe to a lot of loud motherf*ckers on here, but I always have to turn my volume up a bunch for your videos. (worth it, of course)
I always thought maze of ith was a brain … like it stops you and traps you in your own mind
Mtg took out the pentagrams because of moral panic. Proceeds to make white cards seemingly biblical and angry. Lol
The first Mulligan rules were rather punishing. If you wanted to Mulligan you had to show your had to your opponent and show either all land or no land cards, and then you would a new hand. But wait it is much worse than that if you did this, your opponent could mulligan for any reason without them show you their hand.
Please review invoke prejudice
Im pretty sure seeing Elves of deep shadow as a 10 year old gave me my goth gf desires