So the very first expansion of Magic: The Gathering is 'Arabian Nights', which is an expansion based around... well, a real-world piece of literature, the iconic 1001 Arabian Nights. This was before they had much of an idea on how big or how impactful expansions could be, and I believe the original idea was that it was even going to get changed from "Magic: The Gathering" to "Magic: Arabian Nights" and so on. Of course, in terms of marketing and tournament play and everything surrounding it, things didn't quite work out and Arabian Nights ended up being just another expansion... and one that was extremely experimental.
It's just super weird nowadays to talk about Arabian Nights, and it's kind of been shuffled away quietly by the designers. There had been some retcons that this expansion, in-universe, took place in the Plane of Rabiah, but that's about it -- Rabiah was excluded from the relatively recent Phyrexian multiversal invasion, the only 'main set' (i.e. not from a video game, comic or novel) to be excluded so. And personally, I've always found Arabian Nights to not be the most cohesive set in terms of flavour and there was a fair amount of unfortunate design choices that were perhaps fair for its day, but would be a huge no-no now. And as such, I will breeze through Arabian Nights quite rapidly.
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But the gist of things is that in the plane of Dominaria, two powerful Planeswalker brothers called Urza and Mishra (who were name-dropped all the way back in the base set) waged a war with the powerful magical artifacts they found in a conflict called the Brothers' War, lasting for years. Two particularly powerful artifacts, the Powerstone and the Weakstone, accidentally summoned the extraplanar horrors called the Phyrexians, leading to an escalation in battle until Urza unleashed a mighty blast from another artifact, the Golgothian Stylex, that essentially acted as a nuke, apparently wiping out Mishra and the Phyrexians. This also set up the events of the next set.
The actual events that took place would be fleshed out a lot in future expansions that acted as prequel and sequels to this story, but that bare-bones background would be the primary background for Antiquities.
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As a bit of a bookkeeping thing, the original forms of these reviews written circa 2019-2021 lumped a lot of the smaller expansions together in a single article. One of the main goals of this rewrite is also for me to 'unstick' all of the 'two expansions in one article'... but these two will remain stuck together because I don't have much to say about Arabian Nights in general before I start actually talking about real mythology and Antiquities is mostly artifacts, which doesn't give me much to talk about in these 'reviewing monsters' mentality.
[originally published as 'Arabian Nights & Antiquities' in June 2019; rewritten in October/November 2024]
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ARABIAN NIGHTS:
As usual, we'll start off with creatures, though I will not be as exhaustive as I was with Alpha. Aladdin and Ali Baba are two of the most famous characters from the 1001 Nights, and... they sure are represented here! In a nice bit of acknowledging the literary origins, Aladdin is even drawn as a Chinese man with Chinese garb, reflecting how it wasn't actually part of the 1001 Nights collection and was added by Chinese merchants.
In this set, the term 'Legendary Creature' (or just 'Legend' in older sets) haven't actually been invented, which creates a bit of an anomaly where Aladdin and Ali Baba are meant to represent actual characters instead of a type of creature like a Sengir Vampire or a Grey Ogre. This led to the hilarious implication that two Planeswalker fighting each other can summon four dudes, all of whom are named Aladdin, and all of them come from Rabiah... which the lore of MTG handwaved aside with noting that the plane of Rabiah was replicated a thousand times during one of the events, leading to 1001 identical copies of every single thing in Rabiah. Okay, at least they committed to that theme.
I like the flavour of Rukh Egg here, where it's a 0/3 creature that, once destroyed, the egg hatches and a 4/4 flying Rukh comes into play. This is another 'token creature' generator! 'Rukh' is the original Arabian spelling for what would be more commonly translated in English as 'Roc'. I like the artwork, too, of the slumbering, quasi-embryonic Rukh nestled within its egg.
Ydwen Efreet is one of the many genies/djinns in this set, because you need to have some genies in a 1001 Nights expansion. That's fair enough, though Efreet is still retained as a separate type to flavour more 'evil' djinns, which is true to their mythological basis. It's represented here by Ydwen Efreet of having a literal coin's flip chance of refusing to block, making it a bit of a liability.
All this inclusion of Efreets and Djinns and Marids are nice and good... until you realize that a lot of the descriptors were anagrams of the designers' friends that 'sounded Arabic enough'. Ydwen, for example, is an anagram of 'Wendy'. I don't have the energy to go through every single one, but something that probably sounded like a funny in-joke back in the day isn't quite so funny now.
