Portal l The Resleevables #16 l 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 first introductory product - Portal!
The duo dissect Magic's first attempt at customer acquisition, with their thoughts on what goes into designing an introductory set, the use of new terminology and how confusing it unintentionally was, and if having this much land destruction in a set with these goals is a good or bad idea.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
3:08 Facts
31:27 2-Player Starter Deck Gameplay
1:01:38 Cycles
1:20:46 Trivia
1:32:07 Awards Show
1:43:29 Grade
1:57:25 Card Image Gallery
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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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#theresleevables #mtg #podcast #magicthegathering #commander #mtgcommander #mtgstandard #mtgmodern #mtglegacy #mtgvintage #mtghistoric #mtgalchemy - Hry
Last Chance has my favourite reminder text in the game: “You don’t lose the game if you’ve already won.”
It’s great. I thought it was flavor text at first 😅 I wrote a whole comment about how it wasn’t separated by a line and was in parentheses before I realized it was actually reminder text 😂
You guys have become appointment YT viewing for me. Keep up the great work and I CAN. NOT. WAIT. until you guys hit the Urza block.
Get a life nerd
Urza block, or when the developers had no clue how to balance a set.
My only issue with this series is that I started watching it when it started being produced and can't just binge through the game's entire history through it as a result. Very entertaining show but more than that such a valuable resource. I, and probably many other players who started >10 years after the game's launch, know of all these sets but don't actually have much context for most of them. How good they really were, their reaction and impact, the background of their development even... It's so great to get all that info so compactly and with such excellent presentation
Yeah, seconded
I like how even the cards in the expansion disagree with the rules book and call it gaining 2 “life”.
And Armageddon says ‘destroy all lands’ while Wrath says ‘put all creatures into their owner’s discard pile’
@@badgerchillsky535new player reads that and says, welp, guess we light these on fire now, grab the matches. 😅
I also noticed that the playmats have “life total” on them, so tbh I think the use of “score” was probably just limited to the back of the box
Portal is one of the only sets in the game where my overall grade moves up a whole point just from the art.
Sue Ann Harkey doesn't miss. Nearly every card on the screen this episode was gorgeous! Seven Rebecca Guay cards! Eight John Avon cards! And bangers from a ton of other artists - DiTerlizzi, Scott Fischer, Donato Giancola, Janine Johnston, and way more.
Now, granted, that's from a 2 to a 3, but.
Is it possible some of these decisions in wording were made to tone down the violence of the game in favor of more abstract sport or game terms? Satanic panic was a real thing at this time, and maybe they were concerned some of the language of the game was off-putting for parents thinking of buying this game for their children. "Discard pile" instead of "graveyard" and "score" instead of "life" definitely agree with this. The words "Intercept", "Offense", and "Defense" aren't necessarily less violent, but appear more often in sports (especially the latter two) than their original counterparts which might further make the game less off-putting to parents.
I don't think this reasoning justifies the changes by any means, but I just find it really hard to believe "changing all the words makes the game easier to understand!" was an actual thought by a professional game designer. I'm trying to get myself in the mindset of someone at this time when game design principles were less formalized, but even then this idea seems pretty obviously bad to me.
I was thinking the same, even though "block/er" seems incredibly inoffensive, "intercept" does have a wholesome, all-American feel to it. It didn't matter, my friend group still got cracked down on by one mom who confiscated all her son's cards and literally burnt them, in a ritual that in no way resembled anything satanic😂
I remember someone (probably Inquest magazine) making fun of the "reduce your opponent's score from 20 to 0" line by proposing the card names "Drain Score" and "Stream of Score".
There is one reanimation spell, breath of life for 3W but it says to treat the card as if you played it from your hand.
Cedric referencing Lava Axe flavor text from a future printing of "Catch" as he cast it is so funny to me even without the reference, but doubly funny if you know it.
all that land destruction is for targeting your own lands so you can intercept the opponents landwalking creatures. big brain plays.
When they brought up using the starter set and playing with yourself, that's exactly what I did when I was a kid (don't remember exactly which one, but it was one of the future starter sets, since I remember it going on about a bolt/giant growth interaction). I'd gotten it as a hand-me-down from my older brother and didn't yet have any friends who played, so I'd just run through the premade matches myself.
