@@Flummeryman urban legend of someone tearing the card up to hit more cards, it probably never happened, but wotc made a Chaos Confetti card that requires you to tear it up
Fable 9: fury, grief, not dead after all, dauthi voidwalker, ragavan, troll of khazad dum, lightning bolt, thoughtseize, and finally fable of the mirror breaker
In the early days of chaos orb, people stopped stacking their lands together because there was a risk of losing your whole stack of lands. Then some smartasses started making their library into the shape of a shelter and put cards below the overhang, to hide from chaos orb. One crazy dude went so far as to blu-tack his cards onto a whiteboard in a tournament in order to become chaos orb immune. That's the kind of stuff that led to its banning. XD
I won't try to explain how illusionary Mask works specifically, but I do know it actually ended up seeing play in a combo deck. There are some creatures in magic that don't cost much but have a huge drawback when they enter the battlefield, including a 1 mana 12/12. With the Mask, you can cast them, but since they enter face down, the drawback doesn't trigger. It has never been broken, but it is probably why the price is a little higher
Holy shit never thought about that. Eater of days, leveler. Actually nuts. I like the card less now. Also all covert had to do was look up the card on gatherer LOL
@@chunkitliem3635 Like imagine bringing that card to an event. Youd have to buy a booster box every time you showed up lol. The Card store you played at would love you.
Booster Tutor most famously, but also Stocking Tiger, Opening Ceremony, Summon The Pack, Myntasha Honored One, and Heroes of Kamigawa all literally have you open a pack of Magic cards
Illusionary Mask is a really weird card. I don’t know how it was errata’d because sometimes those errata’s can entirely change the effect of the original card. Based on the wording of this picture of the card, I would assume it works like this: When you summon a creature, you can pay any additional cost (or not). Regardless, the creature goes face down so your opponent doesn’t know what it is. As soon as you use the creature for any reason, it becomes visible again. The point of the card is basically like… if you had a powerful creature card with a very specific mana cost, you could potentially pay a weird mana cost to trick your opponent into not knowing what card it really was. Like something that cost 3 red and 2 black for example. You pay 3 red 2 black and then some additional amount of mana. Your opponent wouldn’t necessarily know which card you summoned. Or you could even try to trick your opponent by paying that mana cost for a different creature card trying to make your opponent think you paid zero mana for the Illusionary Mask effect for your big boss card, but, in reality, you just spent random extra mana tricking them. It’s garbage because it’s basically 2 mana do nothing except give you the option to overpay for a creature if you want.
Without looking it up, I believe the errata is that you can pay any amount of mana but that mana must contain the normal cost, including colors and everything. I believe you have to note the exact mana so you can later prove you didn't cheat. It's one of those old cards barely supported by the current rules.
@@fernandobanda5734 The last errata is also from over a decade ago. It's quite possible that this card can be worded much more nicely but frankly, it's probably not on Wizards' radar at this point.
The main thing is it's supposed to be a bluff card, where you pay an important creature cost for a less important one, and have your opponent second guess themselves if they want to spend the counterspell/removal on the unknown. It was rubbish for the time, but if it was released alongside one of the meta-defining creatures it would probably have seen more uses.
morph creatures with powerfull effects have mostly a very high morph cost than the actual mana cost. You can play a creature and when you're "forced to turn it up" it triggers the un-morph effect, because of the same wording:"when [this creature] is turned face up". Maybe there are some DFCs where this works too, but that would be highly rare, because most of them "transform". Afaik with the last rule changes about transform with the All Will Be One Set, "face down" is clearified as not the same as "transform". Because of that Tokens and Clones have also a transformed side, before nothing happend because there was no back side of a symbol for a imaginary creature.
One of my favorite facts about how Illusionary Mask originally worked is that your opponent can copy your face-down creature with Clone. Then they have a creature in play that they know nothing about. For example if the creature is a Wall, they might go: 'Ok, attack with it.', and you're just like: 'Nope!'.
Wouldn't it just copy the characteristics of the face-down version, which I assume were defined somewhere even then, because it does need to have some characteristics.
@@TharkonI'm pretty sure that's how it works nowadays since they specified rules for face down creatures when they introduced morph. But back when, originally? People just had to make up on the go, and since the opponent couldn't know what the creature was...
@@Tharkon No, that's not the case. The standardization of face down creatures to be 2/2 with no abilities came a lot later. The Illusionary Mask is a weird one as the creature stayed the same, just face down. If it got blocked and you said "your creature died", your opponent basically had to trust you.
@@Alialun2 In your example, your creature would take/deal damage and get flipped though... In those early sets, was there ever a case where your creature does something and doesn't get flipped by the "As soon as a face down creature takes damage, deals damage, or is tapped, you must turn it face up."? The only "trust me bro" moments I can think of would be with passive effects.
I'm glad Rarran mentioned Chaos Orb getting damaged, as there's a horror story about a player ripping theirs up before flipping it so it would hit more things.
A story I will tell my grandkids. One of my favorite reactions to the card from semi-experienced MtG players is 'wait what, this isn't an Unglued set joke card?'
According to internal documents from the manufacturer (Carta Mundi at the time), there were 1008 copies of each rare Alpha card printed, and 3025 for the Beta ones. There is no officially confirmed information for Unlimited, but it's assumed to be around 16000 copies for each rare. All in all, between the three sets, it's safe to assume there were originally about 20000 copies of each Power 9 card.
I can't refute your numbers at all, but the guys at my shop have said "there are 14,000 black lotus in the world" for years. I have no idea how they came across that number though.
@@tomithy_loI'd say that's probably a decently accurate number, actually. If there are at least, according to the top, around 17,000 black lotuses, it would be safe to assume that a few thousand of them were played to death or lost to time before people began collecting. I'd say that's very reasonable
Time walk was originally red and said "your opponent looses his next turn". They meant they missed it, but testers thought it was 1R win the game, so it was nerfed into this. Edit (time warp to time walk)
I played the game as it was originally designed ... and my 40 card deck had 5 contracts from below in it. Yeah, that made ancestral recall look like a p****
@@bcoyne12345. No, the original deck construction rules were basically sealed but with your entire collection instead of just 6 boosters, 40 cards minimum and as many copies of a card as you had opened.
@@bcoyne12345 used to be that you can have a deck with 15ish mountains and the rest are lightning bolts (1 mana deal 3 to anything), as long as you open with 1-2 mountain it's gg. the 4-of rule was invented pretty early in the game's lifespan, thankfully
I interpret the illusionary mask as saying that you can pay the casting cost of the creature and then also the X cost from 0 to whatever. The idea is that because your opponent doesn't know what mana went to the X and what mana went to the card they cannot guess what it might be
That makes sense, but I'm also wondering if this would allow you to play creatures at instant speed. It doesn't mention activating only as a sorcery (unless that's covered in errata), and it doesn't tap either.
yeah that's what I got as well and the fact that it can be 0 is because you can cast creatures for 0 mana under certain circumstances like say a cost reduction card reducing the mana by 2 and you have a 1 mana creature, you cast it for 0 and can choose to pay 0 for the mask
@@sammyj6532 in the errata version: If you do, you may cast that card face down as a 2/2 creature spell without paying its mana cost. So you still have to cast it as a creature which is usually at sorvery speed. I'm guessing the "2/2 creature spell" means it is like a morph creature and can't be cast at instant even when it has flash.
Yeah, my thoughts were "I wanna cast a creature that costs 2rr, so I can pay any amount that is 2rr or more." I can see why they thought bluffing a bigger threat than you actually had would be good, but you'd be better off just adding cards to make your deck more consistent so you could just draw the card your bluffing
Regarding seeing Chaos Orb played IRL, it's a staple in 93/94 Old School. It has a slight errata to prevent the silly counter tactics, but it gets flipped all the time. It's like half the reason to play that format.
@@evandroreismoraes7571basically they both build a deck in their respective games and then try to build a similar deck in eachothers game so example rarran makes aggro paladin and then the other guy makes the closest thing to that
Regarding Illusionary Mask - X must pay at _least_ the casting cost of the creature you choose, including the necessary colours. At the time, the primary function was to conceal which creature you were playing. These days, it is primarily used to put creatures into play without trigging their enter the battlefield abilities. Most notably this card has been used with Phyrexian Dreadnought to cheat in a 1 mana 12/12 trample. From the extended rulings, if the amount you paid for X could not be used to cast the creature (e.g. paying 0 for a face down Grizzly Bears,) this would be considered a game rule violation, and appropriate tournament penalties would be applied when the violation is eventually discovered. The full ruling is as follows: If you use the ability to cast a creature card face down, you must keep track of the amount and types of mana you spent on Variable Colorless. If that creature spell is moved from the stack to anywhere other than the battlefield, the resulting creature leaves the battlefield, or the game ends, the face-down card is revealed. If its mana cost couldn't be paid by some amount of, or all of, the mana you spent on Variable Colorless, all applicable penalties for casting a card illegally are assessed.
Back in Alpha, there was no limit of how many copies of a card could be played. So the most powerful decks of all time were something like 20 black lotus, 20 timetwister, 1 lightning bolt. (decks could be 40 cards at that time). Basically, you kept shuffling until you could cast enough lightning bolts to kill someone.
@@ConnorMurphy-ku8hbOr the creator of Magic's favorite deck: 60 plains 40 shahrazad. It is unknown if any games with this deck were ever actually finished.
15 black lotus and 25 ancestral recall. Allot of people don't realize that recall can target opponents. Draw most of your deck till u get enough mana and recalls to deck your opponent
I expected CGB to point out that the version of Cyclopean Tomb he showed doesn’t work as printed since it doesn’t have a mana cost and therefore can’t be cast. (The mana cost was supposed to be {4} and has been changed to that in its Oracle text and all later printings)
The bizarre thing about Cyclopean Tomb: it didn't have a printed Mana cost in Alpha (using that art is a little deceptive as such), but it officially costs 4 Mana just to get into play. It's way too slow to be truly toxic: 4 Mana do nothing, then 2 Mana to maybe harrass your opponent a little bit.
Thatt misprint on tomb makes alpha versions worth a premium the same way orcish oriflamme from alpha cost 1R, but later sets have it at 3R. Later printings aren't worth nearly as much as alpha. If it cost zero tomb still wouldn't be broken, but it could be pretty annoying with stuff like ancient tomb + cyclopean tomb hitting the board turn 1 or just land mox. Alpha rares in particular though every single one has some collector for it that will pay for it to try to monopolize the card as alpha rare printrun for each unique rare is
Illusionary Mask is one of the few cards in the game where the errata basically makes up a new function for the card, because the original card doesn’t make any sense within the rules of Magic. It has been used competitively in the semi-recent past as a way to play giant creatures with tiny mana costs, but huge drawbacks as they enter the battlefield because it sneaks the creature in face down. The classic card with this is Phyrexian Dreadnaught.
