Magical Thinking: Alliances

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Magical Thinking, where I look at the art and weird cards of the Magic: the Gathering sets of old. First off let me give a big shout out to There Will Be Games, the new host of Magical Thinking. Thanks for giving me this opportunity, Oscar.

Alliances is the third set of the Ice Age block, released in June of 1996, eight months after the disastrous Homelands expansion. This was the last set to see multiple printings of cards with different art in the same set, and the last set that was under printed. Story-wise Alliances continues the story from Ice Age. After the Planeswalker Freyalise ends the Ice Age with her magic (back then Planeswalkers were basically omnipotent gods), the people of Dominaria begin to adapt to a world that isn’t a frozen wasteland. Also the necromancer Lim-Dul is back, with an undead army, poised to conquer the world. Everyone will have to form alliances (name drop) to stop him.

So, let’s get to the cards!

Okay wow. Like I said before, back in the day creatures in Magic were kind of terrible. I mean, for four mana you get a 1/1 flyer, and you get to draw a card the NEXT turn. Not the turn it comes out, but the turn after. That is just not a good card at all. In Standard right now there is a Blue 2/1 flyer for 1 mana that draws you a card the turn you play it. This is just…. I don’t even know. Still, if you ever wanted to put a pigeon in your MTG deck, here you go.

Hey, here’s another terrible monster. For five mana you get a 2/2 flyer that your opponent can just endlessly destroy to keep you from drawing. The card comes with a built-in way to remove it from the game. I’ve seen some bad monsters in Magic, but not one that’s so bad that it gives you the option to erase it from existence in the card.

I love dogs, and I am very sad we don’t live in a world where dogs are big enough to be ridden like horses (Although I will admit this dog needs a bit of dental work done on him, that looks kind of painful).

EVERYONE PLEASE RISE FOR THE KJELDOR NATIONAL ANTHEM! *Ahem* “HAIL, HAIL KJELDOR, MY HEART SINGS OUT FOR THEE…”

Sorry, no idea where that came from, but I like this piece. If you wanted a card that looked like a propaganda poster for the country it’s from, here you go. It’s also got an allied color theme (With there being a blue aspect to the card), which is important since Alliances continued some of the mechanic themes from Ice Age.

Here we see another example of monsters appearing on cards which are way cooler than any monster that actually appears in the game. What even is this thing? I don’t know. I don’t think it was on any creature card. I don’t think it ever becomes a creature. But it’s still pretty neat.

Once again, I got to give it up to Phil Foglio, whose art livens up an otherwise blah card. Like with Reprisal above, I don’t think the creatures depicted here actually exist in Magic. There are no races of green cyclops that I know of, but right now I wish there was.

Let’s have some more Foglio art while we’re on the subject. I love the flavor here of just tearing through your spellbook until you find the spell you need. I feel like that sort of reckless card destruction tied with draw would later become a staple of Red draw mechanics.

Starfish! Most of the Blue creatures in this set are just generic looking wizards, so it’s kind of hard to find stuff to say about them. But this is a good one. It’s not powerful, but it has some cool flavor where it keeps regenerating and new Starfish grow from its severed limbs. Find some way to buff them and you’re in business.

Wow. That looks like it hurts. A lot.

This seems to be a desperation card, where you are about to die so you just start throwing away cards to prevent damage, and when you can’t pay the cost anymore you lose the rest of your deck anyway. This seems like a bad card to me, but I’m sure someone did a wild combo with this at some point.

Hey remember the Homarid’s from Fallen Empires? Well they are back… kind of. Just this one card and an enchantment card. I’m honestly sorry these guys didn’t catch on. Lobsters in real life are really cool. They’re the only animals that technically don’t suffer the effects of aging you know.

Apologies to anyone in the audience who doesn’t like rats.

Again I feel like three mana for a 1/1 might be too expensive, but I like the flavor on this one. All they have to do is get through to attack a few times and they can whittle your opponent down with diseases in a few turns. Of course the trick is getting them in to hit the opponent, and keeping them alive.

You know, if ever there was a card that encapsulated the feelings of 2020, it would be Dystopia. This card is just the biggest of moods.

Sometimes I wake up and I feel like that guy looks. Alternatively this is what it looks like when snapping into a Slim Jim goes horribly wrong.

Maybe it’s because Ikoria came out a few months ago, but I’ll say it again that early Magic monsters were kind of pathetic. I’m not even talking stats, I’m talking about how we had things like worms, rats, pigeons, starfish. Not to say there weren’t cool monsters mixed in there, or that we still don’t have relatively mundane animals as Magic cards, but it just feels underwhelming.

