#60 OrnithopterTracking my Magic: The Gathering collection, mostly cards I’m missing or are interesting.
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Scryfall ARN | Fandom ARN | Wikipedia ARN
Arabian Nights was the first Magic: The Gathering expansion set, published in 1993. The set is composed entirely of new cards. The expansion symbol of Arabian Nights is a scimitar.
Arabian Nights includes a few minor collation and typographical errors. One of them was the so-called “Arabian Mountain”. When the decision was made to have the expansion sets fully playable with the basic set, Wizards of the Coast decided that there was no need to include basic lands in the print run, so they were removed. However, one Mountain basic land card accidentally remained on the print sheet as a common, in a slot intended for a Desert card. Due to this oversight, the Mountain is now the most common Magic card.
Scryfall ATQ | Fandom ATQ | Wikipedia ATQ
Antiquities is the second Magic: The Gathering expansion set. It was the first set to have a backstory unique to Magic that explores the mythos of the Magic universe. The story is primarily about the brothers Urza and Mishra who are inseparable at first, but become sworn enemies over the finding of two power stones.
The set was created by the group of students at the University of Pennsylvania that had helped Richard Garfield design the original game. Mechanically Antiquities revolves around artifacts. Only 35 of the 85 different cards are colored, the remaining 50 cards being artifacts and lands. The expansion symbol for Antiquities was an anvil.
| #60 Ornithopter |
Scryfall 3ED | Fandom 3ED | Wikipedia 3ED
Revised Edition (also simply known as Revised) was the sixth set and third base set released for Magic: The Gathering. Like previous base sets, it had no expansion symbol. Revised Edition cards are white-bordered and generally known for their washed-out look. The set was released in April 1994 and contained 306 cards. It was the first base set to contain cards from black-bordered sets other than Alpha and Beta.
The cards of Revised like the cards of the preceding Unlimited Edition all had white borders, no expansion symbol, and the artist credit at the bottom left. However, the cards were far paler than their Unlimited counterparts, and the three-dimensional beveling of the cards was cropped out. The omission of the bevel in the card frame was an error. This gave the cards an appearance that was widely criticized as “washed out” and even unprofessional. The beveling was returned in 4th Edition, and the colors were much more vibrant in that set.
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Revised was the first base edition of the game to be sold in multiple languages. Black bordered, limited editions were produced in French, German, and Italian. Unlimited, white bordered editions in the same languages were produced after the limited editions had sold out.
 #12 Schutzkreis gegen Rot |
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Scryfall LEG | Fandom LEG | Wikipedia LEG
Legends was the third Magic: The Gathering expansion set, released in June 1994. It was the first expansion set to be sold in packs of 15 (previous expansions had been sold in packs of 8). The set was designed by Wizards of the Coast co-founder Steve Conard and friend Robin Herbert in Canada before the game was initially released. Legends introduces several mechanics and keywords to the game, most prominently the namesake mechanic of Legends: multicolored creatures of which there could only be one in play at a time. These were the first multicolored cards in the game. The expansion symbol for Legends is the capital of a column.
 #137 Chain Lightning (x2) |
 #173 Aisling Leprechaun |
 #177 Cat Warriors |
Scryfall DRK | Fandom DRK | Wikipedia DRK
The Dark was the fourth expansion set of Magic: The Gathering, released in August 1994. The set continued the story begun in Antiquities and recounted the aftermath of the events of that set. The 119-card expansion explored the darker sides of the colors of Magic.
Unlike its predecessor Legends, it did not introduce any new keywords, but did include a number of themes including sacrifice, Goblin tribal, and colors “hosing” themselves (flavored as betrayal). The expansion symbol for The Dark is an eclipsed moon. It was released in 8-card booster packs, of which 2 cards were from the uncommon sheet and 6 cards from the common sheet; 43 uncommons were printed twice as often in the uncommon sheet as 35 rares.
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Scryfall DRK IT | Wikipedia DRK IT
The Italian version of The Dark was printed a year later, as reported in the copyright of the cards, which printed the year 1995 instead of 1994. Some cards in Italian and with the symbol of the crescent moon are also present in the Italian Renaissance expansion, printed however with the edges of white cards. Italian is the only language in which the set was translated, in the rest of the world the original English version has been distributed.
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Scryfall FEM | Fandom FEM | Wikipedia FEM
Fallen Empires was the fifth Magic: The Gathering expansion set, released in November 1994. Out of the set of 187 cards, 102 were functionally unique, with the remainder being variant illustrations of other cards in the set. The mechanics of Fallen Empires include a tribal subtheme and heavy use of counters and tokens. Thematically, the set experiments with conflict within the colors. The expansion symbol for the set is a crown.
Because previous sets were underprinted, often making them unavailable very quickly after they went on sale, more Fallen Empires cards were printed than any previous set. Wizards of the Coast announced the print run of Fallen Empires to be 350–375 million cards, compared to 75 million for its predecessor, The Dark. Booster packs were thus available until 1998, despite the fact that Wizards stopped shipping cards in January 1995.
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Scryfall 4ED | Fandom 4ED | Wikipedia 4ED
The Fourth Edition of Magic: The Gathering was the tenth set released for the game, and the fourth base set. The set was released in April 1995 and contained 378 cards. It was the first set to reprint cards from the expansions Legends and The Dark. Fourth Edition cards have white borders. The set has no expansion symbol.
