What would you do if you had the opportunity to cement yourself in history as a permanent part of your favorite game, a TCG you have mastered at a competitive level? Well, if you’re Olle Råde, the first fan given the chance to design their own Magic: The Gathering card, the answer is: hand in a joke submission that couldn’t be printed and then stop returning Wizards of the Coast’s calls.
It’s one of the most entertaining tales from early Magic history. Nowadays, it’s common for a top tournament performer to make a card for inclusion in an upcoming MTG set, but the concept for this prize got off to a rocky start.
When Swedish player Olle Råde won the Hong Kong Duelist Invitational in 1997, the official prize was to make your own Magic card. Råde was asked to come up with his own design, which Wizards would then tweak as needed. But according to a recent article by Mark Rosewater, who ran the tournament and devised the prize, “He turned in a joke card that didn’t do anything.”
According to Rosewater’s article: “I asked him for an actual submission, but never got one, so we didn’t make a card for him.”
This retelling doesn’t seem strictly fair on Råde, whose card, while silly, technically functioned within Magic’s rules. According to Gavin Verhey, the card was an Enchant World spell called World of Burns. It cost a single red mana, and had zero rules text, the idea being that it would replace/remove an Enchant World card that was currently in play.
The trouble was, ‘World’ was a card supertype that was being phased out of the game. Clearly this design would not do.
Råde’s second design was plain OP: a counterspell that went back on top of your library after you cast it. In testing, it played just as miserably as it sounds. After being rebuffed twice, it sounds like Råde gave up (or maybe he missed an email, we’ve all been there). It might’ve been because he dropped out of the competitive Magic scene at the pinnacle of his success to join the army (Sweden has mandatory military service).
Despite the false start, Rosewater kept the same prize in place for the second Magic Invitational, and Darwin Kastle’s card, Avalanche Riders, came out of it. Later, highly impactful cards like Meddling Mage and Shadowmage Infiltrator were created as prize cards, which may be part of the reason that Råde eventually got back in touch with Mark Rosewater.
In the 2002 set Judgement, five years after he won the Invitational, Råde’s third attempt at a card, Sylvan Safekeeper, was released. This elf featured Råde with the long hair fans remembered rather than his military buzz cut, and the original art features an unusual mount for an elf: a great big spider.
That’s a reference to Råde’s winning Pro Tour Columbus spider deck, fondly remembered today as a pile of mostly-terrible cards that were carefully positioned to beat out the meta.
Like most Magic fans, Råde has drifted in and out of playing Magic over the years. He’s currently involved in the game, however, and earlier this year tweeted about Sylvan Safekeeper’s success alongside Nadu in the Modern Pro Tour.
For more Magic: The Gathering content, check out the MTG release schedule, or our list of the best MTG Arena decks.
Source: Wargamer
