Its dog week on the blog, so after considering what to write about for a while, I decided to go with one of these. The problem is, dogs or hounds haven’t actually been that big of a deal in the history of the game, although there definitely are some strong cards here, although they might not seem that way immediately.
Fact or Fiction
is very strong. It dominated during its time in Standard (or Type 2), while still being a favorite in Commander, Conspiracy, Vintage Masters and Eternal Masters. It made its way into FTV20 as well, which was a collection of 20 cards that had dominated tournaments during each of the first 20 years of Magic’s history and its in pretty good company. Its very popular, but hasn’t been reprinted in Modern, but it has a few cousins.
Since the early days of the game, black has been secondary with cards with blue being the king. Still, while blue’s history with this is all about changing costs and not much more, black has a more detailed history, which gives us clues into how WotC views different resources and their values.
The benchmark these days seems to be Read the Bones
, which is quite strong, seeing plenty of Standard play. But how did we get there?
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.