How many cards are in The Dark set?

The Dark contains 119 unique cards, printed on sheets of 121 cards. The rarity breakdown is 41 commons and 78 uncommons, with the U1 uncommons effectively serving as the set's rares. There are no cards officially designated 'rare' in the modern sense.

When was The Dark released?

The Dark was released in mid-August 1994 and was available through mid-November 1994. It was sold in eight-card booster packs containing six commons and two uncommons.

What mechanics does The Dark introduce?

The Dark doesn't introduce sweeping new mechanics, but it brings back poison counters and establishes a goblin tribal theme. It also made history by featuring the first multicoloured noncreature card, the first common multicoloured card, and the first enemy-pair multicoloured card in Magic.

What is the story and setting of The Dark?

The Dark is set on Dominaria, in the era following the Brothers' War. The Sylex Blast blotted out the sun, causing climate cooling and triggering the rise of an anti-magic religion that persecuted wizards. Magic-users fled to two hidden refuges: the City of Shadows in the east and the Conclave of Mages in the west. The set was introduced by a short story published in The Duelist issue 2.

What makes The Dark lands look different?

Each land in The Dark has a unique dark grey-purple-coloured text box not found on lands in any other set. The only time this distinctive frame appeared elsewhere was on the Chronicles reprint of Safe Haven.

Was The Dark released in languages other than English?

Yes — The Dark was the first Magic expansion released in Italian, making it a historically notable printing. The Italian edition of Legends was released later, despite Legends being an older set.

The Dark (DRK): MTG Set Guide & Card List

There's something almost poetic about a set called The Dark arriving in the summer of 1994, just as Magic: The Gathering was still finding its footing. Released in mid-August of that year, The Dark is a small, strange, and historically fascinating expansion that rewards closer inspection - not just for its cards, but for what it represents in the game's early story.

What is The Dark?

The Dark (set code: DRK) is an expansion set released in August 1994. It was sold through mid-November 1994 in eight-card booster packs, each containing six commons and two uncommons.

Despite being printed on sheets of 121 cards, the set contains 119 unique cards. Its rarity breakdown is unusual by modern standards: 41 commons and 78 uncommons, with the uncommons split into U1 and U2 tiers - the U1 cards are effectively the set's "rares." One card appears at C1 frequency alongside the U2 uncommons, so the practical experience of opening packs felt quite different from how rarity works today.

Wizards of the Coast announced a print run of approximately 62 million cards, making The Dark one of the larger early print runs. The set carries another notable distinction: it was the first Magic expansion released in Italian, beating the Italian printing of Legends to market.

The expansion symbol is a thin crescent moon - a deliberately understated image that captures the set's tone perfectly.

Themes and mechanics

The Dark doesn't introduce sweeping mechanical systems in the way later sets would. Instead, it leans into a handful of focused themes that give it a distinct, slightly oppressive character.

Goblin tribal

One of the set's most recognisable threads is a goblin tribal theme. If you've ever wondered why goblins have been a persistent tribe in Magic's red identity, The Dark is part of that origin story. The set builds on the chaotic, aggressive nature of goblin cards in a way that planted seeds for tribal strategies to come.

Intense mana and upkeep costs

Many of The Dark's most powerful effects come with a price - heavy coloured mana requirements and ongoing upkeep costs that punish you for not committing fully to a strategy. This design philosophy gives the set a boom-or-bust flavour. Cards feel genuinely dangerous, which suits the tone.

Poison counters return

The Dark marks one of the earliest reappearances of poison counters in Magic's history. Poison counters - which cause a player to lose the game upon accumulating ten - have had a famously on-again, off-again relationship with the game's design. Seeing them surface here, so early in Magic's life, is a small piece of trivia that infect (👋) players still talk about today.

Multicoloured firsts

For a set released before gold cards were mainstream, The Dark quietly made history on the multicoloured front:

It introduced the first multicoloured noncreature card
It contains the first common multicoloured card
It features the first enemy-pair multicoloured card

These feel like footnotes, but they matter. The Dark was quietly expanding what Magic cards could even be, months before Legends had fully settled into players' collections.

The Dark lands

Each land in The Dark has a unique dark grey-purple-coloured text box - a visual choice that no other set has replicated, and which gives these cards an immediately recognisable look. The only exception is the Chronicles reprint of Safe Haven, which carried this distinctive text box forward.

