When was Fourth Edition released?

Fourth Edition was released in April 1995. It is a Magic: The Gathering core set with the set code 4ED, containing 377 cards.

What is the difference between Fourth Edition and Revised Edition?

Fourth Edition added 122 cards that were not in Revised Edition, drawn from early expansion sets like Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, and The Dark. These additions include notable cards like Strip Mine, Ball Lightning, Land Tax, Sylvan Library, and Mishra's Factory.

Are Fourth Edition cards legal in Modern or Standard?

No. Fourth Edition cards are not legal in Modern, Pioneer, or Standard. They are legal in Legacy and Vintage, though several individual cards — most notably Strip Mine — are banned or restricted in those formats.

Is Strip Mine from Fourth Edition banned?

Strip Mine is restricted in Vintage (meaning you can only play one copy) and banned in Legacy. It was included in Fourth Edition as one of the 122 cards added from earlier expansion sets, and its power level — destroying any land for no mana cost — has kept it under format restrictions ever since.

How many cards are in Fourth Edition?

Fourth Edition contains 377 cards, making it larger than Revised Edition. Of those, 122 cards were new to the core set and had not appeared in Revised.

What notable cards were added to Fourth Edition that weren't in Revised?

The 122 new additions include Strip Mine, Ball Lightning, Land Tax, Sylvan Library, Mishra's Factory, Fellwar Stone, Triskelion, Colossus of Sardia, and Clockwork Avian, among many others drawn from Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, and The Dark.

Fourth Edition (4ED): The Complete Set Guide

Released in April 1995, Fourth Edition is one of Magic: The Gathering's core sets - and like the editions before it, it's a reprint set rather than a collection of new cards. Its job was to put more copies of foundational Magic cards into players' hands at a time when the game was growing fast and cards were genuinely hard to find.

At 377 cards, it's a substantial collection that drew from across the early Magic card pool, bringing in 122 cards that hadn't appeared in the previous core set, Revised Edition.

What is Fourth Edition?

Fourth Edition is a Magic core set released in April 1995, carrying the set code 4ED. Like Revised Edition before it, it's a reprint set - no new cards were designed specifically for it. Its purpose was accessibility: getting more of the cards that defined early Magic into print and into players' pockets.

At 377 cards, it's noticeably larger than Revised Edition, and that size difference tells the story of what makes this set interesting. Wizards used the expansion to pull cards from sets like Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, and The Dark that Revised had left behind.

Format check: Fourth Edition cards are legal in Legacy and Vintage. They are not legal in Modern, Pioneer, or Standard. Many individual cards have their own ban or restriction history depending on the format.

Cards added from Revised Edition

The most distinctive thing about Fourth Edition's card list is the 122 cards it introduced that weren't in Revised. That's a significant chunk of the set - roughly one in three cards was new to the core set lineup.

These additions came from the early expansion sets, and they give the set a noticeably different feel from its predecessor. Some highlights from the additions include:

Ball Lightning - a {R}{R}{R} 6/1 with trample and haste that sacrifices itself at end of turn. A card that still shows up in aggressive red lists to this day.
Strip Mine - four colorless mana for a land that can destroy any other land. Its power level is such that it's restricted in Vintage and banned in Legacy.
Land Tax - a {W} enchantment that lets you search for up to three basic lands whenever an opponent controls more lands than you. A card that has had a complicated relationship with ban lists across formats.
Sylvan Library - a {1}{G} enchantment that gives you extra card selection each turn, at a life cost. Still a Commander staple decades later.
Mishra's Factory - a land that can animate itself into a 2/2 Assembly-Worker. One of the most quietly powerful utility lands from the early era.
Triskelion - an artifact creature that enters with three +1/+1 counters it can spend to deal damage. The blueprint for a whole family of later designs.
Colossus of Sardia - a massive 9/9 artifact creature with a steep untap cost, a card that felt genuinely imposing in 1995.
Leviathan - a 10/10 that demands real sacrifices to attack, the kind of enormous creature that made players feel like they were doing something epic.
Fellwar Stone - a two-mana rock that produces mana of a type your opponents' lands can produce. Still sees Commander play today.

