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 Unlimited. 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.
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, leading to me talking a lot about cards I don't actually have much to say about.
Let's start with White, this time around, and we'll go off with Argivian Archaeologist and Argivian Blacksmith. Argive, as MTG Wiki tells me, is one of the three kingdoms of Terisiare on Dominaria, and homeland to the two brothers Urza and Mishra (neither of whom actually would be represented in cards for a long time). Archaeologists are a pretty neat fit, lore-wise, into an expansion all about ancient artifacts, even if the Argivian Archaeologist does bizarrely wear what seems to be a set of modern-day clothing.
I really like the flavour text for these, which help to build up a society that's interested in searching remnants of an older era, and reassembling the strange, mechanical creatures in that land. Actually, each of the colours have their own flavour on how they relate to artifacts, and White's is excavation, it seems. We'll go through the different colours and the lands, before going to the artifacts themselves.
I just really like just how utterly baffled Skull-Helmet Johnny in the background looks in the artwork for Reverse Polarity. Which is doubly hilarious for the utterly absurd and very sci-fi sounding name.
Argothian Treefolk and Argothian Pixies here represents, Argoth, apparently a large, lush island that's probably the setting of a whole lot of Green cards in this set. As the flavour of these two cards notes, it's been devastated by the artificer war, and the magical creatures in the forest have adapted to basically counter said magical artifacts.
The Pixies are kinda boring, but I do like the bizarre look of the Argothian Treefolk. While Ironroot Treefolk from the first M:TG set is just a tree with a face, I do like how the Argothian Treefolk look far more humanoid, like someone carved humanoid statues out of a large tree.
Gaea's Avenger is, a creature in the same vein as... Gaea's... Liege? From unlimited. The one where the artwork is a bearded tree-dude's face, in any case. I don't remember every single card name, sorry! Gaea's Avenger is a far more conventionally cool version, and it's far more suitable since it's born out of mother nature's wrath against these damn users of artifacts. I do like the somewhat lizard-like face it has made entirely out of branches, the hair made out of leaves, and the fact that it somehow has fashioned crude armour out of... rocks? Different coloured-bark?
Most of Green's destructive effects have the general feel of being consumed by nature and returning back to dust and ashes, but Crumble is actually pretty cool, representing someone repenting their "faith" on unliving devices, and is thus granted new life (healed, in gameplay terms) while losing one of the artifacts they control. It's actually pretty obvious that the nature-loving Green would be the most opposed to the unnaturally enchanted artifacts.
Meanwhile, while Green is happy to destroy them, Blue is way too busy trying to unravel the secrets on how the world works. We don't actually have a lot of coloured-mana cards in this set, but cards like Transmute Artifact do focus more on flavour with what little space they have. Pretty cool artwork in this case.
Holy shit, Sage of Lat-Nam, I know you're probably busy trying to figure out the science and magic behind all of these magical artifacts, but jeez, that is a long-ass beard. That has got to get in the way of things. Like walking. Or going to the loo.
Reconstruction shows off what the Sages of Lat-Nam are up to, and while it's actually just repairing a broken artifact, the visceral way that this skeletal robot humanoid is put together, with a skeleton-like body to boot, is a pretty dang cool piece of artwork. I really do like the flavour of Blue in this set, too, where it starts to explore Blue's role as the one that's most curious colour, trying to unravel the secrets of magic FOR SCIENCE.
"Artifact Blast achieved widespread fame", apparently, as the first line of defense against Urza and Mishra... until, of course, things that the two main characters create are, unsurprisingly, immune to the power of Artifact Blast. It's a pretty hilarious name regardless, and I do love the fact that this tablet for whatever reason has like eyes all over the pieces. Meanwhile, I just really love the name Shatterstorm, even if smashing a golden wineglass is nowhere as impressive as ARTIFACT BLAST.