Limited and draft

The Dark predates the modern draft format, and its booster configuration - six commons and two uncommons per pack - doesn't map neatly onto how we think about Limited today. As a result, there's no established draft archetype framework for DRK in the contemporary sense.

If you're looking to experience The Dark in a Limited environment at all, it's most likely through Cube or old-school formats. The set's mechanical identity - aggressive costs, tribal goblins, punishing upkeeps - suggests a format that rewards commitment and punishes greediness.

Lore and setting

The world after the Brothers' War

The Dark is set on Dominaria, in the period immediately following the catastrophic conclusion of the Brothers' War. The Sylex Blast - Urza's desperate, world-scarring final act - lofted debris into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun. The result is a prolonged darkening of the world: crops fail, temperatures drop, and civilisation fractures.

This is where the set gets its name. "The Dark" isn't a villain or a place - it's a historical era, a slow-motion catastrophe unfolding across Dominaria in the decades after Urza and Mishra's war destroyed everything they claimed to be fighting for.

Out of this desperation, an anti-magic religion rises to power, blaming the Sylex Blast and its consequences on magic and those who wield it. The persecution that follows drives magic-users underground - literally, in some cases. Two refuges emerge: the City of Shadows in the east and the Conclave of Mages in the west, where wizards hide and survive while the world above condemns them.

Lore aside: The story of Jodah, one of Magic's longest-running characters, is rooted in this period. Jeff Grubb's novel The Gathering Dark (1999) is set here and follows the early life of the archmage who would eventually become a recurring figure across decades of Magic storytelling.

The Dark short story

The set was introduced with a short story - simply titled The Dark (sometimes called The Lure of the Dark) - written by Kathy Ice, Beverly Marshall Saling, and Rick Saling Marshall. It was published in the second issue of The Duelist in summer 1994.

The story follows two characters: Brand, a wizard who ignores a friend's warnings and pursues dark magic to defend the outer ring of planes he controls, and Mindrel, who tries to talk him out of it - and later returns to find his home refuge corrupted and lifeless. Mindrel leaves knowing she'll face the same challenge soon, and unsure whether she'll be strong enough to resist the same temptation.

It's a tight, morally serious little story that does exactly what a set-introduction story should: it tells you what the theme of these cards feels like to live through, not just to cast.

Storyline sources

The Dark has accumulated a substantial body of associated fiction over the years, spanning pre-revisionist short stories and the later revisionist novel that tied the era into Magic's broader continuity:

| Title | Author | Published | |---|---|---| | The Dark (short story) | Kathy Ice | Summer 1994 | | Inheritance (Tapestries) | S. D. Perry | July 1995 | | A Monstrous Duty (Distant Planes) | Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury | June 1996 | | Dark Legacy | Robert E. Vardeman | November 1996 | | A Song out of Darkness (The Colors of Magic) | Loren L. Coleman | February 1999 | | Bound in Shallows (The Colors of Magic) | Kevin T. Stein | February 1999 | | Loran's Smile (The Colors of Magic) | Jeff Grubb | February 1999 | | The Gathering Dark | Jeff Grubb | June 1999 | | The Fog (The Dragons of Magic) | Tim Ryan | August 2001 |

The earlier stories in this list are pre-revisionist canon - meaning they were written before Wizards standardised Magic's continuity, and may contradict later official lore.

Set legacy

The Dark is a set that tends to get overshadowed in histories of early Magic. It sits between the titans - after Legends and before Fallen Empires - and its 119 cards don't include the flashiest power-level moments of either neighbour.

But that undersells it. The Dark is historically significant in ways that compound over time. The multicoloured firsts it established helped prove the design space that sets like Ravnica would eventually make foundational to the whole game. Its goblin tribal contributions are part of a lineage that runs through decades of red aggro. And its poison counter appearances are an early data point in one of Magic's longest-running design debates, one that didn't fully resolve until Scars of Mirrodin in 2010.

Perhaps most importantly, The Dark gives us one of the richest and most underexplored periods of Dominaria's history to build story around. The era it depicts - a world blotted out by magical catastrophe, with desperate survivors hiding in the shadows - is genuinely compelling, and the fiction it inspired, especially Grubb's The Gathering Dark, holds up as some of the better Magic prose from that era.

For collectors, the set's distinctive land frames and crescent moon symbol make it immediately recognisable. For historians of the game, it's a quiet but essential piece of Magic's early puzzle.