Ice Age Remastered

By ryuaqua

Score: 1

Draft this Cube Open pack Create Sealed Copy

Description

Recently, a friend suggested buying a box of Ice Age and drafting it. This is a horrible idea, because Ice Age has REALLY not stood the test of time, with super-weak creatures, outdated keywords, and way way too much color-hosing. Instead, I'm looking to put together a "fixed"/"remastered" version of the set which is suitable to contemporary design sensibilities and draft practices. To do this, I'm going through the set lists for Ice Age, Alliances, and Coldsnap, putting in as many playable cards as I can, cutting the chaff, and then fixing the rest with more recent strictly-better fare or on-theme cards (which, if possible, aren't total flavor breaks). Goal is to have a collection which could be either drafted as a cube or presented as a set of commons/uncommons/rares to be drafted (250-400 cards).

Replacements/Upgrades Show

Themes Show

Ally color support. Like much of old-school Magic, the original Ice Age was VERY heavy on enemy-color hosing, which leads to unplayable cards, unfair sideboard bombs, and unfun games. I've kept the color hosers to a minimum, but preserved a lot of the cards which are buffed by playing ally colors. Additionally, there are five multicolored cards for each two-ally-color combination, three multicolored cards for each "shard" combination, snow taplands, and original painlands (the ones that debuted in Ice Age!). By contrast, there is no "enemy color" multicolor support of any kind in the set.
Snow. Snow-covered lands, snow mana, and snow permanents. There are obviously way fewer of them than in triple-Coldsnap draft environment, which makes the support weaker than it otherwise would be, but my hope is that it can play somewhat like Deserts in Hour of Devastation draft: a viable buff to an existing deck strategy when it works, with minimal downside if you don't have it. Cube packs from this set would probably have to guarantee one snow-covered basic land in a common slot.
Payment/recurring costs. The original Ice Age introduced "cumulative upkeep," which is found in force here. Original Ice Age also had a lot of non-cumulative upkeep costs and effects which cause opponents to lose lands or pay extra costs to do actions such as attack or block. This is again just unfun if done to excess, but adding a decent amount of fast mana / ramp to the format and including a lot of low-CMC cards should make for interesting gameplay decisions about whether to pay for a desired effect, or jettison it in favor of other options.
Tap/untap effects. A lot of the "freeze" effects in Magic tap creatures or keep them tapped through a player's untap step. There might be some room to add effects which trigger upon permanents becoming tapped or untapped, to make use of this.
Small artifacts. Original Ice Age had a lot of trinkets and baubles and amulets and such, and so I've included a good number of cheap artifacts here. It also had the Soldevi, who made use of artifacts, and some Phyrexians. It's hard to find artifact support cards which aren't wildly off-flavor (i.e. set in Kaladesh or Mirrodin), but there may be room to add things like Trinket Mage which benefit from the rather high number of playable artifact cards. (I've also updated some of the old "sword" and "bow" type cards to genuine Equipment, and some of the "war machine" cards to Vehicles.)

Colorless (73)

Artifact (37)

Land (26)

Creature (10)

Gold (39)

Creature (21)

Instant (7)

Enchantment (4)

Sorcery (7)

White (61)

Creature (31)

Enchantment (15)

Sorcery (1)

1x Sunscour

Instant (14)

Blue (63)

Creature (31)

Instant (16)

Enchantment (14)

Sorcery (2)

Black (64)

Creature (36)

Enchantment (11)

Sorcery (7)

Instant (10)

Red (68)

Creature (40)

Instant (12)

Enchantment (9)

Sorcery (7)

Green (70)

Creature (45)

Instant (10)

Sorcery (5)

Enchantment (9)

Planeswalker (1)

1x Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury

Please login to comment

Cards	438
Date added	7 years
Last updated	7 years

Top Draft Picks

1.0	Agent of Stromgald
1.0	Centaur Archer
1.0	Dreams of the Dead
1.0	Elkin Bottle
1.0	Fumarole
1.0	Heart of Yavimaya
1.0	Hecatomb
1.0	Infinite Hourglass
1.0	Inheritance
1.0	Kjeldoran War Cry
1.0	Snow-Covered Mountain
1.0	White Shield Crusader
1.0	Wild Aesthir
1.0	Woolly Razorback
2.0	Abyssal Specter
2.0	Ashnod's Cylix
2.0	Balduvian Warlord
2.0	Bestial Fury
2.0	Chaos Harlequin
2.0	Infernal Denizen
2.0	Rimebound Dead
2.0	Zombie Musher
2.5	Cower in Fear
2.5	Icefall
2.75	Gorilla Chieftain

Magic the Gathering, FNM is TM and copyright Wizards of the Coast, Inc, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This site is unaffiliated. Articles and comments are user-submitted and do not represent official endorsements of this site.