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Part 0: Introduction
Part 1: (#1-12): Banhammerin'
Part 2: (#13-29): The Problem Children

 

Ah, now we come to the good stuff.  The stuff that was so good, you can't even play with it anymore except in carefully controlled laboratory conditions.  Hazmat suit required, let's dive in!

The Power Nine:

Over the past year, there have been several heated threads about whether they should eventually appear online on various MTGO message boards and article comment sections.  Especially with the introduction of Mythic Rares, people now see it as a possibility in a future ME set.  I'll say that while I personally would absolutely love to have them online and yes, would spend hundreds of dollars to get them, it may have a highly detrimental effect on paper Vintage and Magic's image as a whole brand.  I would spend the money but still feel somewhat upset that Magic was selling out.  It may not have a detrimental effect, it may have a positive effect - it's hard to judge.  If they do reprint them, they might be in ME4, but it might be sometime after Prophecy is 'released' online and they no longer have the cash stream of the old sets.

 

30.

Black Lotus

VERDICT: MAYBE (Someday).

 

31.

Ancestral Recall

VERDICT: MAYBE (Someday).

 

32.

Time Walk

VERDICT: MAYBE (Someday).

 

33.

Timetwister

Timetwister is the one part of the Power Nine you could bring online as normal rare in ME4 and no one would really raise a ruckus.  It's much more narrow than the other 8 and does not play well with Yawgmoth's Will, a huge strike against it.  Sure it would need to be restricted, and sure it can do amazingly broken things in the right deck, but it's not a "must own" and "play in every deck" to the same degree that the other 8 are.

VERDICT: MAYBE (Someday).

 

34.

Mox Emerald

VERDICT: MAYBE (Someday).

 

35.

Mox Jet

I'd just like to say that it's bothered me for the past 16 years that Mox Jet is somehow all special and gets a psychedelic drug-induced hallucinatory background, where the other Moxen get: Gray.  If you HAD to smoke a Mox, I'd start here.

VERDICT: MAYBE (Someday).

 

36.

Mox Pearl

VERDICT: MAYBE (Someday).

 

37.

Mox Ruby

VERDICT: MAYBE (Someday).

 

38.

Mox Sapphire

VERDICT: MAYBE (Someday).

 

Other Banned / Restricted:

This is the complete list of all 8 cards currently banned in Legacy or restricted in Vintage that are not online, excepting the Power Nine above.  You'll find most of the "requests" people have for future ME sets come directly off of this list.  Often misspelled and with poor grammar. I'll try and do better.  All of these cards should eventually come online.  The only question is whether they need to be restricted or not.  And when I say "restricted" I mean restricted in Classic.  It also means they will most likely be banned in Singelton and Tribal Classic, though that remains to be seen.

39.

Fastbond

Broken, but objectively not as broken as Channel because you need lands to get your free mana.  Despite that, it's much more playable as a one of due to favorable interactions with Gush.  Which mattered when Gush was a 4 of in Vintage when R&D went temporarily insane and unrestricted it.  I had to watch Stephen Menendian play GushBond for like 13 hours at the Vintage championships that year, including 5+ hours of table judging him.  Were they trying to punish me personally?  What's up with that?  (Just kidding, Steve.)  But Gush is still a 4 of online, and even without that this card will always be restriction worthy.

VERDICT:  YES (R, Restricted).

40.

Mana Vault

Fast mana.  Say it with me.  Faaaaaaaast Maaaaaaannnnaaaaaaaaa.  I mean, it's no Black Lotus.  It's more like a colorless Black Lotus that you spend 1 mana on and it damages you for the rest of the game.  You know what?  That's still broken in half like Batman's spine.  Back in the day, we would play with 4 and power out turn 2 Serra Angels and Sengir Vampires with it.  These days, I think you could do something a little more intimidating with it.  It's kind of exactly like Mana Crypt plus 1, and that's already restricted.

VERDICT:  YES (R, Restricted).

41.

