Power Nine

In Magic: The Gathering, Power Nine is a set of nine cards that were only printed early in the game's history, consisting of Black Lotus,[1] Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Mox Pearl, Mox Sapphire, Mox Jet, Mox Ruby, Mox Emerald, and Timetwister.[2]

The Power Nine are considered to be among the most powerful cards in the game. All nine cards are of the rarest level of rarity and were printed only in the Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited sets in late 1993 to early 1994.[3] Currently, all of the Power Nine cards are restricted in the Vintage tournament format[4] and banned in Legacy,[5] the only tournament formats where they would be legal otherwise, and all except for Timetwister are banned in the Commander format.[6]

Cards

Black Lotus
The Black Lotus, signed by artist Christopher Rush

The "Black Lotus" card can be played at zero cost, and grants three mana (the game's primary resource) when sacrificed (discarded from play). Thus, the card gives the player an enormous jump in the early stages of a Magic game. Former Pro player and Magic writer Zvi Mowshowitz has declared Black Lotus as the best card of its type of all time, claiming every deck in the history of the game is better with a Black Lotus in it.[7][8] It has since been banned from all official tournament formats save for Vintage, but even there, it is limited to one copy per deck, compared to the normal allowance of four.[9] The illustration on Black Lotus was painted by Christopher Rush, who was at the time a Wizards of the Coast employee. The Black Lotus illustration is a depiction of a black lotus flower over a foliage backdrop.

The reason this powerful card is a flower is attributed to Richard Garfield liking the idea of a lot of power being contained in a flower, a transient object in contrast to more permanent objects like rings or amulets that are often depicted as sources of power in other fantasy settings.[10]

Black Lotus is usually considered to be the most valuable non-promotional Magic card ever printed. Its Alpha and Beta versions in particular are considered to be extremely valuable, due to the more limited print runs and black borders of those sets. The Alpha version is the most sought-after, with an estimated 1100 ever printed, followed by the Beta version, with 3300 ever printed. A "gem mint" Alpha version of the Black Lotus was auctioned for more than $166,000 in an eBay auction in 2019.

Moxen

The five original Mox cards are:

  • Mox Pearl
  • Mox Sapphire
  • Mox Jet
  • Mox Ruby
  • Mox Emerald

They are colloquially known as "Moxen". They are similar to the five Basic Lands (the cards that provide the primary resource to play most cards) in that they cost nothing to play and can add one mana of a specific color to their owner's resource pool. Unlike lands, however, more than one can be played per turn. Like Black Lotus, this can lead to extremely powerful plays much earlier than normal.[7][11][8] All five Mox cards were illustrated by Dan Frazier.[12] In each artwork, a different piece of jewelry is depicted. The word Mox is derived from Moxie, slang for courage, or as Richard Garfield interpreted it energy.[10] However, not all of the people involved with the creation of Magic may have known that fact: when Frazier asked art director Jesper Myrfors what a Mox was, he replied "Oh, we don’t know!"[12]

Ancestral Recall

Ancestral Recall allows the player to draw three cards at an extremely low cost.[13][8] It originated as part of a set of five cards known as "Boons", one of each color, which gave three of something (e.g. mana, life, damage) for the cost of one mana. Ancestral Recall is the only rare Boon and the only one not to have been reprinted since the Unlimited set.[14]

Time Walk

For a very low cost, Time Walk allows a player to take an extra turn. In a game that involves a constant build-up of resources over time, a full turn's additional development turned out to be far more powerful than Magic's early designers had imagined. Several cards that grant additional turns have been printed since Time Walk, but always at a much greater cost.

In Time Walk's early development version, it originally had the text "Target player loses next turn." Richard Garfield tells an anecdote about a playtester telling him that he had a card in his deck that would guarantee he would win the game on the next turn. Garfield could not figure out which card this could be, until the playtester showed him a Time Walk, and pointed out the alternate meaning of the word "loses". The wording was changed prior to the release of the game.[15][8]

Timetwister

While the other Power Nine cards are simple in concept, Timetwister is more complex. It forces each player to shuffle their hand, graveyard, and library together and then draw a new hand of seven cards. Because it affects all players, it may not be apparent at first why Timetwister is a powerful card. Its power lies mostly in situations where the player playing it has fewer cards in his or her hand than the opponent, and has established a powerful board position—Timetwister does not affect cards already on the table. The player casting Timetwister can essentially catch up on cards in hand, and potentially get back powerful cards that were discarded, without giving up a dominant board position. Unlike the other cards in the Power Nine, Timetwister therefore requires a deck to be more carefully built in order to exploit its power.

