About this archive

This is a static copy of 10,322 threads (129,271 messages) from the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad, spanning 1994 to 2010. It is every thread in which one of the game's rules directors posted — Thomas R. Wylie (from December 1994), Shawn F. Carnes (July 1996), Jon Wilkie (October 1996) and L. Scott Johnson (June 1998 onward) — which is where the rulings of the newsgroup era were handed down. The threads they answered in are here whole, questions and argument included, not just the answers.

Why it exists

The VTES rulings database is a curated list of rulings, each one sourced. Several hundred of those sources were links into Google Groups. Google Groups stopped accepting new Usenet posts in 2024 and its archive has been progressively harder to reach; a rulings database whose citations rot is a rulings database nobody can check. So the cited threads live here instead, as plain HTML that any web server can hand out and any browser from any decade can read.

What you are reading

Each page is one thread, in posting order. Message text is shown as it was posted, hard wraps and all, because Usenet was a fixed-width medium and its tables and diagrams only line up that way. Two things are not original:

• Author e-mail addresses were already partly obscured by Google Groups (someone...@example.com); that is how they reached us.
• Where you see [ quoted text not captured ], Google Groups had folded the quoted passage behind a "show trimmed content" control and the scrape never saw it. The text is not lost from the archive — it is in whichever message was being quoted.

Linking to it

Every thread keeps the identifier Google Groups gave it, so a link can be translated mechanically:

groups.google.com/g/rec.games.trading-cards.jyhad/c/KWekwiRSa2I
        ↓
  usenet.krcg.org/t/KWekwiRSa2I/

Within a thread, #m0 is the first message, #m1 the second, and so on. The # beside each author name is that message's own link.

Provenance

The threads were scraped from Google Groups' copy of the newsgroup. The JSON they were rendered from is committed alongside the site generator in the newsgroup-archive repository, so the pages can be rebuilt, re-styled, or re-purposed without going back to any third party.

The posts are the property of their authors and are reproduced here for reference and preservation.