Pointed Discussion

This guy is still a really strong 2-drop, even with power creep doing its thing over the years. Amazing card back in the day, still very solid since it is a strong clan.

4/5

At 2 mana, the original green first striker is arguably the best. It was copied as a common twice - as Hornet Cobra and then Land Leeches - at a higher mana cost. Elvish Archers can deal with the plethora of 2 toughness commons in Revised like Pearled Unicorn, Scathe Zombies, Gray Ogre and the like. Its one toughness means that like Savannah Lions, the Elves are particularly susceptible to Rod of Ruin and Prodigal Sorcerer.

Not a bad creature. I wish they would reprint more stuff like this. I find as far as minor things, the color pie is still a bit strict (even with hornet sting and such in existence.)

@Ibn_Shisha
Nice joke

@everyone who doesn't know
The movie 300 was based on the Battle of Thermopylae.
This card's flavor text is referencing a quote made during that battle.
The battle happened over 2,000 years before MTG came out.

Interesting thing about the flavor text - this predates 300 by quite some time, one wonders if whoever wrote that particular bit of dialog in 300 was an old-school magic player...

@Eved - How do we know what anyone really said at the Battle of Thermopylae. Herodotus may have used creative license in Histories vol. VII. Most of his information was via word-of-mouth.

The flavor text is indeed a reference to Hdt. 7.226.1. "ὡς ἐπεὰν οἱ βάρβαροι ἀπίωσι τὰ τοξεύματα, τὸν ἥλιον ὑπὸ τοῦ πλήθεος τῶν ὀιστῶν ἀποκρύπτουσι: τοσοῦτο πλῆθος αὐτῶν εἶναι. " It is tucked inside a whole lot of indirect discourse.... so it turns out Herodotus heard about this guy named Dieneces who heard from the Trachinians that "When the barbarians shot their arrows, that they hid the sun by the great number of arrows... so large was the number of arrows." Translated by me.
Cool, eh? 5 stars for a Herodotus reference

I just discovered I own a French blackborder version of this card!

I wonder where the hell I got that from...

Anyway, there are, even today, very few creatures on par with this guy. I terms of 2/1 creatures costing 1X (X being a colored mana), the only other two I could find are Youthful Knight and the fantastic Thalia, Guardian of Thraben.

If you up to two colored mana, you get better choices though, like Knight of Meadowgrain, Vampire Hexmage, Elite Inquisitor, Knight of the White Orchid, Longbow Archer, Sigiled Paladin or the White/Black/Blood/Silver Knights.

Certainly a nice card, but a bit bland for a rare, especially compared to other rares from the early days.

Loved this card back in the days of Revised. It had everything we loved about Magic: flavorful function, great art, power and speed, good flavor text, and simplicity. It was fun to play and fun to look at. This was always in my green decks. A classic.

4/5