If you enjoyed this Magic: The Gathering diatribe, be sure to check out “Masters Sets Have Failed! How To Make Them Work Again” here: https://youtu.be/PhoBpA-AjMc
Want to see how Magic: The Gathering cards are really made? Check out my insider sneak peek at the process here: https://youtu.be/7Jxn5Dy-T7I
Full “I Came To Game” interview with Richard Garfield can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gtqv5vYANI
Is it worth it to buy a Starter Cube for Magic: The Gathering? https://youtu.be/g4JsJiSR-xY
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“Vintage Education” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Long ago in an ancient age known as 1994, Wizards of the Coast gave away a unique card at an event called Dragon Con. That card, Nalathni Dragon, was a 1/1 Dragon for two red mana and two mana of any color. Nalathni dragon had flying and for one red: Nalathni Dragon gets +1/+0 until end of turn. If this ability has been activated four or more times this turn, sacrifice Nalathni Dragon at the beginning of the next end step.
There was one more odd feature, Nalathni Dragon was the first and to this date still the only red creature to have banding. What does banding do?
This issue was not that Nalathni Dragon was a great card. It wasn’t. The alarm and frustration that arose in the Magic community of 1994 was that in order to get this unique card, one would have to had traveled to Dragon Con in Atlanta Georgia. If you had no been in attendance, then you could not get this Magic card. What would happen, people wondered in frustration, had Nalathni Dragon or a future exclusive promo card been a powerful, competitive card?
I honestly remember one day on the playground during high school in the mid-nineties hearing my friends and fellow Magic players complain bitterly about Nalatnhi Dragon. Again, it wasn’t that the card was needed to play a strong deck, it was the bad feels of a card being offered in such a way as to prevent such a majority of the playerbase being able to get a hold of it. Those bad feels were felt and responded to by Wizards of the Coast, that took this message to heart and never again repeated this type of exclusive card promotion.
Flash forward 22 years to the release of Dominaria. Over those 22 years, cards have been offered at conventions such as Comic Con with special, alternate artwork available nowhere else, or as booster box promos, again with special or alternate artwork, or even exclusively through non-booster pack products such as Commander preconstructed decks, until recently, a powerhouse seller in their own right, but never was a unique card designed and offered nowhere else except via promotion.
While there was never an official policy or explicit promise ala the Reserve List that blunders like Nalathni Dragon would never be repeated, there was a lot of implicit evidence that this was something that was off the table.