Forensics : Older Black-Bordered Cards

If your cards are black-bordered and do not have any set symbols and there are not copyright dates at the bottom of the cards, then you either have Alpha or Beta edition cards.

The Alpha Edition was released on August 5, 1993. It consisted of 295 cards. There were initially supposed to be about 10 million cards printed, but only about 2.6 million of them were considered to be the Alpha edition.

The Beta Edition was released slightly after the Alpha edition with some corrections were made. The remaining 7.3 million cards or the original 10 million card batch were released as the "Beta" set consisting of 302 cards.

If you have any of the following cards, they are Beta cards because they did not exist in the Alpha edition:

It is fairly simple to to tell the Alpha cards from the Beta cards because their shape gives them away. For some reason Alpha cards are more rounded at the corners than Beta cards. This causes them to look "out of place" when compared to what the Magic cards of today look like. That is the largest distinction that we know about at this time.

This page is under construction. There will be more details about how to determine what kind of card you have very soon. If you have any tips on how you decipher which set a card belongs to, please e-mail me and you will be given the appropriate credit on this web site.