Bird Maiden seems quite happy to be around! I like her very colourful set of wings and tail, which explode behind her as a hang-glider. Her outfit is also quite colourful, which I really appreciate. I believe the story she is referencing is specifically about Hassan of Basra, which has the protagonist fall in love with a shapeshifting bird that can take the form of a beautiful woman.
We're going to get a couple of 'just an animal' in these early sets, but I do like the artwork on Kird Ape here, particularly the beady, glowing eyes. It's also an early card that rewards playing a multi-coloured deck, and it makes somewhat sense -- it's an ape, so it's aggressive like Red creatures tend to be, but it lives in the jungle and gains bonuses from Forests.
Black gets a lot of the 'evil' monsters, with a couple extra ghouls and sorceresses after the break. These two are probably my favourite, with Juzam Djinn being a massive, horned green-skinned demon holding a little human with his fingers. 'Juzam' is an actual attempt at using Arabic terms here, with juzaam being a term for leprosy... even though the wiki and other official sources claim it's 'evil'. Not quite, but at least it was an effort.
I like the artwork for Junun Efreet, which looks pretty stylied with his weird mutant-horse face, and his hair and fists being lit on fire. Reminds you of a JoJo Stand in a way, yes? The Arabic word junuun means 'madness'. Both the Junun Efreet and Juzam Djinn are examples of 'price of power' flavouring, with the Djinn dealing damage to the summoner every turn, while the Efreet demands a price just to maintain it on the field.
Guardian Beasts is a pretty cool artwork, with two glowing eyes of a massive, four-armed muscular creature lurking in the shadows with skeletons scattered all around his feet. The creature type update would make him a 'Beast', which is kind of a wastepaper basket for any vaguely-animalistic creature that doesn't fit into any other classification. The flavour of his effect is a being that guards all of your artifacts from being stolen or destroyed by evil thieves.
We've got a pretty cool art with Ernham Djinn, though I'm not sure which of the two dudes here are the real Ernham Djinn. Is it the guy in the foreground swinging on vines, or the guy in the background with a tornado around him? It's the strongest creature in the entire expansion (and even has a weakness! It buffs your opponent's creatures!), which speaks to the relatively low power level in this set. Ernham, by the way, is an anagram of Herman. Yeah.
Ah, the Singing Tree! The artwork is a bit peaceful and soft that it takes a while yo realize that one of the trees has the profile of a singing face on the trunk. This is taken from the 1001 Nights story of the Persian King Kosrouschah, although in that story it's the leaves of the Singing Tree that has mouths. This Plant creature is able to reduce an attacking creature's power to zero, presumably because it becomes so transfixed by the Singing Tree that it forgets to attack.
Nafs Asp is a snake coiled around a vase. Again, a pretty simple animal that fits the theme of the set. I like the depiction of poison here, where the turn after the Nafs Asp bites your opponent, they have to suffer an extra damage from the poison unless they pay some mana to purge the effects.
Nafs Asp is a snake coiled around a vase. Again, a pretty simple animal that fits the theme of the set. I like the depiction of poison here, where the turn after the Nafs Asp bites your opponent, they have to suffer an extra damage from the poison unless they pay some mana to purge the effects.
Being the 'force of nature' colour, Green gets a couple of spells representing the harshness of deserts, like Sandstorm here and both Desert Twister and Cyclone below.
I really like the card art for Metamorphosis here, which just looks painful as the man is transformed into a snake... or is it the other way around? It's not a one-to-one transformation, too, as there seems to be a third eye-socket with a red orb within that's neither man nor serpent. It just looks so wretched as the human's flesh is stretched out into tendrils, and the two beings' tongues are intertwined. The flavour is similar to some Black spells, but I guess if it's transforming instead of doing a ritualistic sacrifice to Griselbrand the Arch-Devil, it's totally about life and nature.
I was once a man! A MAN!
More animals that fit with the whole desert theme, and I suppose these are 'mounted' animals, which is why they're associated with White instead of green? Camel is a pretty simple creature, and while itself is a weak creature, is theoretically able to Band with other creatures to make them stronger and immune to Desert damage. Not... not very useful.
And War Elephant has Trample and Banding. Which also isn't super useful when you're a mere 2/2. I like the consistency that the elephant is smaller than a Mammoth from the base set!