Regrowth

A card that seems quaint and out of place on the Vintage banned list.  It's an even lamer comparison than Mind Twist / Mind Shatter, in that Regrowth / Recollect only has one COLORLESS mana separating the two costs.  Does subtracting one mana from let's say (hits "random card" function in Gatherer - awesome), Brassclaw Orcs suddenly make it into a banable card?  No, I don’t think so.   How about Wandering Eye?  No, that might make it into a playable card.  Recollect did have some hype when it debuted, but frankly, everyone quickly discovered that paying three mana to get a card back just felt kind of crappy.  Two mana is pretty good, and better for the self-esteem, but I just don't think it's broken good.  There hasn't been a deck in years that used Regrowth in a significant way.  Ok, that's difficult because it's restricted in Vintage.  Comparison to Naya Charm would lead you to believe that 1G was a pretty reasonable cost for 1/3 of its abilities that are worse in multiplayer at sorcery speed.  Comparison to Nature's Spiral would lead you to believe that they totally copped out on just reprinting Regrowth like they should have.  Regrowth's just slightly more efficient at its basic effect than other cards - it doesn't break fundamental things the way most of the other cards on this list do.  And frankly, apart from Tarmohmygod, green could use a power boost in Classic.

VERDICT:  YES (U).  Someone needs to start a serious write-in campaign to get this unrestricted.  Yawgmoth's Will regrows all of your cards for one more colorless mana.  Rerowth's just not quite on the same level, but they're both restricted.

42.

Sol Ring

My favorite artwork of Alpha, like many others.  Now this looked like an epic "artifact" and instilled the proper sense of awe that they wanted the word "artifacts" to engender in the early days.  Now, I don't know where you would keep your Sol Ring because assuming an average-sized star, you can see its curvature which implies this Sol Ring is roughly twice the size of Jupiter and would probably incinerate your entire plane of existence when summoned.  But flavor, shmavor, it looks super-badass when Mark Tedin turns it into the Evil Eye of Mordor for your pimp deck.  Too bad we can't doodle on our cards online...  hey, there's a fun future feature!  Oh, yes, yes, it's broken like the love between Britney and K-Fed, and needs to be restricted, blah blah.

VERDICT:  YES (R, Restricted).  Even without the Power 9, Mana Vault and Sol Ring add a lot of fast mana to any format.  We need both of them, but if ME4 is the last one, they better be able to find room for both...  and ok, I'll give you that this is one uncommon that may need to become a rare.

43.

Time Vault

Ah, Tezzeret the Seeker *imagine 80s japanese-import saturday morning cartoon theme* Go go Tezzert!  He's fighting for the rights of people who add lots of unnecessary metal to their bodies!  Tezzeret!  He loves machines in a slightly uncomfortable way!  Tezzeret!  He's all blue mana but keeps forgetting and wearing red robes in his comics!  Go go Tezzeret!

 

My hats off to the tireless efforts of Stephen Mendian, Rich Shay, and others who I don't know because I don't have another site's premium service that fought for the unerrata of Time Vault, going so insanely far as to GET A QUOTE FROM RICHARD GARFIELD HIMSELF about the intention of Time Vault's wording.  I wouldn't recomend that for most errata discussions, it's kind of like calling upon God to identify the piece of broken pottery you found at your archaelogical dig.  But they did prevail upon the Gottlieb, and rightly so (though hats off there as well, I thought his previous errata was pretty clever, and it was gracious of him to kill it).  So now we can Voltaic Key and Time Vault to our heart's content, easily taking infinite turns and cackling with glee all the while.  Tezzeret gets one or both pieces of this combo and provides a pretty unbeatable win condition as well, and can sub in for Voltaic Key as well.  It's no surprise he was the toast of the Vintage town last year.

VERDICT:  YES (R, Restricted).  Yeah, restricted, do ya think?  Some lame people would argue that with the unerrata, it's too powerful to have online at all.  But it is a pretty fun way to combo out that doesn't take too long.  It doesn't do anything *good* without another combo piece.  It think it's safe for 1 per deck.  We already have Yawgmoth's Will online and no one has spontaneously combusted, so what else could possibly go wrong?

44.

Wheel of Fortune

If you don't get the headnoise of a studio audience chanting "WHEEL-OF-FORTUNE" every time you cast this spell, and have secretly believed that it's Vanna White behind those robes since the day you saw it, you obviously did not grow up in an English-speaking or even an English-knowing-about country.  The best red combo card ever printed, what deck doesn't think that it's better than its opponent's deck anyway and wants to draw seven cards?  LightningBolt.dec will love this, and then you'll love beating them up with your much better cards.  Win-win all around.