Is it really a new function if it works exactly how the printed text says? You can pay some amount of mana for X and then cast a creature face down if the mana you spent could have paid its mana cost. Then it gets turned face up if it does any of the things the card mentions.
@@petrie911 "The X cost can be any amount of mana, even 0; it serves to hide the true casting cost of the creature, which you still have to spend." What? Nobody understood how this was supposed to work. You can pay 0? There were no creatures in Alpha that cost 0. When did you have to "spend" that mana? When you play it face down? When it's turned face up? What if you don't have the mana when the card is revealed? Etc. The new version makes it clear (well, clear-er) that you can't cheat on the mana, you still have to spend at least an amount that could cast the creature. Also the card says nothing about the creature being a 2/2. It just says it's face down. By the card text it has no characteristics. An old errata made it a 0/1 because a creature can't exist without a power and toughness, but it was later changed to a 2/2 to match the properties of other face down creatures.
@@christopherlundgren1700My assumption is that {X} is the additional cost, not the full cost, in the original printing. So it is 0 if you pay {B} to sneak in the aforementioned Dreadnought
@@christopherlundgren1700 It's a lil confusing at first, but if you read it properly; It simply says it CAN be 0. The second sentence states It "hides the cost", but you still have to pay the cost. Altogether it says "spend any amount, but it must be at least the cost of the creature". You know when to pay it because the "X:" at the start of the ability means it's a cost you have to pay it to use the effect in the first place, and the "The X cost" simply refers back to the "X:" at the start of the effect. I think the better wording would be like "X: put a creature into play from your hand face down that costs X or less. The card is flipped face up when it is tapped, or when it would deal or be dealt damage".
@@Bladius_ I don't think X is just the additional padding that you choose to pay above and beyond the creature's mana cost. What happens when your opponent asks you what X is? Perhaps I'm reading it with more charitability than it deserves, but it seems clear to me that X needs to at least "cover" the mana cost of the creature. They say "X could be 0" because they were future-proofing the card, knowing they might someday print a 0-cost creature.
Timetwister is that expensive because its not banned in Commander. Also, good on Rarran for recognizing that Lorcana card "A Whole New World" is basically just MTG's wheel of fortune, which is the non-shuffle draw 7 part of Timetwister. Wheel of Fortune also inspired the cards Professor Oak and Imposter Professor Oak from the Pokemon TCG
Camouflage is notable for being basically impossible to fit within the modern card text format. If you look at Scryfall or Gatherer, the card is even longer and arguably less comprehensible than the older version.
So about the Raging River being undiscovered good, a very similar situation happened in base set of Pokemon TCG. The metagame for base set was between 3 archetypes consisting of "Haymaker", wigglytuff decks and a mewtwo deck. Stall existed as an archetype but had terrible matchups against those T0 decks. It wasn't until a guy called Hookah combined a bunch of his random bulk cards into a classic deck that the scene discovered Moltres & Lickitung stall, which proceeded to wipe the format 15 years after base set was printed. Dude wasn't even playing 4 copies of the important cards. Nowadays Haymaker is dead as it gets beaten out by multiple options that weren't considered previously and Mewtwo decks have had to change a lot of their cards out to adapt.
I actually think raging river just isn't that good. I think he's used to hearthstone combat where minion vs. minion combat is a much bigger component than it is in MTG. The first thing to bear in mind is that if you aren't playing an aggro deck, this card is complete trash - if your opponent is more aggressive than you are, they don't care about blocking your attacks. Your creatures could be unblockable for all they care. You attacking them at all means you aren't blocking their attacks, so you usually wouldn't want to attack them even if raging river were already in play for free. Even in an aggro deck, it's not that clear that you'd rather have it over something that just does damage to the opponent to try to close out the game (it's kind of slow for an aggro deck - you don't want to play it on turn 2 because it's way more important to be playing your creatures, and by the time you have the mana to spare to play it you probably won't be able to get much more damage out of attacking the opponent even if you play it). The second thing to keep in mind is that removal is very strong in MTG, and can usually be played at instant speed. Even if you have a bunch of unblocked creatures, it doesn't count for much if they're planning on using spells to kill your creatures anyway. You attack with 4 creatures, they put 2 creatures on each side, you send them all on 1 side, then they block 2 of them and use spells to kill the other 2 for instance. It also *definitely* is complete and utter trash in any metagame where stuff like the power 9 are being used.
@@asdfqwerty14587 I agree that raging river isn't great. Everything you said, but also: There aren't all that often many combat creatures on both sides of the field. The only case where this even DOES something is specifically if the opponent has just 1 creature capable of blocking you. Then you can send your attack to the other side. If they have 2 blockers, then you're still being blocked and (usually) losing an attacker. If they have no blockers, then the river is useless. If they have more creatures good enough to block with, then you're usually just dead to his attacks instead. And in any case: if you're using it to be aggressive, then it just means the opponent is losing his blockers slower. Instead of losing 4 creatures to your attacks on turn 1 and then getting hit face, he's losing them over 2-3 turns.
Illusionary mask is a cool card. You put a card into play face down by paying at least enough mana to cast the creature card. It flips up when those conditions are met (would take or assign damage or become tapped). It avoids enter the battlefield triggers and it’s most common use is putting Phyrexian Dreadnaught into play without any drawback. (It’s a 1 mana 12/12 that makes you sacrifice 12 power of creatures when it etbs.)
Ancestral recall was actually part of a cycle of cards (one for each color) called the boon cycle which all did 3 of a thing for 1 mana. Blue: Ancestral Recall-draw 3 or force an opponent to Black: Dark Ritual- add 3 black mana Red: Lightning Bolt- deal 3 damage to a creature or player Green: Giant Growth- target creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn White: Healing Salve- gain 3 life or prevent 3 damage to a creature or player That's roughly in order of their power, though 2 and 3 could be swapped. White really got the short end of the stick.
the funniest thing about old magic for me is that you only died at the end of the current phase, so you could just do whatever while chilling at -100 life as long as you got back above 0 before the phase ended. the game only checked if you are dead at the end of every phase but you could casually revive yourself no big dead during a phase
I think the most fascinating part of this video is just learning how wild the beginning of Magic was (and really early card games when you think about it). I recall land destruction being common place back then but to think creatures were much weaker before is nuts when creatures matter so much more now. Great video idea and would love to see something like this again!
For Illusionary Mask, simply put you can pump any extra amount of mana, even 0, to hide the real casting cost of your creature. So you can pay 7 mana for your 2 mana creature if you reaaaaaaaly wanted to.
Remind me of a mechanic in Eternal were Stealth units are play hidden and all cost either 3 or 5 mana, and some 3 mana stealth can be played with an additional 2 cost granting them a bonus effect
Additionally, you still have to pay the colored mana cost for the card when you cast it with this ability. So if you are casting a Grizzly Bears with this effect, you have to at least pay 1 green mana and 1 mana of any color, then you can overpay as much as you want to hide its real casting cost.
The thing about the power 9 is that 5 cards are copies, so it's really like the 5 most powerful cards not the 9 most. Totally get why he guessed so many cards were in it.
I'm surprised they didn't mention the story (or maybe urban legend at this point, I'm not even certain) about some player ripping chaos orb up and tossing it up confetti style
We need more of this stuff. This is so cool to see my two favorite games overlap. MtG has so many cool stories with it and it’s super fun to see Rarran’s reactions to them. Reminds me how much I love these games even beyond the gameplay!
Illusionary Mask simply requires you pay the exact cost of the creature or a superset cost. So for something like Ornithopter you can pay 0, but you can't pay 0 for a Raging Goblin. For that you have to pay at least one R and any amount of extra mana.
When you activate Mask, the X cost you pay has to at least cover the mana cost of the creature you hide (that’s the “which you still have to pay” in the original text, and the “could be paid by…” in the oracle text). The answer to “what happens if you just pay 0” is that you can’t do that (unless of course the creature you hide is free). The original “point” of the card is the hiding thing. But what it actually gets any play for is skipping enters-the-battlefield replacements/triggers, like that of Phyrexian Dreadnaught (why yes I would like a 12/12 trample for 1 mana thanks)
this is one of my favorites of all these M:TG videos, it's hilarious. I would love for this to just be a series of CGB traveling through the various sets in order of release(or maybe blocks of sets) picking out the interesting and unique cards to discuss with Rarran.
I LOVE how every card player has his terminoligy, like Rarran names the colours classes: "The black class" it would have never come to my mind since I started with MTG and then went to Hearthstone. Same goes when MTG players call everything creatures, yugioh heads call them monsters and hearthstoners call em minions. So fun!
30:58 This card seems very simple to me. Say you want to pretend your typhoid rats is a Sheoldred. You pay X=4, play the rats face down, having “wasted” 3 mana. Boom, you have an up to 4 drop in play, face down. Or, you pay 4 mana later for a face down actual Sheoldred, then the mind games of “can I kill it with less than 5 damage?” comes into play. Ofc, playing Sheoldred face down wouldn’t be great, but maybe it’s a Skithryx, or a Lich.
How I think Illusionary Mask works: I want to play this creature which has a cost of 1 green and 2 colorless. I tap 2 forests and 2 mountains for Illusionary Mask. 3 mana is played as the casting cost for the creature, the one other mana is a bluff which Illusionary Mask allows me to perform. (X is 1, my opponent doesn't know that) The creature goes face down and won't be turned up until I use it to attack, block, tap, or it gets damage by an opponent through non combat damage. My opponent has no clue what this card could be, all they know is that I paid 2 Red and 2 Green for this card. So it could be any card in the entirety of magic that is Red or Green or BOTH or none that costs at most 4 mana. In reality, I paid 3 mana for this green dude. I paid 1 mana to make my opponent confused. The situation where you would pay 0 for Illusionary Mask would be if you're not bluffing and are paying the exact amount for a summon. Thus you summon a creature, and activate Illusionary Mask for 0 to play it face down.
I've won tournaments playing Illusionary Mask before, but it works differently now than it did in the past. The key interaction was you can play it with Phyrexian Drednought, and it allows you to skip the CIB trigger. In older Magic, the mask put the creature into play, so it got around counterspells (it doesn't work that way now). When you activate it, you must pay the full mana cost for the creature - It doesn’t allow you to cheat costs. You can pay extra mana to disguise what you’re casting, but you don’t have to. The current rules make it work similar to Morph. You play the card face down. Anytime it taps or takes damage it will trigger, and turn over.
Regarding the Illusionary Mask: You must fully pay the legal mana cost of the spell and you can optionally pay more to hide the mana cost of the spell. I believe you can technically pay less (or wrong colored) mana, but then the spell is considered illegal when flipped up and you must return it to your hand and potentially suffer a game loss.
