Vintage Masters Card Gallery

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Tuesday 5/13/14 cards

Gavin Verhey's cards: Arrogant Wurm, Circular Logic, and Goblin General

Magic Arcana's card: City in a Bottle
 
Interesting about this card is that it has new Oracle text:

Whenever a nontoken permanent originally printed in the Arabian Nights expansion other than City in a Bottle is on the battlefield, its controller sacrifices it.
Players can't play cards originally printed in the Arabian Nights expansion.
The article says:

The change that took place for the card is a subtle, but important, change. The new rules text now states that it only cares about cards which were originally printed in Arabian Nights, and it no longer cares about what the actual expansion symbol on the card is. This means that you can safely play your Arabian Nights Mountains against City in a Bottle, but you can't play your Ali from Cairo that was printed in Masters Edition IV or City of Brass printed in Modern Masters.
But it still seems to me you can't play an Arabian Nights Mountain. Am I missing something or is the article wrong?
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
But it still seems to me you can't play an Arabian Nights Mountain. Am I missing something or is the article wrong?
You do notice the word "originally" in both lines, right? Since Mountain was originally printed in Limited (Alpha), it is unaffected by City in a Bottle. But I seem to remember this change happening a while ago...
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Oh. I thought since it was an Arabian Nights Mountain, it would still be affected since it was printed in Arabian Nights. But I get it now.

From the Gatherer discussion tab on the card, I can't tell at a glance when it all might have changed to work as intended. It seems there was a Comp Rules update sometime in May 2013 that removed the expansion symbol as a characteristic of a card, but only says the three cards (City in a Bottle, Golgothian Syplex, and Apocalypse Chime) will receive errata "in the future", so not sure if the future is now for City or happened between then and now. I'm also not sure what the Oracle text was on the card before this to tell.

I guess if an Arabian Nights Mountain was able to played before, then it was a poor example to use as a contrast to being able to use the City to destroy Arabian Nights cards that are appearing in Vintage Masters but without the Arabian Nights expansion symbol <shrug>
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I read the article behind the link. It might not explain this very well, but the change to City in a Bottle (and Golgothian Sylex and Apocalypse Chime) is "new" in the sense that it happened fairly recently (I don't have time right now to track down when the errata were introduced, but I do think it was last year). It has nothing to do with Vintage Masters. City in a Bottle online will function in the same way that the card already did in the normal game.

What Trick Jarrett is trying to get at is that this functionality is different from the functionality that City in a Bottle used to have from 1994 to 2013 (or so). Before the changes to City in a Bottle and the other two expansion-referencing cards, it was the case that City in a Bottle would prevent a Mountain printed in Arabian Nights from being played (in case you don't remember: the basic lands used in the core set were going to be included in Arabian Nights, but were cut at the last minute and a single version of Mountain was left in and printed by mistake). For all other purposes, that Mountain was just like any other Mountain, but if City in a Bottle showed up, that one printing of Mountain was vulnerable and other mountains were not. Similarly, a Kird Ape from Arabian Nights would be destroyed by City in a Bottle, but the ones that were later printed in the Revised Edition were immune. This meant that functionally, all cards in Arabian Nights that got reprinted were slightly inferior to their reprinted versions, as they were vulnerable to City in a Bottle and the reprints were not. Everyone thought this was stupid, but it hardly ever came up because the three expansion-based cards were irrelevant in all formats anyway (although there was some discussion, which I don't think amounted to anything, of using Golgothian Sylex in Vintage to hose Workshop decks).

With the errata, City in a Bottle now works on all cards originally printed in Arabian Nights. So the Arabian Nights Mountain is exempt (it had already been printed in another set) and all Kird Apes, no matter what set they're from, are vulnerable. This is a minor improvement, but it simplifies the game in a way and keeps anal-retentive players from not wanting to use their old school City of Brass or whatever on an extreme corner-case technicality. As far as I know, the only bearing any of this has on Magic Online is that the releases of pre-Odyssey sets online hasn't corresponded to the physical releases of those sets. Arabian Nights was never released online. But City in a Bottle will work on all the same cards online as it does in the normal game if they exist online, that is).
 

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Oversoul said:
I don't have time right now to track down when the errata were introduced, but I do think it was last year
Yeah, I understand what the errata means. But from what I can tell from here, City in a Bottle and its two like cards are not listed in any of the Oracle Update Bulletins from when the rule 109.3 was changed in M14 until now. So I think the "will receive errata in the future" means now; it didn't have up until now.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Yeah, I understand what the errata means. But from what I can tell from here, City in a Bottle and its two like cards are not listed in any of the Oracle Update Bulletins from when the rule 109.3 was changed in M14 until now. So I think the "will receive errata in the future" means now; it didn't have up until now.
Message board ate my first attempt at responding to this. I checked the wayback machine and found that the snapshot of the Gatherer page for City in a Bottle from November of last year (the only snapshot for last year, unfortunately) includes the change. Whenever that "later date" was, it turned out to be some point last year (some time between July and November).
 
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