I started with 8th edition, and also played solitaire for hours on end, just red vs blue, blue vs green, green vs white etc., all possible combinations, to figure out the color I liked the most, my first lines and combos. Awesome stuff
Same! And guys here calling me out hard!😂
I know this is mostly nostalgia speaking, having gotten into Magic through my older cousin handing me down an old Portal: Second Age starter set, but to me, the first two Portals are among the best looking Magic sets. The frames, the basics, the little evocative symbols for power/toughness, the more professional but still uniquely 90s high fantasy looking artworks, and just the overall vibe (especially of the black cards) is so compelling. As a kid, these sets really drew me in and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. Are there any published metrics on how successful the Portal sets were? They kept making them, so they must have been somewhat of a hit.
I can't wait for the Portal: Second Age episode and your take on it! I heard the guns depicted on many cards in the set were very controversial back then, so I would love to get some background info on that. I also remember how fond I was of the Nightstalker aesthetic. I wish there would have been more of them throughout Magic's history.
the gameplay has been such a welcome addition. these starter products are so good to watch
"are you slow rolling me in a game of Portal?"
The "score" thing was also on the 5th Ed. starter pre-con you guys played. I think it was more of a thing that was on the back of the box of those specific products, rather than the set as a whole reframing life as score. Still makes for hilarious content though. Also when I started playing, people had portal and non-portal cards mixed together at the same time. So it was extra confusing to simultaneously be introduced to "blocking" and "intercepting".
I'm of two minds about Portal. On the one hand it contains bafflingly dumb decisions as outlined in this excellent episode. However, my first ever games of Magic were with Portal and it is how I first learned the game back in 1997, a game that I still play to this day. So I'm a Portal success story
I wonder how much instant speed sorceries were not only to introduce the stack but also to help players understand when instants are optimal. Think about Assassin's Blade, it's not just play it whenever, but only in reaction to attackers, which is a higher level game play move instead of simply drawing it on your turn and then playing it right away as opposed to seeing what your opponent does for attackers.
45:52 the long slide across the table was excellent
I appreciate you guys throwing in some more notable cards especially as we move into sets that have a ton of sweet cards that won't necessarily win any awards
My God the editing is top tier.
Leaves me dying laughing 😂
Hey guys, just wanted to leave a comment that my first set was actually Chronicles way back in the day when I was in Middle School. i played until about mercadian masques and only just recently (with Brothers' War) returned to magic. just recently discovered your channel a few weeks ago, and it's been such a great trip down memory lane. the rapport you two have is infectious. saw your commander game on TCC recently, and it was just all great vibes all around 'storm count one' had me rolling, and that was after everything else. you have quickly become one of my favourite channels.
This had me crying laughing with you guys. The Un-Sets wish they could be as hilarious as Portal is.
If you think about some of the nomenclature changes:
Interceptor
Score
Offense
Defense,
it’s as if they were trying to sell the game to people who watch football.
I've been waiting for this episode as Portal was my introduction to Magic! After seeing my cousins play Magic at a family gathering, I badgered my parents about getting some cards and got the starter bundle for either my birthday or Christmas in 1997 (can't remember which) at the age of 7. My younger brother (4 years old) and I struggled a bit using those intro decks but we had a great time and still play Magic to this day! I got hit by a massive wave of nostalgia after seeing the playmat, "score" counters, and the taglines for each of the mana colors, I'd completely forgotten about them!
A lot of praise (rightfully so) gets thrown at magic design and especially in the formative years. It's refreshing to acknowledge the early mistakes and have a laugh. This is the first episode I've watched, and I am hooked. Thanks
In "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", there is a bit with an invisible rabbit named Harvey. That's gotta be a reference to that play/movie. Just more evidence of what a good job they did with the setting; it really feels like you're in the 1940's.
I love that movie.
First episode of the Resleevables I've watched, will definitely be coming back for more!
Portal was my introduction to Magic, and I’m still here. I love that the decks were in a specific order, and the instructions told my cousin and I what moves to make, and why we were making them. Now that I think about it, the 2-player intro was the best Xmas gift I ever received.
this was my intro to magic. it seems like anathema in its design but it gave me that first taste and the transition to full magic wasn't so bad, especially given the simplicity of the precons I went on to. It helped that I could get the starter set from my local corner shop for about a quarter of the price of a precon deck and bought loads of them ( plus it was years until I even saw a magic product other than this, my region didn't have game stores at all).
all-time episode, great work!
gotta love all the portal sets ive included many of the cards in edh decks and cubes.