I don’t know how a judge in 2024 would rule, there is no game rule for what happens if you don’t cover the cost of the creature with the mana you spend on the ability. You just did something you weren’t allowed to do, same as if you just cast the creature and didn’t pay enough for it (but more awkward because you find out later).
Chaos Orb Story: Plays Chaos Orb > rips up Chaos Orb in 20 little pices > throws the snippets on the table > wipes the opponents board > opponent baffeled > crowed baffeld > judges baffeld > wins game
I wonder if eventually we will see Rarran featured in an episode of Command Zone learning commander or a video with the prof. It'd be so cool to see him interact further with the MTG community.
Sooo after a bit of Research on Illusionary Mask, it got erratad into Pay X, where X is the CMC (Mana Value) of the Card or More (Designed to Fake out an Opponent i guess) to put it into play as a Morph (2/2 without any Effect (ETB (Enter the Battlefield Effects) do not trigger)). If the "Morphed" Card would be dealt Damage or Deals Damage / would be tapped, it's "unmorphed" and assigns it's Attack/Defense Stats into the Combat. It's more or less a Funny Way to Overpay for Cards and try to Fake out your opponent with Say a Shivaan Dragon when it really was a Crap Card. Atleast thats how i understand the Card and after researching it for like 30 minutes im pretty sure, that's how it works. Dont forget that back in the Ruleset we had Manaburn (each Mana you produced by Effects and/or Tapping Lands that wouldnt be used up after a phase would deal 1 Damage to yourself) aswell, so you could get rid of overproduced Mana by overspending for the Effect.
There was a fun practice while Chaos Orb was still legal where people would spread their cards so they were more than one card-length apart so it would be harder to land on multiple things at once. Because Magic has no strict board layout, it was all totally legal, and very funny.
Could you print Chaos Orb on a A0 paper sheet to nuke the opponent? Could you flip the card on top of their library to have them discard the card before even drawing it?
@@CountFab You have to be able to shuffle all the cards in your deck or you lose the game, so no to the first point, also chaos orb specifies 'in play' so it wouldn't destroy anything in the library unfortunately
I love all the videos with these two. I don't even care about Hearthstone at all, and I love these videos, so someone who likes both Hearthstone and Magic must more than love these videos. They really are great.
31:29 You activate the artifact anticipating x amount of mana (probably keeping note of the colors). When the hidden creature is tapped, would deals damage or is dealt damage or (i think) interacts with any object or relevant effect you have to pay the mana to cast it, otherwise it is countered (probably)
Also Balance, which is probably the single most powerful effect in the game if it actually resolves. It was so good people splashed for it off City of Brass in basically everything
Yeah, in addition to Balance as another person mentioned, Armageddon too could be brutal for aggro to close, though I guess in a Moxen format it might prove to be lacking assuming everyone gets access to 4 Moxen. Green I think is considered the worst in Alpha as even though it has mana dorks and Channel, everyone has Moxen to ramp if they want it, and the ramp payoffs are lacking outside of the Channel + Fireball combo. Also, the removal in Alpha is amazing compared to the creatures, which current Standard shows how Green midrange/aggro struggles with that.
@@Duall8 Yeah Mox Emerald was the weakest of the moxen because of mana dorks, who were also just worse than artifact mana. It's not until much, much later in Magic's history that green became one of the stronger colors. Green doesn't start overtaking white until around Tarmogoyf got printed in Future Sight.
Chaos Orb is also a currency item in Path of Exile because Chris Wilson one of the games creators is a huge mtg fan so he put it in the game as an homage.
Illusionary Mask is an insane card. It basically let's you hide the cost of the creature and put it in morphed, and auto-flip it if you would attack, block, or tap it, or if something would affect it. It let's you mindgame your opponent for if they want to respond, or let you cast creatures while skipping EtB effects. Being about to cast something like Phyrexian Dreadnaught with no downside, without needing a Stifle in hand at the same time, and it is reusable.
The X in Illusionary Mask is different in printed text vs oracle text. In the printed version, you can activate it for X=0, and then cast a face-down Grizzly Bears for its normal cost of 1G. (Or choose a different value of X to hide the fact you're casting a 2-mana spell.) In the oracle version, the X includes the mana cost of the creature. So you could only use it to cast a face-down Grizzly Bears if X contains 1G or more (but you wouldn't have to pay the creature's cost a second time).
I could be wrong but the way that I understand illusionary mask to work in mtg terms is {x}: cast a creature card from your hand with mana value x or less face down whenever it deals damage, is dealt damage, or is tapped instead turn it face up and it deals damage, is dealt damage, or is tapped face up (basically meaning it acts normally now). some notes is that the errata makes the face down version a 2/2 when it is face down all of its triggered effects like entering the battlefield effects don't get triggered feel free to correct me or to make a more accurate summary this is just as i understand as a player of mtg but certainly no judge
You’d also be owning a piece of cardboard older than most people watching this video. Having said that, a lot of Alpha cards aren’t worth much compared to the heavy hitters.
@@theparagonalAlpha as the name implies was the first print run of Magic cards that are now recognized as tournament legal. With there only being 2.6 million cards printed and it initially being released at a game fair. Early on a lot of the sets were not quite printed to demand as demand was not known so the print run for sets were quite limited.
Twiddle was in Alpha to let you untap time vault, but it didn't let you go infinite. For illusory mask, you pay the creature's cost + any amount as you cast it. The "without paying it's mana cost" is just so you don't need to reveal the cost. So you could pay 10 for a 1 drop to bluff it being good, but not 1 for a 10 drop.
If I’m getting it right, illusionary mask is used to make your opponent think ur summoning one that costs more then it really does. Then they might use some of their important removal on what they think is a 6 mana card but it’s actually like a 2 mana one. So for that I would tap 2 for the creatures cost and 4 more for the cost of the mask.
Ayy, I get to explain Illusory Mask! So basically the idea of this card is that you have to pay the mana cost for the creature you cast when you cast it, just like any other Magic card. The X cost to activate is so you have the option of bluffing what that card is by paying extra mana. So for example, you could pay 4 and play a card face down and your opponent wouldn't know if the creature cost 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. Paying X = 0 means you play the card for its normal cost. Paying 0 mana overall means you can only play a creature that costs 0, since the total amount of mana you spend has to be at least as much as the creature would cost normally.
The original printing of Time Walk said, "The opponent loses their next turn." When people first started playing the played the card as if it just kills your opponent for two mana.
For Illusionary Mask: You can play a card face down by paying it's mana cost, and if you wish, pay extra mana as a way of disguising it: EXAMPLE: this could be used to trick an opponent into thinking a 1/1 is a more powerful card or to play minigames about what you just played.
Mask + Phyrexian Dreadnought used to be a deck! The PD was a 12/12 for 1 mana and a wildly detrimental enter the battlefield trigger. By using mask, you could dodge the trigger and get the body very cheaply.
to answer your questions about illusionary mask: you cannot pay 0 unless the creature you're playing also costs 0. X always has to be equal to or more than the cost of the creature (and it also has to be the correct color. so for example you could pay WG or WWG to cast a creature that costs 1G but you could not pay WW) you are required to write down or otherwise keep track of the mana you used to pay for X and the card must be revealed at the end of the game if it wasn't revealed during the game. If it turns out you didn't spend the correct amount of mana to play it then you effectively cheated and are liable for whatever penalty the tournament you're playing in has for playing a card illegally.
The reason the original card is worded so confusingly is that in that version X was the cost you were paying on top of the normal cost to cast the creature. So you were paying 1G to cast a 1G creature, plus X to activate the artifact, and you could choose what X was, even 0. The errata changed it to X being the full cost because the old way of wording it doesn't work with current magic rules
So, the way Illusionary Mask works is that you can play a creature from your hand face down for any mana cost. When that creature is dealt damage, receives damage or is tapped, you must pay the amount of unpaid mana. If you don't pay that mana, you sacrifice the creature. I'm not 100% on this, but I'm fairly sure. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Illusionary Mask DOES NOT Let you play anything for free. It lets you play cards face-down, and allows you to spend extra mana should you choose to. So you pay the cost of the creature you're playing (say 3 green mana), then you may (if you want to) pay any amount of additional mana to gaslight your opponent into thinking "Oh crap, that thing must be dangerous!".
When I was new to MTG. I just went to a comic book vintage shop that also sold just collections of mtg cards. They had a box of something like 200 cards for like 15 bucks. For starting out, felt like it was a deal. Since they were a vintage store first, and not a card shop I can only assume they didnt know the value of Black Lotus as there was one in that box. However, I wouldnt know its value either and gave it away without realizing my mistake till about 6 months later when I learned about some of the most expensive cards
I dont know if someone already explained but illusory mask works like this: the amount of mana and the type of mana that you pay when you activate it needs to be able to cover the cost of the creature, for example if you pay 5 mana (lets assume 3 colorless and 2 red) to activate mask you will be able to put a creature that cost at most 5 and has at most 2 red colored mana in the creature casting cost. So basically the X amount you pay for orb needs to be more or equal to the cost of the creature, you will not be able to pay zero to put a creature that costs more than zero
@Covert: Illusory mask works like this - pay the normal casting cost of the creature you are casting then pay any amount of additional mana you'd like (including zero) and play the creature face down. Then it flips under the conditions stated.
31:45 how illusionary mask works. Pick a creature in your hand you'd like to put on the battlefield. The cost to activate the mask is that creature's mana cost plus any additional amount you want to add to confuse your opponent. You then cast that creature for free face down. The next time anything happens to it, it get turned face up. For example you have a black knight in your hand it costs BB. You pay BBB to the mask and put the knight face down. To your opponent that card could be any creature that costs (1), (B), (2),(BB),(1B), (3), (1BB), or (2B). /e spelling
31:48 Card Name: Illusionary Mask Mana Cost: 2 Mana Value: 2 Types: Artifact Card Text: Variable Colorless: You may choose a creature card in your hand whose mana cost could be paid by some amount of, or all of, the mana you spent on Variable Colorless. If you do, you may cast that card face down as a 2/2 creature spell without paying its mana cost. If the creature that spell becomes as it resolves has not been turned face up and would assign or deal damage, be dealt damage, or become tapped, instead it's turned face up and assigns or deals damage, is dealt damage, or becomes tapped. Activate only as a sorcery.
Ancestral Recall is one of 5 specific 1-mana instants in Magic's history (1 for each colour, and each does 3 of something), but is by far the most powerful and most iconic one. The others include Dark Ritual (black; Pay 1 black mana to add 3 black mana to your mana pool), Giant Growth (green; target creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn), Lightning Bolt (red; deals 3 damage to any target), and the white one (which I don't remember what it is, and it isn't very good). Giant Growth and Lightning Bolt see more regular play, while the white one's usage is almost nonexistent today. Dark Ritual is the second-most powerful of the 5, and as such is only legal in a few formats (a couple more than Ancestral Recall).