The full list of 122 additions covers all five colors and artifacts, pulling from Arabian Nights (Sindbad, Nafs Asp, Oasis, Junún Efreet), Antiquities (Mishra's Factory, Triskelion, Colossus of Sardia, Tetravus, Yotian Soldier), Legends (various creatures and spells), and The Dark.

Themes and mechanics

Fourth Edition is a core set from 1995, so don't expect the kind of cohesive mechanical themes you'd find in a modern set. It's a broad cross-section of early Magic design - everything from straightforward creatures and removal spells to some genuinely strange corners of the card pool.

What you do find is an interesting snapshot of what Magic was at this stage. There are:

Circle of Protection: Artifacts - suggesting artifact-based aggression was a real concern worth answering.
Color-specific Mana Batteries (White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green versions) - artifacts that store mana across turns, a design that reflects how differently Wizards thought about mana at the time.
Clockwork creatures from Antiquities - Clockwork Avian and others that enter with counters and gradually lose power, an early experiment in resource-tracking on creatures.
The Brute, Giant Strength, Blood Lust - a cluster of red pump effects that point toward aggressive creature strategies.

Honestly, the mechanical identity of Fourth Edition is less about any single theme and more about the sheer variety on offer. It's a toolkit - a wide, somewhat eclectic selection of tools drawn from the first few years of the game.

Notable cards and lasting impact

For a set with no new card designs, Fourth Edition has left a surprisingly long shadow.

Strip Mine alone justifies the set's place in Magic history. The ability to destroy any land - not just non-basic lands - for zero mana investment beyond the land drop itself proved so powerful that it's been restricted or banned in competitive formats ever since. It's one of the clearest examples of early Magic design not fully anticipating how a card would be used.

Land Tax has had its own complicated journey through ban lists, spending time on the Modern banned list (before Modern existed as a format) and seeing restriction in various formats. It's the kind of card that looks harmless and then quietly wins games by ensuring you never miss a land drop while thinning your deck.

Sylvan Library remains a genuine Commander staple in 2024. The combination of card selection and life payment is exactly the kind of flexible value engine that multiplayer formats reward, and the card has aged remarkably well.

Ball Lightning defined a certain kind of red aggression for years - the idea of trading a card for a burst of damage that your opponent can't easily block. It spawned a whole lineage of similar designs.

Fellwar Stone is still a perfectly reasonable two-mana rock in Commander, particularly in multicolor decks or when you know your opponents are running specific colors.

Mishra's Factory was, for a long time, one of the most quietly dangerous lands in competitive Magic - a threat that costs no card slots because it lives in your land base.

Lore and setting

As a core set, Fourth Edition doesn't tell a specific story or take place on a single plane the way modern sets do. Its card pool is drawn from across early Magic's settings - the Arabian Nights-flavored world of Sindbad and the Junún Efreet, the artifact-war history of Antiquities with Mishra's Factory and the Yotian Soldier, and the broader fantasy world that the base set had always occupied.

The flavor text across the set is a window into how Magic communicated worldbuilding in 1995 - short, evocative quotes from in-universe scholars and warriors, hinting at histories and conflicts that were only loosely connected. It's charming in a way that's hard to replicate, a sense that every card was a fragment of something larger that nobody had fully mapped yet.

Set legacy

Fourth Edition is remembered primarily as an accessibility set that did its job well. It arrived at a moment when Magic was expanding rapidly and new players needed ways to get foundational cards without hunting through out-of-print expansion packs. By pulling 122 cards from early expansions into the core set for the first time, it introduced many players to cards they'd never otherwise have found.

From a competitive standpoint, it's the set that put Strip Mine and Land Tax more widely into players' hands - which contributed to both cards eventually needing format attention. That's a genuine mark of impact, even if it's not entirely a positive one.

For collectors and historians, Fourth Edition also represents a transition point in Magic's visual identity. The white border (used on all Revised and Fourth Edition cards) is immediately recognizable, and for many players who started in 1994-1996, these are the versions of the cards they learned on.

I think the most honest way to describe Fourth Edition's legacy is this: it's not the most exciting set in Magic's history, but it was exactly what the game needed at exactly the right moment. Sometimes that's enough to matter. ✨