MTG News 3-18

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Good Day Magic Peeps,

It appears that the news truck backed up and dumped its contents on Wizards today. Two noteworthy items are a tweak to the official Reprint Policy and a new set announcement. First - let's have a looky-see at the reprint policy . .

The reprint policy is basically a promise by Wizards of the Coast not to reprint listed cards. Essentially, the list included all the cards from Alpha that had rotated out of print before Fourth Edition along with all the uncommons and rares from Antiquities, Arabian Nights, and Legends. In addition, from Ice Age through Urza’s Destiny, all the rares had only one opportunity to get reprinted in a base set and after that they were added to the reserved list, never to be printed again.

The reason for the policy was in response to the secondary market and the desires of collectors to have some sort of buffer to ensure their cards did not loose value through reprints. Fast forward several years latter and some new Magic players were clamouring for an opportunity to be able to play with some of the old school hotness. Wizards had reprinted some older cards not not the reprint list and found they had satisfied newer players who wanted to get their mitts on older cards and yet were able to please some collectors - the value of their cards did not take a hit at all as their was still a demand from some players who prefer the older art, or some people just think it’s way cooler to play with older cards, etc.

The reprint policy was just revisited / re-examined. The announcement may be viewed here and the official updated policy viewed here. This has some members of the community polarised into basically two camps : happy and angry. As we are casual standard players, this announcement did not really make very large waves with us. Drop us a comment if you want to vent or add to this.

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The next piece of news . . .
The new fall set had just been announced . . .

The corrosion begins October 1, 2010

Set Name : Scars of Mirrodin
Block Set 1 of 3 in the Scars of Mirrodin block
Three-Letter Abbreviation SOM
Number of Cards 249
Release Date : October 1, 2010
Prerelease Events : September 25-26, 2010
Launch Parties : October 1-3, 2010

Design Team : Mark Rosewater (lead), Mark Gottlieb, Alexis Janson, Erik Lauer, Matt Place, Mark Globus, Nate Heiss

Development Team : Mike Turian (lead), Aaron Forsythe, Erik Lauer, Mark Purvis, Matt Place

Some Notes on Rotation : Standard now rotates only once each year, with the release of the October large set. So Scars of Mirrodin will enter Standard on its release and Shards of Alara block and Magic 2010 will leave. The Standard format after the release of Scars of Mirrodin will consist of Zendikar Block, Magic 2011, and Scars of Mirrodin.

Mirrodin was a much-loved set with great flavour released back in the fall of 2003. We were not playing MTG at the time but are looking forward to this take / flavour extension of it.

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