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Title: Magic: The Gathering -- Official Encyclopedia, Volume 6: The Complete Card Guide by Brian Tinsman, Cory Herndon ISBN: 1-56025-343-6 Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press Pub. Date: 09 November, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.95

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Summary: They're learning!
Comment: Volume 6 covers Invasion, Planeshift, Seventh Edition, and Apocalypse. As usual, this volume only deals with expansions released since the previous volume of the encyclopedia. If you've *never* collected previous volumes, you might want to look into _The Complete Encyclopedia of Magic: The Gathering_ instead (which is no longer complete, what with the expansions released after the summer of 2001).

Before launching into the expansion chapters, the usual introductory material includes 'how to use this guide' and a Collector's History - a few paragraphs of introduction plus the usual Magic timeline, including the 'for beginners' decks (e.g. Portal), the basic sets, and the expansions. The introduction to the Collector's History gives the roll call and price list for the Power Nine - the most notorious and expensive cards of them all: Black Lotus, the 5 original Mox cards, Time Walk, Timetwister, and Ancestral Recall.

Each set of cards covered in Volume 6, as usual, is provided with an introduction, the style of which has been updated to make it more useful. Each introduction begins with 'At a Glance': Release Date, Size (number of cards), Featured Mechanics, and The One-Sentence Story. For example, Featured Mechanics for Invasion lists 8 features: multicolored spells, kickers, Dragon Legends, dual lands, Kavu, and 'divvy' cards. After 'At a Glance', each introduction continues with the kind of material provided in previous volumes, still broken into segments but now given a framework and consistency by conforming to At a Glance. The framework begins with the story segment (a few paragraphs fleshing out the one-sentence version), the development segment (design history), individual segments for each of the entries in the Featured Mechanics list, concluding with Standout Cards. All the segments are interspersed with images of the relevant cards. After the Standout Cards discussion, of course, we come to the main body of the chapter for a given set: the cards.

The individual cards for each set are listed in alphabetical order; they're shown at about 3/4 actual size. The versions of Magic that included those cards (at the time of printing) are specified, as well as any errata. The card lists' images are enough to hold the attention of even a casual collector, since the flavor text is legible and the artwork is printed well.

The introduction for the 7th edition chapter adds a new item: a table listing Cards Removed from the Basic Set (compared with 6th edition): 31 each for white and blue, 35 for black, 26 for red, 24 for green, 24 artifacts, and 6 lands. (On the bright side, Serra Angel has been brought back - I thought it was gone for good.)

After covering the individual sets, the book gives an overview of 2000 World Championship decks, this time including photographs of the World Champion and the other 3 quarterfinalists. The book concludes with a "Deckbuilders Indexes" section, as in the earlier volumes of the Magic encyclopedia.