The History of Magic's Arabian Nights: the Game's First (and Weirdest) Expansion
Magic's first expansion is also its most wild. Find out why...
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Arabian Nights, Magic’s first expansion, was released in December 1993 - just four months after Magic: the Gathering itself. Magic’s first small-run set of Alpha cards debuted and quickly sold out in August of that year. A second printing of the game’s core set - now referred to as “Beta” by collectors - dropped in October. Arabian Nights followed almost immediately after, expanding the card pool for the first time and setting the unceasing pace for the 90+ expansions and 23,000+ cards that have since followed.
Arabian Nights is a bit of an MTG oddity. It has the lowest print run of any expansion, as well as the smallest number of total cards. It’s also themed around a real-world setting and myth - a practice that would never be repeated. All of these facts and more make Arabian Nights a really fascinating Magic expansion to explore. Let’s get into it:
Arabian Nights History
We’re going to avoid recapping the entire pre-history of Magic (we’ll save that for another day), but a little context is necessary to help understand Arabian Nights’ somewhat odd position in the game’s history. It’s also just a really interesting story.
By 1991 Magic creator Richard Garfield had already conceptualized Magic’s basics, and had signed with small RPG publisher Wizards of the Coast to distribute and further develop the game.
Thanks to buzzy early playtests, WOTC Founder Peter Adkison was confident he had an incoming hit on his hands. In the run-up to the game’s “official” big debut at tabletop convention Gen-Con in August of 1993, the company already had a few groups working on bigger expansions - including the set that would eventually evolve into Ice Age. Adkison tapped Garfield himself to quickly develop a smaller set of new cards to jump the expansion queue and get a new Magic product to market faster. This is what would become Arabian Nights.
It is important to understand that when Arabian Nights launched, Magic was still relatively unknown. It’s true game was beginning to boom - the first run of 2.5 million cards - meant to last through all of 1993 - sold out almost immediately at Gen-Con. The game came out of the convention a bonafide hit.
But MTG launched into a world that was pre-internet (as we know it today). The initial Alpha print run sold out too fast to be even close to nationally distributed. There were no collectible card game magazines. There were basically no online communities. Even if you were an in-the-know nerd in Seattle or San Francisco, we’re talking about a sold-out product that had been around for just a few months when Arabian Nights dropped.
The game’s 2nd printing helped a little. It was bigger, at around 7.8 million total cards. But Arabian Nights launched a few weeks before Unlimited, Magic’s full 2nd edition and its first truly big print run, at 40 million cards. Unlimited was the first set to allow for something close to nation-wide distribution. But by the time Unlimited came out and Magic first got into the hands of many fans... Arabian Nights was already nearly sold out.
In short, Arabian Nights was born into an environment where a small company had just released a massively popular product and was now making things up as it went along. And Antiquities, Magic’s second expansion, would follow it just 11 weeks later. If you take away one thing from this history lesson, it should be this: Arabian Nights was only widely available for sale for around two months! The expansion was gone before many nerds had even played their first game of Magic.
Set Details
Arabian Nights includes just 78 new cards, making it the smallest Magic expansion set. Almost every online resource, including Wikipedia, lists Arabian Nights’ card count at 92. This is because 14 of Arabian Nights’ cards were printed with an obvious and fairly significant print error - the colorless mana symbol in these cards’ casting cost is darker. So most collectors feel that to have a “full set” of Arabian Nights you should collect these clearly alternate printings as well.
Another printing oddity - one of Arabian Nights’ 78 cards is…. a Basic Land mountain. Arabian Nights was originally going to be printed with a full set of basic lands, so the cards could be played stand-alone, without the need for any MTG Core Set cards. But when that decision was reversed at the last minute (more on this in a bit), the basic lands were removed from the expansion’s printing sheets. But the Mountain was accidentally left on.
Arabian Nights was sold in booster packs of 8 cards, and cost $1.50 - $2.84 in 2021 dollars. I like to picture the gamers lucky enough to get their hands on a fairly hard-to-find 8-card Arabian Nights booster only to discover that one of their 8 cards was…. Just a plain Mountain.
Semi-official sources list Arabian Nights’ print run at about 5 million cards. There are no Rares - only Commons and Uncommons. But because of how Magic cards are printed - on 11x11 whole sheets which are then cut (121 total cards per sheet), and because a card would appear on one of these sheets multiple times, some commons and uncommons are much more rare than others. In other words, a common appearing five times on the common printing sheet has 5x the total number of copies in circulation as a common appearing just once on the printing sheet, and was 5 times more likely to show up in your booster pack. This leads to some unusual final card counts.
Example - some “Uncommon’ cards were printed 4x on each Uncommon sheet, like Oasis. The math works out to 41,300 Oasis cards printed in total. But some “Common” cards were only printed once on the Common sheets, like the odd Mountain mentioned earlier. And there are actually fewer of these “C1” commons (cards printed once per common sheet) than there are “U4” Uncommons (cards printed 4x per Uncommon sheet). The math works out to around 41,300 total uncommon copies of Oasis printed in total, and 31,000 total common copies of the Arabian Nights Mountain printed in total, making the “common” Mountain a little more rare overall. Weird, right?