Fourth Edition included the beveled border missing from the previous base set, Revised. The colors were also much more saturated than in Revised. This set was also the first base set to include a Wizards of the Coast copyright notice at the bottom of the card, in addition to the standard illustration credit.
 #31 Island Sanctuary |
 #34 Land Tax |
 #56 White Knight |
 #154 Plague Rats |
 #157 Royal Assassin |
 #273 Sylvan Library |
 #279 Untamed Wilds |
 #331 Jayemdae Tome |
 #357 White Mana Battery |
 #358 Winter Orb |
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Fourth Edition was the first Magic set to be printed in Asian languages. It was published in English, French, German, Italian, and as a first for a Magic set in Japanese, traditional Chinese, Korean, Spanish, and Portuguese, which was printed primarily for the Brazilian market. Korean and Chinese Fourth Edition cards have been made with black borders, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish cards exist with white and black borders.
 #146 瘴気 |
Scryfall ICE | Fandom ICE | Wikipedia ICE
Ice Age was the first “stand-alone” expansion; that is, it was the first set that could be played independently of other Magic: The Gathering products. It was the first expansion to reprint all five basic lands. Ice Age is also the first set that was printed for a certain period. Previous sets had a previously specified print run and were then sold while supplies lasted. It was sold in 60-card starter decks and 15-card booster packs, the latter with no basic land cards.
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Scryfall CHR | Fandom CHR | Wikipedia CHR
Chronicles was the first compilation set of Magic: The Gathering, released in July 1995. The set is one of two sets that have been sold in twelve-card booster packs, the other having been Alliances. The set remains somewhat unusual, as Chronicles introduced no new cards, but solely reprinted cards from Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, and The Dark. These reprints kept the original set’s symbol as well, rather than using a Chronicles specific symbol.
The cards in Chronicles are white-bordered, in accordance with the Wizards of the Coast policy of the time that black-bordered cards would only be reprinted with white borders. In addition, the game text on many Chronicles cards was updated to reflect then-current rules, rulings, and templating. For example, Cyclone from Arabian Nights instructed players to place “chips” on the card to mark its status, while the Chronicles reprint of Cyclone used “counters” instead, as had become standard usage.
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Wizards of the Coast originally planned all foreign-language Chronicles sets to be black-bordered, except the Italian version, which would be white-bordered because every card in it had already been printed in Italian in a black-bordered set. However, Wizards of the Coast’s licensee Hobby Japan ended up printing the only foreign-language Chronicles that was ever released—a Japanese printing with black borders.
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Wizards of the Coast released a similar set to Chronicles called Renaissance into German, French and Italian markets. The German and French versions of the black-bordered set are the same, and contained all the cards that rotated into 4th Edition from the first four expansion sets. This was due to company policy that stated that a card could not be reprinted in a white-bordered set without first appearing in a black-bordered set in that language.
The Italian version of Renaissance (Rinascimento) had different cards, because Wizards of the Coast’s licensee Stratelibri had already printed The Dark (Oscurità) and Legends (Leggende) in their entirety in Italian, and released them in that order, the opposite of the order of the original English versions. Rinascimento instead contained the cards rotated into 4th Edition from the Arabian Nights and Antiquities expansions, plus the cards reprinted in Chronicles from the Arabian Nights and Antiquities expansions.
Scryfall REN | Fandom REN | Wikipedia REN
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Scryfall HML | Fandom HML | Wikipedia HML
Homelands was the seventh Magic: The Gathering expansion set, released in October 1995. While a stand-alone set as far as its storyline, it was considered to be part of the Ice Age block for tournament legality purposes until the announcement of Coldsnap in October 2005.
 #20 Truce |
 #41 Baron Sengir |
 #86 Faerie Noble |
 #105 Didgeridoo |
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These are French versions of Homelands cards.
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Scryfall ALL | Fandom ALL | Wikipedia ALL
Ice Age was followed up June 1996 with Alliances, the fourteenth Magic: The Gathering set and eighth expansion set.
Alliances experimented with different levels of rarities of cards. There are 49 rares in the set, three of these being artifacts that are actually three times as common as the other rares, thus making them just as common as most uncommons. Alliances was the last set to have multiple cards (other than basic lands) with more than one artistic conception.
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These are Italian version of Alliances cards.
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Scryfall MIR | Fandom MIR | Wikipedia MIR
Like Ice Age, Mirage began as a set of modifications to Alpha by a group of Richard Garfield’s playtesters in winter 1992. Bill Rose, Charlie Catino, Joel Mick, Howard Kahlenberg, Don Felice and Elliott Segal created gameplay modifications and new cards that developed into “Menagerie”, which developed over the course of three years. In October 1995, Mirage was sent to Wizards of the Coast for development.
 #21 Illumination |
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Scryfall VIS | Fandom VIS | Wikipedia VIS
The Visions expansion originated as a split from “Menagerie” (the original name for Mirage), which had grown too large for a single set. For a brief time during its development, Visions was known by the codename “Mirage Jr.” It received its final name shortly later. Visions was the first set to have the same name as a Magic card printed earlier, and the first set to have a wide dispersal of pre-releases.
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