We don't have traditional 'blocks' as of yet, but even this early on Wizards has already segmented 'large expansions' and 'small expansions' pretty well. And coming off 'Legends' as we build up to the huge events of 'Ice Age', we have a couple of small expansions.
The Dark and the expansion that comes after it, Fallen Empires, bridges the gap between the storyline told in Antiquities. The huge magical war caused the sun to be blotted out by magical debris, and this plunges the world of Dominaria into a literal dark age. Hence, The Dark.
Despite the rather cool premise, this 119-card expansion is probably one of the ones that feels the most non-cohesive and feels more like a gathering of cards that didn't make it into the larger sets of Alpha, Legends or Ice Age... the other early 'small sets' of Arabian Nights, Antiquities and Fallen Empires all had either a flavour or gameplay mechanic that holds them together. The Dark... doesn't. It's hard to be too mean considering that the designers of this game are still pretty much on a huge trial-and-error mode at this point, but it will become apparent if you sneak a peek into the card effects as a whole.
In particular, The Dark is remembered among the MTG fandom for introducing a lot of 'colour pie' conflicts... certain colours have certain mechanics that they are good at, and certain things that they should have limited or no access to. The Dark flips this around in the head with some cards, which is quite detrimental to both game balance and game flavour.
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[Originally released as 'The Dark & Fallen Empires' in August 2019; rewritten in January-February 2025]
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We'll start off with a pretty fun artwork of the Bog Imp. The card itself is a 'French vanilla', which is to say a simple creature with a single keyword, in this case the Bog Imp is a 1/1 with Flying. But I really do like the artwork! A green humanoid with an elongated, Alien-esque skull and a fanged grin, and limbs that taper off into red. Or are they blood-stained? There's a pair of wings that are folded down, almost like they were plastic coverings or something? I like the almost peaceful scene here with the imp seemingly fishing.
Rag Man is... interesting? "Aw, he's just a silly dirty little man" says the flavour text. And the idea is that he just seems like a pretty harmless -- if unkempt -- man... but that elongated arm with curled fingers are just a bit too long to look perfectly harmless. The effect has the Rag Man force your opponent to discard a card, which does fit with the imagination of this thing stealing something from you. The artwork almost implies that the Rag Man is secretly a vampire or a ghoul or some sinister creature of the dark, but the great creature type update retcons him into a 'Human Minion'. I think I preferred the version of the Rag Man that my imagination cooked up.
Frankenstein's Monster is a fun little reference to the classic horror novel. I do appreciate that the card art isn't just copying the 'classic' feel of the 1931 movie, and instead opts for a grislier artwork. It's got a pretty flavourful (if weak) effect, where you exile cards from the graveyard and add a buff token of your choice to Frankenstein's Monster, simulating the effect of you 'using up' the bodies in the graveyard to attach extra buffs to Frank.
An example of how mismatched the early sets are are things like this. After the previous expansion made such a big deal about the 'Legendary' cards representing creatures instead of a creature type, we get 'Uncle Istvan'. Who, since this isn't a legendary creature, leads us to assume that there are multiple crazy hermits called Uncle Istvan in this time period in Dominaria. Yep, yep.
Nameless Race should've been a boring card. The artwork is just two knockoff Prince Zukos posing. The effect has the X/X be tied to an amount of life that the caster pays. Kind of boring... except that as of the great creature type update, Nameless Race is, thanks to the name and the game designers having a nice sense of humour, the only creature cards without an actual creature type.
For an expansion that's called 'The Dark', a lot of the Black-mana creatures aren't particularly special, yeah? Eater of the Dead is kinda cool. He's a Horror (the aesthetic lines between what counts as a Horror, a Demon or a Devil is really blurry, even with modern retcons) that eats corpses. It's another early example of the Exile (or 'remove from play') effect matters, in this case a flavourful representation of Eater here consuming the physical corpse in a physical graveyard. Pretty simple demon-guy design, with a dog head and Baphomet goat horns and wings and whatnot... though those eyeballs on his shoulders are kind of neat.
Word of Binding just taps creatures. Pretty simple sorcery, if not for the fact of the very cool horror (it's a horror, right?) displayed in the picture. A nasty, 90's-00's edgy grimdark flesh-monster with huge fangs, a whip-like tongue with jagged teeth and no eyes. Oh, and fleshy tentacles all over his body. Pretty creepy, pretty badass! It's just rather strange that the effect of a presumably holy 'Word of Binding' is given to... Black instead of White. Huh?
