Making A Better Bear: Part I: Send in the Clones

Grizzly Bears

Creature - Bear

2/2

Short, sweet, and too the point. It survives being pinged by Prodigal Sorcerer, can live through a Dry Spell, breaks right through Blistering Barrier, and stops any Eager Cadet from getting any closer. So how has this staple of a card evolved over the years? Its template is as old as Magic itself, so how has that been modified? And what will future bears look like? All those questions and more will be answered in due time, but for now let's start with discussing the copy cats and how we've gotten to where we are today.

Magic: the Gathering releases Alpha, the first of many, many sets to come. I won't go deep into the history, since I'm sure many of you are aware of it already, but did you know the original play test cards for Alpha still exist. Some lucky collector out there owns an original play test Black Lotus, which has a price tag equaling or surpassing that of an actual Black Lotus. In fact, they may own something even more valuable: the first ever Grizzly Bear!


So the original Grizzly Bears was nothing more than a Striped Bears without the cantrip. So things obviously had to change and both Richard Garfield and Barry Reich (the first play tester for Magic) realized this early enough on. The finished product has been repeated more than 120 times either being the same, having an upside, having a downside, or having both an upside and downside. The formula worked!

Correction: As pointed out by @gorgonzola the mana costs during playtesting were different. The number meant how much mana you needed to spend and any letters meant you needed to spend at least that much of that color. So Bears had a CMC of 3 and one of the three mana you used to cast it must be

So the original Bears was really a Gray Ogre, another Alpha card.

So now it's time to break down all the different bears that exist out there. Let's begin with the functional reprints first.

While these may be exactly the same, one shines above the rest: Cylian Elf 

Why is that, you may be asking. It has an arguably more relevant creature type than the other cards. There's plenty of support out there for Elves and virtually no support for the other cards. So, it's possible to have a tribal relevant bear without the cost being affected at all. In fact, Deeproot Warrior is just that with an added bonus. But we will discuss bulkier bears later on.

So where else have bears made an appearance?

With the exception of and , each color has at least one vanilla bear. The first one being Fresh Volunteers, which also has the advantage of having two relevant creature types: Human and Rebel.

Walking Corpse was the first vanilla bear and Falkenrath Reaver was the first vanilla bear. Before that, they only had downside bears.

That covers the original card and the clones that have followed. So what have we learned?