So I was looking at the card Fire Dragon.

The first thing you're liable to notice is that it's really bad at being a dragon, flying around on those tiny little wings (or what look like tiny wings thanks to perspective) and breathing fire from its tail while it smiles for the camera.*

Second, you probably notice that it's nine mana. If this isn't enough to make you ignore everything else, you find that it's a 6/6 flier that comes with a Spitting Earth.

But if you pay close attention to it, like you might do after looking it up for the third time since you thought it would be a hilarious inclusion in an EDH Deck, you might notice there's a discrepancy between the printed and oracle text of the card.



A lot of the difference is just your average wonky Portal wording, avoiding things like target, not having terms like "battlefield" yet... but "from your hand"? Was this a normal thing with Portal cards that I just haven't noticed? Fire Imp seems to have the same issue. As written, it shouldn't work with Zombify, Spliter Twin, or Feldon of the Third Path, but the Oracle most certainly does.

I just thought that might be interesting.

*I actually really like this art, it's just got some goofy elements

yeah that's just Portal being Portal.

Sea Drake is love.

That is totally functional errata. What the crap Wizards.

No, it's just Portal being Portal. They used the same wording on the reprint Man-o'-War and that was not intended to change its behaviour. In the rules vacuum that was Portal, the only way a creature could enter the battlefield was from hand (the sole exception, Breath of Life, explicitly said "Treat it as though you just played it from your hand" to make sure it triggered these abilities). Portal was just extra-anal about redundantly naming zones cards come from (like "Mind Knives" saying "discards a card at random from his/her hand" - the word "discard", by proper magic rules, implies "from hand" (and thus the Oracle version of that card doesn't include that zone reminder) but they redundantly used the zone name anyway to reinforce the zone name. They reinforce the "from hand" zone name on Man-o'-War and Fire Dragon similarly - in Portal it make no functional difference, and in nonPortal play they were cleaned up to how they would have been worded if they weren't using the Portal heavyhanded templating.

Besides, Portal is full of functional errata to get around its Portal-ness anyway. Like the Sorceries-that-are-now-instants. You couldn't put a Deep Wood on an Isochron Scepter if it hadn't been errated to be an Instant.

It's a shame that I can no longer re-enact the art from Simulacrum, lemme tell you...but that's mostly the rules nowadays saying you're dead the moment you hit 0. I just want retroactive damage dealing!

I'm 99% sure they did this outside of portal. Yep, looked it up and am now 100% sure, see Abyssal Horror

It's definitely just a Portal-ism. The cards wouldn't really work if they blindly kept to the original wording, since a strict reading implies it only cares about entering the battlefield directly from the hand, and in normal Magic the only way something can do that is with cards like Cauldron Dance or Swift Warkite. And limiting those cards to only work with such effects is just plain ridiculous.

In this case it's obsolete formatting being translated in a weird way. Much like how Sacrifice wasn't a direct translation from Bury but it works well enough to just copy and paste.

They could add a "if" rider but since all the Portal cards with the same wording have been Oracled to the same actual wording, I don't feel it's an issue.