When was Ninth Edition released?

Ninth Edition was released on July 29, 2005.

How many cards are in Ninth Edition?

Ninth Edition contains 359 white-bordered cards in the main set: 116 commons, 112 uncommons, 111 rares, and 20 basic lands. An additional nine exclusive vanilla creatures were available only in the Core Game starter pack.

Was Ninth Edition the last white-border Magic set?

Yes. Ninth Edition was the last Magic: The Gathering set printed with white borders. Starting with Tenth Edition in 2007, core sets switched permanently to black borders. The popularity of Ninth Edition's Russian printing — which used black borders — was a key factor in that decision.

What was the release promo card for Ninth Edition?

The release promo card for Ninth Edition was Force of Nature, distributed to players at release events. Russian-language participants received a Russian Shivan Dragon promo instead.

Was Ninth Edition the first Magic set printed in Russian?

Yes. Ninth Edition was the first Magic: The Gathering set ever printed in the Russian language. All Russian-language cards from this set have black borders, while other language versions used white borders.

Ninth Edition (9ED): The Last White-Border Core Set

Q: Did players have input on which cards were reprinted in Ninth Edition?

Yes. Some of the reprints in Ninth Edition were chosen through public voting on the Daily MTG website run by Wizards of the Coast, giving the community a direct say in the set's contents.

What is Ninth Edition?

Released on July 29, 2005, Ninth Edition (set code: 9ED) is a Magic: The Gathering core set and, as it turned out, a genuinely historic one. It features 359 white-bordered cards - 116 commons, 112 uncommons, 111 rares, and 20 basic lands - drawn largely from popular cards across older expansions, many of which received brand-new artwork.

Ninth Edition holds a small but meaningful place in Magic history: it was the last Magic set ever printed with white borders. Every core set after it would use black borders, the same as expansion sets. That shift is, in part, a direct consequence of how 9ED was received - more on that below.

The set also has a fun bit of community DNA baked in. Some of the reprints included in Ninth Edition were selected through public voting on the Daily MTG website, run by Wizards of the Coast. Players genuinely helped shape what went into the set, which was a fairly novel idea at the time.

Card pool and set contents

The 359-card main set is the bulk of what most players encountered, but Ninth Edition also included nine exclusive starter-level "vanilla" creatures found only in the Core Game pack - a 2-Player Starter Set aimed at brand-new players. These nine cards weren't available in regular booster packs, which makes them a minor curiosity for collectors.

Format check: Like all core sets of its era, Ninth Edition was legal in Standard for roughly two years after release, then rotated out. It is not legal in Modern (which only goes back to Eighth Edition's 2003 reprint window as a baseline for card legality, though 9ED cards are legal if the card itself was printed in a Modern-legal set). Always check the specific card's print history on Scryfall if legality matters to you.

How Ninth Edition was sold

Ninth was available in the following products:

15-card booster packs (five different booster artworks: Elvish Champion, Serra Angel, Hell's Caretaker, Rathi Dragon, and Mahamoti Djinn)
Five theme decks
A fat pack - which received an upgrade with this set, now including two boxes with card dividers and a mini-poster built into the reverse of the card box wrapper
A Core Game (the 2-Player Starter Set)
24-card Demo Game boosters and 10-card sampler packs

Notably, Ninth Edition was not sold in tournament packs, which had been a staple of core set releases before this.

Like Eighth Edition before it, 9ED was the second and last set to feature box-toppers in booster boxes. The release promo card was Force of Nature. All booster packs also had a chance of containing premium black-bordered foil versions of any card in the set - a nice contrast given the white borders on the regular printings.

A historic first: Magic in Russian

Ninth Edition was the first Magic: The Gathering set printed in the Russian language. This is a small footnote that ended up having a surprisingly large ripple effect.

All Russian-language cards from the edition were printed with black borders, while every other language used white borders. The Russian printing proved enormously popular - and that popularity was one of the factors that pushed Wizards of the Coast toward permanently switching core set printing to black borders going forward.

Russian players also received a different promotional card: a Russian Shivan Dragon promo, given out in place of the Force of Nature promo distributed everywhere else.

Set legacy

Ninth Edition doesn't get talked about as a format-defining set - core sets of this era were reprints vehicles, not innovation labs - but it earned its place in Magic history on a few fronts.

It closed the white-border era for good. White borders had been the standard for core sets since the very beginning, used to distinguish reprints from new expansion cards. Ninth Edition's Russian printing demonstrated that players strongly preferred black borders, and Wizards listened. Tenth Edition (2007) launched with black borders across all languages, and the game has never looked back.

The community voting element was also ahead of its time. Letting players vote on which beloved older cards got reprinted was a genuine acknowledgment that the community had a stake in what the game preserved and celebrated - something that would later evolve into more formal player-engagement programs.

I think of Ninth Edition as a set that did its job quietly and well: it introduced new players to the game, gave veterans access to reprints of cards they loved, and then handed the baton to a new era of Magic presentation. Not every set needs to shake the foundations. Sometimes the most lasting contribution is being the last of something.