Nostalgia is a powerful force, especially for marketers. It feels like everything is getting into this! I'm writing this, what, a couple weeks after Mixtape came out and sparked ... somehow a completely different discussion about interactivity and "industry plants" for some reason. Here's the big takeaway: The present sucks, the future looks like it's going to suck, so many folks are retreating to an imagined version of the past that didn't suck. Here's the thing: the past sucked too. You were just a child back then, so you probably preferred it, because one is usually happier as a child, or more easily made happy.
Wizards of the Coast has, for years, been on the perpetual nostalgia bait train, but this recent product is a special type of blatant. The "Back In My Day!" Secret Lair release probably doesn't seem like anything special in this regard, but you have to remember, as a Secret Lair release, it's specifically aimed at a small target audience who will directly order it from WotC. Effectively, it's openly aimed at whales, but a specific subset thereof. And just like all of these nostalgia products, it is frequently extremely incorrect in its emulation of a bygone era; it creates a curious false past. It's almost postmodern in how severely it screws up.
So, for fun, let's take a look at how far off these cards are from a rules text perspective. But first, we gotta ask ourselves: What time period are they aiming for? That I'm not completely certain of with the exception of two cards. First, Battle Hymn - which is by far the most correctly-worded of the cards - is explicitly made to fit into the Exodus1 through Urza's Legacy era going by its Mana Source card type. Meanwhile, Birthing Pod, by citing itself as a "Mono Artifact," aims to replicate the pre-Revised Edition era. That one is far and away the worst facsimile of ye olden days.
Still, we'll go in order. As I said, Battle Hymn is fine. So now let's look at Breath of Fury. The wording of this version of Breath of Fury uses a wording that, at earliest, marks it as an imitation of Odyssey block wording (see Seize the Day). This threw me off at first because I didn't notice the word ordering correctly. So this is correct, but extremely weird.
Veil of Summer is a fairly simple card by comparison, so it's perhaps no surprise that this is extremely acceptable. Veil of Summer would most likely be an interrupt in order to allow it to interfere with countermagic. The wording is weird, as well, but it wedges this card into a very narrow period comparatively; this wording and card typing fit for the card being released in Mirage block (or Fifth Edition). The problem here - as with all of these cards - lies very heavily in aesthetics.
For a start, these first three cards feature artists who started to illustrate for Magic way too recently to work. Birthing Pod does not fit the invoked era, but would otherwise be fine, and in fact perhaps Ron Spencer should have illustrated Breath of Fury - out of these cards, I think he'd pull that one off the best. Mark Poole at least has been illustrating Magic since the beginning. His art didn't really look like that back in the day, but we'll give WotC a pass for at least picking an appropriate artist. But the thing that bugs me that many people might not notice is the frame, which is using too recent of a bottom-of-card information layout and has a gold expansion symbol. This change was made in Exodus, released a few sets and therefore about a year later. Until then, the copyright and illustrator credit were left-aligned, not centered. MUH IMMERSION
Speaking of immersion and aesthetics, especially for the frame: Birthing Pod. Oh, this is a monstrously bad choice for this project.
First of all, take a look at this sample Mono Artifact. You, uh, you might notice some major differences here! Names and card types were not printed very clearly at all back in the day, which, to be fair, is probably why they didn't use the old-style frames. Still, it is wrong, and I'm going to point that out. The text is also wrong, with the abilities being ordered wrong and their being too many (i.e. any line breaks. Additionally, the word "sacrifice" as a rules term did not exist back then. This often lengthens texts significantly - Priest of Yawgmoth, one of my favorite cards ever that the coward bastards at Wizards of the Coast has not reprinted (and still can thanks a lot reserve list), has a fucking doctoral thesis for a rules text as a result. So here's what I would recommend as card text to fix the formatting and make it more accurate:
1G: Destroy any of your creatures in play without regenerating it to search your library for one creature card whose cost is one higher than the destroyed creature's. Put that card directly into play as though you just played it from your hand. Reshuffle your library afterwards. Pod is a green spell when cast and is green while in play, but is still an artifact. You may pay 2 life instead of G when casting or using Pod. Life spent this way is not considered damage.
Okay. Look at how readable the printed version is. Now imagine it's this... with the colors of Alpha artifacts. Yeah...
Again, I think they did this for a reason, but it's still the coward's path and, most importantly for this article, wrong.
We get to wrap things up now with Utopia Sprawl. This is naturally less incorrect than the previous, but I'm not sure exactly what era they are trying to evoke here. The first line is worded in a way that I think would be correct for the Mirage era, but the main bulk of the ability is wrong again. For a start, suggesting that enchantments can't enter in ways other than casting feels like it would fit in a much older version of the card text. By this point, not only was the color-selection effect a thing you did "When ~ comes into play," it was a separate line! If it was earlier, the restriction effect would not namecheck the card! Arrrrgh!
So I'll just put the full corrected text box in here.
Utopia Sprawl can enchant only a Forest.
When Utopia Sprawl comes into play, choose a color.
Whenever enchanted land is tapped for mana, it produces an additional one mana of the chosen color.
So, uh, I don't know why I did any of this. I think I just felt like it and was bothered by how off these read for what they were going for. In general, I think WotC's attempts at using the throwback style have always looked very off, and this is just the newest incarnation of that. Nostalgia isn't some easy road to quality. High quality is achieved only by things being good - regardless of when they come from.
1. ↑ It has to be EXO at earliest due to the section under the text box being formatted as it is, and the use of color-coded expansion symbols for rarity.