Urza's Saga

Urza's Saga is the 15th expert level set, a 350-card Magic: The Gathering expansion set that debuted in October 1998. Some employees of Wizards consider it one of the most powerful sets ever released, with many cards now banned in tournament formats.^[1] The expansion symbol features a pair of gears from an Urza machine.

Set history

Urza's Saga has a storyline and thematic feel that suggest an artifact-based set, although it contained many notable cards of each different card type. Among players, the Urza block is widely considered to be the most powerful block from top to bottom.

Urza's block ushered in a new era of combo decks (card decks where only a handful of cards are needed to win games). The period of play after the release of Urza's Saga is often referred to as "Combo Winter" by both players and Wizards staff.^[2] Standard (Type-2) and Saga Block constructed decks were so fast that they could often win before turn three. Several articles on the Wizards of the Coast website MagicTheGathering.com discuss various tournaments in which players would mulligan down to half their starting hand size just for the perfect initial hand. A ban on several of the sets most powerful cards followed. The all-too-true joke of the era was that "the early game was the coin flip, the mid game was the mulligan, and the end game was the first turn."^[3]

In all, The Urza block has had more cards banned from it than any other card set. Over the course of the block's history, 16 different cards have at one point been banned in at least one DCI sanctioned format, nine of which debuted in Urza's Saga (Stroke of Genius, Time Spiral, Windfall, Yawgmoth's Will, Goblin Lackey, Voltaic Key, Gaea's Cradle, Serra's Sanctum, and Tolarian Academy).^[4][5]

Storyline

The story of Urza's Saga and the later sets in the block are prequels to the former Tempest, Stronghold, and Exodus sets, explaining the aftermath of the Brothers' War as seen in the Antiquities expansion.

Whereas other sets have all five colors of cards referencing the same story, Urza's Saga has each of the five colors showing a different part of the storyline.

Green cards detail the conflict on Argoth, which would lead to the events of the Ice Age expansion. Black cards reveal Urza's failed attack on the plane Phyrexia. White cards document Urza's period of recuperation in Serra's Realm. Blue cards explain Urza's founding of an academy on Tolaria and his temporal experiments. Red cards show Urza's alliance with Shiv.

Shiv, Phyrexia, Tolaria, and Serra's Realm are some of the most iconic settings in Magic. Most of the story of this set is written in the book Planeswalker, though the battle of Argoth is from the end of The Brothers' War and the founding of Tolaria and alliance with Shiv are found in Time Streams.

Mechanics

• Cycling cards allow a player to pay a small cost to discard that card and to draw another to replace it.^[6] In this expansion set, the cost for cycling is always two colorless mana. When the mechanic appeared again in the Onslaught expansion, the costs varied to fit the card.

• Echo is a mechanic that requires the player to pay the casting cost for a permanent again on his/her next turn, or it must be sacrificed. Echo cards generally have lower mana costs than comparable non-echo cards, in exchange for the double payment.^[6] All are creatures in Saga and almost all cards with echo are green or red.

• Free Spells were a mechanic exclusively featured in blue cards. These spells allow the player to untap the same number of lands as the card's converted mana cost upon resolution, freeing land for other use.^[6] This was abused by decks that use lands that produce more than one mana, and Sapphire Medallion from Tempest. Doing this can produce great quantities of mana and the ability to utilize cards from the Scourge expansion with the Storm mechanic.

• Urza's Saga had several "Sleeping" Enchantments, enchantments that would change into a creature when an opponent triggers a condition, usually by playing a certain type of spell.^[6]

• Urza's Saga also contained a cycle of three Legendary Lands, which produced colored mana for each permanent of a given type controlled: enchantments for white, creatures for green, and artifacts for blue. These would prove to be popular cards and so powerful that all are banned in the Urza's Saga Constructed format.

As a side note, the rules for the Trample ability were simplified in Urza's Saga.^[6]

Notable cards

• Morphling — Nicknamed "Superman" for its wide range of abilities, Morphling was for years considered the best creature ever printed due to its abilities and chance to combine them. Morphling appeared in many decks making it one of the most useful and effective blue creatures available at the time.^[7]
• Tolarian Academy - Often considered the most obviously overpowered card to come out of Urza's Saga, Academy was used to produce unprecedented amounts of blue mana in combo decks full of cheap artifacts. This mana was often used to draw many cards with Stroke of Genius, or to simply target the opponent with a very large Stroke of Genius, winning the game via decking. Urza's Saga contained many ways to profitably reuse Academy in a single turn, like Time Spiral and other blue "free spells".^[8] It is among over a dozen cards from the block to be featured on multiple ban lists^[9]
• Goblin Lackey - Unspectacular at first, Goblin Lackey would become a serious threat in all competitive formats several years after the release of Urza's Saga. This is due to the high number of powerful Goblin cards released in the Onslaught block. Goblin decks would become a common and highly competitive deck in seemingly every format, with Goblin Lackey being a key card in the "Gobvantage" decks of the older formats (Extended, Legacy, and Vintage).^[10]
• Yawgmoth's Will - When used in conjunction with mana-producing instants and cheap or zero-casting-cost cards, Yawgmoth's Will can allow a player to replay every card in his or her graveyard in one turn. It is banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage for this reason. Wizards does not ban cards in the Vintage format, but noted Vintage writer Stephen Menendian once said that there should be an exception made for this card because of its extremely high power level.^[11]

References

External links

• Wizard's official page for Urza's Saga