Nice ITYSL reference right out the gates.
I will never stop loving Portal as my intro to Magic. Everything about the look and flavour of the cards completely drew me in, and I kind of wish things still looked this way.
I just found here from BoshNRoll, this series seems incredible! The Portal episode seemed like, well, an appropriate place to start! As a trained-but-amateur game designer I found Patrick to be an incredible resource for learning and checking my own impressions against.
The only big thing I disagreed on, though I could be misunderstanding, was the decks saying to play your first game face up. I 100% agreed with this. In the most common case of an experienced player teaching a novice, the novice doesn't know enough to play for real, and so playing hands face up helps in 2 ways.
1) The novice player can see (with assistance) what the expert is seeing, and *why* they make the plays they do, helping them learn.
2) The expert player can see the options of the novice, and coach them through their viable and good actions.
For two novices learning for the first time, they do a poor job of explaining it for sure, but given they tell you not to shuffle and you mentioned a "script" in the book I don't think it's supposed to be a "game" at all! I think it's supposed to be a scripted "tutorial", like Arena, and it's kind of a clever if flawed way to do it! A video tutorial for the pre-YT days!
I'm so in love with the gameplay segment in this episode and the 5th edition one. I hope you guys keep doing that more! I don't know when precons started, but I wouldn't mind a gameplay video of some precons in every episode. There's something so entertaining about seasoned Magic players playing old precons.
Patrick is a card snapper. Big time.
Found you guys late and now going back to the beginning and working my way through. Your chemistry and knowledge is amazing and I love every second!
Great episode, as always. Just wanted to say that the card image gallery at the end is a really nice touch!
I like how the cards with landwalk already have reminder text, but the versions from those other products have even more reminder text.
They wanted to be sure you understood that though a land may be tapped, rest assured, it is still there.
Wish you would do presleevables again. That was very useful/interesting
(Cedric) Unfortunately, those episodes didn't get enough views to keep doing :(
@TheResleevables would a crisp Alexander Hamilton trading card change your mind?
This series rocks! I love you guys for bringing me vintage magic!
Foil 8th edition Raging Goblin was my first favorite card when someone taught me to play Magic.
This talk *gave me* creative energy. Amazing duo 👏
My first set my dad heard about at a course, it's is as old as my brother who we nicknamed "Thing from the Deep" & I now co-own an expansive collection with.
Love the gameplay segments!
This set was my entry point into magic. Crazy how long its been. Didn't take long until i bought my first packs of 5th edition and then Urzas Saga. Lets say the contrast in gameplay experience was pretty wild :D
Never realized how insane this was for a "starter" product.
Patrick had so many good points during the Cycles section i never fonsidered
This episode feels very timely. I may be teaching someone new to play soon, and Portal is a perfect showcase of what not to do :)
Some of the ideas are not bad, even if the execution might be suspect. Starting out with decks that have cards that are simple to understand is exactly what I would recommend, and having fewer card types at the outset is not the worst idea. You can start adding more different kinds of cards as your friend gets used to the basics of how to play.
Something I know people do is try to jump right in with Commander or try to over explain every little interaction, and it can put people off because there’s too much information too fast.
This exact 2 player starter pack was the first Magic product I was ever exposed to. My mom bought it for me when I was like 10 years old and didn't really speak any english. We learned the game together from the books provided (with huge rules errors of course but it doesn't matter) and then I spread the game to a group of my friends. So in my case Portal worked perfectly as designed. Great memories.
I think the best sweeper to put in a starter set is End The Festivities/Tectonic Hazard: 1 mana red sorcery, “deals 1 damage to each opponent and each creature they control”. It doesn’t hurt you, it’s relatively weak, but it also allows some sneaky combat math that rewards players for thinking a bit deeper about their plays.
I wonder how much the satanic panic played on WoTC’s decision to steer away from words like graveyard and life for Portal
We've crossed into my first set. I remember so many of these cards, playing sleeveless on asphalt during recess. So nostalgic, such good art. The simplicity was perfect for us to learn the fundamentals in third grade.
The commercial you used in the intro was my introduction Magic.
