Chronicles | The Resleevables #10 | 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 twelth set - Chronicles!
The duo dissect Magic's first compilation set, with their thoughts on what Wizards of the Coast was trying to accomplish with Chronicles, why they missed the mark as badly as they did, and the debacle that was Renaissance.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
3:30 Facts
17:37 Lore
32:23 Renaissance
38:47 Misprints
40:28 Awards Show
53:45 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
I saved up my allowance for two months to buy a box of boosters for this set and I think it was the first time I truly understood how bad gambling is.
Good to learn that lesson young.
I mean you got exactly what was on the package. Were you illiterate too?
What did you pull?
@@popo237we’re all thinking you are that’s forsure
As far as the "H" goes - the font they used just had the capital H look like a big lowercase h. If you look at a card that has both a upper-case and lower-case H in it, (such as Hyperion Blacksmith) the upper and lower case Hs look different. It's bizarre that they decided to go with that as the capital H but there you go.
So the font for Type Line is different?
@@dewrules235 On the old card frame, yes. See something like the Legends printing of Hell's Caretaker for the comparison to Hyperion Blacksmith. The type line has a more "normal-looking" font, kind of like Times New Roman, and the card name line has the one with the weird capital H.
Most of the people buying Chronicles weren't playing with friends who had access to anything before Revised.
The print runs prior to Revised were so small that MTG was only available in limited regions, and it sold out quickly.
For most people, power 9 were practically mythical, so you wouldn't use them as a basis of comparison for the power level of Chronicles.
People in regions with access to the older cards, simply wouldn't need to buy Chronicles. Chronicles was aimed at new players who had missed out.
At the same time, there was an intentional choice by WotC to phase out overpowered cards like the dual lands, power 9, and things on the Type 1 (Vintage) restricted list. WotC was phasing out that whole style of play in favor of introducing Type 2 (Standard). They wanted the old powerful cards to go away (rotate out).
Mostly unrelated to Chronicles, a lot of existing players resented that WotC would introduce a rotating format which made their existing card collection not tournament legal. It alienated the player base.
This is accurate.
The pre-Eighth Edition Magic font is called Goudy Medieval and the capital H in that font just happens to resemble a lower case h in most fonts.
The 2003-present font is proprietary and is called Beleren.
8th edition-journey into nyx (I think that's the last set before m15) used matrix font, m15 forward uses beleren
It wasn't exactly Goudy Medieval, it was a proprietary font created by the original MTG production manager.
The font was heavily based on Goudy Medieval, changed just enough that they didn't have to pay for the Goudy Medieval font.
This font was modified slightly in mid 1995, and most people didn't notice the change.
Even in that period from Fallen Empires to Homelands where every new player felt like they missed the good times, Chronicles was a low point. You basically just opened a pack hoping to see City of Brass, pulled out the Tron lands if you didn't have a set yet, and put everything else in a pile. And considering the power level of all the sets surrounding it and the fact that this was SUPPOSED to be a reprint set to get us old cards, it really felt like Wizards was saying "We don't print powerful cards anymore, you missed them."
I have so much nostalgia for this set. I remember some kid showing me a white border Elder Dragon and I was like what is this from and he told me they were making magic packs that had cards from every set and I was blown away. I bought a bunch of packs hoping to get a mox or something because pre internet we had no idea what was in the set. It was wild.
technically, internet was a thing, but it was a bit exclusive, I went to university in 1994 (before chronicles) and we had broadband internet already, and usenet and early www to find things like card lists.
Best Magic content on the interwebs, period.
I like that they printed the tron lands in chronicles
Commander, or Elder Dragon Highlander wouldn't exist as it does today without the Elder Dragons.
So Nicol Bolas, which is definitely the most iconic Elder Dragon is a great pick.
Also worth thinking about, it was originally Elder Dragon Highlander, and the implication is that you use an Elder Dragon as your Commander. There's an argument to be made that Commander, likely MTGs most popular paper format right now, significantly boosted in accessibility to Elder Dragons via Chronicles very early on, which allowed it to grow into what it is today.
