This was also the year that Mark Heggen, and many other team members helping him, created Secret Lair
If you discard a card while you control Festival of Embers, abilities that function when that card is discarded (such as madness) still work even though that card never reaches a graveyard
You trade off the ability to Clone opponents stuff for having Cycling and for being able to copy your artifacts
Both Captains give the other hexproof, and then you could generally just race most people pretty quickly
It's important to remember that, even though each Companion card states you can cast it from outside the game, this is not /actually/ the case
Compare this with the original Symbol Sheet for my old blanks: With the old Symbol Sheet, you had to manually cut-and-paste in the symbols where you needed to, which definitely involved a lot of needless work trying to align them with one another for attacks, weakness/resistance, etc