Oh, I absolutely love the artwork for Worms of the Earth. Giant worms burrowing under the earth has been a pretty great fantasy feature, and I really like Maddocks' artwork here of this poor schmuck hammering away on the ground. The tip of the worm's tail pokes out behind him, and yeah, that is a big worm... but still manageable to the man, presumably. But the artwork's cross-section of the ground beneath shows just how massive and undulating the body of the earthworm truly is. Pretty cool artwork!
The effect, again, isn't particularly strong even for that era of MTG, but I like the flavour of the worms tunneling around and preventing both players from casting land cards. Someone has to sacrifice lands to feed the worms, or just take 5 damage from presumably challenging the worms directly.
And just like that, we're out of Black and into Blue... and that's not a particularly worthy set of cards for an expansion that implies the rise of dark powers, is it? Yeah. For Blue, The Dark gives us a bunch of brand-new animals that are interesting for the novelty of being the first time these animals show up.
And a sign of the age of the original versions of these articles is Giant Shark here. My original writeup, circa 2019, bitched about how 'Shark' was reduced to a boring 'Fish', and how a lot of creature types were 'over-rolled' into an umbrella term. Since then, Sharks have been reinstated as their own creature type. Nice artwork of a shark here, although the card itself is pretty terrible -- with Giant Shark having the notoriously bad 'Islandhome' mechanic.
Water Wurm is a pretty fun aquatic worm. I don't think it's based on any specific type of worm, but it's got a nice artwork of a segmented, legless body and tapering antennae. There are a surprising amount of worms that live in the ocean other than the virally popular bobbit worm. This guy reminds me of the deceptively long beach worms I've seen in many walks to beaches.
Oh yeah, I love this guy. Leviathan is one of the bigger creatures in MTG, and still is. A massive 10/10 means that physically, the Leviathan is stronger than even the Elder Dragons we've seen in the previous expansion. MTG still hasn't really gone all that far beyond double-digits, reserving it for the biggest cosmic monsters and gods, which is a nice bit of powercreep restraint.
What a massive creature, too -- a simple design of a massive, whale-like serpent that's seemingly made up of water. And that would be the knee-jerk response to this -- a 'leviathan' is usually a sea serpent, right? And the blue background makes it easy to mistake this creature as swimming through the ocean. But a closer inspection shows that it's a house in the foreground, meaning that this isn't just a monstrously gigantic whale-serpent, it's a monstrously gigantic whale-serpent big enough to swallow a house with a single gulp. Awesome!
(The card itself is terribly pricey with a cost to even untap, so it's very impractical, but cool art!)
Dance of Many has a nice artwork of a bunch of orange-and-blue sea slugs that have butterfly wings dancing in an altar. Very surreal-looking! That is a terribly-formatted paragraph there, but basically Dance of Many allows you to copy a target creature, and you have to keep paying mana (i.e. keep dancing) for this copy to exist on the battlefield. No explanation to what these slugs are, but they sure are dancing!
MIND BOMB! My favourite card on this page, no questions asked. It's so ridiculous! It has nothing to do with 'the Dark'. It's a bomb made entirely of brain matter -- complete with a cerebral fissure -- and you have the missile shell casings being ejected as if by psychic energy. (Incidentally, what are those shell casings made up of? Skull bone? Probably skull bone.) Somewhere out there is a mad mage that drops these things down from the stratosphere down upon his enemies.
Incidentally, Mind Bomb is one of those 'anti-colour-pie' cards that should not happen. Blue isn't supposed to be able to do direct damage to the player, or to disrupt them via discard. It doesn't seem like much, but from a mechanic game-design standpoint, giving different colours access to too much of what the other colours are meant to do destroys the whole appeal of playing in a certain style.
That is such a creepy depiction of Amnesia. Memory loss is legitimately one of the things I'm afraid will happen to me. Is that why I like listing down things? Perhaps. But the giant fleshy hole in that man's head, and the brain-dead expression on his face... pretty creepy. The flavour text makes it even creepier, because it implies that this brutal showcase of amnesia is actually voluntary, as the person's trying to forget something particularly horrible he saw.
