Games - 4th Edition

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	Games - 4th Edition

The Fourth Edition of Magic: The Gathering
was the ninth set released for the game, and the fourth base set (or "core set"). The set was released in May, 1995 and contained 378 cards. It was the first set to reprint cards from the expansions Legends
and The Dark with white borders.

Fourth Edition was also the first Magic set to be printed in Asian languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, as well as Portuguese, which was printed primarily for the Brazilian market. The Japanese edition was particularly successful and contributed to the burgeoning of Magic's popularity in Japan.

Physical Attributes

The bevelled border that was missing from revised returned, and the whole set no longer looked washed out and was very colorful. This set was also the first core set to include a Wizards copyright at the bottom of the card. Up to this point the cards only had an illustration credit.

Booster packs, for the first time in a core set, came in packs with cropped card art on the packaging. Up to this point, Alpha, Beta, Unlimited, and Revised all had a common-looking booster pack packaging. Art on the booster packs are: Brass Man, Hurloon Minotaur, Mana Vault, Mesa Pegasus, and Spirit Link. Starter Packs no longer looked like an approximation of a card back and now had the mana symbols in place of just the colored dots, and an overall red theme to the art.

Fourth Edition was the first set to offload its land printings to a dedicated land sheet. This freed up room on the other card sheets to include more spells. Another consequence of this was that booster packs now could be produced without any lands, and Wizards decided to do just that. The only way to get lands in this printing was to purchase starter decks. Not many really took offense to this, as now the booster packs no longer ran the risk of having a land where the rare card in a pack was supposed to be, and by this time there was so much land out there that many card shops allowed the trading of land in large communal bins similar to "take-a-penny-leave-a-penny".

Starter decks now included an additional rare, bringing the total to three. Prior starter decks included only two rares. One of the tradeoffs was that starter decks now contain fewer uncommons, bringing it down to 9 from 13.

Other noteworthy changes are the inclusion of the changed "Tapped" symbol also first introduced in Ice Age.

Cards removed

For the second basic set in a row (Revised Edition
had set a precedent for all core sets that followed), several cards were removed and new ones were added.

Among those cards removed were those that had attracted controversy from those outside the game. Most of the cards whose art depicted nude or near-nude humanoid forms (including ' and ') were excised, as were many that had overtly religious themes (including ' and '), though one demon, ', remained. One card, ' had its artwork altered to remove a flaming inverted pentagram in the background.

Also removed were the original ten "dual lands" (one for each pair of Magic's five colors). With the ability to tap for one mana of either of two colors, they were deemed too powerful. Other cards pruned from the set for being too potent included ', ', and ', while a few, such as ' or ', were considered too complicated (and the cause of too many headaches) to warrant their inclusion. One card dropped for being too complex, ', would return to Magic in the tribally themed Onslaught and to the core set in Ninth Edition
after the rules dealing with cards of its kind had been streamlined.

Famous Cards

Like other basic sets, Fourth Edition introduced no cards that had not yet been printed. However, it did make some older cards newly available, which was a concern in those days, when expansion sets were printed in limited editions (today they are printed to meet demand). Cards appearing in the basic set for the first time included:

': For more than a year after Fourth Edition came out, the Mine (a land that can be used either for mana or to destroy an opposing land) was automatically included in almost every deck in the Standard (then called "Type II") tournament format. The omnipresence of Strip Mine led to its being restricted by the DCI
in mid-1996 to one per deck, and its removal from Fifth Edition
.

': Another land that was used in a broad range of Standard tournament decks, this one for its ability to turn into a creature for a turn at a time.
': Being able to look at the top three cards of one's library each turn, and select the best to draw (or pay life to draw multiples) made this a powerful addition to many control decks.

': Aggressive red decks loved to play this creature, a very efficient (though always short-lived) source of damage.
: Though all it essentially does is let its controller get land cards from his deck into his hand, a seemingly harmless ability, Land Tax was so efficient and powerful at what it did that it was included in almost every deck playing with white. It formed the basis for many powerful combinations with other cards, and so was restricted to one per deck along with Strip Mine (see above).

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