Pointed Discussion

Why do these cards exist????The flavor of this card needed to be explained some more to make sense of its significance to Dominia...

Yeah, why are there cards that are set based?

amazing for EDH

Magic wouldn't exist if these existed in every expansion. Unless they actually did what they should have done years ago and banned these for good. This card functions too similarly to Chaos-Orb - in a way Magic simply shouldn't work.

So does this hose reprints off the original set? Are cards of a later block actually worth MORE because of crap like this. Jesus christ.

The original reason for Golgothian Sylex and City in a Bottle was because they wanted players to be able to control the use of cards outside of the core set.

Obviously, as the game grew, such cards became completely useless, and really it's good they stopped doing it after Antiquities. Could you imagine if there were cards like this for every expansion?? It'd be insane.

Oh... forgot about Apocalypse Chime in Homelands... I think I purposely forgot, lol...

@ Guest57443454: I agree, the card does nothing to explain why it does what it does, but was its significance already decided at the time of print or if it was a later storyline revision?

For those who are quite justifiably missing the connection between a ceremonial bowl and mass destruction, the flavour behind this is that it's an ancient artifact of unknown origin which Urza uses to end the Brothers' War, by creating the explosion which kills Mishra, destroys the forest of Argoth and ignites Urza's planewswalker spark. How it works is never really spelt out, although it involves him channelling energy through the bowl of the sylex.

wish there was one of these for Urza Block

It doesn't kill reprints. Only cards that actually have an Antiquities expansion symbol. What about Chronicles cards? Nobody seems to know.
If it were costed more efficiently, you could hose Workshop decks with this in Vintage. Ehhhh.. actually, probably not.

This baby loves my opponents Workshops :)

Very weak for a card that represents an artifact in the novel (The Brother's War).
It should destroy everything on the board (except library).
Nevinyrral's Disk is better although it only destroyed the City of Urborg.
For an artifact that caused the Ice Age in Dominaria, it's very weakly represented in card.

The only time cards like this should exist is in un-sets. Period.

@GainsBanding: It actually checks for the expansion symbol that's printed on the card. Chronicles cards with the Antiquities expansion symbol would be sacrificed.

206.3. A spell or ability that affects cards from a particular set checks only for that set’s expansion symbol. A card reprinted in the core set or another expansion receives that set’s expansion symbol. Any reprinted version of the card no longer counts as part of its original set unless it was reprinted with that set’s expansion symbol.

The mechanics of this card weird me out. 1.5/5.

Idea for 'build a better Cylex'. The 'hose an expansion' thing is dumb, but this particular one needs more love because it is responsible for....ummm...Magic: the Gathering as we know it, as opposed to every war being technological advances in artifice (basically, the real world).

Urza's Sylex CMC 3

Legendary Artifact- Mythic Rare

1, T: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.
T: Destroy all artifacts, creatures, and lands from antiquity (before the Modern card frame),
then exile Urza's Cylex.

I'm letting Planeswalkers and Enchantments live because:
a) not too many broken enchantments, and a cheap repeatable Obliterate
is not a card you should want to make. This will still leave you a game to work with,
but not much.
b) I made it cheaper to cast than Disk so it'd be interesting, and Legendary because it's
obviously Legendary.
c) It exiles itself, which is a better way of preventing repeated use than leaving open the possibility
of making it Indestructible.
d) I choose destroy over exile because I have a strange Vorthos-sense tingling telling me that that's what it does. Exile and Destroy are not just interchangeable, and the things affected should go to the graveyard. If I wanted to design something that blew a hole in TIME, I'd probably make it exile. This merely causes great physical energies to be released. Definitely a 'destroy' effect.
e) Destroying cards from a setting is...interesting- but too narrow a 'search' and the card is just weak.
Further, *nearly* all the Truly Dangerous and Ancient Artifacts of Power come from the before-time, before 8th Edition. SO I am also really liking the flavor of 'This kills every troublesome thing from Mox Sapphire to the Mirari' :)
f) and lastly, I made it a filter-mana stone, because this is how Urza learned sorcery, and this ability suddenly makes it MUCH more interesting on a number of levels than any comparable artifact. This thing is pretty wierd, but I think not really broken, and definitely not useless. :D

Fill with mana! Set it then forget it!

This card belongs in a MUSEUM!!

Useless if judged by its printed abilities... horrifyingly powerful if one knows its backstory.

Notice this is legal in Commander.

You will only destroy something with this once in your life. But if you use this to surprise-explode someone's fancy black-border Urzatron... well, let's just say they will never forgive you. And they will never forget.

...

For true badassery, recur this with Reconstruction and Drafna's Restoration.

The comp rules update for M14 changes how this works. Now it will destroy every card whose first printing was in Antiquities:

109.3

Expansion symbols are no longer a characteristic. Magic cards are recognized as individual game pieces by their English card names. One of the central tenets of that system is that all cards with the same name are considered the same for deck building and play purposes. This system lets us reprint cards, print promo cards, and have cards appear in many languages. But three older cards referred to cards from a specific expansion, and that runs contrary to the system. The Arabian Nights Bird Maiden and the Fourth Edition version should be the same, but City in a Bottle says they're not. In fact, it makes the original version worse!

So, cards will no longer refer to expansion symbol as a characteristic. The three cards that used to do this (City in a Bottle, Golgothian Sylex, and Apocalypse Chime) will receive errata in a future update to refer to cards "originally printed" in the Arabian Nights, Antiquities, and Homelands sets, respectively). This means that City in a Bottle no longer affects any cards named Mountain. It also means that those three cards can affect cards that were in the appropriate set and then reprinted. City in a Bottle will affect the aforementioned Fourth Edition Bird Maiden.

References to expansion symbol being a characteristic were removed in several other rules as well.

WHAT?! one of the weirdest cards ever...
does it destroy only cards that were originally printed in antiquities, or cards with the expansion symbol (lands)?

Sick anti-Workshop and anti-Tron tech!

...Still doesn't make it good, of course.

To those who suggested they print a set hoser for pre-modern card frame shenanigans, they did. It's called True-name Nemesis and it is partially responsible for a fairly large decline in the popularity of legacy as a format.