One thing that is interesting to me in watching these set reviews, which I do remember, and it's a trip down memory lane for me, is that it allows me to compare how the game was viewed and designed at the time vs modern sensibilities. One thing that is odd is that cards that were wildly popular at the time are just bad. They were bad then, they are bad now, players didn't understand how the game functioned at a basic level and didn't know what they wanted. The point is, there's an impulse to theorycraft a "what if" version of the game where they never made certain mistakes, and went with the design sensibilities that work straight from the get go. The weird part about this is that the best cards today only make sense in the context of understanding how the game works, usually by being shown through practical experience. So there's an alternate version universe out there where MTG had much tighter design sensibilities from the beginning, and BECAUSE of that it flopped hard because the cards weren't appealing, evocative or just plain weird enough to drive player interest.
Well said!!!
Why does Cedric always say there is “one thing left to do” when they have to give the award for “what card won the set?” And they still have to give it a grade. That’s 2 things
Well, they reprinted Dandân. Imagine how expensive it would be if not for the extra chronicles cards! :)
Them laughing at Fallen Empires not being considered for Chronicles was 10/10
People forget that the Chronicles card list was leaked on the early internet and people who had access to the list unloaded the reprinted cards for moxes and other high value cards to those who did not have access or knowledge of what was being reprinted.
I don't think it was a leak on the internet. You are correct that the set was entirely spoiled in advance, something just not done at the time, because people were panicking that the sky was going to fall and the game was done for.
I AM SO EXCITED AND ALSO SCARED
I was there before release, and you can not understate the disappointment we all felt at the pathetic card pool. Especially when considering some of the power house sets they were pulling from.
I cracked a ton of this in 1995. The set was super hype. Not only we’re a lot of double digit cards we’re reprinted, good cards like Erhnam Djinn got played after reprint.
I'm still baffled. I missed Antiquities and Arabian Nights. Opening Chronicles was maddening that 90% of the reprints were trash.
@@KellyUnekis actually they weren't "trash". There is a phenomena where cards become high priced due to minor demand but even less supply due to low print run. But nowadays, with modern border cards, these cards get reprinted in a Masters-type set and voila, now that everyone has access to the card, the price plummets to less than a few bucks. And people play with the card and discover...it isn't that good/useful/needed of a card. So a lot of cards were reprinted that people wanted bad and those cards were over 20 bucks, which back then was a lot of money for a non-power 9. It's just that the cards were so rare in 94 before Revised, many cards that were actually bad became valuable because people would hear stories of these cards and want them. But once everyone and their moms could get 4x copies, people realized the cards aren't that good. It just wound up the one card that was still good was City Of Brass...a card that no one wanted but became great was Erhnam Djinn.. But before the heavy reprint as both 4th and Chronicles were everywhere, a lot of the cards reprinted were very, very exciting. The Wretched was a $50 rare in Legends. All of the Elder Dragons were over $25, especially Nicol Bolas. It just happened to be that many of the "bulk turned out to be actually useful" was printed in 4th while the "only casual but valuable cards" were in Chronicles.
Overstate, maybe?
Cedric and Patrick are the most delightful people ever.
Nicol Bolas used to be the guy you wanted to Sneak Attack. 7 damage to the face plus a Mind Twist. Can you imagine?
Cedric and Patrick touched on this briefly, and one commenter beat me to this point, but it bears repeating once more: BY FAR the most important thing Chronicles did was reprint the five elder dragons.
These were rares from an early set with a giant card pool and a tiny print run. No one had them. Like, when's the last time you saw a Ramses Overdark or a Boris Devilboon in someone's trade binder?
Then Chronicles came around and suddenly elder dragons were all over. Printed to demand and then some. These five 3-color legendary dragons were way too clunky for competitive constructed, but so splashy that an entire format got created just to give them a place to shine. They literally named the format Elder Dragon Highlander. And now that format is THE MOST POPULAR way to play constructed Magic.