This is a ridiculously good series
Have you guys given any thought to connecting with design team to give their input? I believe this would be amazing to hear.
I will say, although the game play is clunky... the art and bold texts make up for it. The cards are aesthetically pleasing imo
I had this starter pack! My booster pack had a Wrath of God in it. Still have it to this day; it's in the cube!
Happy to be able to watch you two back together again🎉 side note do miss some wrestling talk w/ Joey Baggs.
Awesome episode
If you accumulate enough intro decks you should run a tournament with them, see who got the best introductory experience
First off, love the series, keep up the good work.
Second off, when talking about Willow Dryad (1:25:17) you mention that is functionally similar to Shanodin Dryads which you say is a card from 5th edition. While it is true that Shanodin Dryads was printed in 5th ed, the card is originally from Alpha and was reprinted in every core set up through 7th edition.
this is one of the few sets i think i've never examined very closely. i can't believe all the hosers made it into the starter set.
On the portal playmat it says "life total" not score..
The set as a whole has horrible continuity in its formatting.
Wrath and Armageddon are worded different, one says destroy and the other says to put them into the discard pile.
I think there could have been a little more respect for Thundermare. It's gameplay is very unique, risky, and rewarding. The visual it gives of stunning all of the creatures before charging in for the win is really what i enjoy about it. That was my card that won the set for sure.
I started in Shards Zendikar, and remember being told how insane BBE was, as an overcosted 3/2 with combo potential, because of how bad most creatures were. It is kind of insane how developers and designers treated combat in the 90's
I actually like the face up idea of the first duel. In my experience new players are so lost, that they need every help they can get to manuever through their first turns.
I think the idea is that the new players can work together to figure out how to do anything.
Imagine teaching someone chess by shrinking the board, changing the names of the pieces, and changing the way several of them move.
In order to simplify knight movement, instead of moving 2 spaces then 1 over, it just moves in a straight line to that spot. We've also included a handy pointer to show where it will go. Just place under the knight and rotate until it ends up to in the center of the a square.
My first set was Portal and my second set was Fifth Edition. I'm surprised I lasted thing long....but in all seriousness, Portal has my favorite art of any set. It's so evocative.
(Tempest is my favorite set, though.)
When I'm explaining the game to friends and / or family who really aren't that interested I usually say it's a game where you try and score 20 points. (And that you have a deck of cards to play with, and a discard pile where stuff ends up.) My assumption is that the people who made the call to use similar terms in Portal did so because they used similar communication shortcuts with people who didn't play.
I will admit that I struggled to explain life gain effects the first time it came up, but now I just say, "You deduct X points from your opponent's score."
I would chip in with the "this product won't get in the hands of people who don't know about magic" topic. My parents actually found a Portal 2 intro pack in a regular supermarket store, it was the first Magic product ever carried by supermarkets in my country, and through that I was introduced to the game. The problem was, I had no idea how to follow up on it, and find people to play with, now that I had some cards and wanted to play the game more.
As to the other things like bad terminology and first game face up, it was common for card based boardgames at the time to suggest first game with open hands and simplified rules, so that was completely fine at the time, and I personally didn't mind it, as Magic was very different from anything I've played before. The bad terminology argument comes down to this product being intended for translation to languages Magic wasn't being printed in, and I believe the terms they chose made it easier to grasp in other languages after translation. The starter pack of Portal 2 came with a guide translated into my language, which made it the first product to be translated as such, and henceforth served as an amazing intro for players from those countries who didn't have great or any knowledge of English. Score is just much easier to correctly translate than Life, just like Interceptor, Offense, Defense, when you consider a person with no knowledge of Magic or card games in general is likely to be translating this product.
Harvey is one of the best films ever made. I highly recommend watching it (without a cynical eye).
Very eager to hear what you'll have to say for PTK.
We had picked up maybe 1 Fallen Empires pack from our local baseball card shop, but never tried the game at that point. In summer of '97, my EGM included a Portal two-player pack, and we were hooked after the first Raging Goblin! Some of my favorite artwork of any expansion. I love the saturated color look that Beta, Unlimited, Mirage block and on have. The printer that produced Alliances, Ice Age and 4E left those sets with such a washed out look.
That tron shirt is soooo sweet
The portal white bark tree swamp is the best swamp art ever made.
