Why do magic cards say deckmaster

Consistency, as they say, is king. I've always thought the back of Magic cards look pretty cool. They've got that old-school, warlock artifact look. Apparently this was quite intentional, as the creators of Magic meant for it to quite literally represent a spell book. Your deck is your "library" of magic spells, obviously kept in some kind of magical book This was a little more obvious when the starter deck box itself back in the days of Alpha was also designed to look like a tome complete with pages on the side and a bookmark.

Though deck boxes are no longer designed to give the illusion of pages, we still refer to the deck as a library - so clearly the metaphor is still going strong! Nonetheless, you can get the spell tome looking deck boxes here at Wizardry Foundry. It's nice to think that the game of Magic remains safe from the realities of business - that the look and feel of the cards is loftily separate from concerns over sales and profits.

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case - and a great example of it is the coloring of 'Magic'. Many years back though, the brand team realized that blue was a poor choice for packaging and advertising. It didn't "pop"—that is, it didn't draw your eye to it. As this is important for a logo, the decision was made to change the color from blue to yellow.

You'll notice that everywhere else the logo is used it is now yellow. To be honest, this is a pretty minor discrepancy and I never really noticed it - and the yellow font does look good on packaging. If the ability that put it face down specifies other characteristics, such as Tezzeret, Cruel Machinist or Yedora, Grave Gardener , then those characteristics are used instead.

A double-faced card or meld card 's back face is indicated by the transformation related icon often the moon symbol in its upper left corner. Also, the Magic: The Gathering logo has been changed from blue to yellow. There are also official card sleeves with this design. Challenge Decks have different card backs, which indicate that they can't be played in regular decks. Hero cards and most tokens both have advertising on their card backs, to indicate that they are to be kept separate from all decks.

Some token cards, however, may be double-faced to represent two different token permanents. For Oversized cards and Magic software. Re-imagined for UltraPro card sleeves [18]. MTG Wiki Explore. Main Page All Pages. Explore Wikis Community Central. Legends , though, had the craziest of printing problems. All the uncommons were split into two groups, group A and group B.

An "A" box of Legends only had the uncommons from group A. This meant that if all the boxes you bought were from the same grouping you were missing half of the uncommons. There was no tap symbol when the game began. Cards in Alpha simply said "Tap to". Then with Revised came the first tap symbol see below. It was a T in a circle turned slightly on its side. This proved to a be a problem, though, as Magic added additional languages because the word for "tap" in other languages didn't start with a T.

The next version of the tap symbol looked like a black card turned forty-five degrees with a white clockwise arrow in it. Then come Eighth Edition , the tap symbol turned into what we know today, a grey circle with a black clockwise arrow. One type of card in Alpha required tapping to use but didn't mention the word "tap" anywhere on the card.

This card type was artifacts. Artifacts that required tapping were Mono Artifacts on their type line. Mono Artifacts were defined as artifacts that had to be tapped to use and thus could only be used once a.

Some artifacts were Poly Artifacts. These artifacts had activated abilities that you could use as many times as you wanted. Then there were Continuous Artifacts. These simply had a global effect that was always on. Finally, there were Artifact Creatures that—well, this one you should know.

The tap symbol isn't the only symbol to go through changes. The white mana symbol we know today was not the one the game started with. The original white mana symbol was closer to round see below. The new one has more swirls coming off of it. The change happened in Ice Age. The reasoning was that the original white mana symbol was not distinctive enough and hard to make out from a distance. The rules are that a game can be inducted ten years after it first goes on sale.

Magic had the honor of being inducted the very first year it was eligible, the first such game to ever have that honor. How many Magic cards are there? Magic has over 10, unique cards, the 10,th of which was printed in Shards of Alara. The Magic brand team wanted to make a big event out of it, but there were too many different ways to calculate which cards was exactly the 10,th. At the time, Magic Online had somewhere around two thousand cards.

How many different decks existed mathematically with those cards? We did the math and it turned out there were more existing decks than there were atoms in the universe. Suffice to say, they didn't run with that campaign. My point with this fact is that you might think there are a lot of potential Magic decks. It is probably several if not many more than several—remember, the above math was with only two thousand cards orders of magnitude larger than you assume.