By no means should the set designers get any credit for this accident of history, and if anything I think Cedric and Patrick err on the side of being too forgiving of the many early Magic set design decisions that are *utterly inexplicable* even when grading on a heavily era-adjusted curve. But sometimes you get lucky, and Chronicles deserves begrudging recognition as being the set that accidentally gave birth to Commander, a format that is as responsible as anything else for the explosion in the game's popularity over the last decade.
P.S. Whatever money people lost in 1995 due to the Chronicles reprints tanking collection values has been paid back tenfold by Commander turning thousands of bulk rares into Commander-playable $5 singles. As far as I'm concerned, its debt to society has been paid.
Wow! Great points!
I bought every Chronicles pack I could find because they had multi-color and legendary cards I had never seen before. That's all I needed back then.
good point... as good as Cedric and Patrick are, they sometimes forget to look from the non tournament player point of view. a lot of bad cards were always popular at the kitchen table
I can tell you, as a German, that Renaissance booster packs were still very plentiful and extremely worthless when I started playing, around the times of Urza/Masques Block - very similiar to Homelands and Fallen Empires, so I'd assume that they were received equally poorly :)
edit: Looking forward to the next episode! Homelands is a guilty pleasure set of mine. I know the cards are terrible, but I really like the flavour, and it's extremely nostalgic for me because my dad used to buy me a bunch of homelands boosters as a kid (propably because they were very cheap, but I didn't realize that at the time).
I bought many boxes of Renaissance back then. It was very hot. Lots of gorgeous black bordered playables. In the US we loved those packs.
I went to SPIEL Essen every year, from the Netherlands.. i think we bought tons of boxes of renaissance for like DM 30,- a box, that is 50 cents (or 20 euro cent) a booster . we could sell those packs for double or triple money back at home, because people would just buy anything that was foreign and weird
Interesting that Patrick mentioned 4th + Chronicles would've been about 450 cards. Turns out 5th edition had 449 cards. Such a massive set.
Stumbled across your Ice Age review, y'all did such a great job, had to go back and review your catalog. Its been a great supplement for me as I was there for the start of Alpha and Beta, but we had mine and my brothers cards destroyed after our religious mother deemed them "Satanic". Jump cut to years later when the Urza's set was being released, and we somehow convinced her to let us start playing again (As long as the black cards were promised never to be played *Rolls eyes*). Watching these vids has given me a sense of what I missed out on for some of those years, and I really love y'alls insight into it, please keep up this amazing work!
The lower case “h” thing blew my mind. Been playing since Revised, NEVER noticed that before. I love watching these videos just for small things like that
I'm from Switzerland and started playing in 94/95. Players in Switzerland were playing with german, french and italian cards (3 of the 4 national languages) as well as english cards. When Chronicles and Renaissance came out everyone was very confused, I had no idea what was going on with these reprints. 😂 But I was happy as an elementary schoolboy to finally get some City of brasses and erhnam djinns.
Btw content is amazing, so much nostalgia for me!
With the lower case H's, I think that's what the upper case H looks like for that font. At the time, they used a different font for card titles than for the rest of the card.
If this set doesn't rate a 1 then no set will. Time to watch the episode ...yup -- you made the correct call. Really the only one that could be made.
As a card seller back when this came out, this set was an unmitigated disaster. Fallen Empires had broken us of buying multiple cases. This set drove a lot of us out of business.
Stopped at Homelands. Analysis is spot on.
Really weird that you're here watching this video then.
My friends and I bought lot of Chronicles, just as we had bought lots of Ice Age and tons of Fallen Empires. Because to us that's what Magic was, and we were kids, and we couldn't really tell the difference between what cards were good or not and didn't have a bunch of disposable income to buy old cards with.
Exactly. I was ten years old and didn’t know how to play. Nobody else in chess club had any powerful old cards. Ice Age, Fallen Empires and Chronicles were what got me hooked, and here I am, 29 years later.
Agreed that we're younger than Patrick and that if you're born 1982+ you're too young to buy into ABU and also too young to understand how to play and if cards are good or not. 😊
@@andygoody2599 I'm probably the same age as him, if not a little older, but your experience in those days would've been very different depending on your local scene and who you played with.
