1 Introduction Alpha Magic

This battle box was inspired by Richard Garfield's very first set of Magic: The Gathering playtest cards. I'll let him describe that set in his own words:

—Richard Garfield, "Magic Master" (Tabletop Gaming No. 20, July 2018)

—Richard Garfield, "The Creation Of Magic: The Gathering" (Magic Pocket Players' Guide, 1994)

Alpha Playtest Remastered

Alpha Playtest Remastered is both a set and a design for a battle box, just like Alpha Magic was. It's also a history lesson and an exploration of the possibilities, both past and present, for the first, and the greatest, trading card game ever invented.

This battle box features rules and a card mix designed to balance fidelity to Garfield's original prototype game with cards and concepts that we now consider important in all limited Magic formats.

Unlike other cube-style limited formats, this battle box presents its own custom-made set of cards. These cards use the modern Magic frame, but are otherwise closer on average to the original prototype cards they're based on than to any officially released Magic card. This battle box also makes prominent use of ante and change-of-ownership effects. Players should be prepared to face off against each other across a series of games using constantly evolving decks.

Unlike Garfield's original 120-card game, this battle box incorporates a deck construction phase. That phase adds another layer of skill, and it also means that players won't go into games with "completely untuned five colour decks" as Garfield put it. The cards themselves were also chosen and customized with limited gameplay in mind.

If all you want to do is play this battle box, reading Sections 2 and 3 of this overview ("Setup" and "Rules") will suffice. Section 4 is for those who are interested in learning about this project's development. Section 5 describes how to use various Magic cards in place of the custom cards created for this battle box.

2 Setup

Step 1: Assemble the components of the battle box. You will need eight copies of each basic land, the 79 unique Alpha Playtest Remastered cards, and one duplicate copy of the card Skeletons.

Images of all 79 cards are available in the "List" tab. In addition to the customizations, the cards in the "List" tab feature art that was selected by Richard Garfield or one of his playtesters to illustrate the prototype Magic cards they made immediately following Garfield's original Alpha Magic set. You may wish to proxy some or all of this battle box using these images. Basic lands that feature prototype art are also in that section just in case you want the full playtest experience!

For those who would prefer to use genuine Magic: The Gathering cards as much as possible, refer to Section 5, "card substitutions and alterations."

Step 2: Determine the number of games that must be won before the winner of the match is declared. I suggest a minimum of four games, which would put the total number of games played at between four and seven.

There is no suggested maximum—in fact, players could elect to engage in an ongoing series of games over multiple days that ends only when one of them surrenders due to having an unplayable deck. That's how Alpha Magic was played!

Step 3: All 120 cards are shuffled and divided evenly between the players. Each player is considered for rules purposes to be the sole "owner" of the cards they receive in this step for the duration of the match regardless of who literally owns the battle box. "Ownership" of these cards can change in three ways: trading between players, claiming of the ante, and through in-game effects.

Step 4: Each player constructs a deck of at least 30 cards from their card pool. Trades between players can happen during this step.

Step 5: Setup is now complete and the first game can be played. From this point forward, Step 4 is repeated after each game until a match winner is declared. In other words, players are free to modify their decks as much as they want using their own card pool in between games, and they must present a deck of at least 30 cards at the start of each new game.

3 Rules

Alpha Playtest Remastered uses the present-day rules for Magic: The Gathering with the following exceptions:

1. Cards are played as written rather than with reference to their Oracle text. Section 108.1 of the Comprehensive Rules, mandating the use of Oracle text, is stricken.

2. There is an additional keyword ability called "Stacking", which is similar to banding. As with creatures in a band, creatures in a stack attack and block together, they must be blocked as a group, and a creature that can block any of the stack's creatures can block the whole stack. The difference from banding is that combat damage dealt to the stacked creatures is considered to be dealt to a single toughness value shared by all of them. The comprehensive rules are updated with the following details:

3. Mana burn still happens. The following obsolete section of the Comprehensive Rules is reinstated:

4. Playing for ante is mandatory. Section 407.1 of the Comprehensive Rules, describing ante as "an optional variation," is stricken.

5. If your opponent antes a land card, you can make them redo the ante until they hit a nonland card. Section 407.2 of the Comprehensive Rules now reads as follows:

4 About This Project The Inspiration

This project grew out of a desire I had to learn about the development of Magic's original set of cards. Once I learned that about half the cards were created relatively late in the development cycle, and that a bunch of other changes were made around that time, I wanted to know which of the 292 cards in Limited Edition were the "original cards" and what those cards looked like in their original form. It's widely known that the power level of the Limited Edition cards is woefully inconsistent. Had the late-stage changes to the game done anything to address this problem?

After studying the "Gamma" prototype Magic cards and comparing them to their earlier "Beta" counterparts, my conclusion was that they had in fact done the opposite! Although information about the contents of the Beta set is incomplete, I was able to conclude that Gamma was when they introduced the five Moxes and Black Lotus. Wheel of Fortune, Balance, and Timetwister might have been introduced then as well, although these cards are more difficult to draw conclusions on. To make matters worse, nearly all of the creatures in Gamma were nerfed with an increase of to their mana cost, and in some cases the cost went up by !

I'm sure the designers of Magic believed these changes were for the better at the time, but with 30 years of hindsight, we can now see that they weren't. In that time, Magic's designers have corrected the game's initial imbalances and given us a wonderfully dynamic and balanced game.