Shahrazad is the alternate spelling of Scheherazade , main character of the 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights. The main story of the 1001 Nights is that Shahrazad tells a thousand and one stories to the king she is married to in order to delay an execution, and at the end of so much time spent with the king, he has fallen in love with her. Shahrazad is a sorcery that is extremely high on Magic's ban-list not because she's a powerful card, but because her effect is just so needlessly convoluted and time-consuming.
To wit, upon casting Shahrazad, the two players leave the 'main' MTG game they are playing, and then play a MTG sub-game with their hands as their decks and the loser having his/her life total cut in half. Gimmicky, and in larger formats with multiple players and much more things to track of, a logistical nightmare.
We're going to blue now with Dandân, the largest fish in the sea that is able to swallow entire ships and fish swarms in a single gulp. I really love the artwork here, which focuses more on the ship that contrast the murky sea... but the Dandân is lurking beneath, ready to chomp down on the boats. Love that it's just a big fish instead of like, a leviathan or something. And yet it's got a rather pathetic 4/1 statline, and the debilitating Islandhome ability. Great flavour, but all around too restrictive of a card.
"Serendib" is the old name for Sri Lanka. The more you know! They're represented in two creatures in Blue, both of which demand a bit of a price from the user. The Serendib Djinn has a pretty typical 'modernized by Disney' genie appearance, right down to the bracers and facial hair. I really like his lightning-bolt horns that he's got.
The Serendib Efreet is probably one of the more interesting djinni/efreeti, with his body half-manifested from the lamp he is being summoned out of. It's like the magic is half-3D-printing his body, which is an interesting way to handle this kind of visual effect... and the Efreet himself is a very atypical design as well! I love it. I love the left hand ending in a crooked little sword, and how the lower half of his face splits into two mouths.
I mean, you've got to have a flying carpet in an Arabian Nights inspired set, right? There is an actual Flying Carpet artifact, but we've got Flying Men! Or well, just one man, based on the art and the 1/1 statline. The flavour text even actually quotes the actual 1001 Nights story -- which, by the way, has nothing to do with Aladdin.
Yeah, a Giant Tortoise! Interestingly, this one isn't an 'islandwalk' or 'islandhome' creature, but a defensive creature that has more toughness than usual. Presumably this represents its shell somehow. It's neat. I like tortoise.
The Island Fish Jasconius is named after Jasconius, a legend taken from Irish myth of the Legend of Saint Brenda. There is a giant island fish in the Arabian Nights stories -- specifically in Sinbad's first voyage -- but they randomly decided to conflate it with another giant fish legend. Eh? I still really like the artwork despite the randomness of the two myths being fused together, particularly the fish-eyes and mouth poking out from the left side of the island while the plants and foliage cover its body.
What a terrible effect, though. The upkeep-to-untap and islandhome are bad enough, but the fact that it's an island fish that has nothing to do with the Islands that Blue uses to generate Mana? What the heck, game designers?
We've got a bunch of artifacts, albeit not as much as Antiquities will have. Some of them are items from the 1001 Nights stories, like a flying carpet or Aladdin's lamp. One of the artifacts (and it isn't a creature) is Ebony Horse, which is a magical artificial horse that's able to move at inhuman speeds created by a Persian magician to help a prince elope. The effect here basically allows the Ebony Horse to help one of your attacking creatures 'elope' and escape combat. That's neat.
City in a Bottle is a nod to what probably inspired this expansion -- DC/Vertigo comics' The Sandman, issue #50, which features a similar concept within a dreamlike metaphysical plane where all stories exist. Mechanically, it's an 'expansion hoser' that forces all Arabian Nights cards to be discarded from play as they are sealed within a bottle. It's... it's something that's cute when there's only a couple of expansions to keep track of, but can you imagine this in modern magic, where so many cards have been reprinted in various different forms?
Library of Alexandria! It's a real location, and we also have references to Baghdad, Iraq, in another card. This is also an insanely powerful card that is banned is pretty much all formats, being able to add a mana or draw a card. Thanks to some policies that Wizards of the Coast has about reprinting certain cards, some early-expansion cards have never been reprinted... and Library of Alexandria is one of those. Being a card that can be fitted into almost any deck, this is one of those cards that can reach the thousands of dollars in price!
Anyway, that's it for Arabian Nights, with some of my commentary about the rest of the expansion after the break. It's a bit of a smaller expansion, but not that small.
