A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Chapter 1: Magic as Dr Richard Garfield, PhD Intended
Magic is a weird game. It's been around for 30 years, there are thousands of unique cards, it's gone through several mechanical re-inventions and transformations. The history of the game is littered with every assumption being upturned: what if you didn't win by dealing damage. What if you sideboarded in One with Nothing. What if you won on turn zero, before the starting player's first main phase. What if you won without casting spells.
But, before we get to the truly depraved stuff, we need to go back to the very beginning and establish the template.
Magic: the Gathering launched originally at GenCon in 1993. A year later, when the very first 'world championship' was held at GenCon 1994, the original card set already had multiple printings, three expansions were out, and Black Lotus was just about hitting $50 on the secondary market. The game exploded like a bolt out of the blue.
Magic is, at its heart, a simple game. You put lands and spells in your deck. Play one land each turn. Turn the lands you have sideways to make mana. Spend that mana to cast spells. Most spells are creatures. Turn creatures sideways to attack your opponent. Get them from 20 life to 0 to win the game.
Most later-day CCGs would, of course, have an even simpler set of basic rules. But even given its baseline higher complexity, Magic was already full of complicated and unintuitive cards from the get go. It is notoriously almost impossible to evaluate Magic cards in a vacuum, so cards that seem powerful at first glance can actually turn out to be worthless – and cards that seem unplayable can turn out to be broken.
The first printing, known as Alpha, contains the template for basically all of Magic. Every card in Alpha is either a one-off failed experiment or the progenitor of a whole lineage of related cards: riffs, reinventions, nerfed or buffed versions, and assorted descendants. Black Lotus gives rise to Lotus Vale, Lotus Petal, Blacker Lotus, Gilded Lotus, and so on and so on.
People will tell you that the most important cards in Alpha, or at least the most powerful, are the power nine. Traditionally, those are the best cards in Magic – though some might contend around the edges that other cards, like Sol Ring, belongs on that list. This is, from the long view of 10 or 20 or 30 years on, true. But it's also missing the reality of early Magic.
The Power Nine are mostly mana rocks that seem, to a totally naive player, indistinguishable from basic land. Time Walk is obviously powerful; Ancestral Recall a little less so. Timetwister's symmetrical effect might not even seem broken at first glance – the trick, as with all symmetrical cards, is that you get to choose when you cast it. More importantly, the Power Nine are all rares. In the early days of Magic, your entire playgroup might have seen one of the Power nine.
No, early Magic revolved around these bad boys:
These cards are so bad, and yet so good! The very early days of Magic were dominated by this nonsense. They were commons, so everyone who wanted them could get them. Modern players would balk; why waste mana turn after turn to blank your opponent's creatures when you can just kill them outright?
But in this early era of Magic, decks were slow and inefficient. Players often didn't have enough good cards (as opposed to terrible ones) to assemble a one- or two-color deck. Most turns were spent in the condition Magic players would come to describe as 'mana screw': Not enough lands to cast your spells, or mana of the wrong color.
In these conditions, players would draw large portions of their decks. Using one of the many, many creature removal spells was clearly not as good – why trade one for one when you can invalidate half your opponent's creatures?
If you want evidence that this early "kitchen table" metagame revolved around the circles of protection, look no further than the very first piece of officially-sanctioned strategy writing about Magic, in Duelist #1: an article about how to use the Circles of Protection.
It ends with a list of ways to deal with the Circles, ranging from the obvious (blow them up with Tranquility) to the ridiculous (use Sleight of Mind) to change your opponent's CoP to the wrong color.
This is, pretty much, the shape of the early 'naive' Magic metagame. The level zero strategy was attacking with plentiful, inefficient common red and green creatures. The level one strategy was putting Circles of Protection in your deck. The level two strategy was putting Tranquility or Disenchant in your deck.
But this equilibrium wouldn't last. Magic was headed for a second limited-run printing (Beta), and eventually an 'Unlimited' printing. The amount of packs people were willing to open and cards people were willing to collect was orders of magnitude bigger than the expectations of the game's designers. There were much more optimal things to do with the original Magic card pool, and players were going to find it.
Next chapter: Magic breaks. Then it breaks again. This all happens before it's a year old.