Alliances

Alliances is the eighth Magic expansion and was released in 1996 as the second set in the Ice Age block. It was sold in packs of 12 cards and was the last expansion to feature regular multiple artworks on cards. This was discontinued to ease identification of cards by their artwork, which was important to the global community as Magic was beginning to see print in languages other than English.

Alliances is also the last standard Magic expansion that was underprinted, as supply did not meet demand in many areas. Alliances was highly anticipated after a nine-month wait from the release of the less-than-spectacular Homelands expansion.

Mechanics & Themes

Alliances didn't introduce any new keywords, but it did introduce the popular Alternate cost mechanic, popularly referred to as "Pitch cards", that allowed a player to discard cards of specific colors (sometimes with an additional life payment) to play a spell instead of paying mana. This mechanic was also used on rare cycles in the Masques block, the Betrayers of Kamigawa expansion and the Coldsnap expansion.

Alliances builds on many of the themes of the Ice Age block. Cumulative Upkeep and cantrips return, as does the allied color theme and a few new legendary creatures. The Snow mechanic, considered a failure by the design team of Alliances, was largely abandoned but appears on a few cards.

Notable Cards

• Balduvian Horde was initially heralded as the "new Juzam Djinn," then considered the best creature in Magic, as a 5/5 for 2CC. It later proved to be only mediocre and has seen print in Sixth Edition.

• Diminishing Returns is the first attempt at creating a "fixed" version of Timetwister. Despite its decrease in power compared to Timetwister, Diminishing Returns sometimes still sees play in Vintage alongside Timetwister.

• Force of Will continues to be an important and potent card in every format it is legal in because it can counter any spell without the use of mana.

• Ivory Gargoyle was powerful because it was difficult to get rid of it permanently and was used in some control decks as a win condition.

• Kjeldoran Outpost was used as a win condition in Counterpost-style control decks.

• Lake of the Dead was used to speed up already-powerful Necropotence decks.

Storyline

After the planeswalker Freyalise cast her World-spell, ending the Ice Age, a population long adapted to the cold had to readjust to warm weather. With the new climate came devastating floods and plagues, and the necromancer Lim-Dûl has built an army of undead bent on world domination. An alliance is formed between races to defeat Lim-Dûl and his army.

Design & Development

When designing Alliances the design team looked at the mechanics and themes of the Ice Age expansion. Design considered the Snow mechanic to be a failure and was completely ignored, although Development added in a few Snow-matters cards before the release of the set as the mechanic has great flavor in the block.

At some point, Continuity (the department responsible for the storyline) decided that Alliances would have a race of sentient gorillas. The design team thought this was a silly idea and protested by renaming all the cards in the set to have "Gorilla" in their names.

Cycles

Alliances has five cycles:

• Two-color multicolor cycle: Energy Arc, Lim-Dul's Vault, Lim-Dul's Paladin, Surge of Strength, and Nature's Blessing are each uncommon cards with CD as part of its mana cost, where C and D are allied colors.

• Three-color multicolor cycle: Wandering Mage, Lord of Tresserhorn, Misfortune, Winter's Night, and Phelddagrif are each rare cards with CDE as part of its mana cost, where C and E are the allied colors of D.

• Two enemy color hoser cycle: Royal Decree, Tidal Control, Dystopia, Omen of Fire, and Nature's Wrath are each rare cards that have a negative effect on both enemy colors of the card's color. This cycle was the first to attempt to hose both enemy colors at once and inspired the creation of a similar cycle in the Mercadian Masques expansion.

• Replacement land cycle: Kjeldoran Outpost, Soldevi Excavations, Lake of the Dead, Balduvian Trading Post, and Heart of Yavimaya are each rare lands with "If [this] would come into play, sacrifice a (untapped) [basic land type] instead. If you do, put [this] into play. If you don't, put it into its owner's graveyard. T: add (1)C to your mana pool." and an activated ability. Words in parenthesis appear together on some of these cards. C is the same color of mana that the sacrificed basic land produced.

