Pattern Recognition #138 - Fallen Empires

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

23 January 2020

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition! This is TappedOut.net's longest running article series. In it, I aim to bring to you each week a new article about some piece of Magic, be it a card, a mechanic, a deck, or something more fundamental or abstract. I am something of an Old Fogey and part-time Smart Ass, so I sometimes talk out my ass. Feel free to dissent or just plain old correct me! I also have a Patreon if you feel like helping out.

Fallen Empires.

You know, when I went to start writing this article, I wanted to make sure that I did not do to this set what I accused others of doing to Mercadian Masques a couple of weeks ago. So, after remembering that most of my cards from that time were irretrievably damaged, so what else did I have? Most, not being all. I do still have some from that time, just not a lot.

Well, I remembered that this was the set with Icatia for and for it being the proto-Benalia that would be the mainstay of throughout a good chunk of Dominarian History, and for the Thrulls, 's self-sacrificing creatures for added effects.

Yeah, not much. Let's go digging, shall we?

Released on 15 November 1994 (Yes, that's over 25 years ago), Fallen Empires came after The Dark in terms of sets, and before the publication of 4th Edition. It was developed and designed by the same team of four people, and was a very small set, consisting of a mere 102 cards.

Of these, the set broke down into 35 commons....

WAIT A F'IN MINUTE!

Oh, you. Now I'm beginning to remember you.

So, almost three years ago, I wrote an article about rarity in the game and pointed out how it was one of the things that could have killed Magic, and that the 8 card boosters just added to the issue?

Well, Fallen Empires didn't have Rares. No, they has 15 C4s and 20 C3s for commons. 25 U3s, 5 U2s and a C1 for the Uncommons, while the 36 "rares" in the set were in fact printed as U1s.

Before I get into that a little more, I just wanted to point out that this multi-printing of cards allowed Wizards to experiment with the idea that cards could have different pictures - an experiment that culminated in the 'Seasonal' lands of Antiquities - where the four pictures showed the same location in different seasons. But this was the last set to do so.

Anyway, turns out that the experiment didn't work. Players could get too confused to easy, and I can understand why given the sheer disparity between some of the images. Just look at the three different versions of Farrel's Zealot over on Gatherer for an example of this discontinuity.

Why yes, I would love to get my hands on a playset of Mishra's Workshop from Antiquities, why do you ask?

But hey, I can't really knock a legitimate experiment that didn't work out now, can I? Not at all.

I can however, hate on the rarity scam. But that wasn't limited to just this set, so I choose to temper my disappointment. For now.

Fallen Empires was a set designed around flavour. Well, that and so many counters. There is a reason why I talked about Counters as marks of measure three weeks ago, and part of that was to help set up this set. I mean, seriously, Dwarven Hold was part of a cycle of rare land that were called Storage Lands in that they could store up mana before letting it all go in one fell swoop. And Homarid... What the heck is this? This is just... what

No, there were lots of counters in this set, including the beginning of the Thallid line of cards that stretches out all the way across time to Dominaria (the set). Heck, this is something that I played at the time because I was young and liked to watch my numbers get bigger and bigger.

Another big theme of the set was the idea of Sacrifice. That being that while you could get a normal effect, you had to sacrifice the permanent to get some real value out of it. Elven Lyre was part of a cycle of cards that included Conch Horn where they did nothing by themselves, but you got one use out of them before they hit the graveyard.

Oh, and these cards existed at "Rare".

I'll count this as a strike against the set. Sacrificing cards should be an option for players, something to give an additional benefit for. Like, say, Geothermal Crevice, and not Havenwood Battleground. In addition, there is no real boon or proper reward for the loss fo the resource - save for the Thrulls, but I'll get to those in a moment.

You see, sacrifice effects in the game tend to be either a combo-piece where you gain more resources than you lose, or to put cards into your graveyard for the next step of your plan. But with all these cards from Fallen Empires? No, we don't get that at all.

There's no reward for sacrifice in this set. No real out to the endless loss that makes it all worthwhile in the end. And so I tally another strike against the set.

But I did mention Thrulls, so I suppose I must justify why the above point isn't true for them.

Thrulls were the creature type of choice in this set, much like Thallid was for and Homarid for . They formed an integral part of the story line, but that's for later.

No, the thing about Thrulls is that they embraced the core concept of that has been mostly lost with time. That there is no power without sacrifice, no greatness without loss. And the Thrulls? Well, they were designed to be sacrifices. Some, like Basal Thrull found use as as sources of mana, while others had more ... material benefits, such as having a more intelligent Thrull Retainer.

But the Thrulls were designed to grow more efficient at their tasks, to better serve the needs of their creators. And while this was represented in the cards, this is where we have to move to the story of Fallen Empires.

One of the conceits of the set was that each card had flavour text on it if possible, and each piece of the text had to tie into the story of the set.

