The Magical History of Fireballs

Hello, all. I’m not sure how much I’ll be doing this, but this idea just came to me while lying in my bed, reading a book on education theory at around one o’clock at night. Weird how we people come up with stuff. Any how, I thought how interesting would it be to see how certain types of cards (say, rats, black removal, knights, ramp spells, counters) have evolved over the years. Magic has been around for a long while now, so there must be interesting things here.

In the interest of doing something quite general at first, I decided to go with something quite ubiquitous. And since MagicCards.info tells me there’s 59 red cards with X in the casting cost, many of which are not related to this article, his might actually be a manageable enough place to start.

First, what do I mean ‘Fireballs’? Well, all the descendants of this:

Its kind of iconic and has been around since the beginning, although they’ve tried out a lot of different things with these things over the years. I’m limiting this to spells that can deal damage to both players and creatures, but it has to target, so no Earthquake or Molten Disaster here, just for the sake of limiting this to something I can sift through in a limited amount of time.

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