Sadly, they don't really have much in lieu of flavour text, but the Goblin Artisans have one of the most hilariously charming artwork, even if the Goblins apparently shop at the same modern-clothes store that Argivian Archaeologist shops in, what with those hard-hats and whatnot. This honestly is the start of goblins turning into M:TG's resident funny, wacky sources of comedic humour, something I'm pretty A-Okay with.
What is an Atog? It's one of Magic's first original creature types instead of just adapting something from a myth, and Atogs will show up a bunch of times in subsequent sets. The original depiction of the Atog is utterly bizarre, though, just showing a creature from the neck up, with a somewhat stone-like consistency to his skin with veins running through it. It's got a pretty neat-looking pair of golden alien-esque peepers, and that insanely wide, wide grin, which just looks hilarious as all hell. The Atog, it seems, is a creature that is happy to chomp on artifacts and shit.
Black doesn't care for crafting their artifacts like Red, or excavating them like White, or studying them like Blue... they just straight up steal the powers of the artifacts, as in Artifact Possession here, where they apparently employ "Thrax-o-demons" to possess magical swords and shit. I do like this wacky-looking Thraxodemon, this worm-man with lots of horns and a bug-like face.
Xenic Poltergeist is a poltergeist, which I am pretty glad is its own race. And it's neither Merlin or Sorting Hat dude hiding under the table, it's the ghost throwing that book at him. "Oh no! A book thrown at me! As a magician with the power to bend reality to my whims, that is my one, sole weakness!" Sod off, pussy wizard.
Gate to Phyrexia? Shit, I didn't realize Phyrexia showed up so early in M:TG! Huh. The Plane of Phyrexia (a.k.a. Machine Hell... no, really) is basically the over-arching Big Bad of the entire series, being this dimension of mechanical, unnatural life, which, in retrospect, is probably very fitting that it's one of the antagonists introduced in an expansion all about artifacts. Anyway, the less-good brother, Mishra (honestly, neither Urza nor Mishra really end up coming off as good people from what I get from the set), would later tap into the powers of Phyrexia in a bid to destroy his brother.
Priest of Yawgmoth is a reference to the main bad guy of M:TG, Yawgmoth, the 'god' of Phyrexia. We'll talk about him more when he becomes more relevant, but Priest of Yawgmoth does show off a pretty awesome-looking man created entirely out of gold metal plates, as sort of a 'preview', I guess, of what Phyrexia looks like. I absolutely love the bizarre skull-but-not-quite-a-skull face he has, the segmented robot fingers as well as the random red pipe running from his wrist to the palm of his hand.
Yawgmoth Demon looks a bit more comical than scary, I feel, just being mostly a stylized skeleton... until you reach his head, which has this utterly bizarre skull-face with a long chin and worm-like tendril hair.
And apparently... you just have Phyrexian Gremlins. And I absolutely love the little bug-eyed buggers are just running around and presumably destroying artifacts in their wake. They're probably Phyrexia's resident pests, aren't they? I just adore the angry-looking one with those adorable fangs at the center of the art, above the huge blue wheel-gear thing. Gremlins and their ability to fuck up machinery is actually a very neat inclusion in this block!
We're going to rush through the artifacts, and talk about some of the ones I find the most interesting. The Golgothian Sylex, presumably named after the Biblical Golgotha, might look pretty boring. It's a fucking bowl! But it's actually the most powerful artifact in this set, and one that ended the Brothers' War. Used by Urza in desperation the final battle of the war, the Golgothian Sylex blew up all the involved armies, the island of Argoth, and destroyed most of Dominaria's major civilizations, causing the Ice Age. It's flavour text, hinting at the mysteriously ancient predecessors to humanity in Dominaria, is actually subtly chilling, too.
Its effect is to just remove every single card from this particular conflict -- i.e. the Antiquities expansion. Which is just kinda fucking crazy!
