1020.  That's the number of unique, widely distributed, non-silver-border Magic cards that are printed on paper with no specific plan to get them online in Magic: the Gathering Online (hereafter and forever abbreviated as MTGO).

This series of articles is going to examine each and every card not online, and talk about whether there's any reason for that card to make it online in Master's Edition 4 or beyond, be it for Classic, casual, limited, or nostalgia reasons.  It's also going to make fun of the bad ones as appropriate.  Every single card not online is going to get a YES or NO.  I'm going to consider the card's use in as many relevant possible types of online constructed and limited as possible: Classic, 100 card Singleton, Classic Vanguard, Two-Headed Giant (paper, real rules), other Multiplayer, Commander, Prismatic, Tribal Wars, and Pauper, as well as maybe even theoretical formats like Master's Edition "block constructed" and of course Sealed and Draft.  I'll be focusing on Classic (ie, Legacy and Vintage in the paper world) and Limited, with a lesser focus on Multiplayer and Pauper, but will keep all the others in mind too and mention them as appropriate.

I wouldn't mind eventually seeing every card online, but realistically, that's quite difficult.  As Master's Edition 3 contained 204 "new" cards, it would take exactly (eerie, isn't it?) five more Master's Edition sets to get everything online, including all 50-odd vanilla creatures, 70 godawful prevention effects, etc.  But Master's Edition 5 is unlikely, much less number 8.  As we'll eventually see, even with all of the above formats available, card utility doesn't change all that much and more than 60% of everything not online is nigh useless in both constructed and limited.  No one wants to draft through 600 cards of chaff to get the slightly decent stuff.  That's one purpose of this series, to identify what players would like to see online.  It's not only me, it's my 7 years a judge as well as my local playgroup's opinions and my MTGO clan's opinions, and also all of you through the comments section of these articles.

I'm not going to do it alphabetically or anything like that.  Rather, I'll do it by grouping similar cards.  So many articles in this series will be all YES or all NO.  As this set of cards is exactly the set of cards NOT online, I can't link them all to MTGOTraders, so I'll use Gatherer instead.  I'll put the first printing picture above each card, and link to the current oracle text right beneath it, and then a verdict at the end.  There also will be a quick summary at the end of the article for each card that week.

These articles will have their humorous side, but not every card is bad enough to inspire dedicated ridiculing.  I mean, I don't want to get a reputation as the class bully or anything.  There's also tons of cards just not worth spending a lot of time talking about, or even noticing.  The cards like that work as file clerks and commit suicide with butane lighters when no one's watching.  Like poor Conservator back in '98.  So some days will have more 'serious' analysis, and some days I will compute the humor quotient to the seventh decimal to make sure that your eyeball velocity is properly being matched by the guffaw coefficient.

The primary method of getting these old cards online has been through the Master's Edition sets, of which there are currently three (hereafter abbreviated as ME1, ME2, and ME3).  I assume that WotC will continue releasing the classic sets from Mirage through Prophecy... only 5 left to go!  The ME sets have followed certain rules, which I will assume they will continue to observe for at least the next theoretical set, ME4.

1) No more than 5% of the cards have already appeared online in a "regular" set, and (almost) all of these reprints must use different art than what is currently available online.  Most of these cards are utility cards like enchantment removal, counterspells, bounce, creature removal, etc.  We won't consider here what cards these may be - we can just assume there's 5% less "slots" in each set than the actual number of cards in ME4, which reduced us down to 204 from 215 in ME3.  As well as utility, several cards in ME3 already online were included just to complete themes - Kobold Taskmaster, Nicol Bolas, and Scryb Sprites among them.  The only reprint in ME3 I was truly puzzled by was Peach Garden Oath which is neither part of a theme or especially useful in limited, especially considering the abundance of bad lifegain effects not online. I think the developers honestly just forgot it was in 8th Edition and already online.

