Mirage Magic The Gathering Cards
Mirage was the fifteenth Magic: The Gathering set and ninth expert
level set, released in October 1996. This expansion began the first
official block set with one large expansion being followed by two
smaller expansions all tied together through card mechanics and
setting. This expansion also introduced 5th Edition rules (5th Edition
was released in March 1997). Mirage's expansion symbol is a palm tree.
Like Ice Age, Mirage began as a set of modifications to Alpha by a
group of Richard Garfield's playtesters in winter 1992. Bill Rose,
Charlie Catino, Joel Mick, Howard Kahlenberg, Don Felice and Elliott
Segal created gameplay modifications and new cards that developed into
"Menagerie", which developed over the course over three years. In
October 1995, Mirage was sent to Wizards of the Coast for development.
Rose lead the development team of Mike Elliott, William Jockusch and
Mark Rosewater, while Art Director Sue-Ann Harkey provided Mirage's
African influenced look.
While its origins in playtesting linked it to earlier sets, Mirage
was not designed to stand alone. Mirage was created as an introduction
to Jamuraa, with two more planned expansions to create a cohesive set.
This model became the standard for Magic: The Gathering expansions and
began the concept of "block rotation".
Mirage's public debut was at Pro Tour Atlanta 1996, where
professional Magic players had the challenge of playing sealed deck
with cards they had never seen before. Mirage was also the first set to
have pre-releases at more than one city.
Wizards of the Coast's design and development team considers Mirage
to be the first set of the "Silver Age" or "modern" era of Magic. It
was the first set to be designed with Limited and Constructed play in
mind. Previous designs had been imbalanced for formats like draft and
sealed-deck, and cards were designed for casual players rather than
with thought of their impact on the tournament scene.
On December 5, 2005, Mirage was released on Magic: The Gathering
Online. This was the first time in the three-and-a-half years that the
online version of the game had existed that an expansion older than
Invasion (2000) became playable on MTG Online.[3] With their
introduction on MTG Online, all Mirage cards received updated creature
types and wordings to bring them in line with modern Magic cards.
Mechanics
Mirage introduced the first cycle of "charms". A charm is a spell
that allow a player to choose among three different effects when the
charm is played. Since then, similar cycles of charms have appeared in
Visions, Planeshift, Onslaught, Planar Chaos. and Lorwyn
The Nightstalkers were a cycle of three small creatures:
Breathstealer, Feral Shadow and Urborg Panther. A player could
sacrifice these three creatures from play to summon the legend Spirit
of the Night.
The "Insta-enchantments" were a cycle of auras that could be played
as an instant. Thus, they could be used as a surprising maneuver, but
if you did so they would last only one turn.
This set introduced two new keywords: flanking and phasing.
- Flanking represents the advantage of fighting on horseback. Any creature without flanking that blocks a creature with flanking gets -1/-1 until the end of the turn. This allows a creature with flanking to destroy creatures larger than itself, and even destroy creatures with a toughness of 1 before damage is assigned.
- Phasing represents the removal from existence caused by
Teferi's experiments. A permanent with phasing enters and leaves play
without any involvement by the player. At the beginning of a player's
turn, before the untap phase, any permanents with phasing in play
"phase out" (are removed from play into a special zone), and any
"phased out" permanents return to play. Formerly, phasing triggered
"leaves play" events but not "enters play" events. It was this point
and many others that caused players confusion over phasing and prompted
a similar ability with simpler rules, flickering, to replace phasing in
future blocks. As of the rules updates in October 2005, phasing no
longer triggered "leave play" events.
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