Hey! It’s my birthday! Been thinking long and hard about the trivia request for this year. Any trivia in magics first Dinosaur, Fungusaur? If not, trivia on any other dinosaur would do.

Fungusaur was the first creature to use +1/+1 counters.Happy Birthday!

Hi, my birthday is this week. Can you tell me any trivia about my favorite tribe, the humble fungus? Thanks!

Fungus as a printed creature type didn’t show up until Fallen Empires. Most the creatures that made Saprolings (that also premiered in the set) were Funguses. Interestingly, the first printed card to later become a Fungus, Fungusaur, was in Alpha. At the time it was creature type Fungusaur, but it would late be errataed to Fungus Dinosaur.Happy Birthday!

If Fungusaur was printed in Ixalan, would it have has enrage?

Yes. It wouldn’t have been called Fungusaur but something similar like Rampaging Fungusaur.

Hey, Mark! Yesterday was my birthday, can I get some trivia about +1/+1 counters?

+1/+1 counters go all the way back to Alpha on the card Fungusaur, a card that got functional errata on one printing and then went back to its original function on a later printing. Happy Birthday!

Taking off your designer hat for a moment: you've played Magic since the get go. How long did it take you (and your playgroup) to realise that these silly two-coloured lands were in fact better than the Shivian Dragon or Lord of the Pit you had been hoping to open? If this answer is linked to an interest anecdote we'd love to hear it.

My story is actually about a slightly different card but the point is the same. My first purchase of Magic was a starter and four booster packs of Alpha at a convention in Los Angeles. I spent what I though one spends on a new game and called it a day. Flash forward a week - I was hooked.I was out of luck though because Alpha was here and gone. So when Beta came out a month or so later, I ended up buying a box of boosters and a box of starters. They weren’t all for me. I knew that if I wanted to get some of my friends into the game, I was going to have to provide them access to the cards. One of the people I sold packs to was my dad. He’s a long time gamer and the one directly responsible for my love of games. In one of the packs he opened a card called Mox Emerald. I had never seen it or any of the moxes before. Remember at the time rarity wasn’t on the cards so I didn’t have a rare or mythic rare symbol hinting that this was anything special. I couldn’t figure out why you would play this over a forest but I was intrigued because I assumed there was some reason. I traded my dad for it because I didn’t own it yet. I gave him a Fungusaur and you have to understand, as far as I was concerned, I was being very nice to my dad. I had two Fungusaurs and I thought the card was very cool. This was my way of letting my dad have one in a way that felt fair.  It took me a few months to figure out what I had with the Mox Emerald. Once I figured it out I went back to my dad and offered him more cards but he said it was fine as I cared more than him about it. The one caveat to this story is that when magic began the internet was still in its infancy so there wasn’t places for me to go to easily share information. I had to learn it from actual person to person contact in game stores where I played. And that is my story.