I was at Origins game convention in San Jose CA in July '94. When someone told me about how a player used Chaos Orb in the MTG tournament. Apparently he tore it into tiny pieces and scattered them everywhere. Destroying the other players entire board, including all land. I believed the story at the time but after hearing it repeated so many times, I have come to see it as an old wive's tale.
How Illusionary Mask works: Pick X, lets say 2. Play a creature face down. Lets say it costs 3. You pay 5 mana. Opponent has no idea if the creature you played is worth 0, 1, ..., 5 mana. Thats it. If you choose x to be 0 and pay 2, opponent knows that your creature is worth 0, 1 or 2 mana. If X is 5 and you pay 7, opponent has no idea of you played a gigantic creature or not. The more you pay, the more uncertain your opponent is
29:30 X: Cast a creature card from your hand that could be cast with the used mana face down as a 2/2 creature sorcery spell. Turn it face up before it assigns or receives damage or becomes tapped.
Illusory Mask quick version: Chose a creature with cost Y in your hand. Pay Y+X: Put it onto the battlefield face-down (In modern magic by definition a face-down creature is 2/2 morph). You can only pay 0 total if Y = 0. The card, while not inheritly busted, was part of a powerful combo play with the card Phyrexian Dreadnaught. Dreadnaught is normally a 1-mana card that has a debilitating ETB effect that makes you normally effectively sac your board, including it if you don't have enough power on board already. If you illusory mask it, you avoid the etb effect by just paying 1 to put it out face down and get a 12/12 trample.
So, Illusionary Mask: When you use it, you need to pay the creature's actual mana cost plus any additional amount. The creature becomes a 2/2 without any other attributes until one of the conditions for turning it face-up are met. So if you attack (unless it somehow got Vigilance) or it would be involved in a damage exchange, it gets turned face-up. It's similar to a card with Morph, where the morph cost is the card's mana cost + X, except you can't turn it face-up as a special action.
The think the mask means you have to pay the creature's mana cost or more. It says you still have to pay the mana cost in the first sentence about paying X, not the second sentence about revealing it.
Word of Command's best (most realistic) lines of play are usually to forcer them to use their removal on their own creatures, or discard/burn spells on themselves. In those cases, it's a guaranteed 1 for 1, and often a 2 for 1 for BB. Board wipes can also be very good if you are behind, and they are just holding a board wipe because they have a more valuable board. You can swap the game state pretty fast. It also uses their mana, so you do deny them whatever else they were planning on playing that turn too! Very good card. My personal Favourite I specify most realistic, because obviously the best lines of play are like, making them cast time stretch targeting you on their upkeep, or some other unlikely scenario.
To use illusionary mask, follow these simple steps: 1. Choose a creatuee card in your hand 2. Pay its cost, and any extra you want to pay to hide the exact cost you paid from your opponent 3. Put the creature in play face down 4. Wait for something to happen to it (damage, targeting, tapping, etc), at which point you turn it face up. This is useful because the creature doesn't enter play as itself, so paying 1 mana into the mask lets you put a 12/12 phyrexian dreadnought into play without triggering its detrimental trigger on entry
From my understanding, "Illusionary Mask" works as follows: You pay the cost of the creature you would like to play plus any additional amount of mana to hide what the true mana cost of the creature is (This means) - You may use 4 mana to cast a 3 mana creature to bluff that it is a 4 cost creature when it is in reality a 3-cost creature
Illusory mask just says X must be the cmc of the creature. Which includes zero ofc. And then the moment it meets the criteria it’s flipped. Also you would have to show it at end of game to make sure you didn’t cheat and pay an incorrect casting cost. The same penalty you would get if you drew extra cards. It’s just honor system.
The idea with the og wording on illusory mask, as far as i can tell, is that as originally intended, you still tap all of the mana to cast the creature, then pay any amount into the mask, to "hide the casting cost." So if you "summon" a craw worm, you still pay 4gg for it, but then can spend any amount more than that and put it face down. Obviously the errata changed all of that, which is why it now casts for free.
So the way Illusionary Mask works is that what you pay for X has to at least be able to cast the creature, you can spend more than what the creature costs. It was mostly just a way to get a Phyrexian Dreadnought into play without having to worry about its comes into play ability. Also, there were 3 types of artifacts back in the day: Mono (requiring the artifact to be tapped to use it's effect), Poly (did not require it to be tapped to use it's effect), and Continuous (which did not have an activated ability, however if they were tapped they be "turned off", such as Howling Mine)
I think the best part of this for me is the points where someone explains why an effect would be ridiculous in their preferred card game, because it shows how the different games function in how they value certain actions. Some actions are almost universally good, like getting to take an extra turn, but other things are much weaker just because of the context of the game and the meta.
Illusionary Mask works like this: you pay X+Y mana, where X is the cmc of the creature, and Y is any integer. So you have to pay the base cost, but then can pay however much extra to try and trick your opponent into thinking it's something else.
So, for Illusionary Mask, the way it works is you pay any value for X, keeping track of mana symbols and such. Then, you can take any creature from your hand with a maximum value of X, whose mana cost can be covered by the mana you used to pay for X, and play it face down. So, if you pay RUBGW for X, you can cast any creature from your hand with a maximum CMC of 5, and that requires any combination of that mana to cast - so you can cast anything with a cost of W, B, U, R, G, 1W, 2W, 3W, 4W, 1U, 2U and so on and so forth. It's a super convoluted way to give any creature morph well before morph because an actual thing.
On Illusionary Mask: They way it works is simply that you play a creature spell face down by paying at least its cost, and you can adjust its cost with any amount of mana, usually calling all the colors to confuse the opponent. It wasn't played a lot, but one of the ways it used to be played then (I have some Illusionary Masks, I was there, I am that old) was on small creature decks, where you would throw a bunch of low cost high effect creatures for the time, like Hypnotic Specter or WhiteKnight, and make them all cost the same mana, so your opponent would know which creatures you had in your deck, but had to figure out which of the 2-3-4 creatures was the one that was the real threat for his deck. So I summon this for UBB, and this for UBB and this for UBB, etc. Games used to last a very short amount of time with the classic Land-BlackLotus-Channel-Fireball combo, but when Channel got banned and Black Lotus restricted, some people like me attempted to make fringe cards like this one work. As for the Chaos Orb legend, it happened at a Canadian Tournament in 1994, when a guy brought a deck to the tournament including the Chaos Orb, and proceeded in tearing it apart in the final game, and flipping all the small pieces onto the opponent's playing field, hence destroying most of his lands and creatures, and some of his lands in the process, and winning the final bout of the tournament. The ref didn't know what to do, since it was a first, and since all the small pieces turned, they were all considered the "Chaos Orb", and the guy won the tournament, for which the first prize was a black lotus and an unlimited box, so the cost of the Chaos Orb was offset tenfold. I had a college friend who played at that tournament and witnessed it first hand. Right after, an errata was added to Chaos Orb to indicate that it had to still be a card. That was back when the erratas would come in the magic magazine Scrye.
I believe the way the illusory mask works is that you need to pay *at least* the amount of mana the creature normally requires, and you can overpay to try to bluff another creature. If you pay 0 for X, you can only summon a 0-cost creature. I think the reason it mentions that you don't pay the creature's cost is because you're already spending the mana on the mask's effect, and they want to make sure that both the required mana and excess mana are spent at the same time (or maybe due to the logistics of paying for a card without revealing it).
I am EXTREMELY disapointed that Covert didn't tell the Chaos Confetti story.
was thinking about that one too!
Facts
What happened
@@FlummerymanYou can rip up your Chaos Orb then sprinkle it over the board for a full clear iirc.
@@Flummeryman urban legend of someone tearing the card up to hit more cards, it probably never happened, but wotc made a Chaos Confetti card that requires you to tear it up
Rarran saying "Powerful nine" every time, and "Fable nine" is hilarious.
The Fabled nine actually sounds kind of sick though.
I loved how he said it enough times that even Covert eventually started to go with it.
Fabled 9, the 9 most iconic and storied cards in magic history. What would they be?
Fable 9: fury, grief, not dead after all, dauthi voidwalker, ragavan, troll of khazad dum, lightning bolt, thoughtseize, and finally fable of the mirror breaker
@@andrewgreenwood9068 all I'm thinking of is all of the french vanilla cards that people worship. Like stormcrow and colossal dreadmaw
Every time he said powerful 9, I took psychic damage
In the early days of chaos orb, people stopped stacking their lands together because there was a risk of losing your whole stack of lands.
Then some smartasses started making their library into the shape of a shelter and put cards below the overhang, to hide from chaos orb.
One crazy dude went so far as to blu-tack his cards onto a whiteboard in a tournament in order to become chaos orb immune.
That's the kind of stuff that led to its banning. XD
Yeah i was thinking of just spreading my cards 4 inches apart
what does blu-tack mean?
@@ThenewWereWolfGod stick them to the board
how does that make them chaos orb immune?@@juliandacosta6841
@@ThenewWereWolfGod It's a brand of adhesive putty for sticking things to walls and similar surfaces temporarily.
I won't try to explain how illusionary Mask works specifically, but I do know it actually ended up seeing play in a combo deck. There are some creatures in magic that don't cost much but have a huge drawback when they enter the battlefield, including a 1 mana 12/12. With the Mask, you can cast them, but since they enter face down, the drawback doesn't trigger. It has never been broken, but it is probably why the price is a little higher
Tru it's just anti-etb tech.
Phyrexian Dreadnought, Phage the Untouchable...
@@chuckwagon3718Leveler
Holy shit never thought about that.
Eater of days, leveler. Actually nuts. I like the card less now.
Also all covert had to do was look up the card on gatherer LOL
thats so cool!!
"The effect you just said, opening a pack, is really cool, I'd love to see that in other card games."
*Elise the Trailblazer* "Am I a joke to you?"
lmao
"Yes. Even post-buff."
but if they play that offline they would actually need to open a booster pack instead let the system randomly generate some card for them
@@chunkitliem3635 Like imagine bringing that card to an event. Youd have to buy a booster box every time you showed up lol. The Card store you played at would love you.
Booster Tutor most famously, but also Stocking Tiger, Opening Ceremony, Summon The Pack, Myntasha Honored One, and Heroes of Kamigawa all literally have you open a pack of Magic cards
Illusionary Mask is a really weird card.
I don’t know how it was errata’d because sometimes those errata’s can entirely change the effect of the original card.
Based on the wording of this picture of the card, I would assume it works like this:
When you summon a creature, you can pay any additional cost (or not). Regardless, the creature goes face down so your opponent doesn’t know what it is. As soon as you use the creature for any reason, it becomes visible again.
