March 1994
The next step in the evolution of the Magic: The Gathering came with the Antiquities expansion. This set differed from the original set and the Arabian Nights expansion in two major ways: Richard Garfield didn’t lead its design team, and it had its own story.
Some of the first Magic playtesters were a group or University of Pennsylvania graduate students dubbed “Wizards of the East Coast.” This group designed what became the second Magic expansion, Antiquities.
The first Magic cards had a more-or-less generic fantasy theme. The first expansion, Arabian Nights, took its theme from traditional stories. For Antiquities, the designers went one step further; the decided to develop their own story. They created a setting, characters to populate it, and a sketched-out plot as a basis for the cards, then made up card names, powers, and flavor text. The cards fit together and provided the players with their first glimpse into an epic story.
The Antiquities story revolved around two competitive brothers, Urza and Mishra, both master artificers. When they discovered a powerful gemstone-a Thran crystal-they struggled to take hold of it, and each brother retained half. Between their mutual jealousy over the stone and the machinations of an evil third party name Gix, the brothers’ rivalry blossomed into full-blown hatred and then into a major war. Their war devastated much of the continent-as the Strip Mine flavor text commented, “Unlike previous conflicts, the war between Urza and Mishra made Dominia itself a casualty of war.”
The brothers and other characters weren’t turned into cards. But many of their magical constructions became artifact cards, and various creatures, races, and roles involved in the story became summon cards. Other cards represented places, spells, or effects from the story.
The Alpha printing of the first Magic set had two pictures for each basic land card; the Beta printing expanded this to three. Antiquities went them one better: each land had four versions. Strip Mine, for example, showed four different terraced pits. These variations added to the visual richness of the set.