The two artifacts that the brothers Urza and Mishra found. Urza found the Mightstone, and would later use it to bolster his own armies during the war, while Mishra found the far-less-impressively-named Weakstone, which he would use to weaken Urza's armies. Oh, and in the process of this conflict, they unleashed the evil forces of Phyrexia into the world, so good job there, guys. I would've definitely just lumped these two with the other "cool, but I don't have anything to say about them" cards at the end.
Actually, I do have something to say about the Weakstone, in that... what the fuck is that thing? That weird... emancipated dog-crocodile thing without ears? Is that what the Weakstone does to you? Jeez, no wonder Mishra became evil.
Trust me, there are a lot of these "just a magical artifact" cards, and I'm just going to talk about those that I really find interesting. And I do like the Armageddon Clock, mostly for its name, but also for how it functions. I don't always read the cards, preferring to enjoy their flavour as opposed to their mechanics, but the way Armageddon Clock works, causing increasing damage to everyone as it 'ticks down', is pretty damn flavourful for a doomsday clock. There's a whole theme of risk-taking involved, too, with each player having the chance to spend their own resources to remove a counter from the Armageddon Clock.
Su-Chi is another artifact that I kinda like, being a staff shaped like the upper jaw and face os a snake, complete with exposed brain for some reason, and a 'cage' seemingly representing the snake's scalp bursting open or something. I dunno, I really do like the look of this staff a fair bit. It's also apparently a 4/4 creature in addition to being a staff, which makes it as powerful as an Air Elemental.
Ashnod is Mishra's apprentice, and she's got a bunch of other cards in this set showing off her creations. One of the coolest has to be Ashnod's Transmogrant, which apparently is a process that involves a giant sci-fi glass jar where some poor, helpless schmuck is thrown in, gets whatever that red substance is introduced to them, and they get turned into.. these hollow-eyed naked skinless blue men, basically turning whatever it touches into Artifact Creatures and causing them to lose their humanity. Or elven-ty. Or goblin-ity. Or whatever race the creature originally was.
I do like Primal Clay's flavour, in that you, the magician controlling these spells and artifacts, is able to mould the primal clay into whichever form suits you the most out of several choices.
Meanwhile, while his glasses and sunglasses were some of my favourite cards from the original Unlimited/Alpha/Beta core set, Urza's Chalice continues the trend of Mr. Sunglasses' mundane items being secretly powerful artifacts of doom.
As noted by the flavour text for Yotian Soldier, Urza's more of a well-intentioned extremist, although he, too, ended up escalating the war by creating soldiers of metal. Do love the weird ant-like face on the Yotian Soldier's face, actually.
The Colossus of Sardia actually has a pretty badass artwork of a giant, unliving statue laying waste to a town, and its poem-like flavour text helps to paint a very neat flavour of the whole "ancient magical items laying waste to the land" conflict.
The Rack is a bizarre torture device where you torture weird dummies with disturbing expressions. The poor dummy is ripped crotch-first, which can't be comfortable. It's apparently one of Mishra's creations? His apprentice Ashnod ended up inventing the Cursed Rack, which actually rips all four limbs of the dummy apart and causes non-sentient dummies to have expressions of pain.
Among the many, many magical staves and amulets and swords in this set, one of the artifacts is a MOTHER FUCKING ROCKET LAUNCHER which I just find to be utterly hilarious. It's actually a pretty neat-looking quasi-fantasy rocket launcher too, looking like it is a magical device that has the approximate shape and function of a rocket launcher, but doesn't work in the same way real-life bazookas do.
I love robots and I cannot lie. I also love dinosaurs, and I cannot lie. Clockwork Avian is a fucking metal pterodactyl, complete with a sci-fi red coloured visor! It is pretty damn awesome.
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, I never realized just how bizarrely out-of-place a literal magical millstone is. Apparently the sound drives people insane, which is represented by them losing 'spells' from their mind. It's just so bizarre that they chose to give the insanity and amnesia causing effect to the humble millstone.
As a bonus, I absolutely love the newer artwork for the Millstone from Magic 2014, a card I actually own, representing a mill grinding away some poor rock dude's brain to dust. It's just a pretty damn surreal image!
