The Fallen Empires expansion, like the ones before it, was a limited edition; Wizards printed only enough to fill the preorders plus a small margin. However, those preorders were placed during the Legends euphoria, when it seemed that the demand for new Magic cards was insatiable. As a result, game distributors vastly over ordered. When demand leveled, game stores and distributors alike were left with stack of unsold product. Even though they lowered the prices in an attempt to get the set moving, it took them over two years to sell all their Fallen Empires cards.
Not that the set was bad--far from it! Fallen Empires actually had many cards that became tournament staples. But most of the tournament quality Fallen Empires cards were common., so everyone quickly has as many as they wanted. This, combined with the over ordering of cardseller, devalued the set in the eyes of most players. Still, a huge number of new players were discovering the game at this time, and the cheap Fallen Empires cards helped many of them start collections.
Fallen Empires took many ideas touched on in earlier sets and ran with them. In the past, the only cards printed with various artwork were the basic lands and non-basic land in Antiquities. Fallen Empires extended this to all of its common cards. Each of them appeared in three or four versions, differing in art and flavor text but identical for game purposes.
The basic set had one rare card, The Hive, that created token creatures. The Legends expansion added two more, both still rare. Fallen Empires went token crazy. Every color had at least one token-creating card. And if tokens weren’t enough, green also had a host of cards that generated fungus counters—and some could use those counters to create tokens!
Finally, a minor theme in the past had been races; goblins, merfolk, zombies, and kobalds each suggested theme decks. The Fallen Empires colors each had two races or factions for players to explore.
Fallen Empires, like the Dark, had a setting but not a story. It was set after the Brothers’ War shown in Antiquities, but in a different area. Five Empires (one for each color) struggled with each other and internal enemies as the climate changes caused by the war disrupted their world.
