The Reliquary

The first years, when nobody knew what the game would become. Print runs swung wildly — Fallen Empires and Homelands were pressed in such volume that they remain common three decades on, while Revised taught a generation how to play and quietly carried the dual lands. The white border marks most of this era: the house style for reprints until 2003.

Magic learned to tell a story. Mirage opened a plane drawn from real-world African setting and introduced phasing and flanking; Weatherlight began the long saga of the ship and her crew. Tempest arrived with shadow and buyback and is still spoken of as one of the finest limited environments ever printed.

The most powerful set ever printed, and the correction that followed it. Urza's Saga gave the game free spells and Tolarian Academy, broke tournament play outright, and forced an unprecedented run of bannings. Mercadian Masques was the deliberate cooling — a set engineered to be weak.

Multicolour came of age in Invasion. The graveyard became a resource in Odyssey, with flashback and threshold. Onslaught brought tribal, morph, and the fetchlands that still shape constructed play. Legions remains the only set in the game's history composed entirely of creatures.

The sets that were always in print, and therefore the sets most players actually learned on. Fifth Edition was the largest Magic set ever printed at 449 cards. Seventh Edition was the first core set to carry foils.