When was Antiquities released?

Antiquities was released on March 4, 1994. It is the second Magic: The Gathering expansion ever printed, arriving in the game's first year of existence.

What is the theme of Antiquities?

Antiquities is built around an artifact theme. Nearly every card in the set either is an artifact, cares about artifacts, or interacts with them directly. The set tells the story of the Brothers' War between the artificer siblings Urza and Mishra on the plane of Dominaria.

What story does Antiquities tell?

Antiquities tells the story of the Brothers' War — the catastrophic conflict between Urza and Mishra, two rival artificers, on Dominaria. Key figures include their mentor Tocasia, Urza's apprentice Tawnos, Mishra's apprentice Ashnod, and Kayla bin-Kroog. The same story was later expanded in the 2022 set The Brothers' War.

Is Antiquities part of a block?

No. Antiquities is not part of any block. It was released before the block structure existed and stands alone as an independent expansion.

Why does Antiquities have multiple versions of some cards?

Antiquities was the first expansion to feature multiple versions of a card with different artwork — a practice previously only seen on basic lands in the Core Set. It also holds the unique distinction of being the only expansion ever to use multiple artwork versions on nonbasic lands.

Antiquities: The MTG Set Guide (ATQ, 1994)

Q: How many cards are in Antiquities?

Antiquities contains 101 cards. It is not part of any block — it predates the block structure and stands alone as its own release.

Before there were blocks, before there was a Standard format, there was Antiquities - Magic: The Gathering's second expansion ever, released on March 4, 1994. It arrived less than a year after Alpha and Beta, when the game was still finding its shape, and it did something no expansion had done before: it built an entire set around a single mechanical identity and told a coherent story through the cards. That story happened to be one of the richest in all of Magic's thirty-plus years of lore.

What is Antiquities?

Antiquities (set code: ATQ) is the second Magic: The Gathering expansion, released March 4, 1994. It contains 101 cards and is not part of any block - it predates the block structure entirely, standing alone as its own self-contained release.

The set's mechanical heart is artifacts. Almost every card in the set either is an artifact, cares about artifacts, or interacts with them in some way. This was a deliberate, focused design choice that gave Antiquities a cohesiveness rare even by modern standards.

Themes and mechanics

Artifacts as the central identity. Antiquities isn't just a set that includes artifacts - it's a set about artifacts. The mechanical and thematic through-line is the same: two brothers, Urza and Mishra, at war, each wielding ancient artifact-based technology against the other. The cards reflect the weapons, machines, and constructs of that conflict.

This was one of the earliest examples of Magic using its card mechanics to reinforce its story, a design philosophy that would become central to the game decades later.

Multiple artwork versions. Antiquities holds a notable place in Magic history as the first expansion to feature multiple versions of the same card with different artwork - something that had only appeared on basic lands in the Core Set before this point. Even more distinctively, it remains the only expansion to use multiple artwork versions on nonbasic lands. For collectors and historians of the game, that makes it genuinely unique.

Lore and setting

The story told through Antiquities is the Brothers' War - the cataclysmic conflict between the artificer brothers Urza and Mishra on the plane of Dominaria. It's one of Magic's foundational stories, set thousands of years before most of the game's main narrative timeline.

The war between the two brothers began over ancient Thran artifacts - specifically, pieces of the Mightstone and Weakstone - and eventually escalated into a conflict so devastating it reshaped Dominaria itself.

Key figures in this story include:

Urza and Mishra - the brothers themselves, rival artificers whose falling-out drives the entire conflict
Tocasia - their mentor and archaeologist
Tawnos - Urza's loyal apprentice and artificer
Ashnod - Mishra's ruthless apprentice
Kayla bin-Kroog - Urza's wife, Queen of Kroog

Lore aside: The Brothers' War was later revisited and expanded in the 2022 set The Brothers' War (BRO), which retold this same conflict with modern card design and a full story treatment. The seeds of that entire set were planted here in 1994.

The story was also told in a four-issue comic series, The Antiquities War, written by Jerry Prosser and published between November 1995 and February 1996 - one of Magic's earliest forays into tie-in fiction.

Set legacy

Antiquities punches well above its weight in terms of historical importance. For a 101-card set released in the game's first year, its influence has been remarkable.

The artifact-matters theme it established became one of Magic's most enduring mechanical identities, revisited in sets like Mirrodin (2003), Scars of Mirrodin (2010), Kaladesh (2016), and The Brothers' War (2022). Every time Wizards of the Coast returns to artifact-heavy design, Antiquities is somewhere in the design conversation.

The Brothers' War storyline - introduced here through flavour text and card names - became one of the most beloved pieces of Magic lore, eventually receiving a full novel (The Brothers' War by Jeff Grubb, 1998) and that dedicated 2022 set.

The multiple-artwork-versions experiment Antiquities pioneered was ahead of its time. The idea that a single card could tell different visual stories through different illustrations is something Magic has embraced enthusiastically ever since, from masterpiece series to alternate-art treatments across every modern set.

For collectors, Antiquities cards are genuinely historical artefacts (no pun intended) - physical pieces of the game from its earliest months, when Magic was still figuring out what it even was. The set's age, scarcity, and lore significance make it a meaningful piece of the collection for anyone interested in where this game came from.