Today on Dig Through Time we finish up Kamigawa block with a review of—Saviors of Kamigawa. This set gave us mechanics like sweep,epic, and channel which varied from good to bad. Sweep was bad; epic, an early attempt at a legendary sorcery, was only good on two cards; channel was okay, and probably paved the way for bloodrush. One technological development in […]

Hoooleeeee crap, it has been awhile. But! Dig Through Time is back today with a review of the second set of the infamous Kamigawa block—Betrayers of Kamigawa. This set came out 13 years ago in 2005 (can you believe that 2005 was 13 years ago?) and introduced one of the most popular, most requested aspects […]

Welcome back to another Dig Through Time, and I apologize for the delay between our last column and today's. Just an FYI, this series is going to become slightly more intermittent, dropping down to once a month or so for the time being, as my family welcomed my second baby on November 21st (fingers crossed […]

Welcome back to another Dig Through Time—I apologize for the lateness of this article. I had some computer troubles, and some issues with work and getting ready for a second child. This week we're going to check out 2002's Onslaught set. Onslaught brought back the cycling mechanic which was first introduced during Urza's Saga, and which we saw […]

Weatherlight came out in 1997 and kicked off the famous Weatherlight Saga—which has been compared to the more recent, more infamous Gatewatch, um...not-Saga? The set had three mechanics—flanking, phasing, and cumulative upkeep; while the Saga featured such famous characters as Squee, Gerrard, Captain Sisay, Hana, Mirri, and others. Flanking saw print again with last year's [card]Sidar Kondo […]

We already covered Mercadian Masques back in February. Today we're going to dig back in time to cover the second set in the Mercadian Masques block—Nemesis. Nemesis came out in 2000, and brought back Spellshapers, alternative casting costs, Mercenaries and Rebels from the previous set. Mercenaries and Rebels are still too parasitic to be very interesting, but the […]

Did you know that Magic is 25 years old? You probably did. But are you familiar with very many cards more than a decade old? Maybe you aren't. Today I'm going to reacquaint you with a set 20 years in Magic's past: Visions! Visions is a small set from Mirage block that used the mechanics phasing, flanking, and cumulative upkeep. But […]

Maybe you've noticed a theme in my last two columns. First we did Future Sight. Then we visited Planar Chaos. Hm, is this a pattern? Yes, we've been doing Time Spiral block in reverse, and that means that today we're going to the past to visit the set that kicked off this crazy block. In addition to bringing […]

This week on Dig Through Time we're going to visit the alternate present of 2007 with Planar Chaos. Like the rest of Time Spiral block, this set explored the "crust" of the color pie, mining for effects that bordered on allowable in each color at the time. They weren't just pushing boundaries, though. Some of the experimentation was […]

Up until today's article Dig Through Time has only examined sets from Magic's past. Today I want to go to the future. That's right, I could no longer stop myself. It's finally time to talk about Future Sight! I remember cracking packs of this set back in 2007 when I was in college. I was super duper […]