Arabian Nights

Arabian Nights

Arabian Nights is the very first Magic expansion and was released in December 1993. It is not considered part of any block.

Arabian Nights was printed on sheets of 121 cards. Arabian Nights was designed by Richard Garfield and co-developed by Joel Mick and Skaff Elias. Arabian Nights is the first set to use an expansion symbol: a scimitar, meant to evoke the Arabian setting of the expansion.

The Arabian Nights lands have a unique sand-colored text box, which was reused in Fourth Edition and Chronicles.

Multiple cards in this set use accent marks, or diacritics, in their names. These accents are not printed in the card title but can be found in the text box because the font for the card title did not support them.

The print run was announced by Wizards to be 5 million cards. Cards were available from late December 1993 until late January 1994. They were sold in booster packs of eight cards which included six commons and two uncommons. Booster boxes contained 60 booster packs. Arabian Nights booster boxes are now extremely rare and cost tens of thousands of dollars. The summer after the release, while The Dark debuted, Arabian Nights booster packs were already selling for five dollars compared to the original price of only $1.50.

As the first Magic expansion, Arabian Nights was originally intended to be released as a stand-alone product. As a result, the set was nearly printed with a yellow-on-pink card back, instead of the blue-on-brown used in all cards known today, in order to distinguish it from "The Gathering", which was originally the name of Alpha. In addition, basic lands were to be included. Although four of them were later removed, a lone Mountain was accidentally left on the common sheet.

Note that the proposed new card back appeared on the booster box, indication that it was indeed a last-minute decision to print the set using standard Magic backs. In December 2003, an unopened “case” of 10 booster boxes of Arabian Nights was auctioned for $95,000.