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Magic: The Gathering cards have the same standard back face since the beginning, but that very nearly changed with the game’s first expansion.
Ever since Magic: The Gathering‘s first set was released in August 1993, the game has undergone many changes, and the early years were highly experimental ones. Magic stands as the world’s first trading card game, developed by Dr. Richard Garfield and Wizards of the Coast in the early ’90s. As time went on, they were figuring out a lot of elements of the game that simply didn’t have answers for how to approach them yet. That included even the backs of Magic cards.
Any trading card game demands that all cards have identical backs, so unsleeved cards can remain anonymous in a player’s hand until they are used. Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! all follow this rule. However, early in the game’s history, Dr. Garfield wanted to experiment with the card’s backs, to tell different sets apart.
The Prototype Arabian Nights Card Back In Magic: The Gathering
As Wizards of the Coast explained in a 2002 posting, the game’s designers wanted to create a variation of the original card back for the Arabian Nights expansion set in 1993 to put a unique and flavorful spin on the game. At the time, Magic: The Gathering didn’t yet have a formal block design, and the designers wanted to make the game an anthology or treat it as a collection of similar games rather than a cohesive whole, so the fundamentals were open to change. The original card back has a distinct but ordinary look, with a rusty copper look and the game’s name in blue text.
In hindsight, Arabian Nights was a flawed but brave attempt at “top-down” set design, where flavor comes first and the lore dictates card design rather than the other way around. Wizards took the radical step of designing an all-new card back to match, with gold and violet hues to make the new card back pop. This could have set a precedent for all flavorful sets to follow, with each set having its own card back and making them collector’s items in their own right.
The main problem was that the unique card backs would give away the cards in a player’s hand. Especially in those early days, it would be too easy to tell an Arabian Nights card apart from an Alpha card. That would heavily skew gameplay and immersion as well. It’s one thing to have unique artistic card frames on the card’s front, such as the Norse-inspired frames of certain Kaldheim cards or the Japanese full-art lands of the upcoming Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. Changing the card back would cause far more problems than it would be worth, and using card sleeves wasn’t common at the time. So, Wizards changed its mind at the last moment and used the original card back for Arabian Nights and all subsequent sets.
Hidden Details Of Magic: The Gathering Card Backs
Wizards of the Coast cannot change the standard back of paper Magic cards, with double-faced cards being a category of their own. The original design must remain, and amusingly, that means including some accidental errors from the game’s very first print run. As Wizards once explained online, there is a distinct bluish, violet “pen mark” on the lower part of the card that reads “DECKMASTER,” near the end of the word. It was likely a printing error, and for the sake of consistency, Wizards has kept that error ever since, and made it a formal part of the card back’s design. It likely would have been too much trouble to recall all first-generation cards and restart the game with a corrected version of the card back.
Digital games such as Duel of the Planeswalkers and the ultra-popular Arena can change things, and some of these games feature a revised version of the card back. The now-redundant DECKMASTER part is gone, and the Magic: The Gathering logo is a vivid yellow and red, rather than a dull blue and dark red. This may reflect what some Wizards staff members wished the original design had been like, and digital magic avoids all the issues of changing the paper cards so radically.
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