• Pitch-card cycle: Scars of the Veteran, Force of Will, Contagion, Pyrokinesis, and Bounty of the Hunt are each uncommon instants with "You may (pay 1 life and) remove a [same color] card in your hand from the game rather than pay [this card]'s mana cost." Words in parenthesis appear on Force of Will and Contagion in an attempt to balance them. This cycle inspired the creation of other Pitch-card cycles in the Mercadian Masques, Betrayers of Kamigawa, and Coldsnap expansions.

Creature Types

The following creature types are introduced in this expansion: Aesthir (later changed to Bird), Bird, Gorilla (later changed to Ape), Harlequin, Heretic, Mosquito (later changed to Insect), Pigeon (later changed to Bird), Spy, Starfish, Swarm, Tactician, War-Rider, and Worm.

The following creature types are used in this expansion but also appear in previous sets: Barbarian, Cleric, Druid, Elemental, Elf, Gargoyle, Goblin, Guardian, Homarid, Horror, Insect, Keeper, Knight, Mercenary, Merfolk, Paladin, Phantasm, Rat, Skeleton, Soldier, Spirit, Wall, Wizard and Zombie.

Points of Interest

• Only Alliances and the Chronicles set were sold in packs of 12 cards.

• Alliances was the first and only set to feature different tiers within its rare cards. A few rares appeared six times on each rare sheet while most appeared twice, making a few rares three times as common as others.

• Phyrexian War Beast and Soldevi Steam Beast were both illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, a well known comic artist who has worked on Batman, Superman and many other projects.

• Dystopia, Justice and Surge of Strength each depict the same Elf in the artwork and each share the same artist, Ruth Thompson.

• Fatal Lore, Library of Lat-Nam and Misfortune are the first modal spells to give the choice to your opponent.

• Gargantuan Gorilla, Storm Elemental, Viscerid Drone and Winter's Night are the only cards that refer to the Snow theme of the Ice Age block in the Alliances expansion. These were added by development.

• Arcane Denial, with a mana cost of 1U, was later considered a mistake for making a "hard counter" too easy to splash into a deck without much blue in it. The result was the creation of a Design rule that all hard counters must have UU in their mana cost.

• Ashnod's Cylix depicts a cylix in its artwork, a Greek two-handled shallow drinking cup.

• Astrolabe depicts such a device in its artwork, which was used for navigation and astrology.

• Balduvian Horde has the greatest combined power and toughness among monocolored red creatures in Alliances. It was also distributed as a foil promotional card at the World Championship held in Yokohama, Japan.

• Bounty of the Hunt used to distribute temporary counters because the rules at the time didn't allow for a spell to target the same object more than once.

• Browse has the only blue Goblin in Magic in its artwork.

• Diminishing Returns is the first attempt at creating a "fixed" version of Timetwister and is the second member of the Power Nine to see such revision. One of the reasons for Timetwister's power was its ability to reuse itself and other powerful cards repeatedly, so Diminishing Returns included a drawback to remove the top ten cards of the library from the game in order to limit its ability to reuse these cards.

• Diseased Vermin is the first card with a triggered ability that triggers on combat damage, a trigger that is now common.

• Elvish Bard is the first creature to have the Lure ability.

• Elvish Spirit Guide inspired the creation of the Channel mechanic.

• Enslaved Scout is the only Goblin in Alliances and is the first Goblin not to have "Goblin" in its name. It is strictly worse than Goblin Spelunkers.

• Exile was originally called "Marriage of Convenience" and was designed as a flavorful way for white to remove a creature from the game, in that it "got married", a reference to how a creature removed from the game by Swords to Plowshares "went farming." However, when the commissioned artwork came in from Phil Foglio it was deemed too silly for a card that was to be a powerful tournament card. Some artwork swapping followed, and the original "Marriage of Convenience" artwork ended up on Unlikely Alliance. Much brainstorming eventually led to the matching of the card with its artwork and its name was changed to "Exile," suggesting that the removed creature was exiled to the castle in the artwork.

• Feast or Famine is the first card to create Zombie tokens. R&D considers this to be one of the most influential cards from the first years of Magic, as it influenced mechanics such as Entwine and the split cards.

• Force of Will's playtest name was "Gorilla, Gorilla, Gorilla, Gorilla, Gorilla, Stop That!" (the number of "Gorillas" used in the name is not clear) and later "Stop Spell." Although an uncommon, Force of Will is the most valuable card in the expansion.

