I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work.

Okay, so today's topic is on something that I don't even know the name of. I'm just calling it the

rule. So in magic, we have a rule that says all cards, and this is in Blackborder,

unsets work a little differently, we'll get to that,

but in Blackborder, all cards with the same English name

have to function mechanically identically.

Meaning it doesn't matter what version you play of a card.

It doesn't matter what it said it comes from, what arts on it.

It doesn't matter the version you have, that all cards with the same name function identically.

Now, interestingly, this rule did not always exist.

So we're going to talk a little bit about where the rule came from, why we have the rule,

and just talk a bit about sort of, it's a history lesson, actually, about the evolution of magic and the need for the rule. So that's today's topic. It's more than you possibly wanted to know

about the rule, the thing that it's, the unnamed thing that I'm now explaining right now. So let's begin our story all the way back in Alpha.

So, um, magic is a card game, which means we have to print the cards.

And early on, so when Wizards of the Coast, when Richard Garfield first came to pitch, not even Magic, he was pitching Robo Rally, and they were a tiny company, and they're like, we don't have the resources to make a game with lots of pieces. And Richard said, what can you make? And they said, well, we have a printer. We can make cards, and we have access to artists. We could have cards with pretty pictures on them.

And so Richard set off to make a game to be played in between Dungeon Dragon games,

which is what, you know, he made magic.

So when Alpha came out, there were a lot of mistakes on the sheets.

And mostly, they'd just never done this before. This was the company sort of, like, magic as a product, it's a pretty complex product. Especially when you take into account that it hadn't been made before. Like, it's not like, you know, if you're going to make a trading card game now, well, you can look at other trading card games, but this was them. I mean, they had trading cards to look at, so they had a little bit of, a little bit of things to work

with. But the idea essentially was they were doing it for the first time, and early magic was

played with lots of printing issues. And it varied from set to set. I'm going to go through Alpha in a second.

But like Arabian Nights, some of the cards were darker than they were supposed to be.

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