Well, since NOBODY IS PARTICIPATING I guess I’ll just do another one.
Today’s Story: The Domination of the Carriage
The shadows were falling on Innistrad as madness took over the plane. Sadly, even MTGPQ was susceptible to the infection, and the madness came here too.
With this set came werewolves and spirits, zombies and vampires, angels and humans, and delirium and madness, and a brand new event with a brand new mechanic: Enraged. Battles were being finished faster than ever before, kill spells and berserk creatures were overwhelming the meta, and the (in)famous Nahiri Zoo was being unleashed on the Quick Battle brackets.
And then there was the carriage.
But, some of you are saying, that’s just an uncommon! And only a 5/1 hexproof trample! For 10 mana! How could it possibly be so terrifying?
But what you don’t know, what was lost to the sands of time and the shadows of Innistrad, is there was another ability. When Runaway Carriage first came out, it had an extra line of text (similar to its ability in paper), “Ignore all damage dealt to Runaway Carriage until it is blocked.”
With that 1 line Runaway Carriage became the most feared creature in MTGPQ history. Deals 10 damage per turn in an enraged match, and can’t be killed by spells or berserkers (there was no untargeted removal back then). Give in Defender or Reach, and you had an unkillable blocker. It was the perfect creature, and colorless! So it went in every deck. Every. Single. Deck.
Immediately, everyone started trying to find ways to stop it. Mass disable followed by a kill spell was possible, but difficult to set up in time. Defenders were possible, but to susceptible to the removal that all carriages packed for that exact reason. Cards like Supression Bonds and Hixus were too rare for most, and too easy to destroy for those that had them. Chaos reigned. Most matches came down to who could cast the first carriage, and the second, and the third. Red and its reliance on damage and berserkers was completely lost. Gideon 1’s first ability became the best in the game (again), and lord help you if you ran into a Nahiri with the carriage.
People tried other strategies. Forcing you to discard your hand every turn before you could play a carriage. Trying to blitz a win fast enough that the carriage couldn’t bring you down first. Making troll decks to crash the game first, forcing others to lose as well (Yes, that was a thing. There were cards that would immediately freeze a game back then, and people made decks with all of them). Any card with a unique ability was immediately eliminated (Westvale Abbey was nerfed before it even came out because of this)
But finally, the madness ended. The extra line was removed, and the Carriage was immediately banished to the junk pile, never to be seen again. And no stupidly broken card was ever released again (for like 2 weeks until the next set came out with Olivia and Ulrich and Piggy and Deploy and Emrakul and, well, you know the rest)
