Magical Thinking: Arabian Nights

Welcome back to Magical Thinking, a retrospective on the art and cards of Magic: the Gathering as seen by a casual player. Today we’re talking about the very first expansion to Magic: Arabian Nights.

Released in 1993, Arabian Nights was based on, well, the book A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Unlike most other settings it was not based upon a world in the Magic multiverse. Instead it was based on fantasy Arabia, and featured characters from the book like Aladdin and Ali Baba. WOTC later retconned the entire expansion as taking place in “Rabiah”, a plane with a thousand and one copies of itself (Presumably to explain why there are multiple versions of unique characters like Aladdin and Ali Baba). Since WOTC doesn’t own the rights to any of the characters in this expansion, it’s unlikely we will ever get another set in Rabiah.

Now, onto the cards.

Oh boy. And once again White is starting us off strong with a good one. White magic, the color of honor, chivalry, justice, peace, healing, LEPROSY. I’ll admit that I know less about A Thousand and One Nights than I do about Magic, but I feel like I’m missing some serious context on this guy. This card doesn’t really fit White thematically. Last I checked, Black was the color of disease and death. But here he is, ready to use his Leprosy powers to bring his opponent down with him. When WOTC did their big creature type fix, they made Abu Ja far a human, so the leper creature type was forever lost.

And here we have the most useless monster in all of Magic. First of all, the Camel has bands. What is bands? Don’t worry about it; its a dumb mechanic that no one uses anymore. But hey, if you band this with another creature, that creature can get around the one damage done by the Desert land. So for the price of using this mechanic that no one uses, your creature can avoid a minuscule amount of damage caused by a card no one uses. There may be worse monsters out there but you’ll be hard pressed to find a more nothing creature, even in the early days of Magic.

Yo dawg, I heard you liked Magic so I put a Magic game in your Magic game so you can lose half your life when you lose this subgame. Also you can waste half of your time and ALL your patience playing a second Magic game.

Imagine if someone is running multiple copies of this card in their deck. You could play a subgame, then play this card again and start a second subgame, then do it again and oh dear I’ve gone cross eyed. Inception is an apt reference because this card was quickly and rightly banished to the depths of limbo. It’s banned in all the tourney formats and has never been reprinted. Copies of this card go for over 300 dollars.

Shahrazad was the main character of a Thousand and One Nights, the storyteller who kept the Sultan from murdering women by telling stories. It’s lucky for her she didn’t challenge him to a game of Magic and break this card out. It probably would have taken roughly the same amount of time to get through.

I believe this is the expansion where Kaja and Phil Foglio of the webcomic Girl Genius began doing art for Magic. Their distinct cartoony style is always a welcome sight. They rank among my favorite card artists for Magic.

Fish liver oil: Filled with Vitamin A and D, helps with Arthritis and joint pain, and it makes you unblockable if your opponent controls an island. Is there nothing it can’t do?

Land walking is one of those abilities you don’t really see anymore. I don’t know why it fell out of use, but I think maybe WOTC didn’t want to give players too many ways to make unblockable minions (Unlike flying, there’s no way to stop a landwalking minion). Plus the fact it’s pretty situational. If your opponent doesn’t play any islands you pretty much have a dead card.

Man, I don’t remember this from the Ernest Hemmingway story.

Apparently this guy is based on a character from the Voyages of Sinbad, and the card ability is based on how he used to jump on people and ride them around (Which he actually can do to Sinbad, since Sinbad is in this set and is just a 1/1). This card was the only Marid in the game until the great creature type rebalancing, when he became a Djinn. Speaking of Djinn…

Okay my bad not a Djinn but an Efreet. As you can probably expect, this expansion was chock full of Djinn and Efreet, with each color getting one or two (except for white, who got King Suleiman, who destroys Djinn and Efreet, because White is and always has been the “Stop having fun” color). This one sticks out in particular because he’s so weird-looking. He’s half a torso coming out of a pitcher of water, apparently being formed out of water, with two faces, three eyes, and a scythe for a hand. Really just an amazing piece of art and indicative of what I love about early Magic.

This is probably one of my favorite Blue cards. It’s a very flavorful spell. It mutates your creature into a stronger form, and everything is great at first, but the new form isn’t sustainable, and soon begins falling apart. Stuff goes bad from turn to turn until the creature ultimately dies from the mutations it’s suffering.

This card was reprinted a couple of times, at least once with new art, and I hope one day they reprint it in a new set. My one gripe is it doesn’t really fit the Arabian Nights theme. It’s like they had an idea for a card they couldn’t fit in unlimited so they put it here.

Another nice piece from Kaja Foglio. I actually owned a copy of this card at one point, so the witches have a place close to my heart.

Also, with the creature type updated these two became human wizards, which seems iffy to me. I mean, they have tusks, and the white witch has six fingers. I suppose when you master the dark arts body modification is one of the perks.

