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(Florian) I knew this trivia was easy, but 177 answers, wow! The missing card in the cycle was Wild Mongrel which is also a 2/2 for 1C and more importantly another dog. Unfortunately there is really not much else to see here.

The winners are Christoffer Brüning, Nikolas Dahn, Jonas Erhorn, Carlos Nobre, and Daniel Scheuer. Congratulations!

(Florian) Something easy and straightforward for this week. What’s missing here?

Control Magic Conquer Steal Artifact

Okay, one actual card is missing and one concept that would make a card that fitted here. In case you didn’t notice, I want you to give me the actual card. By the way, do you also sometimes wonder why they reprint Mind Control all the time instead of giving us back Control Magic? They reprinted Control Magic in Masters Edition IV as a rare and that worked out wonderfully well. It doesn’t ruin as many Limited games and when it does the reduced mana cost is rarely an issue. In Constructed on the other hand the card actually would see some play instead of being something that sits in the back of your mind, whispering pick me, pick me, but than being discarded for being just a bit too weak. Maybe in M13, maybe some day…

Also when I see Control Magic, I wonder how many cards in the history of the game got cleaned up along the way like Flying Carpet and Control Magic. Might make a beefy trivia, but that might be too hard.

Send your answer with full name and MKM-nickname to trivia@magiccardmarket.eu to win a 5 Euro voucher. There will be at least two vouchers and an additional voucher for every 25 participants up to a maximum of five. Mails without name/MKM-nick might not be considered. And please don’t post your answer here. This will ruin the fun for all the others and will also disqualify you from the raffle. I will post the winners and the answer on Monday around noon. Have fun!

(Florian) I thought this trivia might have been too hard or too strange, but fortunately 62 entries prove me wrong. So how did Nevinyrral’s Disk came into being and more importantly how does it work? The name is the first hint. “Nevinyrral” is an anagram of Larry Niven, a fantasy author that had some influence on Richard Garfield when he created Magic. Some of his short stories deal with a world in which mana, the force that fuels magic, is drawn from the environment. Sounds familiar? Garfield liked the concept and it is now part of the flavor of the mana system in Magic. In that world mana is not a self-repleneshing resource, though. You can draw mana from the world to power your spells, but once you’ve used the mana it is gone for good. Back to Nevinyrral’s Disk! In a few of his story a wizard enchants a disk with two spells. One lets the disk rotate ever faster and the other makes the disk unbreakable. This contraption is called a Warlock’s Wheel. Both spells draw their energy from the environment as usual. The problem is that those spells in conjunction work like a short-circuit. The disk consumes more and more mana as it rotates ever faster, but it cannot stop as the energy of the other enchantment keeps the disk together. Thus all mana is consumed from the vicinity, rendering Wizards powerless. On one occasion even a god is slain by this simple trick. Nevinyrral’s Disk transports this flavor to Magic by destroying all things magical. You might argue that the lands in play should not be able to produce mana afterwards, but this apparently was lost along the way.

This week’s winners are Fábio Morais, Nicolas Salihin, Carsten Schröder, and Andrej Smigoc. Congratulations!

(Florian) I have no clue whether you liked this trivia as it was quite different from the ones before, but 72 participants makes me believe that the reception was not too bad. So where does mana come from? The Wikipedia tells us: “Mana is an indigenous Pacific islander concept of an impersonal force or quality that resides in people, animals, and inanimate objects. The word is a cognate in many Oceanic languages, including Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian.” and also “Modern fantasy fiction, computer and role-playing games have adopted mana as a term for magic points, an expendable (and most often rechargeable) resource out of which magic users form their magical spells.” Fantasy writer Larry Niven picked up the term ‘mana’ in his 1969 short story “Not long before the end” and described it as a natural, depletable resource for magic. When Richard Garfield used as the resource for Magic: The Gathering it had long made its way into fantasy role-playing games and the corresponding computer games.

Our winners this week are Lutz Gödeke, John-Paul Hartzsch, Andrej Smigoc, and Daniel Wagner. Congratulations!