Magic the Gathering 1997 Vanguard Gift Box

Day Two of the Birthday Bonanza! Every year during the week of my birthday we will be opening some awesome throwbacks to relive things I got or wish I had gotten for my birthday as a kid!
We're opening something really special today, an unopened Vanguard Gift Box from 1997 originally released as an Arena League Promotion!
To me this format is 100% better than Commander ;)
Oh how I miss Arena Leagues! They were the predecessor to weekly Magic Leagues and eventually morphed into Friday Night Magic!
How many will I remember the names of? What old school awesomeness will we open?
Opened 9 July 2024
#mtgアリーナ #mtg #magic #boosterpacks #starterdeck #tournamentpack #2024 #oldschool #oldschoolgaming #oldschoolmagic #japanese #french #german #italian #chronicles

[@ZackeroniAndCheese]

I had no idea so many 90s products came with foreign packs until I found your channel

[@petespacks]

@ZackeroniAndCheese Some of the magazines and even WotC offered subscription plans where you could get packs mailed to you every month which had Foreign language packs too. I had the Duelist pack subscription for a little while, it was awesome! The 90s were a wild time looking back on it, mail order boxes directly from WotC were a thing too.

[@aarondunn6759]

I didn't know about the Vanguard product but I can tell you they sold the colour boxes individually as flat fold yourself. I still have them, except for the Black one which I sold

[@petespacks]

@aarondunn6759 Nice! I might try to track down some of the others that I don't have yet.
I remember seeing some of them for mail order in magazines, and they were also given away as door prizes for some Arena Leagues, but I thought they had different art. I remember some other ones were available on prize walls at events in the 90s, but I don't remember which ones specifically.

[@FirePullsMTG]

This is really cool get anything good?

[@petespacks]

@FirePullsMTG 😅 that depends on how you define "good" 😂

[@maciejszpyra]

What a weird product. Why would they put different language cards in this? For collectors?

[@petespacks]

That's a great question! Yes it was for collectors, but also, this was before the existence of foils (with the exception of extremely difficult to acquire promotional cards) and alternate printings for cards, so foreign language cards were one of the few ways we had to "bling" our decks.
Foreign language cards were relatively difficult to get ahold of at the time, had much smaller print runs, and showed a level of mastery of the cards to not have to have the text in from of you. As a result they held a significant amount of prestige at the time. Keep in mind this was a time before large card markets like TCGPlayer, CardMarket, etc and before social media sites like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. Most players were either buying cards at a local comic shop, sports cards store, or directly through mail order.
Players often had no idea what cards were in a set until the set lists were released in a magazine like Duelist, Inquest, or Scrye.
Oracle is a text based database containing the official rules text for every card printed, but it was not publicly available until around 97 from what I remember.