Arabian Nights (Magic: The Gathering) - Storyline

Storyline

Garfield considered several mythoi to build Magic's first expansion around, but eventually decided to use a real-world mythos. Personally fascinated with the One Thousand and One Nights mythos he decided that it fit the game well and chose to employ it for Magic. Aside from using the original tale as an inspiration for the cards of Arabian Nights and putting short quotes from the book on the cards as flavor text the set originally had no own background story. In 1995–96 two comicbooks (A Time to Gather and And Then There Was One) were produced by Armada to give the set its own storyline, taking place on the plane of Rabiah. Arabian Nights is the only set to use an earthbound mythos for its background story although several other sets are inspired by other earthbound myths as well.