Magic Online

The Power Nine were not available for the first twelve years of Magic Online. They first appeared as a part of Cube Drafts, where players do not keep the cards for their collections after the conclusion of the event. In June 2014, Wizards of the Coast officially supported Vintage as a Magic Online sanctioned format, and Vintage Masters, a booster specifically providing essential parts of the Vintage format, including all Power Nine cards, was released for a limited period.[16] The Power Nine cards appeared only in the premium foil slots of Vintage Masters boosters where they could be either foil or non-foil as a special rarity. On average it took 53 packs of Vintage Masters to open one piece of the Power Nine.[17]

The implementation of the Power Nine cards online is functionally identical to the original cards, but the cards are displayed with updated rules text. The versions originally released online feature different artwork and are displayed with a modern card frame. With exception of the Black Lotus, the illustrations are those that were originally given to the winners of the Vintage Championships as alternate Power Nine artworks. The Black Lotus received a new artwork by Chris Rahn.

In December 2017 Vintage Masters drafts were reintroduced to Magic Online for a week (beginning 12 December and ending 19 December). In this case players could choose between two types of boosters, the classic Vintage Masters boosters and otherwise identical boosters that included Power Nine with the cards' original arts and borders.

Alternate versions

Parodies

The Blacker Lotus was a satirical card in the parody Unglued set which produced four mana, although it required the user to physically tear the card up after use. Jack-in-the-Mox from the same set works like a regular Mox but produces either a random color of mana, or destroys itself, depending on a die roll. Mox Lotus, from the later Unhinged parody set, provides infinite mana of any color and immunity to mana-burn (now redundant due to rules changes), but costs fifteen mana to play.

Revised versions

Throughout Magic the Gathering's history, "revised" versions of some of the Power Nine have been introduced, ones that have the effects that are the same as or similar to their inspirations, with reduced power levels. Of note are Gilded Lotus from Mirrodin, which is a Black Lotus without the sacrifice clause, costed at 5 mana, and the Mox Amber from Dominaria, which allows its player to gain one mana of any color, provided that the color is one represented by the legendary creatures and planeswalkers the player currently controls.

Alternate art

The Power Nine are among the very few widely recognized cards never to have received updated artwork from their original printing. As a way to rectify this, since 2003, the winner of the annual Vintage Championship has received a unique, oversized Power Nine card featuring brand-new art. These prize cards are considerably larger than actual cards, and therefore cannot be used in play. The five Mox cards feature artwork that represent the settings of the Magic expansions released in their corresponding years. Their artist, Volkan Baga, has also illustrated two other Mox cards—Mox Opal and the reissued Mox Diamond—in the same style. The following cards have been given to the winners:

  • 2003: Black Lotus to Carl Winter (Artwork by Christopher Rush)[18][19]
  • 2004: Timetwister[18] to Mark Biller (Artwork by Mark Tedin)
  • 2005: Ancestral Recall to Roland Chang (Artwork by Mark Poole)[20]
  • 2006: Mox Pearl[21] to Travis Spero (Artwork by Volkan Baga)[22]
  • 2007: Mox Jet to Stephen Menendian (Artwork by Volkan Baga)[23]
  • 2008: Mox Ruby to Paul Mastriano (Artwork by Volkan Baga)[24]
  • 2009: Mox Emerald to Itou Hiromichi (Artwork by Volkan Baga)[25]
  • 2010: Mox Sapphire to Owen Turtenwald (Artwork by Volkan Baga)
  • 2011: Time Walk to Mark Hornung (Artwork by Chris Rahn)[26]
  • 2012: Timetwister to Marc Lanigra (Artwork by Matt Stewart)[27]
  • 2013: Ancestral Recall to Joel Lim (Artwork by Ryan Pancoast)[28]
  • 2014: Mox Pearl to Mark Tocco (Artwork by Raoul Vitale)[29]
  • 2015: Mox Emerald to Brian Kelly (Artwork by Raoul Vitale)[30]
  • 2016: Mox Sapphire to Joseph Bogaard (Artwork by Raoul Vitale) [31]
  • 2016 EU: Mox Jet to Joan Anton Mateo (Artwork by Raoul Vitale) [32]
  • 2017 EU: Mox Ruby to Joaquín Solís (Artwork by Raoul Vitale) [33]

