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There's a new Magic: the Gathering product called Welcome Deck 2016. This consists of five 30 card preconstructed decks, and has its own expansion symbol.

The webpage "Magic Welcome Decks" on Wizards Play Network says

Each deck includes 1 special rare that cannot be found in other Magic products!

But from Gatherer, it doesn't seem like that's true. Gatherer lists five rares in this product: Aegis Angel, Nightmare, Shivan Dragon, Soul of the Harvest, Sphinx of Magosi. All five of those are already accessible as rares in recent core sets or expansion sets that predate this product.

The linked page also indicates that the product was released on April 9 of an unknown year. I guess that the year is 2016 or perhaps 2015, so the product was already released. This is confirmed by the Tournament Rules which says all cards of that set are legal in the Standard format.

Does this product really have cards that don't appear in other M:tG products? If so, which cards are they?

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3 Answers 3

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There do not appear to be any cards that were only printed in the Welcome Decks.

The most likely explanation I see is that the rares you mention appear in the Welcome Decks but not in the concurrently released Shadows over Innistrad block. So, the quotation you reference could mean

Each deck includes 1 special rare that cannot be found in other Magic products [that we are currently publishing/distributing]!

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  • This would be my guess too. It looks like the most recent one of the rares was last printed in Magic Origins.
    – diego
    Nov 17, 2016 at 18:43
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    I think at least a couple of those were only printed in Magic Origins in that set's corresponding event decks, so the last substantial printing may be older than it looks.
    – murgatroid99 ♦
    Nov 17, 2016 at 18:45
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    @murgatroid99: That is relevant, yes. The last large scale printing of Shinx of the Magosi is in Rise of the Eldrazi, Aegis Angel in M2012, Soul of the Harvest in Avacyn Restored, Shivan Dragon in M2014, Nightmare in M2014.
    – b_jonas
    Nov 22, 2016 at 9:26
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The printings in 2015 core set and Origins were actually for welcome decks and did not appear in boosters despite technically being part of the set. None of these rares have been printed outside of welcome decks or deckbuilder's toolkits since 2013 or earlier.

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  • Welcome decks are designed to teach new players how to play and aren't meant to hold real value to discourage people who already know how to play from taking all of them. So if they were to include exclusive cards, they would have to intentionally suck. Although a few of the commons and uncommons haven't been put in any other products for years either
    – Dax
    Feb 27, 2017 at 2:52
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This is really only technically true. The rare in each of these decks - Aegis Angel, Sphinx of Magosi, Nightmare, Shivan Dragon and Soul of the Harvest - are all reprints of cards from past sets. However these copies of the card, stamped with the set symbol for Welcome Deck 2016 W16, can only be found inside these welcome decks. They are the same cards the way you are thinking of them, but different in the same way any two copies of the same cards from different sets are. There were 16 cards stamped with Welcome Deck 2016 set symbols, most were printed last in sets that had rotated out of the standard at the time.

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  • I don't really understand the emphasis on the set symbol here. Wizards generally does not treat reprints as unique cards; are you saying that that is what they intended with the statement quoted here?
    – murgatroid99 ♦
    Feb 16, 2021 at 18:08
  • @murgatroid99 They don't treat them differently in the rules, no, but for sales and marketing purposes they definitely do (Secret Lair is a prime example). The post by WotC did say "can't be found in other products" not unique, if they had meant they couldn't be found in current products like others have said, that's a lie, as Aegis Angel was in Origins, released less than a year earlier and still standard product.
    – Andrew
    Feb 16, 2021 at 18:14
  • "Still in standard" is not the same as "still in print". And, as noted in the comments on my answer, Aegis Angel wasn't really in Origins either, it was just in an event deck, which was more likely to be out of print at that point.
    – murgatroid99 ♦
    Feb 16, 2021 at 18:23

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