Welcome to the dark Disney multiverse, where the role of Aladdin’s Genie will be played by Tim Curry, and after the musical number he eats Aladdin and goes back into his lamp. Dark multiverse Jafar dodged a bullet on this one.

I can’t talk about Arabian Nights and not talk about Juzam Djinn, probably the most famous card from the set, and maybe even the most famous Magic card ever printed. Yeah I’ll make that claim. When people think of Magic, they think of either the Black Lotus, or of this bad boy up here.

Juzam Djinn is also a serious collector’s item, priced at over a thousand dollars. For a playing card. I guarantee you, dear readers, this picture is the closest most of you will ever get to one.

Of course, I have one. Well kind of. Mine says “Plague Sliver” and has different art and isn’t a Djinn. Wait I think I made a horrible mistake at some point.

I think Sorceress Queen went to the same magic school as the Cumobajj Witches. They have very similar aesthetics.

I really like the Queen’s ability. It doesn’t actually say how she makes the victim 0/2, she just does. Does she turn them into a toad? Age them? Just make them weak and frail? Who knows, but I imagine that she would be pretty broken in a Red/Black deck where you can rain down death on the weakened creatures.

We’ve had a few demons in Magic, but this is the very first Devil creature. Sadly when the moral guardians came down on Magic, Devils and Demons both vanished from the game, so this would be the only Devil in Magic for a long time. Devils would eventually return in Innistrad, but there they are primarily a Red creature.

Also, Stone-Throwing Devils is weird because First Strike is an ability usually associated with White creatures. But I guess if White can have lepers Black can have this.

I don’t really have much to say about this guy except I find his ability very amusing. Especially when you consider all of the different things walls can be made of out of Magic. The implication here is that Ali Baba is finding a secret door through the wall to get past it, but can you imagine him doing that to the Living Wall, or any of the other walls made of weird stuff? Honestly it makes me wish walls were more relevant in Magic, but to my knowledge most people don’t play them.

Ali from Cairo? More like Ali from Cai-bro. No. No. That was dumb. Knew it as soon as I wrote it. Didn’t even sound good in my head. Do over.

But yeah, Ali from Cairo, which summons Ali from Cairo (just a human after they updated creature types, no clue if he’s still from Cairo). It’s interesting in that he protects you from dying, which is a very not-Red thing to do. I imagine he’d be very useful in decks where you hurt yourself to do stuff, maybe a Red/Black deck.

This is a really pretty lady and I would never decline an opportunity to share more of Kaja Foglio’s art with people. She just looks so…. joyful. I wish everyone could be as happy as this bird lady.

Now THAT is the face of someone whose jimmies have been rustled. Like Maximum Jimmies Rustling right there.

This was before multicolor cards were a thing (Although Unlimited did have dual lands), but I feel like this was the precursor to having multicolor cards since you would only play this bad boy in a Red/Green deck. Still, a 2/3 for 1 mana is pretty good, especially since this was the era when a 2/2 vanilla for 3 mana was considered an acceptable card.

Okay, this one confuses me. Why is the honey killing creatures? Are the creatures killing one another for it? Is the honey poisonous? Is it so sweet that it kills whoever eats it? Did WOTC predict colony collapse syndrome? I could not tell you. This is why flavor text is important, because it help explains the context for certain card abilities.

Transformation has always fascinated me, and apparently it fascinated WOTC because they’ve tried on numerous occasions to create transformation based creatures and cards. This is one of their earlier attempts, where you transform a creature into a slightly better creature for one mana. An interesting idea, but since Green’s entire thing is making a lot of mana fast, it feels kind of superfluous. Ah well, variety is the spice of life after all. It would not be until much later that we got cards that transformed themselves, in Kamigawa and later in Innistrad, which is where the concept got as good as it could as far as I am concerned.

My first introduction to Magic: the Gathering was a terrible Playstation game called Battlemage, which tried to mix Magic with real time strategy. It was awful, but it let me look at the cards and this was one of the first Magic cards I ever saw. I loved it. I mean it’s a fairly mediocre card, but look at that art. Look at that little exposed bit of flesh, which seems to imply this is some kind of bronze age cyborg. It fascinated me, and led to a love of Magic and its cards.

Early Magic sets would often include a card which allowed you to hose the new set. This is the first such card. As long as this is in play, you have nothing to fear from lepers, camels, genies, witches, or brass men, as they were all safely contained. Naturally WOTC stopped making these rather quick because it’s kind of dumb to make a card designed to keep your players from using the cards of the latest set. But we’ll see a few more down the line.

Finally we have the Desert. The card so powerful that Camel became an auto include in every deck just to counteract it. Oh wait no the other thing. I mean this is just bad. I suppose it can take down weenie swarms, but it’s not even good to finish off blocked enemy minions since they need to actually hit you to set it off. I think unless you need a LOT of colorless mana, this is a card to pass over.

And that brings us to the conclusion of another Magical Thinking. Join us next time when we actually get to the set that kicks off Magic’s first major metaplot, and introduces us to one of its greatest villains. Antiquities is next, see you then.