Psychic Allergy! As someone who's struggled with allergies his whole life, this is a fun -- if grisly -- card. Very nasty artwork of the allergic reaction to that guy touching the portrait. Psychic Allergy causes each player to be damaged by whichever colour that that is chosen by the spell's caster... and you tend to control lots of cards of whatever colour you're playing. Psychic Allergy has one of the 'continual sacrifice of lands' that is always going to be unsustainable, though.
The Lurker (it's considered a 'Beast', which is another one of those very ambiguous creature types) reminds me of some kind of a sasquatch-y creature? Humanoid body, long arms with long claws... that face is really nasty, though. The beard and the scrunched-up features are whatever, but I'm not sure if his mouth is just full of saliva, or if it's actually held together by some kind of mucous-slimed tendrils.
is a more typical sort of sasquatch-y forest beast, a giant muscular humanoid with claws that hunts down people while making use of its ability to hide in the jungle, but I really do like that horrifying face they gave him. Especially the mouth, which seems to be held together by stringy tendrils.
Land Leeches! Speaking of animals that have retained their own identity and not rolled into some other category are leeches, a creepy-crawly that makes its debut here. Land Leeches are our very first leech, and... well, they do have the segmented black body down pat, but they're missing the iconic fang-like sucker that real leeches are famous for. This one is just a 2/2 with First Strike, which, if you forget, allows the creature to deal damage first before its opponent. I guess the flavour here is that the leech ambushes its opponent, and attacks with its 2 damage before the opponent can react.
Spitting Slug just looks super wretched. Compare it to the "Giant Slug" card we saw in Legends, which looks badass and threatening. This guy looks like it's in its last throes. The slug's regular anatomy is bunched up into two hunchbacked-esque blobs. One of its eyestalks is missing, and its mouth just looks uncomfortable as it keeps vomiting out some form of slug-spew.
Its ability makes it even more pathetic. You can pay mana to give Spitting Slug the same 'First Strike' keyword that Land Leeches have. Pumping mana to make your creatures stronger, pretty simple, right? But if you don't do this, any creature fighting Spitting Slug gains First Strike instead. Meaning that if you don't actually give it this mana boost, the slug is so slow and useless, so slow, in fact, that the opponent might as well as have First Strike. Poor slug!
A Carnivorous Plant is pretty much a shoo-in at some point for any fantasy setting. And this plant is your typical exaggerated Audrey-II style venus flytrap. I really like how the artwork makes the sleeping 'head' feel a fair bit disguised among the rest of the green brambles and vines... though closer inspection shows a slightly-less-obvious roaring head on the upper right.
This thing is a Wall, by the way, predating the 'Plant' creature type. It's a bit of a rarity in these earlier sets where unique creature types are the rule rather than the exception, though of course it ends up being a 'Plant Wall' later on. I suppose it just means that these particular plants are rooted to the spot.
Wormwood Treefolk looks a bit more awkward, but probably one of the more badass "Treefolk" in early MTG. It reminds me of the Ancients from Warcraft III! I like the wretched, classic evil-witch-like face, and how this entire thing is just a roaring face with long arms and chunky legs. With its associated-with-disease name, Wormwood Treefolk is the set's token attempt at trying to depict 'the Dark', with some Green cards helping Black when they're supposed to be 'enemy colours'. Not the most obvious way of doing so, design team!
We're in Red now, and Ball Lightning is an iconic creature for Red! Real-world Ball Lightnings are ephemeral phenomena, and this Elemental does exactly that. It shows up with its insanely slanted statline (6/1), is has Haste (meaning it's super-fast, and can attack the moment it hits the battlefield) and Trample (so any damage it deals after killing an opponent creature gets 'carried over' to the opposite player). Pretty powerful, and it's essentially a spell similar to Red's Fireballs and Lightning Bolts in creature form... and Ball Lightning even dies at the end of the turn, meaning that the reason of playing this is to just charge in and deal 6 damage cheaply in a trade. In an expansion infamous for designers 'not getting' the colour identity, Ball Lightning is a very Red card.
Also something that Red does well in The Dark is actual tribal synergy. We've got a lot of goblins, and goblin support cards. I'm not going to list all of them here (which I did in the original version of this article), but Goblin Digging Team is quite fun. It's got the typical flavour of black comedy associated with the goblins, where the Digging Team are sent to destroy a wall through underground tunnels... but they don't think of how to get out, and get killed by a cave-in. Silly goblins! The effect is pretty much that -- sacrifice this creature to destroy a wall!
