Chronicles (Magic: The Gathering)
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| Chronicles | ||
|---|---|---|
| Expansion symbol | The expansion symbol of the original expansion in which the card was printed |
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| Release date | July 1995
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| Size | 116 cards/ 125 cards (counting diff. artwork) |
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| Expansion code | CHR
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| Magic: The Gathering Chronology |
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| Ice Age | Chronicles | Homelands |
Chronicles was the twelfth Magic: The Gathering set, and the first compilation set, released in July 1995.
The set is notable for being the only tournament-legal non-core set that introduced no new cards. All cards in the set were from the Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, and The Dark expansions. Each card was white-bordered, while the cards in their original sets were black-bordered. Also, each card carried the expansion symbol from the set it was originally printed in. However, it was not considered an official expansion of the game.
Chronicles was printed so that new players, and other players who were unable to buy the sets originally due to their quick sellouts, would be able to have their own cards from those sets. The set collaborators were careful not to put the extra-powerful cards (like Arabian Nights Juzam Djinn) into the set, so that those cards' market values would not be affected. Nonetheless, many popular cards, such as Legends Elder Dragon Legends, were included. Also, some cards in the set would prove to become powerful as more players experimented with them. Arabian Nights Erhnam Djinn, reprinted in Chronicles, proved to be exceptionally useful in concert with the 4th Edition's Armageddon, and a powerful deck arose from this combination.
A similar set called Renaissance was released 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 expansion sets. This was due to company policy that stated that a card could not be put into a white-bordered set without first appearing in a black-bordered set in that language. The Italian version of Renaissance ("Rinascimento") was different, because The Dark and Legends had already been printed in their entirety in Italian (and released 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. All foreign-language Chronicles sets were planned to be black-bordered, except the Italian version, which was planned to be white-bordered, but the only foreign Chronicles ever released by Wizards was Japanese, which was black-bordered.