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ANTIQUITIES:
And now we move into Antiquities, the second expansion for MTG and the start of the entire storyline of MTG involving the brothers Urza and Mishra, as well as the Phyrexian Invasion saga. The game designers at this point hasn't really mastered the art of balancing storytelling and the set itself, but it's also very early in the franchise's history and in retrospect the original version of this article was rather unfair to them.
Also, I would like to reiterate that the main body of the article will mostly contain cards that I find interesting to talk with. I think my original version of the Antiquities article was rather hard to read because I was trying too much to have equal representation from each colour, which led to a lot of cards that I really didn't have much to say about!
There isn't really a whole lot of story that goes on that isn't about main characters Urza and Mishra, but we still get a bunch of capital-letter descriptors, like Argivian Archaeologist. The kingdom of Argive is the homeland of the two artificers, and I do find the idea of archaeologists being involved in an expansion all about ancient artifacts being recovered to be fitting! ...even if this guy looks like he should be an extra in Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones instead of a more middle-ages fantasy setting.
That's the only White card we'll talk about here, since Antiquities doesn't actually have that many representations of colours, and most of its card pool are neutral artifacts.
Green's got a pretty cool flavour in representing a "nature rejects the artificial" theme, with Argothian Pixies, from Argoth Forest, being a creature that's more powerful in fighting against Artifact creatures. The r-word usage in flavour text aside, it's nice to have more faeries hanging around, and you can just imagine these little guys sneaking and breaking the magical artifacts used by the mages, yeah?
Gaea's Avenger here getting 'angrier' and stronger the more artifacts your opponents control. The flavour text hints that the land spirit/goddess Gaea was quite angry that the land of Argoth was utterly destroyed. Later errata would identify this guy as a Treefolk, and I like that the white-ish hard bark serves as 'armour' and weapons for the tree guy. His face also reminds me a bit of like a lizard or something.
Whereas Green is angry about artifacts, Blue wants to study artifacts and have a lot of ways of drwaing or reconstructing artifacts. Sage of Lat-Nam here has a comically long beard, which I found to be quite fun! Other flavour text in cards I put after the break describe a bit about the College of Lat-Nam, one of the many magical colleges that'll crop up in MTG lore. Of course, they do it FOR SCIENCE! Or FOR KNOWLEDGE, I suppose, considering the game's called Magic, not Science.
Transmute Artifact doesn't have a cool flavour text, but I really do like the artwork and the usage of colours here. The idea here is you're melting down (or whatever action is equivalent for a magical sphere) an artifact and reforming it into a brand-new one, paying the 'difference in power' with mana.
Reconstruction shows a skeleton in armour being put together, representing the effect of 'bringing an artifact from the graveyard back'. On closer inspection, you can see that the skeleton isn't even a real skeleton, but likely to be an artifact creature of some sort with all the magical runes and/or mechanical circuitry on the skull. Love the visual of magical threads sewing plates of the skull together.
Sadly, they don't really have much in lieu of flavour text, but the Goblin Artisans have one of the most hilariously charming artwork! They do wear anachronistic outfit with hardhats and clocks and some typical factory paraphernalia, which modern MTG is a lot better at. Love this artwork! The flavour for Red is, of course, destroying Artifacts. But not out of any kind of desire to protect nature, but just to blow them the heck up.
Oh, hey, it's the Atog! Like most fantasy settings, MTG would create a bunch of original creatures, and the Atog is the first, being this grinning humanoid figure with veins all over its blue skin, with huge glowing orange eyes, and a gigantic grin. While this artwork just shows us the profile shot, subsequent artwork and expansions would establish Atogs as being the setting's equivalents to gremlins or something. But Atogs actively destroy artifacts and get stronger after 'eating' them, reflected nicely in its card effect.
Originally, 'Atog' was just an anagram of 'goat', because goats are famous for being able to eat anything.
I really like the name Artifact Blast, and the card art of what appears to be some kind of rune-covered wall or a vase or something being shattered into a hundred pieces... and each other piece has an eyeball on it? Interesting effect to match its flavour (it can't destroy artifacts that already exist) even if countering an artifact as it's being cast is rather highly specific, at least in modern days .