Everyone we played with had a Feldon's cane in every deck to counter the fact that everyone played with Tormod's crypt. Recursion angered us so sometimes just nuking a graveyard was done for spite. Lol. This was also the era of Stasis so that says a lot.
A blessing on this rainy Friday morning!
As someone who was around at the time, I think they are being slightly harsh on the grade. Most of us were excited to get some of these old cards, we didn’t really know anyone with Legends cards or whatever. Homelands was far far worse. Like, so much worse.
Finally, they review my favorite set!
I gotta say that I loved Chronicles back in the day, it came out right when I first started to buy lots of cards. It still holds a lot of nostalgia. Hell's Caretaker FTW!
City of Brass y'all. Love that card 🌇
loving this channel
great video yall got the best details
The "H" of the font they used isn't "lowercase" per se, it's just what H looks like in uncial, the majuscule scriptform which that font was based off of.
I hope you guys do a short video on the collector edition / international edition. I know there wouldnt be as much to talk about in all the lore, mechanic etc categories but i would still love to hear more about what it was like when it realeased and players opinions at the time.
Okay am I crazy or was the best vintage cube card award "the MYSTIC confluence award" before the last few episodes?
I somehow got a hold of a renaissance mishra's factory back in the day which confused the heck out of my friends by virtue of being in another language AND black bordered.
Chronicals development team: I have a fever… and the only cure, is more homarids
If only someone had a M:tG themed t-shirt company and could make some sweet "Urza's Private Reserves" swag.
As a filthy casual, for me the experience of Chronicles was euphoria followed by crushing disappointment. I'd read the files for the sets I'd missed and dreamed up exciting best-case scenarios for cards like The Wretched, Craw Giant, and Juxtapose. Getting to open them was thrilling...and then I played with them and realized how trash they were. I was left confused as to why they had ever been worth so much money.
I LOVE THIS SHOWWWWW
I bought a lot of this as a 13 year old hoping to get some of those sweet, sweet reprints. Unfortunately the reprints I got were all terrible. lol. Still have fond memories of cracking these.
I actually started at around Fallen Empires (still playing). I distinctly remember first seeing Chronicles cards in like a binder and thinking they were from the original sets…
I about spit out my drink when the Community clip was in the video😂. Editing is top tier!
Renaissance wasn't the Chronicles card pool, it was the cards inserted into 4th edition with black border and their expansion symbol. Lucky enough to have visited Germany for a few months when it was available.
EDIT: MY GOD KELLY, JUST WATCH THE VIDEO!!!!!!
2nd EDIT: One of the oldest magic pastimes of myself and my close friends is singing Goblins of the Flarg to the tune of "Riders on the Storm" by the doors. It's kind of magical.
49:59 if I recall correctly, I played chronicles in chaos sealed deck a few times when I was a kid…. Suffice it say, that was a bad idea, and didn’t work out well.
42:12 Even back then, we referred to Book of Rass as... something that rhymes with Rass.
Homelands actually did lore and storyline rather well. The Sengir family was interesting, and the set is not quite the worst pile of cards ever printed on card stock… 1:09:54
Shame that Homelands has such a burnt reputation so that they'll probably never revisit the world. Set really hit it out of the ballpark in terms of lore and flavor.
52:15 I'm pretty sure that it is supposed to be a capital "H" but they used a bad font that makes it look like a lower case "h". you can check Legends' card "Hammerheim" wich has a distinct difference between the first H and the second h on the card.
The only good thing about Chronicles cards is that I can get some of those sick Richard Kane Ferguson cards for reasonable prices.
As a player who started during 4th ed, fallen empires and Chronicles. I was lucky to be too young to understand how bad it was and stuck with it but I could see being burned by bad sets again and again and wanting to quit. This set reminds me a lot more f March of the Machines : Aftermath
The Hype of the fact that we have reprints from the last 3 sets only compares to the emotional reality once we knew what was in the set.......
Absolutely love this searies! , love learning the history and, more importantly, what was going on with the community at the time and how things were persived.