The point of the card is basically like… if you had a powerful creature card with a very specific mana cost, you could potentially pay a weird mana cost to trick your opponent into not knowing what card it really was. Like something that cost 3 red and 2 black for example. You pay 3 red 2 black and then some additional amount of mana. Your opponent wouldn’t necessarily know which card you summoned. Or you could even try to trick your opponent by paying that mana cost for a different creature card trying to make your opponent think you paid zero mana for the Illusionary Mask effect for your big boss card, but, in reality, you just spent random extra mana tricking them.
It’s garbage because it’s basically 2 mana do nothing except give you the option to overpay for a creature if you want.
Without looking it up, I believe the errata is that you can pay any amount of mana but that mana must contain the normal cost, including colors and everything. I believe you have to note the exact mana so you can later prove you didn't cheat. It's one of those old cards barely supported by the current rules.
@@fernandobanda5734 The last errata is also from over a decade ago. It's quite possible that this card can be worded much more nicely but frankly, it's probably not on Wizards' radar at this point.
@targetbuddy5 well, it's been on their minds as they brought the concept back with much cleaner rules with Morph.
The main thing is it's supposed to be a bluff card, where you pay an important creature cost for a less important one, and have your opponent second guess themselves if they want to spend the counterspell/removal on the unknown.
It was rubbish for the time, but if it was released alongside one of the meta-defining creatures it would probably have seen more uses.
morph creatures with powerfull effects have mostly a very high morph cost than the actual mana cost. You can play a creature and when you're "forced to turn it up" it triggers the un-morph effect, because of the same wording:"when [this creature] is turned face up".
Maybe there are some DFCs where this works too, but that would be highly rare, because most of them "transform". Afaik with the last rule changes about transform with the All Will Be One Set, "face down" is clearified as not the same as "transform". Because of that Tokens and Clones have also a transformed side, before nothing happend because there was no back side of a symbol for a imaginary creature.
One of my favorite facts about how Illusionary Mask originally worked is that your opponent can copy your face-down creature with Clone. Then they have a creature in play that they know nothing about.
For example if the creature is a Wall, they might go: 'Ok, attack with it.', and you're just like: 'Nope!'.
Wouldn't it just copy the characteristics of the face-down version, which I assume were defined somewhere even then, because it does need to have some characteristics.
@@TharkonI'm pretty sure that's how it works nowadays since they specified rules for face down creatures when they introduced morph. But back when, originally? People just had to make up on the go, and since the opponent couldn't know what the creature was...
@@Tharkon No, that's not the case. The standardization of face down creatures to be 2/2 with no abilities came a lot later. The Illusionary Mask is a weird one as the creature stayed the same, just face down. If it got blocked and you said "your creature died", your opponent basically had to trust you.
I don't have all the errata memorized, but long ago I bought one copy of Illusionary Mask just for the sheer confusion I figured it could cause.
@@Alialun2 In your example, your creature would take/deal damage and get flipped though...
In those early sets, was there ever a case where your creature does something and doesn't get flipped by the "As soon as a face down creature takes damage, deals damage, or is tapped, you must turn it face up."?
The only "trust me bro" moments I can think of would be with passive effects.
I'm glad Rarran mentioned Chaos Orb getting damaged, as there's a horror story about a player ripping theirs up before flipping it so it would hit more things.
Always remember that power is a double-edged blade. It calls to you, where you are most desperate; when victory seems worth any sacrifice.
The good old chaos confetti
And then was disqualified because his deck didn't have the minimum 60 cards in it
A story I will tell my grandkids.
One of my favorite reactions to the card from semi-experienced MtG players is 'wait what, this isn't an Unglued set joke card?'
I'm disappointed we weren't shared the urban legend that inspired the gag card Chaos Confetti, as well as said card.
According to internal documents from the manufacturer (Carta Mundi at the time), there were 1008 copies of each rare Alpha card printed, and 3025 for the Beta ones. There is no officially confirmed information for Unlimited, but it's assumed to be around 16000 copies for each rare.
All in all, between the three sets, it's safe to assume there were originally about 20000 copies of each Power 9 card.
I can't refute your numbers at all, but the guys at my shop have said "there are 14,000 black lotus in the world" for years. I have no idea how they came across that number though.
@@tomithy_loI'd say that's probably a decently accurate number, actually. If there are at least, according to the top, around 17,000 black lotuses, it would be safe to assume that a few thousand of them were played to death or lost to time before people began collecting. I'd say that's very reasonable
I can confirm there is at least one destroyed via using it on a bicycle wheel when I was 11yrs old :(
@@unknownchipmagnet3510 big oof
I like how Rarran said "powerful nine" so many times that CGB even started saying it.
CGB's gonna keep saying it on stream now lol
Time walk was originally red and said "your opponent looses his next turn". They meant they missed it, but testers thought it was 1R win the game, so it was nerfed into this. Edit (time warp to time walk)
It's current version on its own is essentially Temporus, which was unplayable trash at worst and meme combo at best.
*time walk
@@duncanfinch27whether your talking about time walk or time warp, both are very, very, good
“Nerfed” lol
It was reworded but the testers actually understood the card better than the people making the cards
For reference on how strong Ancestral Recall is, drawing 3 cards at instant speed is typically 5 mana these days.
I played the game as it was originally designed ... and my 40 card deck had 5 contracts from below in it.
Yeah, that made ancestral recall look like a p****
@@Danceofmasks wait, was there no rule of 4 in the early days?? :O
@@bcoyne12345. No, the original deck construction rules were basically sealed but with your entire collection instead of just 6 boosters, 40 cards minimum and as many copies of a card as you had opened.
@@bcoyne12345Yeah xd the 4 copy rule came between Beta and Unlimited printings
@@bcoyne12345 used to be that you can have a deck with 15ish mountains and the rest are lightning bolts (1 mana deal 3 to anything), as long as you open with 1-2 mountain it's gg. the 4-of rule was invented pretty early in the game's lifespan, thankfully
To the judge- "His chaos orb is in a sleeve so technically its not touching my card"
To the judge "Atoms repel so it can't touch my cards!"
I interpret the illusionary mask as saying that you can pay the casting cost of the creature and then also the X cost from 0 to whatever. The idea is that because your opponent doesn't know what mana went to the X and what mana went to the card they cannot guess what it might be
That makes sense, but I'm also wondering if this would allow you to play creatures at instant speed. It doesn't mention activating only as a sorcery (unless that's covered in errata), and it doesn't tap either.
yeah that's what I got as well and the fact that it can be 0 is because you can cast creatures for 0 mana under certain circumstances like say a cost reduction card reducing the mana by 2 and you have a 1 mana creature, you cast it for 0 and can choose to pay 0 for the mask
Pay X to get a creature on loan and pay the full mana cost when it’s flipped? Sounds like what it was trying to go for
@@sammyj6532 in the errata version: If you do, you may cast that card face down as a 2/2 creature spell without paying its mana cost.
So you still have to cast it as a creature which is usually at sorvery speed. I'm guessing the "2/2 creature spell" means it is like a morph creature and can't be cast at instant even when it has flash.
Yeah, my thoughts were "I wanna cast a creature that costs 2rr, so I can pay any amount that is 2rr or more." I can see why they thought bluffing a bigger threat than you actually had would be good, but you'd be better off just adding cards to make your deck more consistent so you could just draw the card your bluffing
I would really love if Covert showed you Silver Border cards such as from Unhinged and Unglued, please make it happen :D
Yes! Even if those cards aren't legal, I would love to see Rarran react to the insanity that are Unsets
You mean Unsanity?@@vinpap779
Honestly, I'd throw in some Unstable too. Host and Augment are awesome-weird. Or The Grand Calcutron!
I mean he mentioned Booster Tutor, I feel he's obligated now!
FLAVOR JUDGE! FLAVOR JUDGE!
Regarding seeing Chaos Orb played IRL, it's a staple in 93/94 Old School. It has a slight errata to prevent the silly counter tactics, but it gets flipped all the time. It's like half the reason to play that format.
Video idea - Blue plays builds a magic deck and you build a closest copy of it in hearthstone, and Blue does the same
This is a sweet idea!
I didn't understand but I like it
@@evandroreismoraes7571basically they both build a deck in their respective games and then try to build a similar deck in eachothers game so example rarran makes aggro paladin and then the other guy makes the closest thing to that
@@chadgamer6942 thank you
@@chadgamer6942 you deserve your name
Regarding Illusionary Mask - X must pay at _least_ the casting cost of the creature you choose, including the necessary colours. At the time, the primary function was to conceal which creature you were playing. These days, it is primarily used to put creatures into play without trigging their enter the battlefield abilities. Most notably this card has been used with Phyrexian Dreadnought to cheat in a 1 mana 12/12 trample.
From the extended rulings, if the amount you paid for X could not be used to cast the creature (e.g. paying 0 for a face down Grizzly Bears,) this would be considered a game rule violation, and appropriate tournament penalties would be applied when the violation is eventually discovered. The full ruling is as follows:
If you use the ability to cast a creature card face down, you must keep track of the amount and types of mana you spent on Variable Colorless. If that creature spell is moved from the stack to anywhere other than the battlefield, the resulting creature leaves the battlefield, or the game ends, the face-down card is revealed. If its mana cost couldn't be paid by some amount of, or all of, the mana you spent on Variable Colorless, all applicable penalties for casting a card illegally are assessed.
Rarran hitting the perfect 1$ on Consecrate Land was a success story like no other
Back in Alpha, there was no limit of how many copies of a card could be played. So the most powerful decks of all time were something like 20 black lotus, 20 timetwister, 1 lightning bolt. (decks could be 40 cards at that time). Basically, you kept shuffling until you could cast enough lightning bolts to kill someone.
20 channel 20 lotus 20 fireball (actual numbers tweaked to logical values and the namesake of channelfireball afaik)
@@ConnorMurphy-ku8hbOr the creator of Magic's favorite deck: 60 plains 40 shahrazad.
It is unknown if any games with this deck were ever actually finished.
15 black lotus and 25 ancestral recall. Allot of people don't realize that recall can target opponents. Draw most of your deck till u get enough mana and recalls to deck your opponent
“These kids today with their collector numbers and their newfangled tap symbol. Twenty Black Lotuses and twenty Plague Rats. Now that’s real Magic.”
that changed very quick though ;-)
I expected CGB to point out that the version of Cyclopean Tomb he showed doesn’t work as printed since it doesn’t have a mana cost and therefore can’t be cast. (The mana cost was supposed to be {4} and has been changed to that in its Oracle text and all later printings)
The bizarre thing about Cyclopean Tomb: it didn't have a printed Mana cost in Alpha (using that art is a little deceptive as such), but it officially costs 4 Mana just to get into play. It's way too slow to be truly toxic: 4 Mana do nothing, then 2 Mana to maybe harrass your opponent a little bit.
i was wondering! bet people have cast it for free
only real value id see it for is swampwalk via filth or something altho you could ruin someones gaias cradle or something significant like that lol
Thatt misprint on tomb makes alpha versions worth a premium the same way orcish oriflamme from alpha cost 1R, but later sets have it at 3R. Later printings aren't worth nearly as much as alpha. If it cost zero tomb still wouldn't be broken, but it could be pretty annoying with stuff like ancient tomb + cyclopean tomb hitting the board turn 1 or just land mox.
