Archived from groups: rec.games.trading-cards.magic.rules (
More info?)
Michael Beattie <mbeattie@alumni.rutgers.edu> wrote:
>What's the deal with shiny cards? Do they mean something special? What
>is the point of them?
They are called "foils" by players, and "premium cards" by Wizards. Their
meaning is, essentially, that they're a Shiny version of the regular card;
they're about 100 times rarer, for any given one, than the corresponding
regular card, so they're harder to get.
(Unlike a lot of other card games, Magic did NOT make the mistake of having
certain cards available ONLY as the Shiny hard-to-get version (other than
Super Secret Tech, which still isn't in Gatherer either); the expansions
that have foils have ALL their cards available in foil versions, randomly.)
You do have to be careful with them in tournaments. Wizards stresses that
using foils is not BY ITSELF illegal in a tournament - Wizards made the
cards, and has no reason to want to tell its players they can't be used. But:
the foils -can- warp, with age and humidity, in a slightly different fashion
than the regular cards - something to do with the foil layer - so if you do
use them in your deck in a tournament you need to make sure they're not
marked compared to the regular ones, and/or that you haven't established some
pattern like "all my Islands and my four Plow Unders are foil, all my forests
and my other cards are regular cards". But aside from that detail, they work
just like the regular version of the card, as far as the game is concerned
(again, except if Super Secret Tech is involved, but it's from Unhinged so
won't show up at a tournament anyway).
Dave
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