It really is a shame that Tetravus has a literal wall of text but no real description as to what it is other than the fact that it's an 'artifact creature'. It's got some vaguely Aztec-esque feel to it, and I really love how he's got three colours, actually, and that bizarre face, with eyes that have antennae sticking out of them and the weird flap-covered mouth is just wacky. Presumably, it's some sort of non-sentient flying... bug-worm robot thing? I like it, in any case.
The Onulet isn't much better, and I'm not even sure if this is supposed to be a mobile creature or not. For all the world, it looks more like a long dining table with a bull's face carved on the side.
Hahahahaa what the fuuuuuuck is this thing. The Triskelion is no doubt meant to be a scary war-machine, as that chimney on his back shows, but that goofy-ass expression with that gigantic trap-jaw, and those glued-on googly-eyes just makes the Triskelion look so utterly daft, yet charming at the same time. Also a huge, huge fan of those stiff-looking robot arms. Tawnos, the creator of this thing, is apparently Urza's apprentice. I like your style, Mr. Tawnos.
Meanwhile, Mishra's War Machine doesn't really look like a War Machine. In fact, it looks more like a giant carriage that's see through for some reason? It's weird.
Wall of Spears continues M:TG's trend of having Walls in most of their sets. I don't think there's one in Arabian Nights, though. Not much to say here, although it's sure a bit bizarre to go from fantastical magical objects and robots to just a wall made out of spears.
And to close out this set before I go through all of the others I don't have much to talk about is the Ornithopter, which is... it's one of those Da Vincian flight machines, presumably meant to be used like a hang-glider, but it's just got such a ridiculously funny name. The Ornithopter! What a fun name.
White doesn't really bring much for me to talk about in Antiquities. The Martyrs of Korlis really look like a pair of male models posing for a bodybuilding magazine, though, and we get another variant of Circle of Protection from Unlimited/Alpha.
It's an Enchantment, but I do really like that giant weird leech-centipede-snake-wyrm creature on Powerleech's art. We also get to see another generic druid, as well as our first representation of the goddess Titania in Titania's Song, who I know shows up a couple of times in subsequent expansions.
A bunch of "Blue is experimenting on things!" instants and enchantments, but none that ends up being super interesting.
Hee hee, look at that dumb-ass looking Orc Mechanic. He just looks so pissed off! He and Dwarven Weaponsmith sort of play into Red's role as the ones that create weapons, alongside the Goblin Artisans.
We get a bunch of lands, but unlike the backdrops of Arabian Nights, the ones here feel a bit more personal and tied to the Urza/Mishra storyline. Absolutely love the descriptive text on Strip Mine: "unlike previous conflicts, the war between Urza and Mishra made Dominia itself a casualty of war." Really don't have much to say about the rest of them, although Mishra's Workshop and Urza's Tower kinda help to sort of set up the difference between the brothers two.
A bunch of "just a weapon", which, don't get me wrong, definitely fit the set very well, helping to depict the arms race between increasingly powerful magical weaponry. I just don't have anything to say about them.
A lot of these artifact cards actually make small references to minor characters who would be later referenced in subsequent cards, but otherwise they're just kind of nicely-drawn objects.
Obelisk of Undoing has a pretty fucking badass name! Also, Ashnod's Altar is clearly less of an altar and more of an operating table.
You've got sentient clay golems, magical candelabras and golden wands, but apparently Battering Rams also count as one of the many magical artifacts in this set.
Kind of similar to Yotian Soldier as a robot-man created by Urza, Urza's Avenger's artwork is a really cool looking blueprint that sets it apart from many of the other artifact cards here.
Yeah, sure, Dragon Engine is a neat magic steampunk dragon, but he ain't got nothing on Clockwork Avian! I am also not sure why Shapeshifter is considered an artifact creature, we've had doppelgangers in the original core set. Really could've picked a more interesting name for sure.
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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:
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