I caught this post on Reddit a few days ago (hat tip to the inimitable Cary Thomas for the link). It has to do with the earliest known "fan set" of Magic, titled The Middle Ages and surreptitiously released and sold by someone named Fred Ditzler back in the summer of '94 for about three weeks before being shut down by a restraining order from Wizards.
The cards are pretty much exactly what you would expect Magic fans to design back in the earliest days of the game. There's little to no understanding of what we now think of as the pentachrome, or color pie. It really is like what you and your best friend would have made if you'd sat down in '94 with a box of colored pencils and just went to town making all those glaringly obvious cards that Wizards clearly just "forgot to put into Legends."
Some of them would have been pretty atrocious, even in their day (although the references to things like the Hive and Boris Devilboon are fun), and some of them are just inexplicable for any age (what was going through his head when he designed the Rare Island, I wonder?), but many of them don't seem that far away from the actual contemporary design philosophies that we saw on display in sets like Legends and The Dark.
In fact, if someone who wasn't terribly familiar with the earliest sets of Magic history sat down at a draft with somebody's Old School '94 cube that had been seeded with a bunch of these cards, I can certainly imagine it might take them a while to catch on that these weren't real cards from Legends or something.
One of the things that particularly strikes me is what a labor of love this must have been for Mr. Ditzler and Marauder Graphics. Not only designing the cards, but then making or finding (or stealing) all the art for the cards, then putting it all together and printing the results onto stickers, using 1994-era technology, must have been a herculean effort on his part (and, I'm assuming, whatever friends he also cajoled into helping him). My respect to whoever may have been involved in this project back then!
In some ways, I kind of wish that Mr. Ditzler and Wizards could have come to some kind of agreement about these designs because a lot of them have the same kind of top-down resonance and feverishly flavorful mechanics that make me love the Legends set, balance and playability be damned! I suppose it was doomed to failure because of the way in which he went about selling the set behind Wizards' back, but it would have been interesting if there had been a second set of East Coast Playtesters, designing more things with a top-down, flavor-first kind of attitude, like Steve Conard and Robin Herbert had used up in Vancouver for Legends.
Seeing these kinds of unique rarities from Magic's history is always inspirational to me, though, and I was struck by how much I wanted to see some of these cards with more modern templating. So, I opened Magic Set Editor and put them all into the modern framing, fixed some typos and cleaned up the wording to follow (as best as I understand it) modern Magic templating. I tried to follow the literal meaning of each card's rules text as closely as I could without betraying what seemed to be the spirit of each card.
I had to make a few guesses here and there. For example, he seemingly forgot to put on the power and toughness of Gypsy Moths, so I made the call to give it 0/1 because it seemed like the emphasis of the card was on it's land-destruction ability over any other functionality it could have had. Also, I didn't think it would be right for the moths to get into a fight with the Spotted Owl and kill the owl, which seemed to have been included in the set specifically as a "moth catcher."
I also made the difficult call to change The Magic Shop into just A Magic Shop and remove its legendary status. I made this decision because, Magic Shop was, according to the rarity list Ditzler included, a C3, meaning that 3 different copies of it were included on each Common printing sheet; it would have been more common than any other card in the set except for Underlings. I find it difficult to believe that the designer intended for people to get tons of these legendary lands (that do nothing more than provide 1 colorless mana) and then be unable to play more than one of those lands in an entire game (based on the Legendary rules that he himself wrote in his special rules summary found here). It seems more likely that he intended them to serve something like the role that Wastes do for modern Magic, acting like a colorless basic land. Furthermore, based on the number of other typos and printing errors in the set, I can believe that he accidentally copied and pasted the Rare Island's or the Pyrian Spring's type line onto Magic Shop without noticing and just sent it to the printer's.
The one place where I did just let myself go wild was on updating the creature types. You'll see me try to match art and abilities to modern creature types as often as possible, but I did throw in some stuff just to make myself smile, like Adventuring Party.
A few of the cards are just messy, no matter how I tried to fold them into black-border rules. Namely, Captain Sebastian (which I'm not sure could ever work in black-border) and Musical Chairs (which even has a silver-border name and art already!).
Overall, The Middle Ages seems like a fun little community side project from the ancient depths of Magic's history and wouldn't be that bad an addition to something like a The Gathering-Legends-The Dark Old School draft. If anyone ever ends up printing some of these out and using them as proxies in just such a setting, I'd love to see a game report afterwards.
This doesn't directly have any tie to the Pharaoh Format or the Pharaoh community, but this was just a fun little project that I wanted to share. Thanks to the rest of the Pharaoh Rules Committee for okaying me publishing this on the blog!
The Middle Ages Gallery (presumably still copyright 1994 Fred Ditzler; wherever you are Mr. Ditzler, thank you for your initiative!)
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