A complete view of Arabian Nights’ printing totals (source1) (source 2):
Rarity - Cards printed:
U2 20.700
U3 31.000
U4 41.300
C1 31.000
C2 62.000
C3 93.000
C4 124.000
C5 155.000
C11 341.000
The Quick Decision That Changed Magic Forever
Originally, the plan was for “Magic: the Gathering” to only be printed a single time. It would be replaced and succeeded by separate Magic products like Magic: Ice Age, and so on.
For how much Garfield and Magic’s other core designers didn’t yet understand about the future of the game, the reasoning for this was simple, and showed a tremendous amount of foresight: adding more and more cards to a single card pool would, in Garfield’s own words, “collapse the game into complexity” and would “strongarm players into buying cards they might not want.”
Hmm.
In any case, the original plan was for Arabian Nights, and for every subsequent Magic expansion, to have its own, different card back! Each expansion would include basic lands and could be played “standalone” - without any cards from any other sets - if desired. This was not some flight of fancy, either. It very, very nearly happened. The reversal of this plan came just as Arabian Nights was going to print. It came so late, in fact, that the pink/purple card back is still featured on the booster box packaging for the expansion. Instead, a small expansion symbol (a scimitar) was quickly worked up for placement on the front of the card to distinguish cards that came from Arabian Nights instead.
As word spread about the proposed card backs, fan outcry, combined with feedback from one of Magic’s original designers Skaff Elias, led to the change of heart. The core issue was, if you were choosing to mix cards from different sets, the card backs would give you a clue what you were about to draw. Especially if your deck was almost all cards from “The Gathering” with just one or two Arabian Nights cards sprinkled in. The expansion symbol on the front of cards was seen as the best of both worlds - the Magic card pool could stay unified, but players could still self-regulate and decide ahead of time which sets to use in their decks.
It’s hard to imagine Magic would be with 90+ distinct standalone collections of cards instead of the single, unified, ever-growing game we all enjoy today. Now that card sleeves are required and cards rotate in and out of a “Standard” play environment (to help solve for Garfield’s concerns) it truthfully may not make that big of a difference.
Design
Modern Magic expansions have very strong and very explicit mechanical themes each explores and fleshes out. Ravnica is all about pairs of two complementary colors. Innistrad: Midnight Hunt is all about Werewolves and two-sided “transforming” cards.
Old magic expansions? Considerably less so. Expansion 2, Antiquities, loosely explores and expands on artifacts. Expansion 3, Legends, introduces and explores… legends, as a new game concept and card type. And so-on. We’ll get to these.
Arabian Nights, as an even earlier expansion, and one that Garfield designed more-or-less by himself (with contributions from the game’s other Alpha designers) in a very short period of time - has no unifying design theme. And Garfield - to this day a major proponent for keeping Magic somewhat more “odd” and game-like - put this ethos on full display in Arabian Nights. Garfield no longer works for WOTC or on Magic full-time but still returns occasionally to work on expansion designs, and those expansions inevitably stretch the game into stranger and more unusual directions, too.
Despite no unifying design, Arabian Nights does introduce some important game concepts and mechanics, many of which persist to today (the MTG Wiki has a larger and more comprehensive list):
Lands that have a special ability and do something other than tap for mana, like Library of Alexandria
Coin flips, as an official and sanctioned game rule.
Lifelink - the concept of a creature healing you for every point of damage it deals to an opponent, is introduced via El-Hajjâj. It would be many years (14!) before the ability would be given its official keyword name.
Gaining control of an opponent’s card (stealing!)
Removing cards from the game entirely - not just putting them into the graveyard.
Fetching a card from outside of the game!
Magic’s current lead designer Mark Rosewater has a deep dive on these mechanics and their lasting influence on the game I highly recommend as further reading.
Lore
As mentioned, Arabian Nights is (and will likely forever remain) the only Magic expansion based on a real-world setting. Namely the collection of “1001 Arabian Nights” folk tales. Even if you’ve never read one of these collections, you’re undoubtedly familiar with some of its stores: Ali Baba and the 40 thieves ("Open sesame!"), Aladdin’s Magic Lamp, The Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, etc.
In Garfield’s own words:
I had always thought that the Arabian Nights mythos was fascinating--the djinni, sea serpents, thieves, heroes, deserts, oceans, magical treasures, and so on seemed perfect for Magic. In addition, I had just read Ramadan (Sandman #50), which is set in the Arabian Nights mythos, so I took that as a sign.
I checked out about a dozen books on the Arabian Nights from the library. These included various translations, interpretations, and critiques of translations. I read several translations, jotting down all the major characters, creatures, items, and places I ran across. I took stabs as to whether these things should be white, blue, black, red, green, artifact, or land.
Only 15 of Arabian Nights 78 cards have flavor text on them, but of course flavor comes from card names and art, too. Or more rarely through a card’s mechanics. Arabian Nights is actually quite good at this. Aladdin lets you take control of an artifact. Ali Baba lets you bypass a wall. Shahrazad deliberately drags the game out. Clever.
