GoingMadlem

Oh hey look, more Reserved List talk. As someone who has made his living dealing in Magic, who has played the game since REVISED (step up), let me provide some much needed perspective on how and why this situation happened and what that means for the future of Magic. 1/

The Reserved List came about as a band aid to the nightmare that was Chronicles. Revised was technically the first reprint set, but at the time WotC promised reprints would be few and far between, and “overpowered cards” wouldn’t see the light of day again once they rotated. 2/

Fourth edition came and reprinted very little of value at the time, and collectors breathed a sigh of relief. Then chronicles hit. With it came all 5 of the Elder Dragons from Legends, which at the time were more than Moxes of you can believe that. 3/

Those were the $ cards that got hit. It also reprinted a bunch of other $ cards like city of brass, sol’kanar, etc. Not only did people complain that they were going back on “we won’t reprint powerful cards”, but they did so in “ugly” wb and MASSIVELY overprinted the set. 4/

Magic was growing by leaps and bounds at this time and every release they were just trying to keep up with demand. Aloha sold out in 3 days. Beta in 2 weeks and had 3x the print run. UNL, which was 3x Beta, was less than a month. All of that changed with Revised. 5/

Revised has an absolutely MASSIVE print run. There are 40,000,000 UNL cards total. There were 500,000,000 Revised cards. Fallen Empires was even worse, famous mostly for being notoriously overprinted. Chronicles unfortunately followed this pattern. 6/