Portal Second Age Magic The Gathering Cards
Portal Second Age is the name of the second Magic: The Gathering
starter level set which came out on June 24, 1998[citation needed]. The
set contains 165 cards in all languages except Portuguese, which
contained 49 cards.
Portal was WotC's first major attempt at a set that new players
could come into the game and understand. Back before the major rules
changes brought forth by 6th Edition, Magic was a very complicated
game. The easiest way to describe the difficulty was that in the game,
timing rules themselves took dozens of pages of rules to describe;
today, they are covered using a simple structure: the stack, which
operates as LIFO..
Portal Second Age was the second attempt. This set continued with
the similar concepts of Portal, but reduced the set size and set the
cards up in a simpler, more straightforward style.
As of October 20, 2005, all cards in Portal Second Age are legal in Vintage and Legacy tournaments.
No new mechanics were introduced with Portal Second Age. There were
several "simplifications" made to the game through things left out of
the set.
- Instants -- Instants did not exist within the set. Instead, every "one-shot" spell was a sorcery; however, some sorceries could be played at particular times uncommon to sorceries but normal for instants. Most of these cards have since received errata making them Instants. For example, the card Deep Wood has the following text: Play Deep Wood only when you're attacked, before you declare blockers.
- Rules Text -- All rules text was in boldface. All flavor text
and reminder (italicized) text was not boldface. To separate rules text
and flavor text, the cards utilized a line with a slight bulge on both
top and bottom; this makes the line look like a very elongated diamond.
- Creature Types -- Portal Second Age cards had creature types, and were the first to word them as "Creature -- type" that was adopted with 6th Edition.
- Wording Changes -- In Second Age, "block" remained as it was, replacing "intercept" from Portal. Similarly, "graveyard" re-replaced "discard pile", and "library" re-replaced "deck".
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