The five biggest FU’s in Magic

Everyone’s enjoying a great Standard format and one of the best limited sets of all time while cracking pretty fetch lands. I think it’s important to remember the not so good times, so without further ado.

This is my list of the five biggest FU’s from Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro towards players.

5- Limited Product Availability

Things like Commanders Arsenal and most of the From the Vaults product look great. Unfortunately a lot of people who wanted them either couldn’t get them or had to pay through the nose. MSRP was often ignored and members of the community felt left out because some were bestowed a good deal and others were told to take a hike. The one that hurt most was Modern Masters 2. They make an awesome set and tell everyone how awesome it is to draft and then hide it on the top shelf of the pantry. I love drafting and Modern, I got to draft Modern Masters exactly zero times and only got to play sealed once.

4 – White Ward

Seriously, I got this in my first ever starter deck. It’s amazing I didn’t quit this game on the spot.

3 – Old School Tourney Rules

Ignoring the fact that the player base was fairly dodgy back then, tournaments were also the wild west organizational wise. Sealed deck would use starter decks that came with a random allocation of lands. This was your pool and there was no adding of additional basic lands or land station. If you opened 23 green spells and one forest, suck it up princess. Travelled 2 hours to get here and lost in the first round, what a shame it was single elimination.
Have a single land in your opening hand, well that’s a locked in keeper because you were only allowed to mulligan zero land hands (after revealing to your opponent).

2 – White Borders

White borders were a nice way of differentiating between older printings and reprints. They didn’t just protect the expensive cards nor even just those worth more than a dollar. White Borders went all the way down to making sure you knew basic mountain number 3 was a reprint. I can understand trying to protect collectors or players “investments” but white borders didn’t really achieve that. All it ended up doing was making sure new players were branded as new. I guess the plan to make new players wear a mandatory “noob” t-shirt failed due to the cotton pickers strike of 95 and the introduction of white borders was an emergency fix.

1 - Taking away Leagues from MTGO

Magic Online belongs here and there are numerous reasons why. The program is the one thing on this list which does feel like a serious FU to players. My nomination for one thing that stands out is the Duke Nukem 3D like promising that “Leagues are coming back”. The emphasis should be on back because this is a feature Magic Online used to have. A great way for people to pick up and play when they wanted with little wait time between matches. This feature was too user friendly and made less money than forcing people to booster draft so it was removed.

They at least deserve points for creativity because this is the first instance of a 10 year old program having features actively removed.