Alpha rares in particular though every single one has some collector for it that will pay for it to try to monopolize the card as alpha rare printrun for each unique rare is
Illusionary Mask is one of the few cards in the game where the errata basically makes up a new function for the card, because the original card doesn’t make any sense within the rules of Magic.
It has been used competitively in the semi-recent past as a way to play giant creatures with tiny mana costs, but huge drawbacks as they enter the battlefield because it sneaks the creature in face down. The classic card with this is Phyrexian Dreadnaught.
Is it really a new function if it works exactly how the printed text says? You can pay some amount of mana for X and then cast a creature face down if the mana you spent could have paid its mana cost. Then it gets turned face up if it does any of the things the card mentions.
@@petrie911 "The X cost can be any amount of mana, even 0; it serves to hide the true casting cost of the creature, which you still have to spend." What? Nobody understood how this was supposed to work. You can pay 0? There were no creatures in Alpha that cost 0. When did you have to "spend" that mana? When you play it face down? When it's turned face up? What if you don't have the mana when the card is revealed? Etc. The new version makes it clear (well, clear-er) that you can't cheat on the mana, you still have to spend at least an amount that could cast the creature.
Also the card says nothing about the creature being a 2/2. It just says it's face down. By the card text it has no characteristics. An old errata made it a 0/1 because a creature can't exist without a power and toughness, but it was later changed to a 2/2 to match the properties of other face down creatures.
@@christopherlundgren1700My assumption is that {X} is the additional cost, not the full cost, in the original printing. So it is 0 if you pay {B} to sneak in the aforementioned Dreadnought
@@christopherlundgren1700 It's a lil confusing at first, but if you read it properly; It simply says it CAN be 0. The second sentence states It "hides the cost", but you still have to pay the cost. Altogether it says "spend any amount, but it must be at least the cost of the creature". You know when to pay it because the "X:" at the start of the ability means it's a cost you have to pay it to use the effect in the first place, and the "The X cost" simply refers back to the "X:" at the start of the effect.
I think the better wording would be like "X: put a creature into play from your hand face down that costs X or less. The card is flipped face up when it is tapped, or when it would deal or be dealt damage".
@@Bladius_ I don't think X is just the additional padding that you choose to pay above and beyond the creature's mana cost. What happens when your opponent asks you what X is? Perhaps I'm reading it with more charitability than it deserves, but it seems clear to me that X needs to at least "cover" the mana cost of the creature. They say "X could be 0" because they were future-proofing the card, knowing they might someday print a 0-cost creature.
Timetwister is that expensive because its not banned in Commander.
Also, good on Rarran for recognizing that Lorcana card "A Whole New World" is basically just MTG's wheel of fortune, which is the non-shuffle draw 7 part of Timetwister. Wheel of Fortune also inspired the cards Professor Oak and Imposter Professor Oak from the Pokemon TCG
it also sees play in vintage in certain decks like PO
Camouflage is notable for being basically impossible to fit within the modern card text format. If you look at Scryfall or Gatherer, the card is even longer and arguably less comprehensible than the older version.
So about the Raging River being undiscovered good, a very similar situation happened in base set of Pokemon TCG. The metagame for base set was between 3 archetypes consisting of "Haymaker", wigglytuff decks and a mewtwo deck. Stall existed as an archetype but had terrible matchups against those T0 decks. It wasn't until a guy called Hookah combined a bunch of his random bulk cards into a classic deck that the scene discovered Moltres & Lickitung stall, which proceeded to wipe the format 15 years after base set was printed. Dude wasn't even playing 4 copies of the important cards. Nowadays Haymaker is dead as it gets beaten out by multiple options that weren't considered previously and Mewtwo decks have had to change a lot of their cards out to adapt.
I actually think raging river just isn't that good. I think he's used to hearthstone combat where minion vs. minion combat is a much bigger component than it is in MTG. The first thing to bear in mind is that if you aren't playing an aggro deck, this card is complete trash - if your opponent is more aggressive than you are, they don't care about blocking your attacks. Your creatures could be unblockable for all they care. You attacking them at all means you aren't blocking their attacks, so you usually wouldn't want to attack them even if raging river were already in play for free. Even in an aggro deck, it's not that clear that you'd rather have it over something that just does damage to the opponent to try to close out the game (it's kind of slow for an aggro deck - you don't want to play it on turn 2 because it's way more important to be playing your creatures, and by the time you have the mana to spare to play it you probably won't be able to get much more damage out of attacking the opponent even if you play it).
The second thing to keep in mind is that removal is very strong in MTG, and can usually be played at instant speed. Even if you have a bunch of unblocked creatures, it doesn't count for much if they're planning on using spells to kill your creatures anyway. You attack with 4 creatures, they put 2 creatures on each side, you send them all on 1 side, then they block 2 of them and use spells to kill the other 2 for instance.
It also *definitely* is complete and utter trash in any metagame where stuff like the power 9 are being used.
@@asdfqwerty14587 I agree that raging river isn't great. Everything you said, but also: There aren't all that often many combat creatures on both sides of the field. The only case where this even DOES something is specifically if the opponent has just 1 creature capable of blocking you. Then you can send your attack to the other side.
If they have 2 blockers, then you're still being blocked and (usually) losing an attacker. If they have no blockers, then the river is useless. If they have more creatures good enough to block with, then you're usually just dead to his attacks instead.
And in any case: if you're using it to be aggressive, then it just means the opponent is losing his blockers slower. Instead of losing 4 creatures to your attacks on turn 1 and then getting hit face, he's losing them over 2-3 turns.
Illusionary mask is a cool card. You put a card into play face down by paying at least enough mana to cast the creature card. It flips up when those conditions are met (would take or assign damage or become tapped). It avoids enter the battlefield triggers and it’s most common use is putting Phyrexian Dreadnaught into play without any drawback. (It’s a 1 mana 12/12 that makes you sacrifice 12 power of creatures when it etbs.)
Ancestral recall was actually part of a cycle of cards (one for each color) called the boon cycle which all did 3 of a thing for 1 mana.
Blue: Ancestral Recall-draw 3 or force an opponent to
Black: Dark Ritual- add 3 black mana
Red: Lightning Bolt- deal 3 damage to a creature or player
Green: Giant Growth- target creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn
White: Healing Salve- gain 3 life or prevent 3 damage to a creature or player
That's roughly in order of their power, though 2 and 3 could be swapped. White really got the short end of the stick.
i'm so salty he didn't mention lighting bolt. typical blue-player bias
@@slinelolIt's because Bolt got reprinted after Unlimited
@@berserkerciaran I stick with my "blue player bias against burn"
the funniest thing about old magic for me is that you only died at the end of the current phase, so you could just do whatever while chilling at -100 life as long as you got back above 0 before the phase ended. the game only checked if you are dead at the end of every phase but you could casually revive yourself no big dead during a phase
I think the most fascinating part of this video is just learning how wild the beginning of Magic was (and really early card games when you think about it).
I recall land destruction being common place back then but to think creatures were much weaker before is nuts when creatures matter so much more now.
Great video idea and would love to see something like this again!
For Illusionary Mask, simply put you can pump any extra amount of mana, even 0, to hide the real casting cost of your creature. So you can pay 7 mana for your 2 mana creature if you reaaaaaaaly wanted to.
Remind me of a mechanic in Eternal were Stealth units are play hidden and all cost either 3 or 5 mana, and some 3 mana stealth can be played with an additional 2 cost granting them a bonus effect
Additionally, you still have to pay the colored mana cost for the card when you cast it with this ability. So if you are casting a Grizzly Bears with this effect, you have to at least pay 1 green mana and 1 mana of any color, then you can overpay as much as you want to hide its real casting cost.
The thing about the power 9 is that 5 cards are copies, so it's really like the 5 most powerful cards not the 9 most. Totally get why he guessed so many cards were in it.
I'm surprised they didn't mention the story (or maybe urban legend at this point, I'm not even certain) about some player ripping chaos orb up and tossing it up confetti style
It might have started as one, but I have witnessed it happen at Grand Prix Charlotte in Dec '05.
I'm surprised they didn't mention the story behind Word of Command's art.
We need more of this stuff. This is so cool to see my two favorite games overlap. MtG has so many cool stories with it and it’s super fun to see Rarran’s reactions to them. Reminds me how much I love these games even beyond the gameplay!
Illusionary Mask simply requires you pay the exact cost of the creature or a superset cost. So for something like Ornithopter you can pay 0, but you can't pay 0 for a Raging Goblin. For that you have to pay at least one R and any amount of extra mana.
You are allowed to overpay
@@la8ballBack in the day it was used with Phyrexian Dreadnought to elide the ETB.
When you activate Mask, the X cost you pay has to at least cover the mana cost of the creature you hide (that’s the “which you still have to pay” in the original text, and the “could be paid by…” in the oracle text). The answer to “what happens if you just pay 0” is that you can’t do that (unless of course the creature you hide is free).
The original “point” of the card is the hiding thing.
But what it actually gets any play for is skipping enters-the-battlefield replacements/triggers, like that of Phyrexian Dreadnaught (why yes I would like a 12/12 trample for 1 mana thanks)
this is one of my favorites of all these M:TG videos, it's hilarious. I would love for this to just be a series of CGB traveling through the various sets in order of release(or maybe blocks of sets) picking out the interesting and unique cards to discuss with Rarran.
I LOVE how every card player has his terminoligy, like Rarran names the colours classes: "The black class" it would have never come to my mind since I started with MTG and then went to Hearthstone. Same goes when MTG players call everything creatures, yugioh heads call them monsters and hearthstoners call em minions. So fun!
Rarran you forget at 23:25, that elise gave you an ungoro pack that you would shuffle into your deck, so Hearthstone did have something like that !
30:58 This card seems very simple to me. Say you want to pretend your typhoid rats is a Sheoldred. You pay X=4, play the rats face down, having “wasted” 3 mana. Boom, you have an up to 4 drop in play, face down. Or, you pay 4 mana later for a face down actual Sheoldred, then the mind games of “can I kill it with less than 5 damage?” comes into play. Ofc, playing Sheoldred face down wouldn’t be great, but maybe it’s a Skithryx, or a Lich.
How I think Illusionary Mask works:
I want to play this creature which has a cost of 1 green and 2 colorless.
I tap 2 forests and 2 mountains for Illusionary Mask.