Black doesn't quite destroy artifacts like Red or Green do, but does more wackier stuff like Artifact Possession, where this enchantment just 'corrupts' an artifact and deals damage to its owner any time it's used. And the flavour is done by this little purple... imp-demon thing. I do like the design here, he's got a wormy, snakey lower body that coils around the magical sword, and a face with solid white eyes, no mouth and a lot of horns.
Big lore time! The biggest enemies, and the unambiguous 'Big Bad' of the Magic: The Gathering storyline, are the Phyrexians. I am surprised and pleased to realize that they were mentioned this early on! Phyrexia is an extradimensional plane filled with horrorifying monstrosities, and while the interpretation would vary over different art teams, they always have some degree of body horror and varying levels of grafting or being turned into cyborgs. All this artifact fighting between Urza and Mishra end up attracting the horrors of Phyrexia, opening this Gate to Phyrexia. We see walls made up of... flesh? Wires and/or tentacles come in from the foreground and crevasses all over. It's a bit of a more generic hellscape, I guess, since a lot of the identity of Phyrexia hasn't been solidified just yet, but it's a nice preview!
We'll start off with the comical monster first, with Phyrexian Gremlins. Who are gremlins! Which I suppose make sense as monsters that would destroy artifacts. Love Amy Weber's artwork here, where it isn't immediately clear where the gremlins are and it just briefly looks like a pile of shields and scrap pillars until you see the figures peeking in and out of what I assume is a disassembled version of the Armaggedon Clock below.
Notable that Wizards was very resistant at adding 'Phyrexian' as a creature type, only finally relenting and adding it as late as 2022, almost 30 years since the race's introduction. Hell, the original version of this article (which bitched a bit about the ambiguity of what counts as a Phyrexian) even predates that change!
We have two cards here referencing the original 'big bad' of Phyrexia, Yawgmoth, who is treated as this immense, untouchable demon-overlord of this plane of unlife.
And the first one, the Priest of Yawgmoth, does something that's going to be infamously replicated by some of the most game-breaking Yawgmoth-related cards, which is cheating out chunks of mana by sacrificing something. Look at the design of this guy, though! He looks like he's based on the 'intelligent artificial skeleton robot' Terminator mixed with the body horror of something like Hellraiser. You can see the very human eyes in the sunken skull -- which itself has a bunch of extra metallic parts. And those jointed fingers, and the strange red pipe (does it contain blood or something else?) coming from his wrist to his palm... Very cool, very creepy. Adding to the creep factor that the Priest of Yawgmoth is a "Phyrexian Human Cleric", meaning that this was once human, who ended up being transformed and turned into a robot thing by the Phyrexians.
The Yawgmoth Demon is more straightforward, being a Phyrexian Demon... which means that it is both a demon and a Phyrexian. He's a cyborg demon! He is a bit of a more comical-looking design, especially compared to how badass the 2000s comic-book archenemy vibe of his Priest buddy. Most of his body is pretty all right, being a gangly skeleton, and those tentacle-hair might even be kind of threatening, but the mouthless face just doesn't work. The head looks like a weird tube with eyes, and I'm not sure if that's a bill, or his neck, or his beard, or a long faceplate... he looks weird, but perhaps not as threatening as a demon from the dark corrupt realm of Phyrexia should've been.
And we're going to go into the artifacts, which... again, I try my best to find something to say about the ones I find interesting, but I'm not gonna force myself to. Golgothian Sylex (named after the Biblical Golgotha) is a plot-relevant item that Urza utilized and caused the Antiquities War to end, causing the gateway to Phyrexia to be sealed and Mishra to seemingly be killed... and leading to the events of the next couple of expansions. Its effect is quite damning, if ultimately not something that's ever going to be printed ever again, targeting and exiling all the cards that come from this expansion.
I do like the Armageddon Clock, mostly for its name, but I also like the artwork of a jukebox-looking item with a huge clock, skeletons within it, and two angel wings that are easy to miss as they blend into the map behind it. (It's also seemingly the artifact that was ravaged to nothingness by the Phyrexian Goblins above). Its effect is nowhere as useful as its name implies, however, being a measly counter-based damage.
A bit too important for me to leave to the end, the Mightstone and Weakstone are two of the artifacts found by Urza and Mishra in the Caves of Koilos (that is a card I use a lot in actual magic) and they fought over these for a good chunk of the conflict. Not much to say, Mightstone is just a boring clenched fist. Weakstone is cute in that presumably it's causing this bizarre skinny crocodile-dog to get reduced to a weaker state.
