We currently have black symbols for commons, silver for uncommons, gold for rares, and orange for mythics.

I think there should be two other colors: green and blue

Green for basic lands

Blue for cards that aren't printed anywhere but a pre-made deck (i.e.-PW deck-only cards, EDH-only cards).

Because basic lands show up in boosters in different frequencies than commons do.
And "blue rarities" never show up in boosters.

I want to go to the moon.

Edit: By the way, this was supposed to be a cryptic way of saying "It's not going to happen."

I want to go to Venus and make that planet habitable for humans.

We have purple, red, yellow, silver, and black. Green for basic lands seems nice, but I think that cyan (think of the card back) could be used for promotional materials, while a deep blue could be used for...

You know what? I have no clue.

We've had the basic land discussion before. It was a bad idea then, and it's a bad idea now.

As for your blue suggestion, why? Whether something was ever in a booster product isn't information a player ever needs, and presenting that information in the expansion symbol color would just be confusing. The expansion symbol isn't just a factual reporting of "this card appears more often in boosters than this other card". If you're arguing that the expansion symbol should only be used for that, then all cards in non-booster products should have that blue symbol. After all, you can't get a Commander Island or Evolving Wilds from a booster, either.

Even for products without boosters, they still design "commons" that are different from how they design "rares", and it makes sense to have the expansion symbol reflect that.

I vaguely remember that discussion. Who started that one? -clicks on link-

...Oh...

Why'd I think it was someone else who started it?

That is the primary function of them in Limited.


If you did that, that would mean that cards that appear in both Kaladesh booster packs and Kaladesh PW decks would have different-colored symbols in the same set.

That's actually not true. Some of the cards that only appear in box sets are illegal in certain formats that the reprinted cards would be legal in. That's why I want reprinted cards to carry over their most recent rarity, but the new ones to get the most recent rarity.



They also design EDH cards differently than they design Standard-legal cards. A new EDH common typically has less in common with a new Standard common than it does with a new EDH uncommon. The average power level of new EDH "commons" is higher. The average complexity is a lot higher.

I don't even understand what you're saying here. Best I can figure here, you're wanting cards that aren't legal in any formats to have the blue expansion symbol but everything else to have the rarity color assigned to that card most recently?

This doesn't make any sense at all, since your claim that PW deck cards should have the blue rarity symbol would suggest they're not legal in any formats. But they are legal in all formats, because they're Standard legal as soon as they hit shelves and anything that is Standard legal is legal for every other format (unless banned in that format specifically).

Your reasons for saying no to a different color for basic lands were terrible. It basically boiled down to, "Yes, basic lands are a different rarity, but they've never been printed with a different rarity, so why start now?"

I still say a common, uncommon, rare or mythic assigned to a card that appears only in a box set is completely arbitrary and not reflective of its actual rarity.

Limited only uses boosters, which do use the expansion symbol color in the way you want. Limited doesn't matter for non-booster prdoucts.



Yes. That should show the problem with your blue symbol. If a common symbol means exactly "you have to open a relatively low number of boosters to get this" and a mythic symbol means exactly "you have to open a bunch of boosters to get this", neither would be appropriate for a card where you can just buy it in a preconstructed product. On the other hand, if it can also just mean "this feels common" or "this feels mythic" or even something like "the only source of this is a preconstructed product, but in that, there are more copies of this than another card", there's no problem.



Please explain what you mean.

If a card has a symbol from a Standard-legal set, then it and all copies of it are legal in Standard, no matter if it was printed in a booster or not. If a card has a symbol from a Modern-legal set, then it and all copies of it are legal in Modern, no matter if it was printed in a booster or not. If a card has a different symbol, then it may or may not be Standard/Modern-legal, but it's still Vintage-legal.

If someone buys, for example, a Commander deck and assumes all the cards in it will be legal in Standard/Modern, they have a problem. However, your idea isn't a solution: cards reprinted from really old sets wouldn't be blue even though they're not Standard/Modern legal. And if someone takes the blue symbol to mean a card is not legal in Standard/Modern, they'll mistakenly think the planeswalker deck exclusives aren't legal.



That's also true between regular sets. The pendulum of power level and complexity swings. Cards sometimes change rarities when reprinted. There aren't always clean dividing lines between common and uncommon, uncommon and rare, and rare and mythic rares, but we can still say that Nissa, Genesis Mage and Brambleweft Behemoth don't feel like the same rarity.

If you're suggesting a change, the onus is on you to justify that change. If there isn't any benefit to changing it, then the inertia of it just being how it's always been is a valid reason.

That basic lands are printed on their own sheet is interesting trivia, but it's not something players need to know. The pattern of "you always get one basic land" becomes very clear to anyone opening boosters. And if you just take a "common" symbol to mean that the card is more likely than one with an "uncommon" symbol, then the basic lands having that symbol isn't wrong.

Mostly, basic lands are just sort of in the background. They're in every product, and you quickly get enough of them for your decks. They don't need to be marked as special.

I was naive and dipped my toes into something that was clearly more complicated and dangerous than I imagined. I'll show myself the door.

For starters, you continue to ignore the reasons I gave here and back there for basic land getting its own slot.
For two, basic lands actually AREN'T as frequent in booster packs as uncommons are. They are only more frequent in premade decks.
For three, what a basic land is and what its rarity is needs to be figured out very very quickly, because a new player needs to know that BEFORE he builds his first deck.
Finally, a lot of what you said in this post could very well be used to justify not bothering to print rarity at all.
Hey, WotC didn't print rarity on cards for the first few years! Why didn't the interia there stop them from including rarity? MtG is a game that's always changing.

Slot?

I read through your posts again, and all I see is that it should have a different color because it's a different frequency. That's not the same thing as demonstrating a benefit to changing it. So please, what are the benefits?



Your chance of getting a particular basic land is 1/5 or 1/20, depending on how you view the art. Your chance of getting a particular uncommon is 1/27. So the basic lands are more likely. Or, seen another way, if you open a sufficiently large number of boosters, you'll have more of each basic land than you will of each uncommon.



"What a basic land is" doesn't depend on the expansion symbol color. Basic lands are very visually distinct already and adding a new, unexplained, color to the expansion symbol doesn't provide any information. Also, new players don't (or shouldn't) start out with boosters, since those don't include any instructions and it would take a lot of them to even start to build a workable deck. If they learn from another player, that player can probably supply them with enough basic lands. If they start out with welcome decks or a planeswalker deck, that'll include basic lands.

When they do start opening boosters, the "one basic land per booster" pattern will, again, be very immediately obvious.

You're imagining some demographic that doesn't understand basic lands, immediately buys boosters in order to acquire basic lands, somehow knows that a black expansion symbol means 1/10 and thus is misled to believe that basic lands are 1/10, and would somehow know that if the expansion symbol were instead green, it would mean 1/5 or 1/20 and thus get a more accurate idea of its likeliness.



There are benefits to knowing the rarity of cards. It helps players evaluate cards, it (to some extent) protects players from unscrupulous traders, and it gives players some idea of how reasonable it is to expect a card from boosters (or from the other packs in a draft). And a player would need to open unreasonably many boosters in order to figure out all the rarities themselves.

None of these is relevant to the basic lands.