August 1995
As Magic approached its second anniversary, many players had been playing for less than a year. The Chronicles set was designed to give those players a chance at some cards they’d missed in the early expansions. It contained out-of-print cards from the Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, and The Dark expansions, with their text updated to reflect the current rules. These reprints has white borders but still carried their original expansion symbols.
Players loved the set and clamored for additional reprints. Card sellers, though, were devastated. Collectors still wanted the original black-bordered versions, but so much of the demand for cards was for play rather then collecting the prices on the secondary market plummeted when the cards came available as reprints.
Wizards had planed to produce white-bordered reprints of the older cards—indeed, they’d promised that some would be reprinted by being rotated into the basic set. Still, almost everyone who’d paid high prices or made big trades for the original cards felt disappointed. To satisfy the needs of the collectors, Wizards eventually announced a now reprint policy that limited both black- and white-bordered reprints.
