June 1996
A full eight months passed between the releases of the Homelands and Alliances expansions. This dry spell was something or a “dark age” in Magic’s history. Two of the past three expansions had been substandard in the eyes of many players. The other—Ice Age—was very popular, but didn’t seem to count, because it was a large expansion and still in print. The explosive growth of Magic’s early days seemed to have finally leveled off, and the Fourth Edition rotations and Chronicles reprints had wreaked havoc in the secondary market.
Then came Alliances.
The Alliances set seemed to players like a return to the golden age of the early Magic expansions. It had a lot of powerful or nearly broken cards—in fact, several were good enough to make waves in the Classic tournament format. It also had very few of the under-powered, uninteresting cards that Homelands contained. The Alliances set wasn’t unbalanced, though—it’s just that in most cases the designers chose to round up rather than down when determining a cards power level. Much of this difference was probably due to changes in the card development team; three new members joined during this time, bringing fresh ideas and new view-points to the design process.
For its story setting, Alliances returned to Dominaria, twenty years after the goddess Freyalise had brought spring to end the Ice Age. Balduvians, Kjeldorans, and Soldevi were clashing as the ice receded from their lands. Gorillas of various sorts formed a minor theme and an in-joke; during playtest, every card title had included the word gorilla.
The Alliances set disrupted normal Magic strategy by introducing a new kind of spell, dubbed “pitch spells” by players. Instead of paying mana to play these spells, you could remove a matching-colored card in your hand from the game. No longer could you safely proceed once your opponent’s lands were all tapped, knowing that they could do nothing to stop you. The most famous pitch spell, Force of Will, was a key card in many permission decks.
Another major impact came form the “sac-lands.” Each color contained a land that required sacrificing a basic land when it came into play, providing the same mana as that land and also had a strong ability.