This is more like it: A black skeleton in red armor with eyeballs with weird arrow shaped pupils. When you’re playing an omnipotent plane-hopping wizard this is the sort of thing you should be summoning. Not worms and starfish.

Hey, buddy. You sure you want to take directions from that guy? I mean, I don’t want to judge, but the card’s name is Misinformation and this feels like the set-up for a horror movie and its a Black card and…you know what it’s fine. I’m sure nothing is wrong.

I really like the mechanics for this one. If you are playing them mono black you can manually pump them into a 5/1 for four Black mana, or if you dip into Blue you can just swap its attack and health and get the same result for half the cost. It’s a good ability because if you attack with it, your opponent is always gonna block, and with 5 health the fiend will usually survive, but if it does get through you can pump it for 5 damage to the face.

The Phyrexians are back, but just for this one card. I guess they just wanted to remind people they were still in the background, still looking to make trouble.

Never before have I looked at a card and been like “Oh hey it’s my dad and his friends at a tailgate party.” I don’t recall many barbarians having a dad bod but here we are.

One of the aspects of Red that I feel doesn’t get enough love is their penchant for chaos. Unfortunately in this case Chaos means “Exile your top card and either get a minor boost to your monster or render it useless except for blocking.” Remember this was way before Scry was a thing, so you were just dumping red mana into this thing and praying you could pump it up and not hit a land to ruin your progress.

See, this is more like it. None of those wimpy pigeons and starfish. Red and Green got the good stuff right here. We got GORILLAS, SON. It’s time to go totally bananas. Lets rustle some jimmies. Gorilla glue. Okay I ran out of steam there. Sorry.

ARTIFACTS ARE AGAINST APE LAW!!! Okay we’re back with the gorilla jokes. Gonna try and keep the monkey business to a minimum though. This is a serious publication after all.

Wow. Okay I was complaining about the weak monsters before, but apparently everyone in Dominaria is just super allergic to bug bites. Holy cow. And shroud means you can’t do them in with spells or abilities. You need to either need to block them (and not a lot of creatures can tank six damage) or you have to use global creature destruction (Wrath of God to destroy the hornets nest, only way to be sure).

Yeah this is the Elvish Bard’s high school graduation photo I think, which is why you got the big head shot with them in the front. Also I love the flavor that the bard makes such a spectacle of themselves everyone feels compelled to beat them up. The struggle is real, marching band kids. I feel your pain.

Thought we were done with the gorillas, did you? No, we got even more. Here we got not only the King Kong of the set, but we got an early example of what would eventually become the Fight mechanic in later sets (which is where two creatures attack each other, although the wording here is different).

…Wow, I feel like these might have been taken from a different project and used for these cards. A lovely pair of pieces to be sure, but I wonder if Stephanie Meyer somehow saw these cards and was like “I know how to write my werewolves now.” Just a theory.

Do YOU know that all apes were created equal? I’m kind of sorry now I used my ape law joke already. Ah well.

Here is another card where I love the flavor. Not only does the tornado become harder to control each turn, but using it exacts a more painful cost on the caster each time its power is directed against an opponent. I just love these devastating power-of-nature cards.

Again with the super-powerful bugs. Why are the bugs in Dominaria so powerful? Did they spend the entire ice age just lifting weights?

Ah yes, the Phelddagriff. Probably the only multicolor card in this set that interests me. And why not? They’re a flying hippo. Apparently this guy is useful in Commander if you want to play a “Political” deck (that is a deck where you team up with other players to take down enemies, since you you can give them stuff by using Phelddagriff’s powers).

Guess I spoke too soon when I said there wasn’t that much Phyrexian stuff in this set. I really like the design here: It looks like something out of a Miyazaki movie (and for all intents and purposes it is).

I want to take this time to give a shout out to Amy Weber, the artist who did this card. She’s done a bunch of cards I’ve talked about here, like Armageddon clock, Stone Calender, Time Bomb, Mishra’s War Machine and more. I really like the stylized, almost surreal way she draws artifacts, which gives them an otherworldly feel that is sometimes absent from Magic. Her cards feel like Magic cards.

I do not get this land at all. First of all it’s a soft legendary. Secondly it seems to reward you for having only three lands. I mean, you can run a game with three lands (especially if you are playing White) but at the time this must have been a hard sell of a card. Even nowadays I wouldn’t use it.

And with that, we come to the end of another Magical Thinking. Next time, we begin a new block, on a new continent of Dominaria, and we meet one of the most famous planeswalkers in the franchise. Next time it’s Mirage. See you then, and stay magical.