April 1994
Magic’s popularity continued to boom in early 1994, and supplies of Unlimited cards quickly ran dry. At this point, Wizards decided to start rotating cards into and out of the basic set. These rotations wouldn’t be as dramatic as the changes originally envisioned by Garfield, but they would allow the company to gradually change the environment.
To create this new version of the basic set, called Revised Edition, the designers rotated a little over 10% of the cards. Cards were removed from this printing for one of three reasons: to improve the set’s clarity, balance, or overall appeal. Some cards were too confusing, as measured by the number of questions about them that wizards’ customer service team had received. Some had become known as “spoilers,” or cards that unbalanced the game. And finally, some cards were retired just to make room for new ones, keeping the environment fresh and changing.
Revised discontinued the mythical “rare island” that had appeared in Alpha and beta. The island was actually no rarer than any other island, but it was included on the rare sheet. Because of that, players occasionally received an island as their rare card. After it became the subject of numerous complaints, it was removed in the Revised rotation.
The removed cards were replaced with cards from the Arabian Nights and Antiquities expansions-already out-of-print with no attempt to match rarities. Dragon Engine, for example, was a common card in Antiquities but became a rare card in Revised, and some of the rare Arabian Nights and Antiquities cards were reprinted as Revised uncommons.
The designers also took this opportunity to clarify some of the Magic rules that had proved to be confusing and to improve the card wordings. One of the most visible changes was the creation of the tap symbol, a tilted T in a gray circle. (Because not all translations of the word “tap” begin with the same letter, the T was changed to a bent arrow in a tilted rectangle in Fourth Edition, when many more translations were being published.) Many of the Revised cards were reworded as part of this housecleaning.
