Why is Thunder Spirit on the Reserved List?
General forum
Posted on April 27, 2025, 7:04 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
As much as I dislike the reserved list, I shall acknowledge that some cards deserve to be on it, because of how powerful they are, such as the "power nine" or the original ten dual lands, but I wonder why Thunder Spirit is on the reserved list, since it is not especially powerful, being merely a 2/2 creature with flying and first strike for only 3 mana, so it definitely feels rather unusual, being on the list. If that card was not on the reserved list, it could have been reprinted, and been a staple of white decks, for all these years, so I definitely would like to ask everyone else here for their opinions, on this matter.
What does everyone else say, about this subject? Why is Thunder Spirit on the reserved list, and, as an additional question, why has WotC not reprinted Sky Spirit more frequently, since it is the closest creature to thunder spirit in the game?
The Reserve List is not about power in the slightest - there happen to be some powerful cards on it, but that has more to do with bad game design and broken balancing in the early days of design.
Short form, the RL is about rarity - Magic was trying to do something new in creating the trading card genera. At the time, it was unclear if the game component or the collectable component would drive sales. There was no real analog for a game of this nature, but collectable baseball cards had been a thing for a hundred and thirty years at that point. The RL was created to cater to that creator market, essentially hedging their bets that the game might be less popular than the collection value. This was, in hindsight, kind of dumb and we are suffering for it today, but they were in a complete unknown situation and hindsight is 20/20.
Thunder Spirit is a rare card from Antiquities (a set covered by the RL) that had not been reprinted in a white-border set. That means it met the definition for the RL, and therefore was added. There is no other inquiry - nothing about power, nothing about how useful it would be to the game. It meets the set and rarity criteria and therefore is RL.
April 28, 2025 12:21 a.m.
legendofa in standard, modern, and pioneer there was a heavily played blue white spirits deck that could have used this card.
April 28, 2025 8:56 a.m.
Seeing this post again made me realize that this would have been great because first strike on a flying spirit plus the Lords would have made It even better
April 29, 2025 10:10 a.m.
I have a question for people saying that Thunder Spirit would have seen play, isn't this noticeably worse than Vampire Nighthawk? Isn't that card the butt of jokes now at 3 mana? Honestly curious, because only 2 abilities on a 2/2 vs 3 abilities on a 2/3 seems like an easy call, and I didn't think anyone cared about Nighthawk anymore.
legendofa says... #2
It's less about power and more about price control. I don't pretend to know all of the messy history, but most of the rare cards from Legends were put on the RL to preserve their value for collectors and speculators, regardless of their actual value and completely independent of their perceived power.
As for Sky Spirit, I don't know. I guess there aren't that many planes that have spirits floating around the sky, or sets that need a 2/2 flying first striker. It also doesn't have much flavor depth. I would expect a functional reprint before an actual reprint.
April 27, 2025 8:19 p.m.