Revisiting WoTC’s “You Make The Mirage Precon” promotion.

I am beyond chuffed with myself. Previously I’d only been able to pry the first of these 5 articles from the Wayback Machine. But today I managed to find the other four. Before I start rambling too much, here are the links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.

Why did Wizards nuke all that history? The made sure to keep all the Making Magic columns, but I’d suggest that Latest Developments was just as important too. At least it’s meant I’ve developed a bit of a nack for hunting down things through Wayback. The main trick was changing from the 2007 version of the “Full Archive” page that I had bookmarked to an earlier one:

Image description: a screenshot of wizards.com which is backed up from 2007.

From there it was clicking around different links to find a way to get an archived version of the articles I wanted. Often means going to an earlier or later version, and actually changing from the main article page which is archived to the individual column or author archives, then going earlier or later on those… it’s a bit of faffing and multiple dead links before you find that good one. Eventually I hit Frank Gilson’s page:

Image description: another screenshot of wizards.com – this is basically what this post will be.

And all those links were good! What made it that much trickier is that some of these were obviously mistakenly tagged as “Feature” rather than “Feature Article” so didn’t actually show up on many of the pages I was looking at.

An aside about Frank Gilson, which I picked up from the Ertai’s Lament review which I reread when I was putting together the reviews for Burning Sky (spoiler: the end result of this), is that he played on some of the earliest pro tours and had a reputation of being a strong deck builder. So pretty cool that he oversaw this, and he certainly had the pedigree!

Some more context, ie another aside, before I go over each poll: this was one of the first announcements I could find of the Mirage MTGO thing:

But in another column a month or so later:

Into The Aether was the weekly MTGO focused column, and I should have noted the exact dates of these and the archived URLs. I’m thinking I should hunt down more information about the Competition winner and do a proper structured article about all four of these decks. The whole thing is both unique and interesting and something which only real geeks probably know or care about now so I reckon if you did something real in depth… um. So to the actual “You Make The Mirage Theme Deck” thing. The first mention that this was happening may actually have been in Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar’s column announcing that he was making one himself.

All common sense stuff in the intro: anybody reading this post of mine will be familiar with the picture that Frank is painting.

So here’s the schedule. 5 votes over three weeks. Seems like a good way to break things up, starting with the colour pair. It specifically says Black is out because of JMS, though GW is also missing. I’m not certain if Markus Pettersson had been announced as the competition winner yet, but Jungle Jam is certainly allowed for. This is October and the finals for that was in August so it makes sense. It’s actually interesting that UR ended up winning the vote here with WBG all accounted for. Makes things nice and tidy, or at least until R&D made the 4th deck after the fact.

Oops, spoiled the result of the 18 year old web poll before I posted the screenshot. Silly me. Interesting Red Green was runner up! People like their RG Beats, huh?

With the second vote… “Two Elements” does really stand out for me. Though Control and Phasing could have been interesting as well, just they don’t feel like they have a fair chance: just as one word options they seem a bit boring.

Actually that result is closer than I’d have thought. Choice was clear to me, though granted I know what the deck looks like at the end of the process.

Let’s consider these rares, then. Bracket one:

I am the sort of person who is absolutely into both of the Emberwilde creatures. The Embermage absolutely should be an uncommon, not to mention needing to be fixed in Scryfall’s database so that “is:firstprinting” gives me the MIR version. It’s not very exciting as a rare.

These all have merits. That monkey is super cute and the phasing filtering is fun. Obviously you dump your hand so it’s just upside. Lava is powerful and works with the theme: “Air” is pointing you towards flying creature. I think that’d have been my pick. (A lie, obviously I’m voting Caliph).

The second bracket:

Now, this is the stacked category. Obviously the pick here is a dragon – sorry, Hammer – and Crimson Hellkite is a good one.

Though these both work too. I feel that as you’re likely picking a red card in the first vote that makes Mist the option here for balance. If you have the mana up to phase it out in response to removal or lethal… hard to deal with. But I’m saying Hellkite.

I’m way off with my selections obviously. I didn’t really rate Spirit all that much – well, it’s a reasonable enough card – and the actual voters obviously didn’t like Hellkite as much as I did.

I don’t think I’m going to screenshot all the common and uncommon creatures so let’s more on to the final part:

Fairly clear gap of a percentage and a half between the creatures that made a cute and those that didn’t.

And that’s basically it, I couldn’t seem to find anything announcing the results of the spell vote. It might just ended up as a footnote in another article? I guess though if you look up the actual list you should be able to get an idea.

From the Mirage product page, circa 2006.

So, that’s the first and only precon deck made by public committee. As far as I’m aware they didn’t do anything special for Visions of Weatherlight. And Ice Age must be in MTGO too now? I don’t think they got any though.

If anyone wanted to share what they’d have picked in these polls then it’d be interesting to compare notes!