This card is just gross. A leech that big just makes me wriggle in disgust :-( I know I owned a copy or two back in the day, but I don't know that I ever used it because for 3 mana there were so many other cards I'd rather include. And since I never made a theme deck based around the First Strike Mechanic, this card never made it off the ground. But that art, how disgusting. Fantastic, right? :-D
Another card like Karma, where players who use black get punished. As they should!
A red player could play this card, turn all the swamps of his opponent into 1/1 creatures, then he could play something like Fireball (if he has enough mana) and wipe out all his opponents lands. If he's running short on mana, and is willing to take some damage, he can also use something like Earthquake, which is much more efficient. Without land, your opponent can do nothing, nothing but suffer an ignominious defeat that is! Bwhahahahahaa!
I remember this card, mainly because of the tiger. I don't think I used this card because making your opponent's "everything" come into play tapped means they can't use it the turn it comes into play, which slows the game down AND makes your opponent feel like they can't play. Maybe from a competitive side it makes sense, but when you're playing with your friends, there's no sense in alienating them or making the game feel "unfun". Getting back to the tiger. I don't know why I remember it, because it isn't like it is a creature or anything. But somehow, that image stuck in my head and even now, I can shake my head and remember the card :-D
Sunday saw the dramatic return of Imperator Bookstooge as he swept back into the blogosphere. Spheres of influence were shaken and the status quo destroyed as he vowed to take over Devilreads and make it safe for everyone, not just illiterate dumb dumbs who wouldn't know a good book if it hit them over the head. The Imperator knows he has a long struggle ahead of him and that defeat is most likely, but this has not deterred our intrepid hero. All Hail Imperator Bookstooge!
Monday was one of those days I got home from work and all plans evaporated because of how tired I was. I had visions of doing laundry, vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, etc. 2 weeks ago we got hit by a snow storm that dumped over a foot of snow on us and it is sticking around. I'm trudging around each day through snow that has piled up to my knees in places. I come home exhausted.
Tuesday I was by myself as Short Round went with his wife to an ultrasound to see their newly conceived baby. It was a nice day (above freezing) and while the job sucked (to be fair, all jobs suck this time of year with this much snow), I still had energy at the end of the day. I did laundry. Go me!!!!! I also listened to a lot of Enya's albums as I needed something very easy and soothing to help me settle down from doing all those laundries ;-)
Wednesday was the day I overcame and did even MOOOOR chores. I hadn't vacuumed our place in over a month (don't judge me) and it was time. I broke out ye olde Rainbow Vac and got a ton of stuff off our floors and out of the carpets. Every time I vacuum, I tell myself I need to do it weekly (I do!) but then a month passes and this situation happens, time after time after time. I guess I just don't like vacuuming. But in my defense, Mrs B likes doing vacuuming even less than I do, so you can consider me the clean freak of the pair ;-) Whilst I was vacuuming, I shanghaied Mrs B into sweeping and mopping. I might be the clean freak, but the freaky deaky has to be shared.
Thursday, well Thursday turned into a good day. It was sunny, it was at the freezing mark (amazing how warm freezing feels when you been below it for weeks) AND I got some Mr Macs Deluxe Cheeseburger mac-n-cheese for lunch. Considering it was between 800 to 1000 calories you know it was good. Mrs B had a good day too, so that made for a good evening together as we enjoyed the general goodness of the day.
Friday wasn't as fun as Thursday. The job wasn't easy and by the time we were done I was hurting. I was setting pins on a property line and the ground was frozen, so I had to use a power drill and then whale on the pin itself to drive it flush. THEN I had to put a wooden tall stake next to it as a witness. Oh, did I mention I had to shovel out a foot of snow at each point, enough so I could kneel down and do all that work? Yeah, it was brutal. Ended up taking 2 extra strength tylenol for my shoulder and elbow when I got home.
And that's a wrap for the week!
I remember seeing this card and just loving it. Unfortunately, I was never able to make a deck with this card. That didn't really matter to me at the time though, as I was just as likely to put my cards in a binder and look at them as I was to actually use them :-D This is also one of the few "serious" cards by Phil Foglio, instead of his typically silly and nonsensical art, like "Gaseous Form".
That dude is just ripped! He's the kind of guy who should go up against a Predator, a REAL Predator mind you, not some modern touchy-feeling boo-hoo Predator *gag. That sword alone looks big enough to reflect laser beams or even deflect shoulder missiles!
The artist definitely got that "Warlord" vibe down perfectly. 5stars for ol' Kev Brockschmidt.
Hip hip hurray!
Hip hip hurray!
Hip hip hurray!
This is what is called a "hate card" in Magic, because it is hating on a specific color. White was pretty good at that back in the day. It kind of had to though, because they didn't have a lot of powerful creatures or spells. Plus, since I didn't play black back then, I was especially self-righteous about punishing those who did. Ahhh, youth ;-)
Now here's a guy who you can tell from the get-go that he wants to rip your heart out and eat it in front of you. And with that glowing cook arm, it'll be nice and tender, like a steak!
