I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work.

Okay, and I'm dropping my son off at camp.

Okay, so today, try something a little bit different.

I'm going to talk about general mechanics, something we use all the time in magic.

I'm going to talk about where it came from and how we use it and then talk a little bit about some famous cards that use it. So I'm going to talk about where it came from and how we use it and then talk

a little bit about some famous cards that use it. So I'm going to talk about flickering.

Okay. So flickering means when you exile a card, most often a creature, but you exile something

and then you return it either right away

or you return it at end of turn.

R&D refers to right away as insta flickering, and end of turn is just flickering.

It comes from the first spell that has it called flicker, which was Earth's Destiny.

I'll get to that.

It also sometimes called blinking because there's a card called momentary blink that was very powerful.

Sometimes it's called sliding,

because there's a car called after a slide that was pretty powerful.

But anyway, I want to talk about where this ability came from.

It's something we use in most sets.

Where exactly?

What is the origin of flickering, and why did it come about?

Okay, so first we need to go back to Mirage. So Mirage came out in 1996. It was the first sort of, I say it's the first set

of the second age of magic. It's the first set that kind of clearly had a block built into it.

We kind of sort of had a block for Ice Age.

...