2) Cards may be freely added to ME sets that have only appeared online in a "special" set.  This includes the Coldsnap theme decks, the From the Vault series, and the Duel Decks series, as well as the Premium Deck Series and a few random older promo cards.  Basically, anything not a major release, they've shown a willingness to reprint them in ME sets.  There's currently 18 cards that appear only in these sets.  The only ones worth mentioning are: Balance, Channel, Demonic Tutor, Strip Mine, and maaaaaaybe Braingeyser.  I don't think anyone would be overly upset if all of these made it into ME4 with their original artwork.

3) Cards may not be included in ME sets if they will appear in a set from Urza's Legacy through Prophecy.  Certainly no original card should appear, and with the release of Urza's Saga, we're down to six cards that appear in those sets but originally come from really old sets, so it hardly matters.  Energy Flux is the only one even slightly interesting, and we can wait a year.

4) Cards may not be included if they only appeared in silver border land, or in weird, online only ways like the MicroProse Astral Set or the Japanese Dreamcast set.  If I have any energy left at the end of the article series I'll have a bonus one examining possibilities like this.

5) Cards may not be included if they have appeared in previous Master's Edition sets.  The sole exception here, is Scryb Sprites from ME3, which was included to support ME3's green Faerie theme after being randomly put into ME1.  I don't believe that any future sets will include anything like this, certainly not more than 1 or 2 to support a creature type theme.  Basically, I highly doubt that ME4 will include Force of Will, based on WotC's own statements.

6) The ME sets must be limited playable in both 3 pack draft and 6 pack sealed.  ME1 and ME2 were both vaguely limited playable, but neither were particularly "fun" to play, with ME2 often downright tedious.  A lot of highly defensive creatures with banding, not much evasion, and repeatable damage prevention from Combat Medic and Wall of Kelp made for a lot of long ME2 games where not much happened.  ME3 did much better in both regards, being both faster and a lot more fun to play, although no instant speed removal made for a lack of trickiness and few ways to get ahead if you fall behind.  I'm hoping ME4 does at least as well as ME3, with more instants

7) Set size for an ME set is around 230-240, with no mythic rares.  While ME2 had an 80/80/80 common, uncommon, and rare distribution, many people felt this made the set quite difficult to collect and unnecessarily promoted or kept some cards at rare like Lodestone Bauble.  ME3 had an improved 75/70/70 distribution, less sucky rares in general, and hopefully ME4 will also have no more than 70 rares along with increased numbers of commons.  Along with a YES, I'm going to give every card a suggested rarity so maybe we can prevent the Lodestone Bauble calamity of 2008 from happening again.  Now - Mythic Rares themselves don't fit the "nostalgic past" theme of Master's Edition sets very well, and I hope to not see any in future ME sets unless it was the Power Nine at Mythic - that, I could forgive.

I greatly enjoyed ME3, and I hope they continue in the same vein for ME4.  My one gripe is that among the 15 top constructed rares in the set, seven were uncommons but promoted to rare - Mana Drain, Bazaar of Baghdad, Black Vise, Land Tax, Reset, Karakas, and Old Man of the Sea.  Many of these are understandable, but it would have been nice to leave 1 or 2 power cards as uncommon, like Demonic Consultation in ME2.  Not a single power card was left at uncommon.

The creation of "Online Legacy" was announced recently.  I for one applaud this, as Legacy is now the second most popular format behind Standard, eclipsing Extended.  It'll be great to test actual Legacy decks online once Urza Block and ME4 fill in the major holes.  Another purpose of this article is to identify cards necessary for competitive Legacy, down to the lowest tier of decks that have a vague chance to win a tournament.  The number we need online (assuming we get the rest of Urza and Masques block) is much lower than you think.

One debate in the Classic community is whether the Power Nine will/should come online. And if it does, whether Classic should become "Online Vintage" and adopt it's restricted list.  I'm going to largely stay out of this debate, except to reiterate that I would be fine with exactly 9 Mythic Rares in ME4...

NEXT WEEK:  We start in on the meat of this series, with meaty-flavored banned cards.