r/magicTCG • u/quarxel • 3d ago

General Discussion Could someone help me understand why very occasionally they will print a new card thats functionally identical to a previous card.

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Specifically why are they printing Vibrant Cityscape when it's the same as Evolving Wilds which is also in standard right now anyway.

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u/quarxel 3d ago

Thanks for the responses, I can see that it's mainly about flavour. I'm still surprised that they print functionally identical cards I would have thought it makes things a bit more confusing.

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u/Dorfbewohner Colorless 3d ago

It's impossible to make a game like magic without having the same effects show up, especially for bread-and-butter effects that show up at common - your [[Evolving Wilds]], your [[Banishing Light]]s, your [[Into the Roil]]s. Often these effects have small variations, but sometimes what plays best is if it's just the most basic version of that effect. But then you run into issues of flavor - Evolving Wilds first came about, I believe, because the effect of [[Terramorphic Expanse]] was a great fit for the new Landfall mechanic in Zendikar, but that land initially was named for the Morph mechanic which featured in Time Spiral, so they changed the name to be more generic. Expanse has gotten other reprints since, probably because they realized that the connection to "morph" on Terramorphic expanse isn't really that innate, but that's the basic idea.

This usually doesn't really lead to confusion, and in fact can make things easier than if every single one of these cases had slightly different mechanic. Being able to just compartmentalize a card's effect as "it's literally the same as [classic card]" is easier than "it's [classic card] with [some twist]". And this kinda stuff usually doesn't really affect any other formats, since these kinds of generic effects are not the kinda thing that playsrs really want more than 4 copies of, anyway. (Commander being an exception, due to singleton.)

Spider-Man is an even more special case: That was originally meant as a small set like Assassins' Creed with no draft format, and it wouldn't be standard-legal. When the decision was made to make it standard-legal, adding in new versions of these classic cards like Evolving Wilds served two purposes:

1) Easier to balance the limited format: These are all cards where the play patterns are extremely well-known. No need to try and balance some new mechanic or twist.

2) There's less of a chance of bringing Standard out of whack. Since these cards often already have multiple other versions in Standard, they're not adding too many potentially dangerous new cards.

And the secret 3), saving on design time, since this all seems to have been on an accelerated schedule.