The Revised Edition of the basic set was released in April 1994 with 306 cards. This set set "cleaned up" several rules and graphical oversights from the previous Unlimited basic set.
The Unlimited Edition was released in December 1993 with 302 cards. These cards were the same cards that were released in the Beta Edition but they have white-borders instead of black-borders.
It is hard to tell the Revised cards from the Unlimited cards, but here is a list of as many characteristical differences as possible.
- The easiest way to tell Revised from Unlimited is to examine the border
between the white border and the inner section of the card itself. On
both card sets, there is a thin black line that separates the border from
the inner section of the card. Note that on the unlimited card there is
an thin inner bevel on the inside of the thin black line. Because of this
bevel, some peoplpe refer to Revised cards as being "flat." This is a noticable
difference between the two sets and is the easiest way to tell them apart.
The following example shows the difference between a Revised and an
Unlimited, Green "Grizzly Bears" card:
Revised 
Unlimited 
- A second way to tell Revised from Unlimited is the darkness of the ink.
In general, cards from the Unlimited appear darker than those of the Revised
set. On green cards, as in this example, the best place to look is at the
wooden background of the card text. If the wood is a pale brown vs. a dark
brown, then you have a Revised card. If the wood is a dark brown then you
have an Unlimited card. If you think about it, it makes sense... the Unlimited
cards were first released with grey title text with a black drop shadow (the name of the card,
the type of teh card and the artist information)... because the cards were
so dark, it was actually kind of hard (not really hard) to read the text. So,
by lightening the cards the drop shadow became more prominent and the title
text easier to read. Warning: This is not the best method to use
because the age of an card can have an effect on the darkness of a card. The
following example shows the great difference between the lighter Revised cards
and the darker Unlimited cards:
Revised 
Unlimited 
For full card comparisons of this card and others see the following examples: Grizzly Bears, Regeneration, Life Force
- Many people think that the size of the text can be used to differentiate a Revised card
from an Unlimited card. Although this may be true in more than 50% of the cases, there
are too many exceptions to the rule to use this as an reasonable guideline for Magic
card forensics. The following example is from the same "Grizzly Bears" cards
again showing that the text is about the same size on both cards:
Revised 
Unlimited 
In another example, this one shows that the exact opposite of the myth is true... here due to a rule change, the text on the Unlimited (right) card is SMALLER than that on the Revised (left) card:
Credits: Special thanks to Halpo Patryn for his help on this topic. He is a good customer of the Forstle Card Shop with a lot of knowledge about the older cards.
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.