Goblin Rock Sled is... it's just utterly hilarious, with that goblin wearing a funny little red cap, snow goggles, and apparently spends its time just zooming around on a sled. It's a sled that looks insanely modern-looking! And it's a rock sled, which means that it's something that's meant to slide down mountains, which ties into the fact that this creature can only attack if the enemy has a Mountain.
The initial creature type here being "Rock Sled" while the creature name and art contained "Goblin", in a set where a lot of cards cared about Goblins being around, was the start of classic Magic's troubles with creature types until the Great Creature Type Upgrade retcons I keep mentioning.
We have two or three more goblins in Red, which just features a bunch of regular goblins... but Goblin Hero deserves a bit of a mention here for looking so weird. Look at that! It doesn't look like MTG's usual goblins, and looks more like a psychotic demon. The head looks more like a malformed horse, and he's got bones jutting out of his elbows. It just looks nasty!
I tried a bit too hard to talk about the White creatures in my initial review of this expansion, and... well, to be frank, all of the White-mana creatures in this set are all just some variation of 'human doing human stuff', and at this point, four expansions in, I think we've ran the gamut of human paladins, priests, clerics, citizens and whatnot. But Preachers? We haven't had preachers, mostly because those are a bit more contemporary. This sure is a very angry preacher with very modern-looking clothes and stained-glass windows. It'll take White a fair bit more to become a cooler colour, but I like the sinister undertones of an angry Preacher having a brainwashing effect.
Angry Mob is also a fun White card that's not just squeaky-clean, being a nice, painting-like artwork of a mob with torches. Of course they trample over enemies. And they get stronger the more Swamps (or 'obviously evil' things) the enemy controls.
We have Dark Heart of the Wood, which I really just like the imagery of. It's a literal heart in the middle of the woods. A floating, black heart spreading white energy. It looks almost serene, if it wasn't so ominous. The flavour text is also pretty creepy, describing how goblins are afraid of the place, and noting how the ground scuttles and the tree limbs twist in agony.
Maze of Ith just looks utterly bizarre, and it looks like some sort of giant... brain-intestine-tumour thing? It's also a maze, so it's transversible by people... who, I guess, won't be having a good time trying to squeeze themselves through tunnels shaped like intestines. Just what is this? Some gigantic organism that is titanic enough that people can walk inside it?
I really like Scarecrows as a horror monster, and it's quite inevitable that they are represented as an 'artifact creature', which tends to be golems and other artificial living things. Scarecrows would be upgraded into their own creature type later on, which is nice! This is a nicely ragged specimen, and the artwork's button eyes and fanged teeth matches the flavour text of "more malice... than should have been possible in something that had never known life". Love that the effect is anti-flying-creatures, i.e., anti-crows!
I play a fair bit of Commander, and in that multi-player format, Fellwar Stone is actually quite a useful little artifact to use to generate mana! Not much for me to actually say about a stone, but I've seen Fellwar Stone too much not to at least acknowledge it when it shows up among a pile of artifacts I'm indifferent about.
And that's it for The Dark! Tune in next time for probably my favourite among the older expansions, Fallen Empires!
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And now, for the rest of the expansion:
The Fallen is a zombie, and apparently one where the dark magic backfired on the caster. Dude seems pretty happy with his situation! Murk Dwellers are also zombies, which can be hard to tell with the very painting-like art style.
The Banshee is yet another fantasy term that often gets slapped into another variant of undead. Later retcons would make this into a 'Spirit'.
Bog Rats doesn't have the 'stacking' gimmick of the Plague Rats from Alpha, but I like that it can't be blocked by walls... rats can always get into your house!
I like the ominous artwork of the creepy skull in the miasma of the air in Season of the Witch.
I like the detail of the creepy idol in Curse Artifact. With Black being the colour of swamps, I find it funny that weaponized Marsh Gas is a spell that a warlock can cast in this universe.
Ghost Ship isn't actually a ship, it's actually a Spirit. It's the ghost of a ship, not an actual ship, silly! I guess this particular ship has enough of a soul to be a spirit. Electric Eel is another fish type that I'm happy to show up in the game. Drowned is a nice zombie card, it reminds me of that one scene from the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
Elves of Deep Shadow is one of the supposed gimmicks of 'the Dark', where White's ally colours (Green and Blue) have effects that support their enemies (Black and Red) instead. It's quaint nowadays where all colour combinations are commonly found in any given expansion, and it's not really a standout in this one either.