• Fyndhorn Druid is the first creature to trigger life gain from being blocked.

• Gargantuan Gorilla has the greatest combined power and toughness among monocolored creatures in Alliances. It also has the greatest mana cost among all cards in the expansion.

• Gorilla Shaman is nicknamed the "Mox Monkey" for its ability to cheaply and repeatedly destroy inexpensive artifacts (like the Moxen such as Mox Sapphire), as it was designed to do. It was the only creature played in competitive Vintage decks for some time.

• Gorilla War Cry is a cantrip version of Goblin War Drums.

• Guerrilla Tactics was designed, like Gorilla Shaman, to solve a particular problem in the Vintage format. Powerful discard cards, like Mind Twist, Hymn to Tourach and Hypnotic Specter, all saw regular play. Guerrilla Tactics increased the danger of using these cards.

• Gustha's Scepter was the earliest card designed by Mark Rosewater to be printed. It was included in Alliances because another artifact that was to be included in the expansion proved to be far too powerful and a replacement was needed.

• Helm of Obedience was designed to be the impressive "marquee" artifact of the expansion.

• Kaysa (and to a lesser extent Juniper Order Advocate) was celebrated by some because Green, the "creature color," finally had a card to give its creatures +1/+1. All the other colors already had cards to give +1/+1 to its creatures, making it the last in an odd sort of cycle (along with Crusade, Sunken City, Bad Moon and Gauntlet of Might).

• Keeper of Tresserhorn has the greatest combined power and toughness among monocolored black creatures in Alliances.

• Kjeldoran Home Guard has the greatest combined power and toughness among monocolored white creatures in Alliances.

• Kjeldoran Outpost is the first land capable of producing token creatures.

• Library of Lat-Nam is one of three cards to appear in Alliances that were designed by Mark Rosewater, then a new hire at Wizards of the Coast.

• Lim-Dul's Paladin is the first creature printed with trample and a power of 0.

• Lord of Tresserhorn has the greatest power among creatures in Alliances and among all legendary creatures. Development changed his power from 9 to 10 to fit the nickname "Good Buddy," as in "10-4 good buddy."

• Omen of Fire is the only member of the Two enemy color hoser cycle to be an instant and to have a non-symmetrical effect on its enemy colors (the other cards of the cycle are enchantments and have a symmetrical effect on their enemy colors).

• Phelddagrif is an anagram of "Garfield PhD," meaning Richard Garfield. This card was born when the Continuity department denied the name "Phelddagrif's Winds" for the card that became Freyalise's Winds because Phelddagrif didn't "sound like the name of a Goddess of Spring." When asked what Phelddagrif did sound like, Continuity reportedly replied, "Umm, I don't know. A flying purple hippo?" which is of course depicted in the artwork of this card.

• Phyrexian Portal inspired the creation of the Divvy spells in the Invasion expansion.

• Phyrexian War Beast has the greatest combined power and toughness among artifact creatures in Alliances.

• Pillage taught R&D that having multiple cheap land destruction spells without drawbacks gives this unfun mechanic too much power.

• Primative Justice inspired the creation of the Kicker and Replicate mechanics.

• Sol Grail is an anagram of "gorillas" in homage to the protest of the designers against the use of a race of sentient Gorillas in Alliances.

• Soldier of Fortune is one of three cards to appear in Alliances that were designed by Mark Rosewater, then a new hire at Wizards of the Coast. Also, at the time official tournament rules stipulated that cards used in a tournament must not be visibly marked (often from extensive play resulting in excessive wear). To validate this rule, a player had the right to request that an opponent remove the sleeves from his or her cards. This card was unfortunately used by some specifically to damage an opponent's cards in this way. Soldier of Fortune is the first creature with the Mercenary creature type, a creature type that received mechanical attention in the Masques block.

• Storm Elemental has the greatest combined power and toughness among monocolored blue creatures in Alliances.

• Undergrowth inspired the creation of the Kicker mechanic.

• Winter's Night is the only World Enchantment in Alliances.

Outside Links

• Official product page