Talk:Alpha

Mirrored pairs

Your definition of mirrored pairs is EXTREMELY loose.... Black Knight / White Knight is DEFINITELY a mirrored pair, but Gaea's Liege and Cyclopean tomb? Fear and Invisibility? Come on... I don't see the "mirrored" aspect of it. In that case any vanilla creature is a mirror or cycle if it functionally exists in 2 or more colors, which is not really a mirror/unfinished cycle (i.e. by design). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 38.127.230.10 (talk • contribs).

Actually I agree. I never really got through the list but the example you give definitely does not look like a mirrored pair. I mean you can go ahead and remove those which seem odd. - Yandere Sliver 07:11, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

Personally, I say mirrored vanilla creatures in a set DO form a pair. Particularly true here with the Merfolk/Goblin, given the associated pair of lords, but even if not. Like...what aspect of being a pair are we missing there? A pair of pennies is a pair of pennies just as much as a pair of 1787 Brasher Doubloons is a pair of 1787 Brasher Doubloons.

Sure you have to draw the line somewhere. But it's subjective. On a fan wiki, be open to fans. For something like Liege and Tomb, well...they ARE the only two cards in the set that can permanently change a land's type once per turn! I appreciate the insight in that observation. (There is a related pair of Auras that change land types permanently which I would not oppose as a pair either...Scryfall) If someone reads that pair and says "oh that's interesting", that makes it at least worth considering even if not EVERYBODY says that. With that said, gut reaction matters. If most people's gut reaction is "what?", fine. We talk, things shift one way or another, we come to a consensus...

But aim for openness. If the list isn't unmanageably large, and the justification is factually accurate, tend against removal. I won't fight content just because I'm not personally interested in it. It hurts the community more for some people to miss content they would've liked, than for some people to skim past content that wasn't their thing.

(Fear and Invisibility? Sure! They actually form a triplet with Burrowing :P Scryfall)

Design terms aren't defined by any law. Not even Rosewater can say "THIS is exactly where the threshold is for this loose concept and no other place". (He contradicts himself plenty :P) If we demand a more objective measure, we COULD break down every different dimension by which cards could be compared and create a rating system for pair-worthiness - but then who'd be clogging up the wiki with unnecessarily arcane detail...

Anyway, I'm just riffing here. But what I am about to do is bring up a big edit in which 15 proposed pairs are in question, so kinda related. (I think all of them are more agreeable than Liege/Tomb though haha.) So, on to a new section... - jerodast (talk) 07:59, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

BOON CARDS

You missed out a true cycle of cards in the limited edition. the boon cards. you list others that seem to have been put together since. but not the boon cards. i know they are listed elsewhere on this site. but they should be mentioned here also.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 51.6.149.155 (talk • contribs).

They are right there under "boons" --Hunterofsalvation (talk) 18:57, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

15 maybe-pairs-maybe-not-pairs

Over on the Revised page I just copied over the "Pairs list" from this Alpha page (which itself I just edited). In doing so, I effectively reverted User:WDStudios's edit from 2021 in which they removed 15 pairs, 2 of which they converted to a "4 card cycle", and left 8 pairs. All 15+8=23 pairs are present in Alpha as well (and the only Alpha pair not present there is Timetwister/Wheel of Fortune). It seems reasonable to just discuss any of that here first and sync changes to Revised later if needed.

In the end I disagreed with the cuts made in that edit, and on subjective matters "showing information" should win over "hiding reasonable information" on a fan wiki unless there's a clear argument to the contrary. The pairs' descriptions speak for themselves, and the attributes identified in each outweigh the non-specific sentiment of "despite all that, I just don't think these are pairs". Maybe calling them "pairs" instead of "mirrored pairs" helps? Or someone could split up their interpretation of which ones are mirrored pairs from the others if they really wanted. I'm happy to share more thoughts on any specific pairs if anyone wants. The edit was in good faith and well thought through, so I don't meant to be dismissive of it, but then again so were the original content additions, so there didn't seem to be a clear reason to cut it all.

Overall, there's no hard rule on any of this design stuff. Official sources* are super flexible on what a pair is, with no one criteria that a pair must follow. So it seems best to be generous with how much of the spectrum of reasonable views is on the page, and let readers decide for themselves. I'll spare you the much longer essay I wrote in my head, but if anyone really wants to propose that we must impose exacting criteria on this matter, let me know :P

*(Or, official sources WERE super flexible. It looks like a lot of the old posts cited all over this wiki have been put in the absolutely-removed-from-the-freaking-game-forever zone, and archive.org seems to have failed us. God damn shame when Wizards prioritizes saving some bucks on site maintenance over preserving the history of the cultural icon they created.)

- jerodast (talk) 11:02, 6 February 2023 (UTC)