Agent Palmer

An Introduction to Fourth Edition Released in April 1995, Fourth Edition was a changing of the the guard for base or core sets in Magic: the Gathering. It was comprised of 378 cards, 72 more than Revised Edition, but it wasn’t straight up addition. It was the addition of 120 cards from Antiquities (23 cards), Arabian Nights (10 cards), Legends (55 cards) and The Dark (32 cards), two cards that returned from the base set that were not printed in…

The Fallen Empires set was unique. It was the first set to really introduce the concept of “Tribal” cards, although back in 1994 they were just called what they were; Dwarves, Elves, Goblins, Homarids, Merfolk, Orcs, Thallids, Thrulls, or Townsfolk. That’s not to say that you needed to build a Tribal deck. A lot of the cards within the set are valuable in combination with other cards and some just on their own.

Magic: The Gathering’s first set with some controversy among players about the cards contained or not contained within the set was Revised. It was the definitive base set replacing Unlimited until it was replaced by 4th Edition a year later. The set was very similar to the three base sets that preceded it with the exception of the “Power Nine.”

Sometimes, in geekdom, I think there remains a great ignorance to what came before. Other times, there is more emphasis on the past to the detriment of the present or future. But sometimes those attitudes can exist in harmony.

For me, it’s the latter, a focus on the past, in regards to Magic: the Gathering, which I refer to as “Old School Magic.”