Niall Silvain is another card that really feels like it should be a legendary card, considering how it's an actual name and the flavour text does speak about how "this is his domain". Instead he's just a random ouphe.
Marsh Viper is... it's a nice-looking viper, and another card that uses the 'poison conuter' mechanic.
Oh, did you guys know Whippoorwill is an actual bird name? I didn't, not until I was doing reviews for MTG! It's cute. Note, by the way, that Whippoorwill, despite being a bird in flight, does not have Flying. This ended up causing an internal rule within WOTC where all cards that are shown flying in artwork must have Flying, or vice versa.
That is a rather cool wood-elemental guy in Gaea's Touch. It's got a skeletal body and overly-long fingers that taper into vines. Most fun is its face, made up of a fanged mouth, nostrils and a bunch of branches.
We now have the rest of the White-aligned cards! Pikemen, Squire and Knights of Thorn are varying kinds of knight and soldier-themed minions. I actually like the presence of Witch Hunter -- religious zealotry, villains who think they're doing right, feels quite 'White'.
Miracle Worker and Exorcist are more cleric-themed, and we also have Fasting with a cross on the window. MTG would obviously shy away from explicit real-world religious references, so I'm surprised to see this here.
Brainwash, surprisingly, does not actually brainwash and steal an enemy creature, but merely keeps it from attacking. 'Dust to Dust' forms a pair with 'Ashes to Ashes' on Black.
I really like Festival! It's a fun artwork with some fancy feathers and masks and jester caps... and the flavour text implies that this merry celebration isn't actually as harmless as it seems. Ooh, spooky! White, you can be cool if you try!
I assume it's the work of people like Witch Hunters that Martyr's Cry is happening? We also have Tivadar's Crusade, a card meant to counter Red's Goblin synergy... and the artwork is a pretty brutal crucified goblin being paraded around. Tivadar is mentioned in 'Knights of the Thorn' and 'Morale', but wouldn't get his card until much later.
We have two more goblins among the multi-coloured cards. We only have a few, huh?
Marsh Goblins and Scarwood Goblins are two more goblin cards to add to your Red decks, though they also look quite different. Scarwood looks like one of those World of Warcraft trolls, minus tusks. While Marsh Goblins (with its 'unwholesome customs') is just a naked short man.
Okay, Necropolis is an Artifact Creature? I guess it's a living city. Or, well, a living wall. A 0/1 living wall. Yeah, the flavour of lands versus artifacts versus artifact creatures is still not very consistent here.
I like the ambiguity of whatever the heck is happening with Diabolic Machine. That guy's being crushed between its gears, while the giant Transformers eyes of the machine looms in the background. Thanks to the power of alternate card arts, we know absolutely what this thing looks like from afar... but it becomes a bit less diabolic that way, yeah?
I really like the artwork in Living Armor. It almost looks like it's made up of skeleton or bug chitin or something... and the flavour text implies that it's painful to wear. Kinda looks bondage-y, admittedly.
I really like Amy Weber's art for Stone Calendar. It looks way more complex than a calendar!
Yeah, the flavour team still hasn't quite got what's an 'artifact' and what's a 'land'. I have a feeling that most if not all of Tower of Coircall, Standing Stones, Tormod's Crypt and Barl's Cage would've been flavoured as lands if they were created with the modern mindset.
Presumably, the Wand of Ith is made by the same wizard that made the Maze of Ith.
Oh hey, Skull of Orm! It's missing one eye... we know that the Evil Eye of Orms-By-Gore is a monster, as seen in Legends, so I guess this is the rest of Orm or Orms or however you spell his name!
We've got a couple of new Lands. Is it beating the dead horse for me to mention that only City of Shadows shows off the darkness that's supposed to be enveloping the land?
Sorrow's Path is showing a weird scene of a magician tormenting someone, while in the background a dragon and a bunch of knights are fighting. It's voted by some of MTG's head designers as single-handedly one of the worst-designed cards... it has a penalty for an effect that's basically useless!
Anyway, that's curtains for the Dark. I admit that I had a fair amount of fun talking about the monsters in this expansion than I thought I would, mostly because I remembered not being a fan of this expansion. See you guys next time for Fallen Empires!