Homelands was the first set to have simultaneous release in all languages. Before that, sets were released in each language at different times, as fast as they could be completed.
Renaissance was released BEFORE 4th Edition in those languages. Imagine that you were an Italian, French, or German Magic player who didn't speak English. For you, the Renaissance cards would all be totally new cards that weren't previously available. Even if you could speak English, you weren't buying English Magic cards from the internet back then. Arabian, Antiquities, Legends, & The Dark were difficult to find in parts of the USA, and they were even more difficult to find in Italy, France, & Germany.
These things contributed to Renaissance NOT feeling like a reprint set, so it was received a lot better than Chronicles.
4th Edition in those languages was released soon afterward, and contained white border reprints of the Renaissance cards.
Renaissance didn't inform tournament legality. Tournament legality was based on the English card pool, so the cards were tournament legal before they were available in localized languages.
What does Cedric say at the end after "even though I run every day"?
One of the reasons I think Ice Age deserves better than a 2, is that this set here is clearly a 1. I would argue that if Ice Age was MtGs 1st attempt at a stand-alone set, we can say they missed the mark in some key areas and had some neat ideas in others, all papered over by a good setting. As opposed to Chronicles which appears to have not understood the assignment from jump. So I would argue these 2 sets are not 1 rating apart, personally.
Oh my god the FE clip cutaway got me good
Didn't chronicles include Ashnod's altar too?
I always had this faint memory that sylvan library was in Chronicles..... It's not. I guess it's in real 4th edition and that was my confusion. But I thought I remembered a whitebordered one with a legends set symbol.
I had the same confusion, when they were talking about what they might pull...I was sure I pulled one from Chronicles, but it must have been a fourth ed one. And I sold it a couple of years later as it was undervalued and largely unused for a long time.
You might be thinking of concordant crossroads
To make matters even more confusing, it did appear in Renaissance - though not in the Italian version, since Legends was released in Italian.
Wow! That must be one of those collective mind jobs, then. Because I remember it the same way.
Interestingly, Renaissance is more useful now because of formats like Old School. It gives a much more affordable black border printing (for those who care of such things) with the original art. Some aren't cheap--a Renaissance City of Brass, which comes Italian only, is like $80-120. But an Arabian Nights one is $450. So that's better.
Its interesting to think it could have been a much better set with a few tweaks...I really dont think it was as terrible as you are making out here, there some fun cards...Fallen Angel, Cumbajii Witches, Urza lands...
About 60-70% is chaff though. There could have reprinted more core set feeling cards in the core sets, and used Chronicle releases for classic cards that felt more tied to their sets/complex, like they do with Masters these days.
I shudder to think what blood moon would cost if it was on the reserved list.
It wouldn't be legal in modern if it was so the value wouldn't be as much as you think
Traded a good chunk of my collection for an Alpha Fastbond from Tales of Adventure recently - amazing! Michael and the staff were very nice and made it easy. Their comic store is insane too, great selection. If you're near Quakertown check it out.
So if they hurried a little more we could have had the 4 different arts of Homarid with white borders. We truly live in the darkest timeline.
If they had added just 10 good cards instead of the Legends trash we got, this could have been a triumph
Today's lesson: the more you love magic, the more you play the bad sets.
Cuombajj Witches probably better than Witch Hunter in this astoundingly bad limited format, in case the distinction matters to a single soul.
All these years I thought the RL was because Chronicles reprinted a bunch of high powered cards that made people's collections worth alot less...had no clue it was so under powered which begs the question....why did it spark such a reaction to form the reserve list
...Ashnods Altar?
it should at least have won best commander card imo
Isn't Remove Soul... just Essence Shatter? Same mana cost and effect.
More like Essence Scatter is Remove Soul
@@TheKaijudist Same difference lol. My point was this is a card that has withstood the test of time. Pretty cool and seemingly underrated card.
