A recently leaked Secrets of Strixhaven card has reignited a debate over Magic: The Gathering’s Reserved List reprint policy.
The card was leaked on a Double D20’s Cards & Games’ Whatnot stream when the card was pulled out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pack. The card is Emeritus of Ideation, and providing the leak is of a legitimate card, it is one of the cards in Secrets of Strixhaven that Mark Rosewater hinted at in his blog: “A mythic rare cycle that grants your instants and sorceries old keywords.”
The card text for Emeritus of Ideation is as follows:
Emeritus of Ideation (Casting Cost: 3UU)
Creature – Human Wizard
Flying, Ward 2
The creature enters prepared.
Whenever this creature attacks, you may exile eight cards from you graveyard. If you do, this creature becomes prepared. 5/5
(Prepared Ability)
Ancestral Recall (CC: U)
Instant
Target player draws three cards.
The Prepared ability is thus far an unexplained mechanic. However, it clearly refers to a board condition a creature must fulfill in order to cast the card’s secondary spell, and this creature comes into play already fulfilling that board condition. This card will more than likely make its way in Modern reanimator decks because it seems to pair well with cards like Persist and Ephemerate (without even knowing what Prepared actually does).
However, upon seeing the reference to the Reserved List card Ancestral Recall in the card text, fans almost immediately began chattering on social media about how this card may or may not indicate that Wizards of the Coast is bending their long-standing rules regarding reprinting RL cards with this card (see “‘Magic’ Reserved List“). As social media threads continued on and slowly morphed into a barrage of AI slop posts on various platforms, the debate over whether or not to reprint Reserved List cards spread across the Internet for the first time (in this kind of volume) since the 2022 proxy reprints of RL cards in Magic: The Gathering 30th Anniversary Edition (see “Reserved List Beta Reprints“).
It needs to be noted that this card is not Ancestral Recall by any stretch of the imagination. Mechanically, it is a five-cost creature that lets players pay a sixth blue mana to cast an Ancestral Recall ability. As Tenacious D might describe this card: This is not Ancestral Recall. No, no – this is a tribute
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