Aaaahhh, did I ever tell you that I love the way older white cards look? Not sure what it is, that weird marble and granite background for the card and text-box gave it this weird, holy-artifact like feel. Fourth Edition was when they decided to switch up the printing method they were using; using a different sheet for lands. This allowed the first set to have a wide variety of different spells; with lands being able to be handled separately and cut costs. Meant more spells to put in each edition from now on.
This set never picked up popularity and was blamed unjustly when it came out for dropping the price on older cards like Carrion Ants, for example. Chronicles came along and wipes out card values entirely with multi-color legends and reprints of certain cards. Other than that, it’s never particularly talked about much. In my opinion, it has some great cards that are slept on heavy and not slept on at all, like Mana Vault. For example, this one, Conversion.
What is essentially “Blood Moon” which turns non-basic lands into mountains is what I believe the card is based off of. It had it’s use for countering the litany of red-rush decks that existed at the time, being able to play it early and stall the red-players bullshit until they can have enough mana to cut out the cumulative…or just continue it to ruin the mono-red player.
However it suffers from being hyper-specific and somewhat useless against multi-colored decks, while Blood Moon targets all non-basic lands. Still it carries power simply for the ability to turn BASIC lands over for four mana. I’ve used this in vintage before, hehe. One note I have to make is I like the fourth edition flavor-text. It’s not particularly powerful or potent as later editions; but it reads as if you were actually there in the world taking word from a narrator, traveler or in one case, a memoir of a soldier.
As always folks, have a wonderful day and I don’t think you need hexproof for this one unless you’re playing Selesnya/Green-white mana. No flavor-text, so I’ll leave you with the flavor-text from “Pyrotechnics”
“Hi! ni! ya! Behold the man of flint, that’s me! Four lightnings zigzag from me, strike and return.” ~ Navajo chant on the dangers of lightning
Illustrator - Jesper Myrfors