Book of Rass as the worst card? It's really good! I even play it in an (extremely janky) edh deck, paying only two mana and only two life is much better than the Jayemdae Tome that was brought up... 👍
I really love this series of set reviews but this is the first one where I've really gotta disagree with you on a major point: Chronicles was *not* a joyless set in any way. It *did* contain fun and exciting cards for new players, it *was* fun to open as a young player, and it *did* feel like a natural extension of Fourth Edition. I can understand it being disappointing to players who knew what they were doing, but when I was 8 years old and I cracked a Shimian Night Stalker it was one of the coolest cards I'd ever seen. Craw Giant was MASSIVE, Sivitri Scarzam had the badass dragon artwork, Rabid Wombat had me thinking of all the cool ways I could pump it up, and both Feldon's Cane and Fountain of Youth felt almost unfairly strong.
I know in retrospect the set is largely viewed as a failure, but I feel like you've both dismissed just how cool it was to get old, cool, exotic reprints as a new player, even if the cards were "bad".
I just want to be the guy who says that Book of Rass lets you draw more than one card a turn and is not complete dogshit with Urzatron out.
Mission accomplished
Was "Mana Confluene award" on purpose?
Safe Haven needs Yoda drawn on it
And then there was Renaissance… (for the French, German and Italian players who got Revised in their language but missed out on the reprints shuffled into 4th Edition. Or did you mention that during your discussion of 4th, I didn’t see that one yet.)
"That's awkward... keep it in!"
That's what she said
let's goo
I usually use a different type of video for that. But, to each his own.
Chronically was the first master set and it scared everyone.
Just in relation to the reserve list, it's creation in relation to the blowback over reprints at this point is the most disappointing thing about this set for me.
If the reserve list didn't exist they could have by now done a reprint set appealing to those of us who'd play Vintage or Legacy but don't because of the price barrier, and I'd have maybe come back sooner to the game (I dropped around 6th Ed launch and came back around DMU) and maybe would play paper rather than Arena or in addition to Arena.
It's really telling of how good magic's engine is and how well designed the core set was that this is now the fourth mediocre to bad expansion in a row and yet the game still survived
It's actually extremely mechanically inferior to several games that came after it. But the old adage of being first to market as the most important factor in success, once again, proves itself accurate.
I started during Fallen Empires and stopped during Homelands.
Chrons baby.
Wdym Juzám Djinn cost 4 😭
Antiquities sounds like the precursor to Mystery Boosters but bad
How?
@@danacoleman4007 A seemingly random list of reprints from multiple sets that keep the old set symbols and art
@@pokugrf4000 antiquities was not a reprint set
I think Chronicles was a bad set. I also think you are way too harsh on it. Chronicles was released shortly before I started playing. I didn’t really know the difference between good cards and bad cards. I just wanted different cards. I put A LOT of bad cards in decks in that era but it gave me the ability to gauge what were bombs, what was weak but playable, and what was down right horrible. I stuck with Magic through this era. Chronicles gave me a glimpse at what cards came out before I started playing. The price of packs didn’t break the bank and I enjoyed opening a Solkanar or Dakkon. Just my point of view, I know everyone’s experience will differ.
First!
I love you guys but, a compilation is just that. A compilation. Even in music a greatest hits album is called... get this... a greatest hits compilation, not just 'a compilation'. Assuming that a compilation automatically means 'greatest hits' is false and a you problem. I don't remember any marketing claiming it was a greatest hits set, and looking back I cannot find any now. I think it's disingenuous to continuously refer to it as such and claim it failed to be something it was never claiming to be. The set had enough issues and was terrible in many ways. There's no need to bring it down further over false implications.
Also the font for the name of the card and the other text is different. That in fact, is a capital H for that font. Not a typo. This didn't change until the frame change between 7th and 8th edition.
i love the show but how are you going to admit you listen to N’Sync greatest hits 🤦♂️
Just because you’re uncomfortable with who you are doesn’t mean that I am
@@CedricAPhillips i am very comfortable with myself in knowing with complete certainty that your taste in music is as poor as your magic commentary is excellent
Dude, drop the comb forward thing. It Does Not Work. Embrace your high testosterone level, and the consequences. Signed, a fellow "front and top" dude.
stop telling people how they are supposed to look
Cedric seems like a liberal