I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school.

We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work.

Okay, so today is all about the history of protection.

So protection is an ability that goes all the way back to alpha,

and it has a very interesting history. So I'm going to talk all about protection today, and some of the mechanics that sort of came from protection,

sort of later evolutions of protection.

Okay, so let's go back to the very beginning, because protection shows up in Alpha.

I believe it shows up on seven cards.

There are five cards known as wards that are oras. They give that all in white.

It's a cycle in white that gets protection to each of the five colors. And there is white knight

and black night. There are two creatures that are first right that are protection from the

opposite color. So white knight, the protection from black, black knife's protection from white.

So the interesting thing about protection,

so early magic was a little more hand-wavy

on rules than the game would eventually become.

And the reason for that was when Richard made the game,

he didn't expect it to be something

that people were going to play in tournaments.

It was more like, hey, you're playing in your own home.

And so Richard really saw it as the plus that, like, hey, there's a feel these things have.

And you can figure out how they work.

You know, the rulebook would loosely explain things.

...