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Here are the pairings after some more Gatherer lookups.

1. Mirrodin/Scars of Mirrodin: all those artifacts.
2. Kamigawa and Shards of Alara: a commander thing.
3. Ravnica and Shadowmoor: multicolored
4. Time Spiral and a representative sample of cards for specific abilities from ALL blocks, and the core set.
5. Lorwyn/Innistrad: tribal.
6. Zendikar and Return to Ravnica: dual lands.

Dec 27, 2012 -- 7:48AM, quadibloc wrote:

Dec 13, 2012 -- 7:21AM, tehbeast wrote:

If WotC had a time machine simply for the purpose of fixing just ONE block or set in Magic, Kamigawa would be really far down the list. I think first place would either be Urza or Mirrodin, although making Fallen Empires and Homelands not entirely uselss would be much better.

My suspicion is that the top of the list would be Alpha.

After all, if there never were any Power Nine, any original duals, or Channel , there would be no need for a Reprint Policy, no need for a Modern format or a Legacy format separate from Vintage... just a whole lot of agony and angst could have been avoided, presumably ensuring that Magic's road to success would be less rocky.

Not having a starting point that was too strong would mean that there would be no need to make things that were too weak, like Homelands. But in order to keep Standard rotating, it isn't possible to completely avoid things like Kamigawa.

This makes perfect sense to me. We have Kamigawa because we have Mirrodin, one is a response to the other.

Dec 27, 2012 -- 8:48PM, Dragon_Nut wrote:

No. It isn't Alpha they would go back and fix, it's Chronicles, the set the set of the collectors that caused them to create the reserved list in response. No Chronicles, probably no reserved list. No reserved list, and a lot of Legacy and Vintage card availability issues would be more solveable.

That sounds sensible on the surface, but I really can't agree with it.

Chronicles caused a hue and cry because it reprinted some cards and decreased their value. A bit.

Are you saying that reprinting the Power Nine (to solve Vintage card availability) or reprinting the original duals (to solve Legacy card availability) would not have caused an even louder hue and cry? If only they hadn't reprinted Erhnam Djinn , then they wouldn't be so hypersensitive nowadays, so that less important cards like Black Lotus wouldn't needlessly be prevented from being reprinted?

Put that way, it sounds so silly that probably you didn't mean it the way it seemed to me at first. Perhaps, for example, you're thinking that without the Reserved List, the cards needed for Vintage and Legacy could be printed at such high prices or high rarities that they wouldn't affect owners of the original cards. I think that would cause problems too; for example, Wizards didn't openly discuss the "hidden treasures" of Zendikar, and that may have been on the advice of legal counsel to avoid running afoul of gambling laws; high prices, instead of high rarities, would have problems too, I think: the print runs might have to be so limited that it wouldn't be possible to buy the product even at a high MSRP, for example.