This deck is essentially a rant against the repeating cycle of questions that always come back around year after year about why Wizards won't reprint the Power 9, Dual Lands, (insert crazy thing), etc. for the current generation of Magic players to have and to hold. It's not completely because of the secondary-market damage, or even the code of honor imposed by the Reserved List (though that does have a lot of its own legal baggage), but rather it's because no one in their right mind would actually want to play the kind of degenerate game the presence of these cards causes, even in casual play.
I built this deck on the old Microprose computer game. It's not a difficult thing to be able to win the game before the computer opponent has even taken a turn. The
Juzam Djinn
s are in there so I can win with beatdown if I'm making a ton of extra turns but can't find a
Channel
/
Fireball
combo for some reason.
One major factor in the overall power of these things was that the designers didn't expect people to go out and buy enough cards to collect sets of them. They were already aware the cards comprising what's now called the Power 9 were considerably powerful, but they intended for scarcity to be a natural control on how many copies could ultimately end up in someone's collection (and by extension, any one deck).
Fortunately for them (in a business sense, at least), players loved the game so much that people were very interested in putting as many of these cards together as possible, and the first several printings sold out extremely quickly. However, it meant the design philosophies regarding power level had to be changed to adapt to the unexpected pattern of consumption, and the designers exercised a lot more caution in later years. The way I see it, most of the problem cards after that had to do with designs related to the exchange of resources whose value-relationships with each other weren't yet fully understood (
Necropotence
,
Dream Halls
, etc.).
