4 Scoria Wurm and Twelve Years Ago

Not long now, just three more days until the 100th blog in this, the greatest collection of Magic: the Gathering articles of all time.

A year and a half ago I bought four Forces of Will. The event marked the end of my wading in the Vintage cardpool with a full-on, head-first mental dive. I guess it’s not quite buying a Lotus, but it was significant for me.

Why did I buy four though?

Duh, of course, it’s the most of any single card (other than basic lands) that you can play in a deck. Playing four of one card in a 60-card deck (the minimum decksize) gives you the best opportunity to draw those cards. The chances of getting a four-of in your opening hand are just south of half—it’s closer to 40%.

Still, why did I buy four?

When Magic was new and every game was Type 1 because that was the only format, there was no limit on the cards you can play.

Rob Dougherty, one of the first nominees for the M:tG hall of fame, remembered trying to “break” Magic the first time he and his friends picked it up. He said in an interview at Wizards:

My friends and I had two kinds of decks, fun decks and competitive decks, and the competitive decks got pretty sick. This was before card limits, and after about a month my best deck had evolved into 20 Black Lotus, 20 Ancestral Recalls and two Fireballs. It killed turn one every single time.

Obviously, that’s before sixty-card decks too. And besides the disgustingness of owning 20 Loti and 20 A-calls, something had to change.

In 1993, the Duelists Convocation (before it was the Duelists Convocation International, in fact) was created as the governing body for the fledgling cardgame. Early in 1994, as one of their first acts, they set the limits that everyone thinks existed since the beginning of time—at least 60 cards with no more than four of any unique card.

That’s how the limits on constructed tournaments were set, thus obliterating the previous household rules system of running tournaments forever.

I’m still trying to find out why they set those particular limits.

Anyway, four it is and it’s become almost an industry standard.

Except of course for basic lands.

Oh, and Relentless Rats, which makes them awesome (and hilarious) with Thrumming Stone.

But thank goodness. Four seems to be just about right. Like I said, your key cards show up often enough at 40% to be present in almost every game, but the game-breaking ones don’t show up more than half of the time. Plus, you’re forced to use a variety of different cards in every deck, unless you want to use five variations of Vampire Bats, but even then they have different names.

Of all the numbers in Magic—and there are a lot, almost “arbitrarily large”—four is probably the most important. I guess we’re just lucky the DCI got it right so many years ago.

Now that I have Forces, all that’s left for me is a playset of Mishra’s Workshops, I guess.