3 mana is played as the casting cost for the creature, the one other mana is a bluff which Illusionary Mask allows me to perform. (X is 1, my opponent doesn't know that)
The creature goes face down and won't be turned up until I use it to attack, block, tap, or it gets damage by an opponent through non combat damage.
My opponent has no clue what this card could be, all they know is that I paid 2 Red and 2 Green for this card. So it could be any card in the entirety of magic that is Red or Green or BOTH or none that costs at most 4 mana.
In reality, I paid 3 mana for this green dude.
I paid 1 mana to make my opponent confused.
The situation where you would pay 0 for Illusionary Mask would be if you're not bluffing and are paying the exact amount for a summon. Thus you summon a creature, and activate Illusionary Mask for 0 to play it face down.
I've won tournaments playing Illusionary Mask before, but it works differently now than it did in the past. The key interaction was you can play it with Phyrexian Drednought, and it allows you to skip the CIB trigger. In older Magic, the mask put the creature into play, so it got around counterspells (it doesn't work that way now).
When you activate it, you must pay the full mana cost for the creature - It doesn’t allow you to cheat costs. You can pay extra mana to disguise what you’re casting, but you don’t have to.
The current rules make it work similar to Morph. You play the card face down. Anytime it taps or takes damage it will trigger, and turn over.
Regarding the Illusionary Mask:
You must fully pay the legal mana cost of the spell and you can optionally pay more to hide the mana cost of the spell. I believe you can technically pay less (or wrong colored) mana, but then the spell is considered illegal when flipped up and you must return it to your hand and potentially suffer a game loss.
I don’t know how a judge in 2024 would rule, there is no game rule for what happens if you don’t cover the cost of the creature with the mana you spend on the ability. You just did something you weren’t allowed to do, same as if you just cast the creature and didn’t pay enough for it (but more awkward because you find out later).
Chaos Orb Story: Plays Chaos Orb > rips up Chaos Orb in 20 little pices > throws the snippets on the table > wipes the opponents board > opponent baffeled > crowed baffeld > judges baffeld > wins game
I wonder if eventually we will see Rarran featured in an episode of Command Zone learning commander or a video with the prof. It'd be so cool to see him interact further with the MTG community.
Sooo after a bit of Research on Illusionary Mask, it got erratad into Pay X, where X is the CMC (Mana Value) of the Card or More (Designed to Fake out an Opponent i guess) to put it into play as a Morph (2/2 without any Effect (ETB (Enter the Battlefield Effects) do not trigger)). If the "Morphed" Card would be dealt Damage or Deals Damage / would be tapped, it's "unmorphed" and assigns it's Attack/Defense Stats into the Combat. It's more or less a Funny Way to Overpay for Cards and try to Fake out your opponent with Say a Shivaan Dragon when it really was a Crap Card.
Atleast thats how i understand the Card and after researching it for like 30 minutes im pretty sure, that's how it works. Dont forget that back in the Ruleset we had Manaburn (each Mana you produced by Effects and/or Tapping Lands that wouldnt be used up after a phase would deal 1 Damage to yourself) aswell, so you could get rid of overproduced Mana by overspending for the Effect.
There was a fun practice while Chaos Orb was still legal where people would spread their cards so they were more than one card-length apart so it would be harder to land on multiple things at once. Because Magic has no strict board layout, it was all totally legal, and very funny.
Could you print Chaos Orb on a A0 paper sheet to nuke the opponent? Could you flip the card on top of their library to have them discard the card before even drawing it?
@@CountFab You have to be able to shuffle all the cards in your deck or you lose the game, so no to the first point, also chaos orb specifies 'in play' so it wouldn't destroy anything in the library unfortunately
I love all the videos with these two. I don't even care about Hearthstone at all, and I love these videos, so someone who likes both Hearthstone and Magic must more than love these videos. They really are great.
Always loving these types of vids Rarran. Keep it up ❤❤❤
31:29
You activate the artifact anticipating x amount of mana (probably keeping note of the colors). When the hidden creature is tapped, would deals damage or is dealt damage or (i think) interacts with any object or relevant effect you have to pay the mana to cast it, otherwise it is countered (probably)
white was acutely really good in alpha, it had some of the best creatures with white knight and serra angel and the best removal with wrath and swords
Also Balance, which is probably the single most powerful effect in the game if it actually resolves. It was so good people splashed for it off City of Brass in basically everything
Yeah, in addition to Balance as another person mentioned, Armageddon too could be brutal for aggro to close, though I guess in a Moxen format it might prove to be lacking assuming everyone gets access to 4 Moxen.
Green I think is considered the worst in Alpha as even though it has mana dorks and Channel, everyone has Moxen to ramp if they want it, and the ramp payoffs are lacking outside of the Channel + Fireball combo. Also, the removal in Alpha is amazing compared to the creatures, which current Standard shows how Green midrange/aggro struggles with that.
@@Duall8 Yeah Mox Emerald was the weakest of the moxen because of mana dorks, who were also just worse than artifact mana. It's not until much, much later in Magic's history that green became one of the stronger colors. Green doesn't start overtaking white until around Tarmogoyf got printed in Future Sight.
Chaos Orb is also a currency item in Path of Exile because Chris Wilson one of the games creators is a huge mtg fan so he put it in the game as an homage.
FINALLY MTg content from my favorite goober
Illusionary Mask is an insane card. It basically let's you hide the cost of the creature and put it in morphed, and auto-flip it if you would attack, block, or tap it, or if something would affect it.
It let's you mindgame your opponent for if they want to respond, or let you cast creatures while skipping EtB effects. Being about to cast something like Phyrexian Dreadnaught with no downside, without needing a Stifle in hand at the same time, and it is reusable.
Google says there's almost 30,000 Black Lotuses out there (across all printings).
It’s 30k minus all the damaged ones and all the destroyed ones
@@yoggalo1766 I know, and also in packs still unopened. That's the hard cap to how many there can be.
The X in Illusionary Mask is different in printed text vs oracle text. In the printed version, you can activate it for X=0, and then cast a face-down Grizzly Bears for its normal cost of 1G. (Or choose a different value of X to hide the fact you're casting a 2-mana spell.) In the oracle version, the X includes the mana cost of the creature. So you could only use it to cast a face-down Grizzly Bears if X contains 1G or more (but you wouldn't have to pay the creature's cost a second time).
I want to see Rarran rate the card Balance
I want him to rate Divine Intervention 😂
I could be wrong but the way that I understand illusionary mask to work in mtg terms is
{x}: cast a creature card from your hand with mana value x or less face down whenever it deals damage, is dealt damage, or is tapped instead turn it face up and it deals damage, is dealt damage, or is tapped face up (basically meaning it acts normally now).
some notes is that the errata makes the face down version a 2/2
when it is face down all of its triggered effects like entering the battlefield effects don't get triggered
feel free to correct me or to make a more accurate summary this is just as i understand as a player of mtg but certainly no judge
Alpha is simply expensive by virtue of being limited print run.
Nope. Reserved list as well
@@DiabloTommasoWhat do you think "limited print run" means?
@@theparagonal again it s different. The reserved list was made on pourpouse. So it s not only the set themself been not printed anymorem
You’d also be owning a piece of cardboard older than most people watching this video. Having said that, a lot of Alpha cards aren’t worth much compared to the heavy hitters.
@@theparagonalAlpha as the name implies was the first print run of Magic cards that are now recognized as tournament legal. With there only being 2.6 million cards printed and it initially being released at a game fair.
Early on a lot of the sets were not quite printed to demand as demand was not known so the print run for sets were quite limited.
Twiddle was in Alpha to let you untap time vault, but it didn't let you go infinite.
For illusory mask, you pay the creature's cost + any amount as you cast it. The "without paying it's mana cost" is just so you don't need to reveal the cost. So you could pay 10 for a 1 drop to bluff it being good, but not 1 for a 10 drop.
old magic cards have the text clarity of new YGO cards
If I’m getting it right, illusionary mask is used to make your opponent think ur summoning one that costs more then it really does. Then they might use some of their important removal on what they think is a 6 mana card but it’s actually like a 2 mana one. So for that I would tap 2 for the creatures cost and 4 more for the cost of the mask.
Ayy, I get to explain Illusory Mask! So basically the idea of this card is that you have to pay the mana cost for the creature you cast when you cast it, just like any other Magic card. The X cost to activate is so you have the option of bluffing what that card is by paying extra mana. So for example, you could pay 4 and play a card face down and your opponent wouldn't know if the creature cost 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. Paying X = 0 means you play the card for its normal cost. Paying 0 mana overall means you can only play a creature that costs 0, since the total amount of mana you spend has to be at least as much as the creature would cost normally.
The original printing of Time Walk said, "The opponent loses their next turn." When people first started playing the played the card as if it just kills your opponent for two mana.
For Illusionary Mask: You can play a card face down by paying it's mana cost, and if you wish, pay extra mana as a way of disguising it: EXAMPLE: this could be used to trick an opponent into thinking a 1/1 is a more powerful card or to play minigames about what you just played.
Mask + Phyrexian Dreadnought used to be a deck! The PD was a 12/12 for 1 mana and a wildly detrimental enter the battlefield trigger. By using mask, you could dodge the trigger and get the body very cheaply.
to answer your questions about illusionary mask: you cannot pay 0 unless the creature you're playing also costs 0. X always has to be equal to or more than the cost of the creature (and it also has to be the correct color. so for example you could pay WG or WWG to cast a creature that costs 1G but you could not pay WW)
you are required to write down or otherwise keep track of the mana you used to pay for X and the card must be revealed at the end of the game if it wasn't revealed during the game. If it turns out you didn't spend the correct amount of mana to play it then you effectively cheated and are liable for whatever penalty the tournament you're playing in has for playing a card illegally.
The reason the original card is worded so confusingly is that in that version X was the cost you were paying on top of the normal cost to cast the creature. So you were paying 1G to cast a 1G creature, plus X to activate the artifact, and you could choose what X was, even 0. The errata changed it to X being the full cost because the old way of wording it doesn't work with current magic rules
So, the way Illusionary Mask works is that you can play a creature from your hand face down for any mana cost. When that creature is dealt damage, receives damage or is tapped, you must pay the amount of unpaid mana. If you don't pay that mana, you sacrifice the creature. I'm not 100% on this, but I'm fairly sure. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
sinkhole actually did get reprinted in a masters set a few years ago
Illusionary Mask DOES NOT Let you play anything for free.
It lets you play cards face-down, and allows you to spend extra mana should you choose to.
So you pay the cost of the creature you're playing (say 3 green mana), then you may (if you want to) pay any amount of additional mana to gaslight your opponent into thinking "Oh crap, that thing must be dangerous!".
Best part is both of them trying to figure out how the hell Illusionary Mask works, pulling up the FAQ and getting even more confused.