You see, in the wake of the cataclysmic end of the Brother's War, where Urza's Ruinous Blast led into The Time of Ice, the various continents of Dominaria each began to suffer. Sarpadia was the furthest-most from the epicenter of the blast, so they had the most time to prepare. But, they did not. As the Ice Age began to settle over the world, the five nations of this land went to war with each other for the dwindling resources. Icatia, with the major city of Trokair, stood against the attacks of the Goblins and Orcs of the Crimson Peaks. The Order of the Ebon Hand, representing took to the Thrulls more and more to sustain themselves - as did the Elves of Havenwood came to depend on the Thallids for . In the water, the Merfolk of Vodalia were under attack by the Homarids that came from the south, migrating with the incoming ice.

Sarpadia went to war, and in war, they died.

The Merfolk went first, or perhaps last. Pressured and losing ground as well as resources, they fled north east to the last, most distant colony along the shores of The Domains, the lands where Benalia, Keld, Urborg and Llanowar would later flourish.

In the mountains, the Dwarves defended themselves from the Orcs and Goblins, and their survival from these onslaughts was only because those same forces also attacked Icatia and the human-dominated culture there.

But the doom of Sarpadia was twofold. In Havenwood, the Elves took a page out of the Ebon hand's book and began to cultivate and improve on the Thallids and Saporlings they created, seeking to use them as a renewable resource to survive. But as such things go, they failed to take certain precautions and the Thallids reached a critical mass where they became selfaware and sentient. Seeing their suffering at the hands of the Elves, the Thallids did not so much revolt as they simply ended the Elves in their entirety over the course of a day, or so the story goes.

Yet it was that took it home. The Ebon Hand did try to help the Dwarves, but it was for nought as they kept their might to themselves. The Thrulls they created began to self-direct their improvements, evolving or mutating into more and more powerful forms until they too realized what was happening. Seeing themselves as greater than their creators, the Thrulls revolted, slaying the Order of the Ebon Hand to the end, leaving them as the only source of on the continent.

But Icatia held. Their scouts allowed these people to create a strategy of Defense in Depth to hold back the Orcs and Goblins. But due to the internal sabotage of the Farrelite Cultists and their angering of the Planeswalker Tevesh Szat, Icatia fell to the might of the Thallids, Thrulls and the rest.

The Goblins were devoured by the Thrulls, who moved on the kill the last of the Dwarves who hid in their tunnels, then the Orcs were the last truly sentient and sapient species until they too died out.

The Thallids, being seen as plants and not as competition, survived. But the true masters of the continent were the Thrulls. Thrulls, who, while intelligent, were not cunning or imaginative. They did not conceive of anything past the horizon, so the Thrulls stayed evolving and improving themselves with nothing to stop them except themselves.

They survived, isolated, until the Phyrexian invasion, where the Phyrexians were fought to a stalemate by the Thrulls, sapping resources that could have been used against other strongpoints of resistance and thus helping weaken Phyrexia's advance. But after that? Who knows....

There is a good story in Fallen Empires, and indeed it got a good telling. Not like my quick and dirty summary there. The Vorthos in me can't find fault, because if there's any colours that can survive everything dying, it's and .

Now, you may all be thinking that this is just typical of early Magic. Interesting concepts hampered by a lack of design and development experience. And you would be right. But there is a bit more to all this. Fallen Empires was the fourth expansion printed in 1994. This, plus the reprinting of the initial core set meant that the market was flooded with cards, and Fallen Empires was the set that broke the camel's back and could have killed Magic.

This set was massively, massively overprinted. I mean, seriously, you think that Modern Masters 2 lasted for a while because Wizards was cashing in? That was nothing on Fallen Empires. They printed somewhere between 350-375 MILLION cards in expectations of sales. The Sale department of Wizards completely screwed themselves, their distributors and brick and mortar stores with insane expectations, and no shit there are stories of this stuff still being in stores in sealed boxes for MSRP value still on the shelves in 2010!

You want to know why this set is hated? It's not because of the cards themselves. It's forgiven for still being in the early days of Magic. I mean, this was the set that gave us Goblin Grenade! It gave us High Tide! Hymn to Tourach!!!

Not much else though, I mean. Not every card turned out out to be tier 1, even in the day.

Look, Fallen Empires was a poorly designed set. It had some wonderful ideas, but simply put, when you have three people designing and developing a set full time, with help from a fourth, quality gets spotty at best.

It was a bad set for the most part, the result of the unprecedented success of Magic's first year leading to an over-printed and under-sold set that was Magic's real first mistake. Chronicles would be printed just to help get rid of this set for crying out loud!

But Wizards did the best thing they could. They learned from the mistakes they made. With the next real expansion set - Ice Age - the game started to hit its stride. Balancing cards against each other with the needs of the story. Fallen Empires was the last set of the bad old days of Magic, where no one knew what they were doing, and stands today as a testament to why things were the way they were during Magic's golden age.

So let us remember the issues and errors with Fallen Empires, that they might never happen again.

Join me next week when I talk about something more positive! Don't know what yet, but I'm sure it will be fun.

So, until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!