Ashnod is Mishra's apprentice, and a bit of a villain if Ashnod's Transmogrant is anything to go by. The effect turns a regular creature into an Artifact Creature, which in this case involves being locked in a huge jar filled with green sci-fi fluid, only receiving nourishnment from that flask of red fluid that's stuck straight into its mouth. Presumably this person used to be a human but is now an eyeless humanoid figure with green skin. Outside of game mechanics, why would someone want to be an artifact creature? I guess for more power, to become a Clay Golem or something?
Love that this very disturbing contraption is held together with the power of one padlock.
Among the many, many magical staves and amulets and swords in this set, one of the artifacts is a MOTHERFUCKING ROCKET LAUNCHER which I just find to be utterly hilarious! Look at that goblin guy. He's so happy! I like that it actually looks like something that feels like it belongs in a setting like this, where artifacts are quasi-magical technology and they're not just one-to-one replications of a modern-day rocket launcher.
I really do like robots, and while MTG would perhaps go a bit too far with the robots later on, in an artifact-themed set I really do like them. Clockwork Avian looks less like an 'avian', and more like a monstrous pterosaur. Really like the elongated head and the kite-like wings. It follows the gimmick of Clockwork Beast from Alpha, where it slowly 'falls apart' as it attacks and defends, but the caster can spend mana to repair it.
Millstone is the origin of the trading card game "milling", which is basically to moving cards out of your opponent's deck into somewhere less useful (typically the graveyard), and denying them resources that they could use. Just like Demonic Tutor, looking back at the very original card, it's a bit out of place for its effect, yeah?
The flavour text does explain how it works, though. Since the deck is a representation of the spells in a wizard's mind, the sound of the Millstone's grinding causes people to literally go insane. Very creepy! This artwork from MTG 2014 is a particularly badass one showing how this effect works in a more stylized manner, and I love it.
It really is a shame that Tetravus has a literal wall of text for its frankly uninteresting counter-based effect. But what is it? It's some kind of triple-coloured flying... robot... snake manta-ray thing? It's got electricity radiating out of it, and it's got two sets of wings or flippers. And what looks like a mouth made up of strange, vaguely Aztec-Mayan lines? Are those eyes above that, holy crap, I just noticed it. It's so strange, and I'm kind of sad that there's absolutely nothing in its name or its nonexistent flavour text to tell me what a Tetravus is.
Another strange artifact creature is the Onulet, which looks like... a long desk with a face on its sides that's... drinking? Like a dog or something? It's either a super-long, strangely-proportioned centipede cow or a sentient dining table, and I'm not sure which makes more sense for this setting. The flavour text says that Onulets can be cannibalized for magical essences (i.e. life points) after they get destroyed, which also does not explain what this weird thing is...
...that is, until very recently in 2022, where Tocasia's Onulet shows that the original intent was a giant bull-creature. Okay!
Okay, Triskelion, what are you? He's a big giant robot with giant googly eyes and a big underbite. He's also got three arms, two of which are kind of jutting out from the same side. Apparently despite being functionally a 4/4 that can shoot out its tokens for damage, it's a menace in the battlefields. Okay, sure. I just find it so goofy.
Ornithopter is a term used for any device that flies by flapping its wings. The term faded into obscurity once we moved on to airplanes, but Dune made it popular again in sci-fi. Some of the other card art below (like Urza's Avenger) also take the form of what looks like drafts or design blueprints made by Urza (or Mishra), and he Ornithopter design here looks like something that Da Vinci or someone would make. "Thopters" would later on be a recurring artifact creature type within the various realms of Magic.
And on to the rest of the two expansions, below the break!
Arabian Nights cards:
We've got Ali from Cairo, who's just some dude... but he's also one of the first few cards to be banned!
The Magnetic Mountain is also taken from one of the stories in 1001 Nights, which describes a magnetic mountain pulling iron from nearby ships, which explains why some ships in the region did not use metal in their construction.
El-Hajjaj, or Al-Hajjaj, is a real-world tyrant who was featured in some of the 1001 Nights. I really like Sorceress Queen's very extra pose as she floats above her fanged, stout ogre minions.
Stone-Throwing Devils is an unfortunate bit where the term was taken directly from the 1001 Nights books, but it's actually a slur towards Palestinian protesters, and the card has been since been part of a small group of cards that were removed from MTG's official website due to offensive content.