A few cards from Alpha included Bible quotes in their flavor text. Two from Arabian Nights quote the Qur'an. Bazaar of Baghdad is (as far as I know? Please let me know if I’m wrong!) the only Magic card to explicitly depict a real-world place, thus immortalizing the city into MTG’s lore and canon.
There are two cycles of four cards in the set. Four efreet (more commonly spelled Ifrit these days) - malevolent spirits or demons common in Islamic myth, and four Djinn, or genies. White doesn’t get either. As Garfield put it - “They didn't seem to belong in white--while not always evil, they were never good.”
Around half the set is very explicitly themed after Arabian Nights, pulling characters and events from the stories directly into the game. The other half of the cards support the theme indirectly, introducing deserts, sandstorms, scimitars, asps and the like.
While Wizards of the Coast doesn’t shy away from Arabian Nights’ history and Earthly inspiration, to square the lore circle the company did eventually retcon the set’s lore in a series of comics, now saying it takes place on the fictional desert plane of Rabiah. Taysir is a Planeswalker from Rabiah yet to get his own card. Your guess is as good as mine whether he’ll eventually show up in a Commander product.
Notable Cards
Arabian Nights’ small size, small print run, and ultra-high power level (the cards were barely playtested) make almost every single one of its cards notable. A full set is valued at about $16,000 today, making it the second most-valuable expansion, behind just Legends, which has more than four times the total number of cards to collect.
A few specific highlights:
Shahrazad is another card with massively “flavorful” mechanics, where you play a brand new game of Magic, with your opponent, inside the game of Magic you’re already playing. Just like the “never ending” tales Shahrazad tells in 1001 Arabian Nights. It’s the only card banned in MTG basically because it’s just annoying.
Juzum Djinn terrorized players for years as arguably the most powerful creature in the game. Although Magic has generally resisted any bad cases of power creep, he was eventually outclassed by modern creatures. But for its time, a 5/5 on turn 2 or even turn 1 was very nasty. Especially considering his fairly tame drawback.
Ali From Cairo is an example of how brave Garfield is when designing and balancing Magic. With Ali From Cairo out, you can’t lose the game! At least, not through damage. Pretty cool. Garfield had faith that creature removal and other counter-balances wouldn’t make this card OP, and he was right.
Library of Alexandria is the most expensive Arabian Nights card on the secondary market and is the most powerful card in the set. If it weren’t banned or restricted in official play, every deck ever made would be better for running 4x of them. It basically lets your draw two cards every turn instead of one - a crazy tempo advantage.
Bazaar of Baghdad is incredibly valuable and powerful because, similar to Library of Alexandria, it makes any deck better. Cycling through your deck faster, to hunt out the specific cards you need, is always worthwhile. And what truly makes Bazaar nuts is when it is combined with decks that want you to put useful things in your graveyard, and can easily fetch and use those previously-discarded cards.
Arabian Nights Anecdotes & Trivia
I’ve covered off on most of the interesting ARN trivia and anecdotes I’m aware of in the text above, and the MTG Wiki has a list of card-specific interesting facts and specific literary allusions worth checking out. But here’s a few more odds and ends:
Two cards in Arabian Nights have been scrubbed from WOTC’s official databases and records due to outdated, insensitive cultural depictions. While I won’t be listing them here, they haven’t exactly become forbidden knowledge. You can see them on Scryfall and elsewhere if you’re curious.
Many of the card names featuring fictional fantasy terms - think Erhnam Djinn, Ifh-Bíff Efreet, Mijae Djinn - come directly from Garfield and are references to his friends and loved ones. Ernham and Mijae are anagrams for family members - Herman and Jamie. And “Ifh-Bíff” is an old family nickname for Elizabeth, Garfield’s sister.
Despite now being arguably the most well known Arabian Nights story, Aladdin was not originally part of 1001 Arabian Nights. It was added to the collection by a French translator in the 1700s. It’s essentially a “bonus” story within Arabian Nights collections. The Aladdin story is actually set in China and Aladdin himself is Chinese. You can see this accurately reflected in his Magic art.
Besides just generally being annoying to play against, Shahrazad, the card that lets you play a new game of Magic nested within your existing game - also completely broke everything, under the game’s original ruleset. There were no deck limits in those days, and no limit to how many of a single card you could include in a deck. So you could make a deck of unlimited Plains and Shararazads, keep starting more and more game-within-games, and eventually win by running your opponent out of cards.
Arabian Nights Key Stats
Expansion code: ARN
Total cards: 78 (92 if you count printing variations
Total print run: ~5 million cards
Current collector value: $16,000
Current most valuable card: Bazaar of Baghdad - $3200
Further Reading
If you want to dive deeper into Arabian Nights, these are some Arabian Nights articles and references I used when constructing this newsletter:
Great article! My favorite set by far!
Amazing article! That alternate card backing is so cool. I can see why they didn’t implement that in the game (predictable card draws), but part of me wishes that every set had its own unique card backing.