VERDICT:  YES (R, Restricted).  Now that Yawgmoth's Will is online, it probably can't run around unrestricted.  Despite the severe drawback of not being blue, it's still like most of Timetwister without the recursive abuse that entails.  There's a reason Time Spiral costs six mana and is still banned in Legacy.  There's not really a reason it untaps all of your lands, though.  That one's always been a head-scratcher tacked onto one of the most powerful card abilities of all time.

 

45.

Library of Alexandria

If this was Legendary like it clearly would be today, I don't think it would have been restricted or banned at all.  I think that would be enough to keep it reasonable.  As a non-legend though, Legacy could use 4, and that's pretty clearly broken, so they have to ban it.  Same thing for Vintage and restricting it.  While it doesn't see a ton of Vintage play anymore, it still pops up.  Land Drop -> Tap to draw a card is still playable in control decks.  So think of it's restriction as kind of like errating "Legendary" onto it.  Online, there's just no way I see around eventual restriction in any reasonable format.  Still, more than the others, it might be reasonable to try as a 'four of' for a while.  They did let us have unrestricted Necropotence for like eight months, so you never know.

 

Along with Bazaar of Baghdad, one of the few Magic cards that references an actual place on the actual Earth.  Well, at least it was until they burned it down.  Damn you, Julius Ceasar!

VERDICT:  YES (R, Restricted).  Restricted unless you want to errata Legendary onto it...

46.

Mishra's Workshop

Even today, turn 1 Juggernaut is a still very strong opening play in Vintage Workshop decks.  That puts a smile on my face, because it doesn't get any more old school than that.  It's kind of like the Sicilian Gambit of Magic openings.  Heck, some Vintage Workshop lists used to run Wirecat because four is just not enough love of turn 1 Juggernaut – at least until that new WorldWake dude, Lodestone Golem, was printed.  Now you can run 8 good ones.

 

I've never really understood what the designers were thinking with this card. I imagine it went a little like this.

"Hey, I've got an idea for the new set.  You know that card Black Lotus?  I always liked that card.  What about a land that lets you Black Lotus every turn?"

"Well, uh... that seems a little strong."

"Yeah, here's the drawback - it only lets you cast THE MOST USEFUL SPELLS IN EXISTENCE."

"Oh, well, I'm sure that's fine then."

 

This card was married to the restricted list for most of it's young life, but it fell apart like many young marriages, and it left Restricted List in 2002.  It continues to flirt with it, though, because as it turns out, there's some good artifacts you can cast for four mana or less (with a mox) on turn one.  Namely Juggernaut, Winter Orb, Sphere of Resistance, Smokestack, Metalworker, Tangle Wire, Solemn Simulacrum, Chalice of the Void, Sword of Fire and Ice, Trinisphere (restricted primarily because of it's interaction with Workshop), Crucible of Worlds, Umezawa's Jitte, and relative newcomer Thorn of Amethyst.

 

After it left Restricted List, Workshop and Goblin Welder moved in together within weeks and have been a happy couple ever since.

 VERDICT:  YES (R).  Capable of turning Classic upside down into nothing but Workshop and anti-Workshop decks.  But with Mana Drain and Bazaar of Baghdad already online, I think the hate and alternate engines are there to keep it down to reasonable levels.  Plus Workshop is more fun for everyone, as long as Trinisphere is restricted and Workshop is not.  Even when Juggernauts are backing up all over my dying planeswalker body, I still can't help but smile.

 

SUMMARY:

• 30. Black Lotus MAYBE (Someday).
• 31. Ancestral Recall MAYBE (Someday).
• 32. Time Walk MAYBE (Someday).
• 33. Timetwister MAYBE (Someday).
• 34. Mox Emerald MAYBE (Someday).
• 35. Mox Jet MAYBE (Someday).
• 36. Mox Pearl MAYBE (Someday).
• 37. Mox Ruby MAYBE (Someday).
• 38. Mox Sapphire MAYBE (Someday).
• 39. Fastbond YES (R, Restricted).
• 40. Mana Vault YES (R, Restricted).
• 41. Regrowth YES (U).
• 42. Sol Ring YES (R, Restricted).
• 43. Time Vault YES (R, Restricted).
• 44. Wheel of Fortune YES (R, Restricted).
• 45. Library of Alexandria YES (R, Restricted).
• 46. Mishra's Workshop YES (R).

NEXT WEEK:A slightly more subjective section of good stuff, the cards that are not on any official WotC list but are still good enough to play in Legacy or Vintage (or Classic).  It's smaller than you think!