Now how awesome is that? A swordsman is jumping up and over the castle wall just to try to kill you. You HAVE to admire the guts that takes ;-) This is one of the instantly recognizable cards to anybody who was playing back then. It was used a lot because it was so effective and so cheap. And it gave you a really good feeling when you played it and your opponent had no flyers and so you smashed him in the face with your biggest creature :-D Now that was good old fashioned Magic...
I loved this card back in the day. I always liked artifacts (no clue why, they just were cool) and having card draw was important for the game. The problem is, this card is extremely mana intensive. So unless your deck was built around getting a lot of land out quick (land is what you use to get mana and you can normally only put one land on the table each turn), you were spending all your available mana to draw more cards, that you then had no mana to use. Another card that I just couldn't make work for me. Honestly, I don't think it was supposed to work. Wizards would put in semi-bad cards just to fill up the card slots.
On an unrelated note. When I was looking around to upgrading my avatar from the old
to some sort of actual picture, I did consider using the artwork from this card. I really liked that old looking book. But I liked a "person" kind of avatar more, so I went with this guy
and that has eventually led me to my current avatar. See, books are an adventure!
As far as I can tell, "Jandor" is not a named character in the Arabian Nights stories. He is a made up character exclusively for Magic the Gathering. That doesn't mean WotC didn't do a good job of creating a character out of just a couple of sentences on some cards :-D I'd love to have a modern version myself, called Bookstooge's Saddlebags. It would fill up with rockstar, eggnog and cold pepperoni pizza every night, with maybe a little bag of chips to fill things out ;-)
I never used this card nor do I remember ever actually seeing it used.
What this brings to my mind now are scenes from the epic fantasy series, Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. In that massive series, jade statues play a significant role. In The Bonehunters (book 6), the world is bombarded with massive jade statues, which are an invasion force from another reality (I think). I wonder if there is a universal jade statue myth I'm not aware of that both the artist for this card and Erikson drew from? Otherwise, I'm going to say Erikson was totally influenced by this card.
This was another card, much like Howling Mine or Black Vise, that I really liked the idea of it, but could never actually make it work. The problem is that cards in your hand aren't doing anything and you need those cards to be out on the field, doing something. Sure, it's nice to get a little life, but all it takes is one Goblin Rock Sled smacking you and your life gain is nullified. And if you have 5 useless cards in your hand, then you probably built your deck wrong.
I am sure some game genius could have built a deck and made this work wonderfully, but I was not that genius. So I know I tried this a couple of times and the deck always fizzled and never won me a game. But that was the whole fun to be honest, trying out strategies to see if you could get something to work. As long as you didn't take losing, personally.
This is the exact same card as Iron Star, except for the color white instead of red. Sometimes Wizards would do a whole cycle of artifacts, one for each color, but at other times they'd only do it for a couple of the colors. I think it all came down to the balance of the game. Did Color X "need" a lifegain artifact to help it out? Well, too bad, because that would make Color X too powerful. Ahhhh, those were the days when Wizards actually cared about the game as a game and not only as a money making machine.
Of course, I "might" be viewing things through my Glasses of Urza nostalgia ;-)
When I look at this, all I can think of is the TriStar company production logo. I don't know HOW Wizards of the Coast got away with this.
The only reason to play such a card, even back in the day, was if you were playing a monoblue deck and needed a big finisher near the end of the game to do a lot of damage to your opponent (remember, you and your opponent each have 20 life at the beginning of the game). Blue was simply not meant to have big creatures, so the creators of the game felt that if you wanted a big creature in blue, there were going to be serious drawbacks.
With that being said....
If you had 5 or 6 people over for a Saturday and you all wanted to play a massive game of Magic, and you had to create a bunch of decks quick, you just used whatever you had on hand. That was the fun of kitchen table magic, playing subpar decks and seeing what happened :-D
There are 5 mana types in Magic. Forests (Green), Islands (Blue), Mountains (Red), Plains (White) and Swamps (Black). There is a variety of three artworks for them. When I did the Forests,
I did each one in its own separate post. That just seemed like too much this time around, so I'm lumping all the islands into one post. They are extremely similar and I don't have enough spare words to make something up for each slight difference. I even added the art part just to make this longer ;-)
Red was always about doing damage, even if it meant doing damage to yourself in the process. So any card that was "life gain" (ie, it gave you life) was a big deal. With this being an artifact, it meant that a red deck could run it without any hiccups. When a game comes down to a single lifepoint, having a card like this can keep you from being pushed over the cliff of defeat.
And as we all know, winning is everything. Forget about having fun or hanging out with your friends. You WIN or you lose, that is all there is ;-)
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