What is Chronicles Foreign Black Border (BCHR)?

Chronicles Foreign Black Border (BCHR) is a 124-card Magic: The Gathering set. It is the black-bordered, non-English version of Chronicles, the 1995 reprint set that collected cards from early Magic sets including Legends and The Dark. Non-English editions were printed with black borders while the standard English Chronicles used white borders.

Why do Chronicles Foreign Black Border cards have black borders instead of white?

In the mid-1990s, Wizards of the Coast used white borders for English-language reprint sets to distinguish them from original printings, which had black borders. Non-English editions, however, were printed with black borders as standard. This makes BCHR cards visually identical in border treatment to original Legends and The Dark cards, which is why collectors prize them.

Are Chronicles Foreign Black Border cards legal in competitive formats?

Legality depends on the individual card, not the set. BCHR cards are foreign black-bordered reprints, so each card's format legality is determined by whether that card is on the format's legal card list. Check Scryfall or the official format rules for each specific card.

What is the connection between Chronicles and the Reserved List?

The release of Chronicles in 1995 upset collectors because reprinting rare cards reduced their secondary market value. The backlash was significant enough that Wizards of the Coast introduced the Reserved List in 1996 — a formal commitment to never reprint certain cards. The Reserved List remains in effect today and continues to be a point of debate in the Magic community.

Which Elder Dragons appear in Chronicles Foreign Black Border?

Chromium Rhuell is among the Elder Dragons included in BCHR. The Elder Dragons originated in the Legends set and are historically significant as the cards that inspired the Commander format's original name, Elder Dragon Highlander.

What is the Dakkon Blackblade comic's connection to Chronicles?

The first issue of the Dakkon Blackblade comic series was packaged with a copy of the card Dakkon Blackblade from Chronicles. The comic is set on Dominaria and explores the continent of Corondor, providing lore context for several Legends-era cards that appear in Chronicles and BCHR.

Chronicles Foreign Black Border (BCHR): Set Guide

Some sets exist to introduce new mechanics. Chronicles Foreign Black Border exists because reprints matter - and because a black border makes everything feel a little more serious.

BCHR is, in a very literal sense, a foreign black-bordered version of Chronicles: the 1995 reprint set that collected cards from four older sets - Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, and The Dark - and put them in front of players who had missed out the first time. The Foreign Black Border version is exactly what the name promises: black-bordered printings of those 124 cards, originally released for non-English markets.

What is Chronicles Foreign Black Border?

Chronicles Foreign Black Border (set code: BCHR) is a 124-card Magic: The Gathering set. It is the foreign black-bordered counterpart to Chronicles, the 1995 reprint set. While the standard English Chronicles release used white borders - as was Wizards of the Coast's convention for reprints at the time - non-English editions were printed with the traditional black border. Collectors and players who prize black borders on their cards have long sought out these foreign language printings as a result.

The 124 cards in BCHR are reprints drawn from the Legends and The Dark blocks, among other early sets, and include some of Magic's most iconic early cards. Many of them were, at the time of Chronicles' release, difficult or expensive to obtain in their original printings.

Format check: Because BCHR cards are reprints of older cards, their format legality depends entirely on the individual card, not the set itself. Always check the specific card's legality in your format of choice.

Themes and mechanics

BCHR doesn't introduce any mechanics of its own - it's a reprint set, so it inherits the mechanical identity of the sets it draws from. What that means in practice is a broad cross-section of early Magic design: Elder Dragons with cumulative upkeep costs, banding, landwalk, and a general sense of ambitious-but-sometimes-unwieldy card design that characterises Magic's earliest years.

Legends cards are a major part of the set's identity. Chromium Rhuell - one of the five Elder Dragons from Legends - appears here, and his presence anchors the set's most flavourful corner. The Elder Dragons were the cards that gave the Commander format its original name (Elder Dragon Highlander), and seeing them in black-bordered foreign printings carries a certain weight for anyone who knows that history.

Lore aside: Chromium Rhuell is one of the most widely-appearing Elder Dragons in Magic's story. He shows up in the Ice Age comic series, the Dakkon Blackblade comics, and later in Kate Elliott's "Chronicle of Bolas" story arc for Core Set 2019 - a remarkable breadth of appearances for a card that dates back to Legends.

Notable cards and impact

The headline name in BCHR is almost certainly Chromium Rhuell, one of the five legendary Elder Dragons from Legends. In his original printing, Chromium was a 7/7 flying creature with banding and rampage - a genuinely imposing card for the era, and one whose lore footprint has only grown over the decades.

The Dakkon Blackblade comics, which were distributed with early Chronicles cards, included Dakkon Blackblade as an insert card - a neat piece of Magic publishing history that ties the comics directly to the set's physical cards. The first issue of the Dakkon Blackblade comic series shipped with a copy of Dakkon Blackblade from Chronicles, making those issues simultaneously a story object and a card-delivery mechanism.

Beyond individual cards, the broader significance of BCHR is its status as a collector's object. Black-bordered foreign Chronicles cards occupy a specific niche: they're not original Legends or The Dark printings, but they carry the black border that white-bordered Chronicles copies lack, and they exist in languages that many English-speaking collectors don't often seek out - which can make them surprisingly findable, or surprisingly scarce, depending on the language and card.

Lore and setting

The cards in BCHR are set primarily on Dominaria, Magic's central plane and the home of the vast majority of early Magic storytelling. The Legends set in particular is rooted in a period of Dominarian history defined by powerful city-states, warring factions, and the looming presence of elder beings - dragons, demons, and legendary figures whose deeds shaped the plane for millennia.

The continent of Corondor on Dominaria features heavily in the associated comic material. The Dakkon Blackblade comic series - whose first issue came packaged with a Chronicles card - opens in a Corondor defined by draconian city-states and primitive clans, a world where legends are made because the need for them is desperate. It's a wonderfully bleak setup, and it gives cards like Dakkon Blackblade a narrative context that the card text alone can't quite convey.

Chromium Rhuell's lore is extensive by early Magic standards. He appears in the Ice Age comics alongside Freyalise, Lim-Dûl, and Leshrac, and later turns up in the Dakkon Blackblade series before making a full narrative return in Kate Elliott's 2018 "Chronicle of Bolas" stories - set on both Dominaria and Tarkir - where the Elder Dragons' ancient history is explored through the eyes of Yasova Dragonclaw's granddaughters.

Set legacy

Chronicles as a whole is a genuinely significant moment in Magic history - and not entirely for happy reasons. The set's release in 1995 caused real controversy among the player base, because reprinting rare cards reduced their secondary market value and upset collectors who had paid premium prices for original printings. The backlash contributed directly to Wizards of the Coast developing the Reserved List in 1996: a formal commitment not to reprint certain cards, which remains in effect (and remains controversial) to this day.

Chronicles Foreign Black Border sits at the edge of that story. As the non-English black-bordered version, it was printed for markets where the white-border convention was less established, and it didn't carry quite the same cultural weight as the English release. For collectors, though, the black border is the whole point - these are the versions that look like "real" Magic cards in the parlance of early Magic collecting culture, and they've retained a dedicated following among players who care about border colour on their older cards.

In my experience, BCHR is the kind of set that comes up in conversations about collecting and Magic history more than it comes up in conversations about deck-building. That's not a criticism - it's a reflection of what the set actually is: a fascinating artefact of a very specific moment in Magic's early years, when the game was still figuring out what reprints meant, what collectors deserved, and how to balance accessibility with the interests of its most invested players.