Portal Three Kingdoms rare.This card’s name refers to a trap laid by tactician Kongming using boulders to confound an incoming army. This wily character has his own card in the set (Kongming, “Sleeping Dragon”) and also appears in the flavor text of many Portal Three Kingdoms cards.
Ice Age rare. Did you ever notice that the Orcish Librarian is actually eating books about food? The titles that are readable are “The Joy of Cooking” and “Naked Lunch”, both of which presumably go better with a healthy helping of the Library Paste in the lower foreground.
Unhinged common. The design version of this card was originally called “Polly-morph”, with the idea that the card turns you into a parrot.
Champions of Kamigawa common. This is one of the fairly rare cases in which one card specifically mentions another card as part of a specific combo. Called “combo sets” by R&D, some other examples include the Urza’s lands, the Viashivan Dragon combo, the Spirit of the Night combo, and Dark Supplicant/Scion of Darkness.
Arabian Nights common. First released in Magic’s first expansion set, Arabian Nights (December ‘93), Rukh Egg didn’t get printed in another set until the Eighth Edition core set. At nearly ten years, that’s the longest any Magic card has waited to appear a second time.
Visions rare. This card’s name (and effect) references the much older card King Suleiman, from Arabian Nights. At the time of Visions this card was unique because it represented the longest gap between a card and a card being this directly referenced.
Urza’s Destiny uncommon. The most direct predecessor of this card was Vampiric Feast, printed in the introductory Portal set. The card Soul Feast first appeared in the Starter 1999 set, but with the printing of Urza’s Destiny it made the leap to tournament legal Magic.
Champions of Kamigawa uncommon. There are nine different cards in Magic with “feast” in the name, and out of all of them only this one doesn’t have black mana in the casting cost.
Judgment common. Did you ever notice that the flavor text for this card is actually the culmination of a three-card series that spanned all three sets of the Odyssey block? Taken in the order they were printed, take a look at the flavor text on Decompose, Carrion Rats, and then Rats’ Feast.
Legions common. In one of the more famous mistakes in top level Magic, Kai Budde lost a match at the 2003 German Nationals by playing this as a morph, thinking it was actually a Daru Sanctifier!