Oubliette: [ou·bli·ette] noun. A secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling. Who says fantasy games aren't educational?
We've also got a bunch of additional Green creatures that we've already seen before -- a wolf, an ogre, and a fancy-looking Efreet. I like the effect on Ghazban Ogre, where it's such a treacherous creature that it hops to whoever is the stronger player right now.
We've got two more weather effects, and Drop of Honey is the catalyst of one of the stories in 1001 Nights.
We've got two more 'named' characters in King Suleiman and Abu Jafar... but whereas King Suleiman has a then-appropriate 'summon King', Abu Jafar is 'summon Leper'? Why the disrespect to Abu Jafar, game designers? Nothing in the original 1001 Nights had anything to imply that Abu Jafar is a leper, let alone one that's so devastatingly poisonous to people around him.
Special mention, I guess, goes to Army of Allah and especially Jihad, neither of which would see anywhere close to being printed nowadays for obvious reasons.
Sindbad is one of the more iconic characters from the 1001 Nights, but I really ran out of things to say without actually telling you the stories themselves. The artwork here is depicting one of his stories when he hung on to a Rukh, though! The Old Man of the Sea is one of the antagonists faced by Sinbad, a djinn that latches on to Sinbad's back and enslaves him.
We've got two more weather effects, and Drop of Honey is the catalyst of one of the stories in 1001 Nights.
We've got two more 'named' characters in King Suleiman and Abu Jafar... but whereas King Suleiman has a then-appropriate 'summon King', Abu Jafar is 'summon Leper'? Why the disrespect to Abu Jafar, game designers? Nothing in the original 1001 Nights had anything to imply that Abu Jafar is a leper, let alone one that's so devastatingly poisonous to people around him.
Special mention, I guess, goes to Army of Allah and especially Jihad, neither of which would see anywhere close to being printed nowadays for obvious reasons.
Sindbad is one of the more iconic characters from the 1001 Nights, but I really ran out of things to say without actually telling you the stories themselves. The artwork here is depicting one of his stories when he hung on to a Rukh, though! The Old Man of the Sea is one of the antagonists faced by Sinbad, a djinn that latches on to Sinbad's back and enslaves him.
Fishliver Oil! In the 1001 Nights, the oil from the liver of the Dandan fish allows people to breathe underwater. Here, it gives the Islandwalk ability, which... not the most useful effect, but the closest we can get to waterbreathing, I suppose!
We are in artifacts now. Aladdin's Lamp, Aladdin's Ring and Flying Carpet are pretty famous thanks to Aladdin becoming mainstream, though I guess the Ring is a bit more unfamiliar to people that only watch the Disney movie. In the source material, Aladdin had two djinns, a transporting djinn from a ring and a wish-granting one from the lamp.
The Ring of Ma'ruf is another ring in the 1001 Nights in the story of a protagonist who found a ring with a djinn sealed within. It's one of the few -- and very strange -- cards that allows you to summon cards from outside the game, something that modern Magic treats as a bit of a no-no. Imagine someone with thousands or millions of cards, compared to someone who only has a couple of decks! Later rulings for these cards, I think, limits 'outside the game' to be your sideboard, which you designate before the game starts.
We do have a couple more artifact creatures, the Brass Man and the Dancing Scimitar. The eyes on the Brass Man is kind of disturbing! Also, Pyramids is an artifact, not a land? Huh.
And we get a bunch of new Land cards. The Bazaar of Baghdad is another infamously powerful -- if strange -- land card. A bunch of the special land cards here don't always add mana, which is going to be an oddity phased out very quickly. I like the flavour, which allows you to draw 2 cards and discard 3 cards, symbolizing the idea of haggling over prices and value in a market. I believe it's one of the more powerful cards to come from this expansion!
Elephant Graveyard has such a super-specific effect, regenerating an elephant or mammoth! Desert will actually be retconned to be a land sub-type in Amonkhet, making a lot of the desert-like lands here gain the Desert sub-type retroactively.
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Antiquities Cards:
White doesn't really bring much for me to talk about in Antiquities. We get another Circle of Protection and Ward for Artifacts, which is the huge theme of this set.
I do find it cute that some of the effects really do look like they're kind of based off of sci-fi terms, like Damping Field and Reverse Polarity. Really like the more comedic vibe to Reverse Polarity as well!
The artwork for Argothian Treefolk is a bit of a weird pose, but the flavour text describing them as giving out 'haunting cries' make a bit more sense.
