#i've always been enchanted by that card for being so good at common

[dravidious]

Rotation is actually awesome, because I'm way too stingy when it comes to spending resources, wildcards especially, and I ESPECIALLY never craft full playsets of cards because what if I get a 5th copy in a pack or in limited? That's inefficient! I must be as efficient as possible! But now that Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow have rotated, I'm never going to get any packs or play any limited events for them, so I'm in the clear to craft playsets of all the cards I want to make decks with!

Normally this would be pointless because the cards have rotated out of standard, but I pretty much only play Arena for limited and direct games now, and even when I do play matchmaking constructed I still don't use wildcards because of the above mentioned 5th copy issue. So now I finally have something to spend my 300 uncommon wildcards on!

I never had more than 2 copies of any of these, now I have a full playset of the first two and 3 copies of Grafkeeper!

[marypsue]

I was asked for recommendations because of this post, and here are a handful:

The Wicker Man (1973): The quintessential folk horror viewing experience, this movie is exactly as good as everybody always says it is. The soundtrack alone is worth the watch. Has a Wonderland-esque quality, where the main character is thrust into a world where everything he thinks he knows is turned topsy-turvy, and everybody around him seems to be determined to irritate and confuse him into an early grave. If you haven't been spoiled for the ending yet, try not to be before you give it a watch.

House / Hausu (1977): This movie was made in Japan, so most people call it Hausu, but the title card styles it as 'House' in English and has a voiceover that says "House!" at the same time. This is a surrealistic, almost cartoony psychedelic trip of a movie, where characters are named after the archetypes they fall into and special effects are added with hand-drawn animation onto film. Starting out like a parody of slice-of-life high school dramas and quickly getting weird with it, it could be silly and campy, and in some places it is, but I also found it creepy and psychologically unsettling in a way that sneaks up on you and gets right under your skin.

Halloween (1978): John Carpenter's original is a classic for a reason. Unlike many entries in the inescapable trend for masked killers cutting up co-eds that it inspired, this one is a moody, atmospheric, tense suspense thriller broken up by sharp, sudden explosions of violence. This is one of my all-time favourite horror movies and one that I go back to over and over.

Suspiria (1977): This movie is a candy-coloured confection of spun-sugar broken glass, cotton-candy razor wire, and raspberry-syrup blood. The aggressive use of the Goblins' creepily enchanting theme song nearly made me turn this one off in the first few minutes, but I stuck with it and I'm so glad I did. This is one you want to watch if you're looking for a Grimm fairy tale updated into the modern day (in 1977), built around a series of baroque and dramatically stagey murders.

The Haunting of Julia / Full Circle (1977): 1977 was, apparently, a good year for horror. The Haunting of Julia, or Full Circle, depending on the country of release, is a psychological ghost story with an absolutely gorgeous set and soundtrack. Is Julia really being haunted by a ghost, or just her own guilt? By the end of the movie, you may still not know for sure. This one is truly a horror movie for those of us who grew up on the 90s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden movies. (Just bear in mind that the abdominal thrust manoeuvre for helping choking victims, popularised by Dr. Henry Heimlich, wasn't common public knowledge until after an info campaign in the early 80s.)

Let's Scare Jessica To Death (1971): This is such a surreal nightmare of a movie that in the end, you may end up questioning whether any of the violence actually happened, or whether its perpetrator was really who it seemed to be. Don't go into this one for the plot (it doesn't make a whole lot of sense), go into it for the imagery and the slow ominous rising dread (and the possibility of ancient immortal vampires).

I've also got Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) on my list to watch.

There's something about seventies horror that reminds me of live theatre, actually. The sets and costumes are often cheap, and when it comes to period pieces, more 'inspired by' than accurate; the makeup is big and visible; even when the effects are really good, the blood is usually unnaturally red. The acting tends toward the broad and stagey.

And yet, it's also clear that realism is not the goal. Rather, the movie works to draw you in to a unified fiction, to get you to share in its nightmare. The best seventies horror I've seen has a dreamlike, Vaseline-lensed quality, a sense that it doesn't matter whether or not everything that happens in the movie is likely or even possible in real life. We've stepped outside of real life into a self-contained bubble with its own logic and its own sense, a dark fairy tale where the corpses of young girls might transmute into hares or eternally hungry floating heads, or the night of All Hallows might summon a stalking, unkillable masked evil from the past, or a ballet studio might be entirely controlled by witches. Even the lowest-budget, most exploitative Hammer flicks don't escape the touch of that dreaminess, that velvety, enfolding unreality. The movie suggests a world, and we, if we are wise, gladly succumb to the power of that suggestion.