I think Portal was a huge step in developing the game's rules. Back then, there still was no stack (not until Classic: Sixth Edition), there were series and batches. Batches were sort of like the stack, but once they were closed you couldn't add to them any more, or something like that... They realized that the rules was too complicated, and new players likely didn't want to play with cards with phasing or cumulative upkeep, simply because they had to guess what these words meant. I'm not sure if I like getting rid of the MTG flavor for Portal - not wanting to use words like viashino, Balduvian, or Talruum removes a lot of the worldbuilding, but having generic fantasy flavor that could fit in anywhere isn't that bad too, and the art really was beautiful.
Seems we have three big things that stuck in MTG all of which started with Portal - the big mana symbols on basic lands, the flavor text separator line, and... the word "creature" appearing on creatures - a bit of flavor with summoning was lost, but it streamlined the colored creatures with the artifact ones, and in the end causes far less confusion (creatures being spells on the stack is doesn't come up as much in games).
the way I can see the face up maybe is, we went to walmart got it, what I can see is, playing face up could help each other learn.
I learned the game with Portal. My brother and I thought that damage on creatures lasted across turns 🙃
They put THREE DIFFERENT STONE RAINS in the product designed to get new players?!
Incredible that Magic ever even made it to the 21st century.
Interceptors was oddly prescient since they made Defender a keyword while leaving it as a game term that isn't related.
I didn't pick this set up until 2023. No one I know collected this unless they were really into the art. I never saw this, nor any of the sequels, played. There was a lot of this on the shelves for a long time. You can still find the pre constructed decks sealed fairly easily 27 years later. Showing the card from Starter 1999 with the creature type shows what they could/should have done from the get go (but that set has its own issues -- you'll get there eventually). What Portal did do was provide the first workaround of the Reserved List, and it made the sets cheap (with one massive exception) in perpetuity.
Your game here was the first time I've ever seen Portal actually played -- and I was around since the beginning of Magic. That was not the first playmat -- we had them in Beta.
portal was my first set
great memories
The Grand Creature Type update made me love and respect the game more. The old rediculous rules left and the fame had old cards get an update to the modern age. Same idea with making Portal cards legal in certain formats like they always should have been.
I went back and did the math - there are 19 red sorceries in this set. *17* of them either deal damage to something, destroy lands, or both. Last Chance and Winds of Change are the only two that don't.
good god almighty
Portal has some great art.
I enjoy the gameplay segments, but I wish they didn't break the 180 rule, it always confuses me when the face cams cut back to the gameplay with the two of you siwtching sides...
I want to say, as an older player teaching a new player Magic, playing decks face up and hands revealed used to make it easier to answer questions and explain game rules rather than having them just show their cards and ask "What does this do?" every time they dont understand something. Its not something I would expect from two new players though.
The part about instants, sorceries and the stack doesn't make sense, since the stack was only introduced in 6th edition.
I can imagine they included the landwalking because without it games between two new players would just never end.
Tempest was the first time for me buying singles rather than cracking packs and trading. I really felt like a cheater walking out the LGS with a playset of Ancient Tomb.
I started playing with Ice Age and Fourth Edition, and Portal was the first set to upset me. Classic Magic (but not 6th Edition "Classic")
I still maintain that having no rules text on basic lands is a recipe for confusion, and changing game terms to teach new players is baffling.
Do I remember correctly that you guys used to have a most expensive/valuable card in the set award (when you were with SCG)? I remember it being one of my favorite awards, I would love if you brought it back!
54:14
The Mulligan Rule should be "Reveal your hand only if you have 0, 1, 6 or 7 lands in it. If you do shuffle your hand into your library and draw (x-1) cards.
that's why they call him Cedric "The Hammer" Phillips
Haha, in school we made fun of the "score" thing the same way. "Stream of Score!"
Last chance sees play in cedh as a rare functional reprint.
"THIS FLIES????" XD
I wish they would trade decks and play another game or two before finishing the gameplay section
On "score" vs "life" the actual cards in Portal do use "life". Natural Spring {3}{G}{G} Sorcery Target player gains 8 life. It was just the outside of the box that said "score" for some unfathomable reason.
Really dislike how the cameras in the gameplay make the players appear facing the opposite direction of how they are at the table. Otherwise, great episode!