It's an Enchantment, but I do really like that giant weird leech-centipede-snake-wyrm creature on Powerleech's art. It is always weird when the flavour text identifies the 'development of resistance' by the forest, but it's counted as an enchantment? Eh. Titania's Song gives us a representation of the fairy goddess Titania, who won't show up as a proper card (like most 'big lore' characters) until much later. Crumble has a really good flavour text, and another one that fits very well into the 'Green rejects the Artifacts' thing.
A bunch of "Blue is experimenting on things!" cards, and a little bit of cheeky wink-wink because Drafna's Restoration and Hurkyl's Recall note that there's apparently a fair bit of sexism going on in the College of Lat-Nam, with at least one spell that Drafna made being actually made by his wife.
Hee hee, look at that dumb-ass looking Orc Mechanic. He just looks so pleased that he's about to catapult a presumably explosive bomb at the enemy! The card effect implies that he's launching your precious artifacts and detonating them at the enemy for damage. Shatterstorm is a very cool name for a spell.
Xenic Poltergeist is a poltergeist, which I am very sad is retconned into 'spirit' instead of them making it its own thing. I like the two wizards trying to figure out the clearly mischievous little bugger who's left a lot of paint stains on the walls and is launching a book at Not-Merlin, while his friend hides under the table with fingers in his ears.
Urza's Mine, Urza's Tower and Urza's Power Plant all empower each other the more of them you have on the field, and this would later lead to 'Land - Urza's' being templated for these three cards.
This, by the way, is what I meant when I talked in Arabian Nights about how MTG would use the named Land cards to showcase the setting of the storyline. I also like how different the aesthetics of the two brothers are displayed with how different their respective factories are.
Absolutely love the descriptive text on Strip Mine: "unlike previous conflicts, the war between Urza and Mishra made Dominia itself a casualty of war."
Some weaponry here. I like how Tawnos's Weaponry actually talks about the cost-effectiveness of these powerful sorcerous artifacts.
Su-Chi is meant to be a combination of the Chinese and Taiwanese (I guess they mean Hokkien?) pronunciations of 'four', which... a nice effort of trying to get the 'four is death' trope, but the pronunciation is kind of very far from the mark. Very cool artwork, though, with the snake-maw seemingly opening all the way down the snake's body, and an exposed brain with a crown of unraveled 'snake skin' around it.
I do like Primal Clay's flavour, in that it's so versatile that it can be literally moulded into a variety of different creatures with different options. Very nice!
Ashnod's Altar is just a mad scientist's operating table. Though considering what Ashnod is doing in other cards, I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised .
Urza's Chalice continues the trend of Urza's mundane accessories being turned into powerful artifacts with game-altering effects.
Urza's apprentice Tawnos also has random items of his turned into artifacts, with his asymmetrical Candelabra of Tawnos being the subject here.
Wall of Spears is out obligatory wall. I like the skeleton that's lashed onto the wall, presumably killed when the wall was summoned.
Mishra's War Machine is like a giant carriage with a dome, but you can see little people running around inside it. Is this also meant to be a blueprint in-universe? It looks a bit too serene, too peaceful to be a war machine. I imagine something more akin to the Juggernaut from Alpha or something!
Apparently a Battering Ram counts as one of the many magical artifacts in this set. It's not even, like, a golem or a robot or a magical battering ram. It's just a bunch of people carrying a big block'a wood. At least you can make a case about Grapeshot Catapult having some magical properties that allowed that dead-eyed goblin to catch a purple bat.
I am also really not sure why Shapeshifter is an artifact creature, especially since we've had clones and doppelgangers before.
Yotian Soldier and Colossus of Sardia are what I associate more with the term 'artifact creature', being robotic, artificial golems. I like the bug-face of the Yotian Soldier. Is he holding a piece of mirror? The Colossus has some pretty creepy, badass flavour text. Dragon Engine! Dragon Engine is also really neat-looking.
I'd like to close this with these two cards, The Rack and Cursed Rack, which are torturing this poor, poor dummy. The dummy would become a semi-recurring character in some artwork, but man, he just doesn't have a good day, huh? The Rack rips him apart crotch-first, and whatever the Cursed Rack does, it explodes him so badly that his expression turns into a frown. No! Poor dummy!
...And that's it for Antiquities! See you guys in the next one!
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