But sadly there are still balance problems in Magic even today. Those problems arise not from flaws in the general design philosophy, but from a small subset of "power outlier" cards. But the existence of that subset will be impossible to eradicate for as long as Hasbro demands new cards constantly and in copious quantity.

So will there ever be a truly balanced Magic game? Can such a game be created?

My answer to those question is yes—but I believe such a game would need to consist of a pool of cards that doesn't change. So it isn't Standard, and it isn't any sanctioned eternal format. Perhaps Old School, Premodern, or Classic-Legacy? Perhaps—but those formats happen to use card pools that suffer from the flaws in design philosophy that were present in Magic's early days.

So let's fix the flaws in those cards.

And what better place to start than with the game's first, and most egregious, set of design flaws?

Finding the Right Cards

I had two goals when selecting the cards for this battle box:

1. They should resemble Richard Garfield's original 120 "Alpha Magic" cards as much as possible.

2. They should facilitate what current players of Magic would consider to be an enjoyable limited environment.

In pursuit of these goals, I elected to create my own set of custom Magic cards.

Ideally, this custom set would have been designed solely from the original 120 Alpha Magic cards themselves, but unfortunately very few of those cards are known to the public. The only ones I could confirm have of course been included: Dragon, two copies of Skeletons, Glasses of Urza, and the five basic lands. Other scraps of information that I could find indicate that there was also some land destruction, at least a few creatures with the word "Wall" in their name, some creatures with flying, and several cards that gave you permanent ownership of your opponent's cards.

The above is hardly enough information to construct a 120-card battle box from, so for the most part these cards have been based on the next best thing: the "Beta" playtest cards that Garfield created and distributed two months after he created Alpha Magic.

As noted earlier, information on the contents of the Beta set is incomplete. Using various sources I was able to confirm the identities of 115 of the Beta cards, and I'm 90% sure about two others because they complete a cycle of enemy-color hosers. One source indicated that the number of different cards available doubled from Beta to Gamma, and Gamma has 268 cards. That would put Beta at about 134 cards, which would mean I was missing about 19 cards. Most or all of those cards would be rare: it's believed that only two copies of each Beta rare were ever made!

Garfield describes cutting a few cards with each new playtest set, but overall the indications are that new sets mostly introduced new cards and design tweaks to pre-existing ones. So Beta would then consist mostly of Alpha Magic's cards with design tweaks as well as about 50-60 new cards. Garfield introduced the concept of card rarity with Beta. He knew people would be playing with mostly commons and uncommons, so it's logical to assume he wanted those cards to consist of those he had already playtested in Alpha Magic and determined would make for an enjoyable game. Also, some of the cards introduced in Beta were "powerful hosers" designed to punish people for playing narrow strategies, which implies the cycle of 10 enemy-color hosers wasn't in Alpha Magic. Removing the eight confirmed hosers from the 115 confirmed Beta cards left me with a pool of 107 cards, most or all of them common and uncommon, that I can state with a high degree of confidence are likely to include 80% or more of what was in Alpha Magic.

Of the 84 cards in the "Alpha Playtest Remastered" set, 76 of them are drawn from that pool of 107 cards. The 31 cards that didn't make it are mostly weak effects (e.g. the "lucky charm" cycle), redundant spells (such as Fireball when we already have Disintegrate), and spells that are too strong (Armageddon, Channel, Fastbond, Jayemdae Tome, and Time Walk). The final eight cards are from Gamma. There is a reasonable chance some of those eight cards were in Beta or possibly even in Alpha, but mostly they were chosen because they round out the mix of card types and effects that are available in each color.

Balancing the Cards

I'd like to emphasize that this part of the process is not complete. Although I've made efforts to create a balanced play experience, I won't know how well I've succeeded unless people actually play with this battle box. That's why I'm posting it at its current stage. I hope to obtain feedback from the community and make adjustments accordingly.

For the most part, the tweaks I've made to the cards were to create a consistent power level amongst those cards. For example, Unicorn (from Gamma) originally cost 3 mana and Zombies (from Beta) originally cost 1 mana, but both of them are 2/2 vanilla creatures. Each now costs 2 mana. Phantom Monster, Spectre and Wraith all have evasive abilities, but they originally cost the same and had the same power and toughness as other creatures with no abilities. So, I subtracted a point of toughness from all three.

You can find more details about the adjustments I've made in the individual entries for each card in the "List" tab. The tags indicate adjustments that were made relative to the original playtest card that each card is based on. Clicking on a card will pull up notes about the design, illustration, and flavor text (if any) of each card.

5 Card Substitutions and Alterations

For those who would prefer to use genuine Magic: The Gathering cards as much as possible, the lists below will be helpful. They are presented in ascending order of divergence from the battle box versions of the cards. So, the less you want to rely on proxies, the further down this set of lists you should go:

1. 16 cards with no modifications: The five basic lands, the five Circles of Protection, Dark Ritual, Disenchant, False Orders, Fog, Lightning Bolt, and Unsummon.
2. 15 functionally equivalent cards that can be used as substitutes for cards in the battle box with no modifications:

3. 15 creatures with changes to power and/or toughness that will turn them into functionally equivalent substitutes for Alpha Playtest Remastered cards:

4. 14 cards with alterations to mana symbols and/or numbers that will turn them into functionally equivalent substitutes for Alpha Playtest Remastered cards:

5. 18 cards with alterations to their text that will turn them into functionally equivalent substitutes for Alpha Playtest Remastered cards. The alterations are demonstrated in the card images below:

6. Six cards with unique effects that effectively need to be proxied one way or another: