[arg_discuss] The Coldsnap "Scam"

[John Evans]

This is kind of tangential to the main topic, but I think it's interesting anyway...
COLDSNAP!

For those of you who don't immediately grin knowingly when I say "Coldsnap",
I'll explain. There is a trading card game called Magic: the Gathering. It's been
around since 1993. The game is released in "expansions", which come out
every few months. Usually the expansions are organized into "blocks" of three
related expansions. (Example: the Kamigawa block. Champions of Kamigawa,
Oct. 2004; Betrayers of Kamigawa, Feb. 2005; Saviors of Kamigawa, June 2005.
The Kamigawa expansions contained cards dealing with a world ripped off from
Legend of the Five...er, I mean, a world loosely based on Japanese mythology.)

Of course, there are occasionally exceptions to this three-expansion block
pattern. There were many MORE exceptions in the early days; for example,
Ice Age, June 1995 was related to Alliances, June 1996...but in between was
Homelands, Oct. 1995, which wasn't really related to either of them. Officially
Homelands is in the "Ice Age block", but most people assume the Ice Age block
only has two sets (IA & Alliances).

Okay, background over. This article was posted Oct. 26, 2005:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/feature/291

An excerpt: "But as I began to read through the file I started seeing words like
"Kjeldoran" and "Wiitigo", I realized that I might have just uncovered one of the
great unsolved mysteries of R&D. Yes, in my hand was the lost Ice Age
expansion!"

The idea was supposed to be that they found a "lost file of design ideas", and
were using it to create a new expansion, "Coldsnap". The only problem was that
if you read the article and looked stuff up, you started seeing holes in the theory.
People started getting really annoyed on the message boards. Eventually Mark
Rosewater (head of R&D) revealed that it was, in fact, something of a 'hoax';
they *were* doing an expansion called "Coldsnap", but it wasn't based on a "lost
design file", it was created from scratch. Here's the article (the Coldsnap stuff
is near the bottom):

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr214

An excerpt: "Okay, I'll be blunt when I admit that this little controversy threw me
for a loop. We made up a cute little cover story to add flavor to the “lost set” and
suddenly my inbox is filling with letters that accuse us of betraying their trust. In
the past, I've claimed to have an evil twin, I constantly write about the alien brain
in a jar that runs R&D, and I've talked on multiple occasions about how we use
time machines to fix design and development errors. All of that has resulted in
zero letters questioning R&D's integrity. But find the legendary, yet never
mentioned, lost set of Ice Age in Richard Garfield's old file cabinet and all of a
sudden, we're trying to pull a fast one on you."

So, basically Mark Rosewater apologized and "pulled back the curtain" on their
little advertising "scam". I found the whole discussion interesting. (Mark
Rosewater's column is a great read for anyone interested in game design,
by the way.)

--John Evans