October 1996 - 350 Cards

This expansion began the first official block set with one large expansion being followed by two smaller expansions. This expansion introduced 5th Edition rules (5th Edition was released March 1997). In December 2005 Mirage was release on Magic: The Gathering Online. Mirage was the first set retroactively released on Magic Online.

While its origins in play testing linked it to earlier sets, Mirage was not designed to stand alone. Mirage was created as an introduction to Jamuraa, with two more planned expansions to create a cohesive set. This model became the standard for Magic: The Gathering expansions and began the concept of block rotation.

Mirages public debut was at Pro Tour Atlanta 1996, where professional Magic players had the challenge of playing sealed deck with cards they had never seen before. Mirage was also the first set to have pre-releases at more than one city.

Like Ice Age - Mirage began as a set of modifications to Alpha by a group of Richard Garfield's playtesters in winter 1992. Bill Rose, Charlie Catino, Joel Mick, Howard Kahlenberg, Don Felice and Elliott Segal created gameplay modifications and new cards over the course of three years.

In October 1995, Mirage was sent to Wizards of the Coast for development while Art Director Sue-Ann Harkey provided Mirage's African influenced look.

Wizards of the Coast's design and development team considers Mirage to be the first set of the Silver Age or modern era of Magic. It was the first set to be designed with Limited and Constructed play in mind. Previous designs had been imbalanced for formats like draft and sealed-deck, and cards were designed for casual players rather than with thought of their impact on the tournament scene.

Mirage introduced the first cycle of charms.

A charm is a spell that allow a player to choose among three different effects when the charm is played. Since then, similar cycles of charms have appeared in Visions, Planeshift, Onslaught, Planar Chaos and Shards of Alara.

Also in Mirage - The Nightstalkers were a set of three small creatures: Breathstealer, Feral Shadow and Urborg Panther. A player could sacrifice these three creatures from play to summon the legendary Spirit of the Night.

Mirage introduced two keywords:

• Flanking represents a fighting advantage. Any creature without flanking that blocks a creature with flanking gets -1/-1 until end of turn. This allows a creature with flanking to destroy creatures larger than itself, and even destroy creatures with a toughness of 1 before damage is assigned.
• Phasing represents the removal from existence caused by Teferi's experiments. A permanent with phasing enters and leaves play without any involvement by the player. At the beginning of a player's turn, before the untap phase, any permanents with phasing in play phase out (are removed from play into a special zone), and any phased out permanents return to play. At the time of the set's release, phasing triggered leaves play events but not enters play events. Following a rules modification in October 2005, phasing no longer triggers ‘leaves play’ events.

Story: The story concerns three of the most powerful nations of Jamuraa (a tropical continent modeled after Africa) - Zhalfir, Femeref, and Suq'Ata. Suq'Ata was the warrior nation, based mainly on red. Femeref was mainly white, and featured clerics and healers, while the seafaring traders of Zhalfir were mostly blue. Mirage concerned these three nations and their struggle against the evil wizard Kaervek. Kaervek has imprisoned the powerful wizard and diplomat Mangara in an amber prison and the bulk of the story details the Jamuraans attempting to free Mangara. In addition to these events the planeswalker Teferi has caused his island to disappear from existence for almost 200 years. It is the phasing of the entire island that led Kaervek and Mangara to Jamuraa in the first place.