When I was new to MTG. I just went to a comic book vintage shop that also sold just collections of mtg cards. They had a box of something like 200 cards for like 15 bucks. For starting out, felt like it was a deal. Since they were a vintage store first, and not a card shop I can only assume they didnt know the value of Black Lotus as there was one in that box. However, I wouldnt know its value either and gave it away without realizing my mistake till about 6 months later when I learned about some of the most expensive cards
I dont know if someone already explained but illusory mask works like this: the amount of mana and the type of mana that you pay when you activate it needs to be able to cover the cost of the creature, for example if you pay 5 mana (lets assume 3 colorless and 2 red) to activate mask you will be able to put a creature that cost at most 5 and has at most 2 red colored mana in the creature casting cost.
So basically the X amount you pay for orb needs to be more or equal to the cost of the creature, you will not be able to pay zero to put a creature that costs more than zero
I’d love to see an episode where Rarran reviews all lands. Some are wildly better than others 😂
@Covert: Illusory mask works like this - pay the normal casting cost of the creature you are casting then pay any amount of additional mana you'd like (including zero) and play the creature face down. Then it flips under the conditions stated.
31:45 how illusionary mask works. Pick a creature in your hand you'd like to put on the battlefield. The cost to activate the mask is that creature's mana cost plus any additional amount you want to add to confuse your opponent. You then cast that creature for free face down. The next time anything happens to it, it get turned face up. For example you have a black knight in your hand it costs BB. You pay BBB to the mask and put the knight face down. To your opponent that card could be any creature that costs (1), (B), (2),(BB),(1B), (3), (1BB), or (2B).
/e spelling
31:48
Card Name:
Illusionary Mask
Mana Cost:
2
Mana Value:
2
Types:
Artifact
Card Text:
Variable Colorless: You may choose a creature card in your hand whose mana cost could be paid by some amount of, or all of, the mana you spent on Variable Colorless. If you do, you may cast that card face down as a 2/2 creature spell without paying its mana cost. If the creature that spell becomes as it resolves has not been turned face up and would assign or deal damage, be dealt damage, or become tapped, instead it's turned face up and assigns or deals damage, is dealt damage, or becomes tapped. Activate only as a sorcery.
Ancestral Recall is one of 5 specific 1-mana instants in Magic's history (1 for each colour, and each does 3 of something), but is by far the most powerful and most iconic one. The others include Dark Ritual (black; Pay 1 black mana to add 3 black mana to your mana pool), Giant Growth (green; target creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn), Lightning Bolt (red; deals 3 damage to any target), and the white one (which I don't remember what it is, and it isn't very good).
Giant Growth and Lightning Bolt see more regular play, while the white one's usage is almost nonexistent today. Dark Ritual is the second-most powerful of the 5, and as such is only legal in a few formats (a couple more than Ancestral Recall).
They were all focused on the number 3 and were meant to show the core identity of each color, so the white one gained you three life.
I was at Origins game convention in San Jose CA in July '94. When someone told me about how a player used Chaos Orb in the MTG tournament. Apparently he tore it into tiny pieces and scattered them everywhere. Destroying the other players entire board, including all land. I believed the story at the time but after hearing it repeated so many times, I have come to see it as an old wive's tale.
How Illusionary Mask works:
Pick X, lets say 2. Play a creature face down. Lets say it costs 3. You pay 5 mana. Opponent has no idea if the creature you played is worth 0, 1, ..., 5 mana. Thats it. If you choose x to be 0 and pay 2, opponent knows that your creature is worth 0, 1 or 2 mana. If X is 5 and you pay 7, opponent has no idea of you played a gigantic creature or not. The more you pay, the more uncertain your opponent is
29:30 X: Cast a creature card from your hand that could be cast with the used mana face down as a 2/2 creature sorcery spell. Turn it face up before it assigns or receives damage or becomes tapped.
Illusory Mask quick version:
Chose a creature with cost Y in your hand. Pay Y+X: Put it onto the battlefield face-down (In modern magic by definition a face-down creature is 2/2 morph). You can only pay 0 total if Y = 0.
The card, while not inheritly busted, was part of a powerful combo play with the card Phyrexian Dreadnaught.
Dreadnaught is normally a 1-mana card that has a debilitating ETB effect that makes you normally effectively sac your board, including it if you don't have enough power on board already. If you illusory mask it, you avoid the etb effect by just paying 1 to put it out face down and get a 12/12 trample.
So, Illusionary Mask: When you use it, you need to pay the creature's actual mana cost plus any additional amount. The creature becomes a 2/2 without any other attributes until one of the conditions for turning it face-up are met. So if you attack (unless it somehow got Vigilance) or it would be involved in a damage exchange, it gets turned face-up. It's similar to a card with Morph, where the morph cost is the card's mana cost + X, except you can't turn it face-up as a special action.
I'm proud of you Rarran, you nailed that final price.
The think the mask means you have to pay the creature's mana cost or more. It says you still have to pay the mana cost in the first sentence about paying X, not the second sentence about revealing it.
29:38 x needs to be at least the casting cost of the creature; you may pay more just to hide what kind of creature it is
Word of Command's best (most realistic) lines of play are usually to forcer them to use their removal on their own creatures, or discard/burn spells on themselves. In those cases, it's a guaranteed 1 for 1, and often a 2 for 1 for BB. Board wipes can also be very good if you are behind, and they are just holding a board wipe because they have a more valuable board. You can swap the game state pretty fast. It also uses their mana, so you do deny them whatever else they were planning on playing that turn too! Very good card. My personal Favourite
I specify most realistic, because obviously the best lines of play are like, making them cast time stretch targeting you on their upkeep, or some other unlikely scenario.
To use illusionary mask, follow these simple steps:
1. Choose a creatuee card in your hand
2. Pay its cost, and any extra you want to pay to hide the exact cost you paid from your opponent
3. Put the creature in play face down
4. Wait for something to happen to it (damage, targeting, tapping, etc), at which point you turn it face up.
This is useful because the creature doesn't enter play as itself, so paying 1 mana into the mask lets you put a 12/12 phyrexian dreadnought into play without triggering its detrimental trigger on entry
From my understanding, "Illusionary Mask" works as follows:
You pay the cost of the creature you would like to play plus any additional amount of mana to hide what the true mana cost of the creature is
(This means) - You may use 4 mana to cast a 3 mana creature to bluff that it is a 4 cost creature when it is in reality a 3-cost creature
Illusory mask just says X must be the cmc of the creature. Which includes zero ofc. And then the moment it meets the criteria it’s flipped. Also you would have to show it at end of game to make sure you didn’t cheat and pay an incorrect casting cost. The same penalty you would get if you drew extra cards. It’s just honor system.
The idea with the og wording on illusory mask, as far as i can tell, is that as originally intended, you still tap all of the mana to cast the creature, then pay any amount into the mask, to "hide the casting cost." So if you "summon" a craw worm, you still pay 4gg for it, but then can spend any amount more than that and put it face down. Obviously the errata changed all of that, which is why it now casts for free.
So the way Illusionary Mask works is that what you pay for X has to at least be able to cast the creature, you can spend more than what the creature costs. It was mostly just a way to get a Phyrexian Dreadnought into play without having to worry about its comes into play ability.
Also, there were 3 types of artifacts back in the day: Mono (requiring the artifact to be tapped to use it's effect), Poly (did not require it to be tapped to use it's effect), and Continuous (which did not have an activated ability, however if they were tapped they be "turned off", such as Howling Mine)
Illusionary mask basically gives a creature a morph cost equal to their mana value, but the masked creature flips when tapped, or attacks or blocks
I think the best part of this for me is the points where someone explains why an effect would be ridiculous in their preferred card game, because it shows how the different games function in how they value certain actions. Some actions are almost universally good, like getting to take an extra turn, but other things are much weaker just because of the context of the game and the meta.
28:00 you can untap artifact, return them to your hand to play again, you can blink them sacrifice it and play it from the graveyard :D
Illusionary Mask works like this: you pay X+Y mana, where X is the cmc of the creature, and Y is any integer.
So you have to pay the base cost, but then can pay however much extra to try and trick your opponent into thinking it's something else.
Huh. I always thought interrupts was just an unrefined version of an instant spell, I never knew that there was more to it. Cool
So, for Illusionary Mask, the way it works is you pay any value for X, keeping track of mana symbols and such. Then, you can take any creature from your hand with a maximum value of X, whose mana cost can be covered by the mana you used to pay for X, and play it face down. So, if you pay RUBGW for X, you can cast any creature from your hand with a maximum CMC of 5, and that requires any combination of that mana to cast - so you can cast anything with a cost of W, B, U, R, G, 1W, 2W, 3W, 4W, 1U, 2U and so on and so forth.
It's a super convoluted way to give any creature morph well before morph because an actual thing.
On Illusionary Mask: They way it works is simply that you play a creature spell face down by paying at least its cost, and you can adjust its cost with any amount of mana, usually calling all the colors to confuse the opponent.
It wasn't played a lot, but one of the ways it used to be played then (I have some Illusionary Masks, I was there, I am that old) was on small creature decks, where you would throw a bunch of low cost high effect creatures for the time, like Hypnotic Specter or WhiteKnight, and make them all cost the same mana, so your opponent would know which creatures you had in your deck, but had to figure out which of the 2-3-4 creatures was the one that was the real threat for his deck. So I summon this for UBB, and this for UBB and this for UBB, etc.
Games used to last a very short amount of time with the classic Land-BlackLotus-Channel-Fireball combo, but when Channel got banned and Black Lotus restricted, some people like me attempted to make fringe cards like this one work.
As for the Chaos Orb legend, it happened at a Canadian Tournament in 1994, when a guy brought a deck to the tournament including the Chaos Orb, and proceeded in tearing it apart in the final game, and flipping all the small pieces onto the opponent's playing field, hence destroying most of his lands and creatures, and some of his lands in the process, and winning the final bout of the tournament.
The ref didn't know what to do, since it was a first, and since all the small pieces turned, they were all considered the "Chaos Orb", and the guy won the tournament, for which the first prize was a black lotus and an unlimited box, so the cost of the Chaos Orb was offset tenfold.
I had a college friend who played at that tournament and witnessed it first hand.
Right after, an errata was added to Chaos Orb to indicate that it had to still be a card. That was back when the erratas would come in the magic magazine Scrye.
I believe the way the illusory mask works is that you need to pay *at least* the amount of mana the creature normally requires, and you can overpay to try to bluff another creature. If you pay 0 for X, you can only summon a 0-cost creature. I think the reason it mentions that you don't pay the creature's cost is because you're already spending the mana on the mask's effect, and they want to make sure that both the required mana and excess mana are spent at the same time (or maybe due to the logistics of paying for a card without revealing it).