While modern booster packs are primarily sold in card boosters, it is not the only number Magic packs have ever been sold in. Magi c has had boosters with quantities of 12 Alliances , 10 Unglued , 8 all small sets through Homelands , and now 6.

The year with the most Magic sets in it is Depending on when you count Arabian Nights it came out in December in parts of the country and January in others , had five or six sets released in it Arabian Nights , Antiquities , Legends , Revised , The Dark , and Fallen Empires.

This year saw the release of Visions , Weatherlight , Tempest , and the biggest of all core sets, Fifth Edition. One of the fun things about Un - sets is that I can break records that normal Magic sets don't have a chance at. In Unglued I created both the shortest and the longest name ever in the history of the game. As this is a design column, I'm going to end with a fact about Magic designers. There are only a handful of people who have ever led the design of both a small Magic expansion and a large Magic expansion.

Alphabetically, they are:. That's 25, so I'm going to stop. I hope you enjoyed today's random romp through Magic 's history. This is a column about Magic , so my column this week is about Magic. But I know from my mail that a lot of my readers enjoy my more personal columns so as an extra bonus for those that are interested, here is my personal "25 Random Things About Me" that I posted to my Facebook page:.

I hate bananas. Seriously, I completely detest them. So much so that yellow is my least favorite color. Everything about them I find sickening, especially the smell that brings me close to vomiting. Up until my wife Lora moved in with me, I never had them in my home. It turns out that my son Adam loves bananas and is too young to be able to peel them for himself. This means whenever Lora in not available such as most mornings as she gets ready while I feed the kids I have to peel them for him.

It grosses me out each and every time I have to do it, but I love my son and I know bananas a good for him so I do it. I should stress that I find one redeeming thing about bananas: their skin as a comedic device. I love my job. As far as I'm concerned, I've found my dream job, and I'm happy each day when I go into work.

Before my family, I used to spend just about every waking moment at Wizards. I'm glad now that I have some distance from my job because I've realized that an important part of what I do as a creative endeavor is allow things to percolate. Having time away has proven to lead me to better ideas because I'm not constantly dwelling on them. The thing I'm proudest about my job is that I got it completely of my own doing. At each stage, I was the one that pushed things to the next stage.

And even once I had my job, I feel that I took an active hand to move my job toward what I wanted to do. On top of all that, I feel I'm very good at what I do and I enjoy that I am at the top of my field in my chosen profession. I'm a pack rat. I keep anything and everything. I find a way to take even the tiniest of things and find a way to make it personal for me. One of Lora's toughest jobs has been to slowly pry away my lowest level of pack ratness.

As an example, up until I met Lora, I saved all my drier lint. I had a jar on my washing machine where I put it and it fascinated me how much I collected, so I kept it.

I just kept swapping out the container for something bigger. When Lora started dating me, my lint container was a giant cylinder a foot high and a foot in diameter, and it was packed to the gills with all different colors of drier lint. Part of what makes me know Lora is special is that she both got me to throw the lint away and continued dating me and obviously eventually married me. That makes this card unique on this list for being the only card on the Reserved List on this list.

Wait, no. Underground Sea is the only other dual land on this list. It taps for either Blue or Black mana with no downside whatsoever. We think you can agree that with this and Volcanic Island on the list, it must mean the combination of Red, Blue and Black must be the best one in Magic - and that means Nicol Bolas is probably right.

Yes, this is also on the Reserved List. For only two mana, Copy Artifact is an enchantment that lets you copy an artifact. The pricing of this one might be the most interesting on the list, with it generally being very steady up until its peak in and then fluctuating wildly ever since. In a shocking departure from the norm, this card is also on the Reserved List. Timetwister costs three mana and lets you shuffle your hand, graveyard and library together and then draw seven cards.

The Mox cycle of cards are a marginally less broken version of a Black Lotus. Each one gives you one mana for no mana but, unlike Black Lotus, can be used multiple times. Mox Ruby gives you Red mana, and has been used in a plethora of decks since they were released.