Ripples of the Past

This is something I just noticed, and I haven't seen any indication online of people talking about this, so I think I may have discovered a very minor and particular typo that slipped through the cracks here.

Notice how Oakhame Adversary says it costs less if "your opponent" controls a green permanent, rather than "an opponent"? It implies you'll only ever have one opponent... that's some 1994 wording right there.




This is a problem we solved looong ago. The folks at Wizards realized pretty quickly how easy it was to adapt the game to a multiplayer scenario, so cards were quickly worded to acknowledge "an opponent" instead of "the opponent." So what happened? How can such a weird error, one that hasn't seen print for at least 25 years now, slip through the cracks?



I am reminded of a similar error that happened in Mercadian Masques, wherein Flaming Sword used the old wording of referring to the creature it enchanted as "target creature," rather than "enchanted creature" which had been the standard for some years. This change was at least... more recent? The last time enchanted creatures were referred to as "target creature" seems to be in Ice Age, with the new wording in place as of Alliances. So here they were reverting to a wording from four years ago, but with Oakhame Adversary, it's more than six times that long. What's going on? How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?