Chronicles Magic The Gathering Cards
Chronicles was the twelfth Magic: The Gathering set, and the first
compilation set, released in July 1995 by Wizards of the Coast.
Chronicles introduced no new cards; the set was designated as an
extension of the Fourth Edition core set for the purpose of tournament
play. Chronicles consists entirely of cards reprinted from the first
four Magic: the Gathering expansions: Arabian Nights, Antiquities,
Legends, and The Dark. The cards in Chronicles are white-bordered, in
accordance with the Wizards of the Coast policy of the time that
black-bordered cards would only be reprinted with white borders. In
addition, the game text on many Chronicles cards was updated to reflect
then-current rules, rulings, and templating. For example, Cyclone from
Arabian Nights instructed players to place "chips" on the card to mark
its status, while the Chronicles reprint of Cyclone used "counters"
instead, as had become standard usage.
Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, and The Dark quickly sold out
in the hobby-gaming market, so both new and existing players had
extremely limited access to cards from those sets at the time.
Chronicles was printed to satisfy the market demand of players who had
been unable to buy as much of the first four expansions as they wished,
or who were new players and missed those expansions entirely. Wizards
of the Coast's development team for Chronicles excluded powerful,
abusive cards that were the frequent sources of player complaints, such
as Mana Drain, The Abyss, Nether Void, Moat, and Maze of Ith, while
including cards that they determined had a high "coolness factor" and
would drive sales with the predominantly-casual player base for Magic
at the time, such as the Elder Dragon Legends, The Wretched, Sol'Kanar
the Swamp King, Dakkon Blackblade, and the three "Urza's Lands" from
Antiquities. Tournament players added Chronicles reprints City of
Brass, Erhnam Djinn, Recall, Divine Offering, Fountain of Youth, and
Feldon's Cane to their decks at tournaments such as the first Pro Tour
New York in February, 1996.
Wizards of the Coast released a similar set called Renaissance into
German, French and Italian markets. The German and French versions of
the black-bordered set are the same, and contained all the cards that
rotated into 4th Edition from the first four expansion sets. This was
due to company policy that stated that a card could not be reprinted in
a white-bordered set without first appearing in a black-bordered set in
that language. The Italian version of Renaissance (Rinascimento) had
different cards, because Wizards of the Coast's licensee Stratelibri
had already printed The Dark (L'Oscurito) and Legends (Leggende) in
their entirety in Italian, and released them in that order, the
opposite of the order of the original English versions. Rinascimento
instead contained the cards rotated into 4th Edition from the Arabian
Nights and Antiquities expansions, plus the cards reprinted in
Chronicles from the Arabian Nights and Antiquities expansions.
Wizards of the Coast originally planned all foreign-language
Chronicles sets to be black-bordered, except the Italian version, which
would be white-bordered because every card in it had already been
printed in Italian in a black-bordered set. However, Wizards of the
Coast's licensee Hobby Japan ended up printing the only
foreign-language Chronicles that was ever released, a Japanese printing
with black borders.
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