Alpha

Alpha is the first printing of Magic: The Gathering, released on August 5, 1993. This archive lists all 295 cards of the set with their exact production figures, reconstructed from the Carta Mundi factory records and the 11×11 print sheet layout.

295 unique cards: 116 Rare, 95 Uncommon, 74 Common and 10 Basic Lands (2 art variants per land type).

Production Data & Sheet Logistics

The factory printed exactly 1,008 Rare sheets, 4,530 Uncommon sheets and 16,030 Common sheets, each holding 121 cards in an 11×11 layout. Total print run: 2,610,000 cards (2,609,728 from whole sheets).

These sheets were cut and collated into 69,768 booster packs (often rounded to 70,000 in historical sources) and 26,100 starter decks. Boosters shipped in 1,938 booster boxes of 36, packed into 323 master cases of 6 boxes; starter decks shipped in displays of 10 (2,610 displays). Overall, 59.9% of all Alpha cards reached players through starter decks and 40.1% through boosters.

Product Composition

Alpha had no dedicated land sheet: its 876,230 basic lands (33.57% of the print run) were distributed across the three rarity sheets. This causes the “land invasion” effect: a basic land replaces a spell with a probability of 4.13% in the Rare slot, 21.49% in the Uncommon slot and 38.84% in the Common slot. An average Alpha booster contains 4.96 basic lands, and only 1 booster in 482 contains none.

Basic Land Art Variants

Basic lands in Alpha exist in two distinct art variants per land type. The total copies per land type are confirmed by the sheet layout; the split between art variants follows an equal-slot allocation on the print sheets, declared as a derived hypothesis. Each basic land page shows copies, pull odds and artwork for every single variant.

All figures follow the industrial framework described in our print run methodology.

Buy Alpha Sealed