Alliances (ALL): The MTG Set Guide

What is Alliances?

Alliances is the second set in Magic: The Gathering's Ice Age block, following the Ice Age base set and preceding Coldsnap. Released in 1996, it carries the set code ALL and contains 199 cards. It was one of the early expansion sets that deepened the game's world-building and mechanical vocabulary during a formative era for Magic.

The set takes place on Dominaria in the aftermath of the global freeze that defined the Ice Age storyline - a period of thaw, political realignment, and desperate coalition-building as the world began to recover from centuries of glacial darkness.

Themes and mechanics

Thematically, Alliances is about exactly what its name suggests: groups of disparate factions and individuals coming together under pressure. The set's mechanical and flavour identity reflects that sense of cooperation and accumulated power.

Because the source material for this set's specific mechanics is limited in what I can confirm precisely, I'd recommend cross-referencing Scryfall's Alliances page for a full breakdown of individual card mechanics. What I can say with confidence is that ALL sits in a period of Magic history where the game was still discovering what expansions could do - adding cards that interacted meaningfully with an existing large set rather than standing entirely alone.

Lore and setting

Alliances is set on Dominaria, specifically in the northern regions that bore the worst of the Ice Age's cold. The central figures of the story include Jaeuhl Carthalion, his wife Kaysa, Kristina of the Woods, and the planeswalkers Taysir and Ravidel - names that will be familiar to anyone who followed Magic's early storyline arcs.

The set picks up after the casting of the World Spell, the cataclysmic magical event that ended the Ice Age itself. With the world beginning to warm, the surviving factions of Dominaria are forced into uneasy alliances to navigate the chaos that follows. It's a story about what comes after survival - the complicated work of rebuilding.

Lore aside: A comic book adaptation of Alliances was planned by ARMADA, a division of Acclaim Comics, which had previously released comics tied to the Ice Age set. That comic would have followed Jaeuhl Carthalion and Kaysa directly after the World Spell. It was never published, making it one of the more intriguing pieces of unreleased Magic media from that era.

The Ice Age block's story was later novelised in Jeff Grubb's Ice Age Cycle, concluding with The Shattered Alliance - which covers much of the narrative ground that Alliances the set explores through its cards and flavour text.

Set legacy

Alliances holds a meaningful place in Magic history as a product of its era. The mid-1990s was a time when Wizards of the Coast was still working out what a good expansion looked like - how to add cards that felt like genuine additions to the game's vocabulary rather than just more of the same.

For players who lived through that period, Alliances carries a lot of nostalgia. The Ice Age block as a whole was the first true "block" in the modern sense - three sets designed together around a shared theme - and Alliances was the set that deepened that experiment.

If you're approaching Alliances today, you're most likely doing so as a collector, a lore enthusiast, or someone curious about where Magic came from. The set is a window into a Dominaria that felt genuinely cold and dangerous, and into a game that was still figuring out who it wanted to be. I think that historical texture is worth appreciating on its own terms.