2020 Magic the Gathering Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths Gaming Forum

When Throne of Eldraine was released in 2019 Wizard's of the Coast added card styles and changed how alternate art and alternate framed cards were "handled" on the checklist. In Magic the Gathering terms the type of cards I'm referring to are Showcase Art, Extended Art, Borderless Planeswalkers, and "Promo" (formerly "Friday Night Magic" or "Gameday").

My question: Should these cards be part of the main checklist or listed as insert sets (currently it is done both ways on TCDB)?

My thoughts.....all one checklist. The inserts and promos should be limited to "Date Stamped Promos", Planeswalker Stamped Promos, Foil Parallel, and Tokens.

My reasoning....

1. All the alternate art/frame type cards that I mentioned above are uniquely and consecutively numbered.
2. All the alternate art/frame cards can be viewed as a subset vs. an insert set.
3. The variety of Magic the Gathering products for each set makes it difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate which card type comes in which product.

The background on this issue would take me a full page to describe and is a little confusing because of the multitude of products that Wizard's produces for each Magic the Gathering set. Collector Boosters, Draft Boosters, Premium Collector Boosters, Pre-release Packs, Promo Packs, Commander Decks, etc. Each offering contains "exclusives" as well as "base set" cards.

I'm heavily biased toward having one checklist, but I could see the logic in listing the alternate art/framed cards as inserts. As of today, 2020 Magic the Gathering Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths Gaming has all the alternate art/framed cards as inserts. The 2019 Magic the Gathering Throne of Eldraine set has all the alternate art/framed cards included in the base checklist.

I tried to keep this short and avoid over explaining. Hopefully I outlined the problem well enough to garner some discussion.

I would like to start consolidating the Lair of Behemoths set, but I would like to establish some general standards before I start the tedious and time-consuming process.

I'm going to start consolidating this set tomorrow. I think it is one of only a few Magic Sets formatted this way and I would like to get the Magic sets standardized.

If you have any major objections or input, please let me know.

I'm using this set as an example for formatting:

https://www.tcdb.com/ViewSet.cfm/sid/214573/2019-Magic-the-Gathering-Throne-of-Eldraine

Appreciate your work on this. For my two cents - if the card has a number in the bottom left corner, it's part of the "base set". I know the extended art, etc are "unique" and treated as inserts, but the card numbering, it is part of the set.

To me - inserts would be the artist signature pieces (whatever the name for the art cards that may be gold signatured) with a normal and a signed set, the foil parallels would be the parallel set, and token / foil tokens would be another insert.

I think this is similar to what you are proposing.

I hate to bring it up, but I think it would be similar to how the Pokemon sets are done as I believe some of those secrut ultra mega hyper rares or whatever they want to call them (as you can tell - Pokemon cards are not my thing), have the same numbering issue.

As a slightly separate point on the checklists - I think some of the checklists have "1" versus "001" when the cards clearly have a "001" printed in the bottom left corner - probably should be corrected on the applicable sets too.

CrazieJoe..thanks for the input. It sounds like we are thinking along the same lines as far as formatting.

I also agree on the card numbering. Up until Core Set 2014 Magic cards were number "1", "2", "3", etc. I think it was Core Set 2014 and after that the numbering changed to "001", "002", "003", etc.

I don't want to get into a huge numbering debate (been there done that), but for ease in identification, to aid in card differentiation, and to adhere to TCDB guidance, "The card numbers listed on checklists should try to reflect the card numbers as they appear on the cards themselves, including any dashes, prefixes, or suffixes" - I feel that we should format the card numbers the same way that they are on the cards.

In fact, if it wasn't such a monumental task, I would say we change the number to reflect what is actually on the card; "xxx/XXX". That's probably a bridge to far at this point though.

Agree - the xxx/XXX would be too far, just the "001" or similar number is right. If there was a set or two I enteed checklists on where it should have been "001" but I entered as "1" - would have been my not noticing, using Excel, and it disregarding the zeroes - but I do agree, once they started printing the cards with the "001" format, that should be used.

Always happy to discuss Magic - don't get too much chance to these days. :)

The leading zeroes are fine (I've had to fix a few hockey sets like that), but anything like "xxx/XXX" or "x of XX" or "x in a series of XX", just the first number is needed, and if there's a suffix after, like "1 of 10 RS", include the suffix ("1 RS").

Admin has allowed for some of these gaming releases to have the xxx/xxx in the numbers, because the second part is actually significant beyond it being the "upper limit" (because in some cases, it's not).