Hello all, and welcome to Magic Monday, where Avocados can magically gather and talk about Magic: The Gathering. Each week I’ll highlight a card that either is on my mind or reflects something else that’s on it and offer a prompt for commenting. This week, we remember a contentious feature of set boosters.
Last week, I scored a hot, hot hit from a Bloomburrow pack: a Sword of Fire and Ice with new art reflecting the set’s Redwall-drawn inspiration.1 This card is part of a bonus sheet known as Special Guests, which has effectively replaced a feature that drew a lot of scrunched faces and scratched heads during the four years in which it existed: The List.
The List was, as it says right on the tin, a curated list of 300 cards spanning all of Magic’s existence. It appeared in set boosters starting with Zendikar Rising (2019), which, incidentally, was also the first set to have set boosters.2 The odds of getting a List card in your pack were 1 in 4, and you could generally tell you’d hit one when the card in the back of the pack had a normal Magic: The Gathering backing instead of being a token or (worse) an ad. With each new set, some cards would rotate out of the List and others would be added, but the number always stayed at 300 (except for during Streets of New Capenna, when it contracted to 75 for just that set).3
WOTC said at The List’s inception that they would occasionally add cards to it that thematically dovetailed with the newest set, and they did sometimes manage to accomplish that (for instance, Ohran Frostfang being on The List during Kaldheim). But by and large, whatever philosophy that could possibly have been guiding The List’s curation was thoroughly impenetrable to the average Magic player, and both its actual contents and the value and utility of those contents created far more confusion and disappointment than happiness and satisfaction. Occasionally, you’d score something interesting or playable, but it wasn’t at all uncommon or unexpected to hit worthless draft chaff in the List slot. There isn’t a trombone sad enough to capture the feeling of hoping for a fascinating piece of Magic history only to find a common from two sets prior.
The Magic Monday Card of the Week goes to the best card I ever managed to pull from The List, which was Akroma’s Memorial, a legendary artifact costing seven generic mana. I never got to play with it, but it’s clear from reading its suite of keyword abilities that even a moderately sized army blessed with them could spell game over for the opponent with nothing up their sleeve in response.
Special Guest cards fix most of the problems that people had with The List. There are only ten of them per set, so there are fewer outright whiffs; they have unique art treatments that reflect the vibe of that set; and they align thematically with their plane. They look great and they feel great to pull. I actually said “Holy shit” out loud when I got the Sword of Fire and Ice, which is something I never did with any List pull, so I’m confident this is the right move.
Card Value: Each week, the Card of the Week is rated on a scale of one to five dollar signs (see footnote for values).4 As of this writing, a List copy of Akroma’s Memorial will set you back $32.84, which is actually a touch more than the original Future Sight printing. You might think List reprints wouldn’t be quite as desired, possibly because of that little planeswalker symbol in the lower left corner, but sometimes they’re worth significantly more. I stopped trying to make sense of MTG stonks a long time ago. $$$$
Prompt: What’s your favorite bonus sheet or special slot from a Magic set or product?
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