References
  1. History of the World Archived September 30, 2007, at the Wayback Machine by InQuest Gamer & Leigh Newmark, wizarduniverse.com, December 15, 2006
  2. "The Power Nine". Magicthegathering.com. 2004. Retrieved September 15, 2008.
  3. "Ask Wizards: August 7, 2008". Magicthegathering.com. August 7, 2008. Retrieved September 15, 2008.
  4. "Vintage Format Deck Construction". Magicthegathering.com. March 20, 2012. Retrieved June 14, 2012.
  5. "Legacy Format Deck Construction". Magicthegathering.com. March 20, 2012. Retrieved June 14, 2012.
  6. "Commander". Magicthegathering.com. Retrieved June 14, 2012.
  7. Mowshowitz, Zvi (February 28, 2005). "The Top 50 Artifacts of All Time". Wizards of the Coast. Retrieved August 4, 2009.
  8. "10 Magic: The Gathering Cards So Powerful They Were Banned (And 10 That Should Be)". ScreenRant. January 11, 2019. Retrieved July 19, 2019.
  9. Gerardi, Matt (November 21, 2013). "Rare Magic: The Gathering card sells for more than $27,000". The A.V. Club. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
  10. Varney, Allen (1995). "Words of Magic". www.allenvarney.com. Retrieved September 2, 2019.
  11. "25 Magic: The Gathering Cards That Are Impossible To Find (And How Much They're Worth)". TheGamer. January 12, 2019. Retrieved July 19, 2019.
  12. BigAR (July 17, 2019). "Dan Frazier Interview". BigAR. Retrieved July 18, 2019.
  13. "The Top 50 Card Drawing Cards". Magicthegathering.com. March 21, 2003. Retrieved September 15, 2008.
  14. Ben Bleiweiss (July 10, 2002). "Sets of Five, Part I". Retrieved November 8, 2010.
  15. "Card of the Day August 2003: Time Walk". Magicthegathering.com. August 12, 2003. Archived from the original on May 24, 2014. Retrieved September 15, 2008.
  16. Turian, Mike (October 21, 2013). "Introducing Vintage Masters!". Wizards of the Coast. Retrieved November 11, 2013.
  17. Gutierrez, Carlos (May 12, 2014). "Power 9 At Special Rarity in Vintage Masters". Gathering Magic Explore the Game. Retrieved June 29, 2015.
  18. "A Player's Guide to Type I". magicthegathering.com. August 9, 2004. Retrieved September 18, 2008.
  19. "FNM Foils and Judge Foil Promos". starcitygames.com. April 21, 2005. Retrieved September 18, 2008.
  20. "2005 Vintage Championship". magicthegathering.com. August 29, 2005. Retrieved September 18, 2008.
  21. "2006 Vintage Championship Fact Sheet". magicthegathering.com. 2006. Retrieved September 18, 2008.
  22. "2006 Vintage Year in Review, Part 2". starcitygames.com. December 28, 2006. Retrieved September 18, 2008.
  23. "The 2007 Vintage Year in Review". magicthegathering.com. December 10, 2007. Retrieved September 18, 2008.
  24. Price, Nate (August 2008). "Feature: Vintage Championship Top 8 Coverage". magicthegathering.com. Retrieved September 18, 2008.
  25. "Gen Con: The Days Are Too Short". magicthegathering.com. August 24, 2009. Retrieved August 26, 2009.
  26. "2011 U.S. National Championship - Day 1 Blog". Wizards of the Coast.
  27. "Marc Lanigra, 2012 Vintage Champion". Wizards of the Coast. August 19, 2012. Retrieved August 19, 2012.
  28. "Lim's Fish the Real Deal in Philly!". Wizards of the Coast. November 3, 2013. Retrieved May 8, 2014.
  29. "Vintage Finals: Mark Tocco VS. Dario Moreno". Wizards of the Coast. October 27, 2014. Retrieved July 8, 2016.
  30. "Finals: Brian Kelly (Oath) Vs. Robert Greene (Grixis Thieves)". Wizards of the Coast. August 24, 2016. Retrieved July 8, 2016.
  31. "2016 NA Vintage Championship - Top 8 Players". Cardtitan. Retrieved July 11, 2017.
  32. "EUROPEAN VINTAGE CHAMPIONSHIP 2016 ETERNAL WEEKEND". BAZAAR of MOXEN. October 23, 2016. Retrieved July 11, 2017.
  33. "DECKLIST VINTAGE EUROPEAN CHAMPIONSHIP 2017". BAZAAR of MOXEN. April 2, 2017. Retrieved July 11, 2017.
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