Visions

Visions

Visions is the tenth Magic expansion and was released on February 3, 1997 as the second set and first small expansion in the Mirage block.

Visions contains 167 black-bordered cards (50 rare, 55 uncommon, and 62 commons). Its expansion symbol is the "Triangle of War", a Zhalfirin symbol, inset with a “V” for Visions.

At the time of its release, Visions was a "first" in the release of quality cards at the common level; examples include Uktabi Orangutan and River Boa. River Boa (at that time) was considered "very good", with two abilities (islandwalk and regeneration), and a 2/1 at only {1}{G}.

Visions was the start of increasing the speed of red decks. Red decks began to get faster due to a card from Visions: Fireblast. In the late game, players could now sacrifice two Mountains to deal four damage to opponents. This proved to be essential as burn decks became all the rage. Decks were sporting "pure burn", essentially: four Lightning Bolt, four Incinerate, four Fireblast, which made it very easy for the red player to deal twenty damage to their opponents, or in today's colloquial, it "increased the reach" of the red player. Fireblast was also common rarity.

The Visions set was the first set to introduce the color-appropriate text boxes to non-basic lands capable of producing single colors of mana, such as Karoo, Everglades and Jungle Basin, that had been used for basic lands since the launch of Magic the Gathering. Non-basic lands capable of producing more than one color of mana did not receive color-appropriate text boxes until Invasion (excepting the early Dual Lands which had their own unique box-in-box color design). The Visions non-monocolor lands share the same dull green text box color that Mirage has, and the monocolored lands still had text box frames of that same color. From Fifth Edition on, land text box color was standardized.