Eighth Edition

Core Set Eighth Edition (8th Edition) is a Magic Core Set that was released on July 29, 2003. It marked the 10th Anniversary of Magic.

Set details
Eighth Edition featured 357 white-bordered cards, including cards from every previous expansion set since Alpha. The seven cards are exclusive to the Core Game pack. The set introduced a new cardface design that allowed for larger art and more card text.

Eighth Edition added reminder text about flying to those creatures that have the ability. it was also the first core set to see Fear in print (Fear was keyworded in Onslaught). The tap symbol changed to the simple, straightforward, easy-to-see curved arrow, without the rectangle behind it. The set introduced the basic supertype for lands.

Card frame
The colored frames around the edges of the card were redesigned and narrowed, boxes were placed around card names and creatures' Power/Toughness, card names were printed in a more modern font (Matrix Bold, rather than Goudy Medieval) and mana symbols appearing in the text box of artifacts were no longer colored.

Some players felt the new look interfered with the 'classical' fantasy feel of the game. An early problem was that the new card frames of white and artifact cards were hard to tell apart with a quick glance, which lead to the darkening of the frame of artifact cards with Fifth Dawn. The gray mana symbols in the textbox of artifact cards were corrected with Ravnica: City of Guilds.

Marketing
Eighth Edition was marketed as Core Set, because there were concerns that older base sets confused newer players — their primary audience — by making them feel like they "missed out" on five or six previous editions and were hopelessly behind. The set logo was still an "8" and it is still commonly referred to as Eighth Edition.

Eighth Edition was set to be released to coincide with the 10th Anniversary of Magic: the Gathering 's original release, so the developers took a different approach to the core set. Every previous expansion (34 sets in all) had at least one card reprinted in Eighth Edition that had not been reprinted in the base set before, with a series of votes on Magicthegathering.com website deciding what got reprinted. New artwork for the reprintes often referenced the old art and fans could submit their own flavor text throug the FlavOracle. "Global Celebration" tournaments were held July 26–27, 2003 as a release event of Eighth Edition and a commemoration of Magic 's 10th Anniversary. The release card was a foil Rukh Egg. A 4/4 Rukh Token with Flying for the same card was featured as a Magic Player Reward.

Eighth was sold in 15-card-booster packs, 5 different Theme decks and a Core Game (which was a 2-Player Starter Set), but not in tournament packs. The boosters featured artwork from Blinding Angel, Lhurgoyf, Phyrexian Plaguelord, Two-Headed Dragon and Tidal Kraken.

The set featured randomly inserted premium black bordered versions of all cards in the set, and also oversized Box-Topper Cards found at the top of each booster display box. The Eighth Edition came with both 24-card Demogame boosters and 10-card sampler packs.

Rules changes
A rules change was that the card draw each turn no longer used the stack. Instead the player simply draws a card as their draw step starts. They see what they draw before abilities that trigger "at the beginning of your draw step" are put onto the stack. Spells and abilities that affect the normal card draw should be played during the upkeep step, not the draw step. The type line of each basic land now included the words "Basic Land" and the land's type, separated by a long dash. For example, a Forest card has the printed type line "Basic Land Forest." Plains, Island</c>, Swamp</c>, Mountain</c>, and Forest cards printed in earlier sets should be treated as though they had the same type line as the Eighth Edition basic lands.

Cycles
Eighth Edition has 3 cycles.

Theme decks
The preconstructed theme decks are:

Core set changes
Whenever a development team at the time worked on a base set, they made a wish list of cards they wanted to include but were unable to as the card did not exist and they were not allowed to add new cards. In essence, the team ordered cards for the next base set (traditionally two years later). This means that the Seventh Edition development team had made a wish list for Eighth Edition.
 * Notable changes
 * Red's Enrage</c> replaced black's Howl From Beyond</c> in both Eighth and Ninth Edition.
 * Green's Naturalize</c> replaced white's Disenchant</c> in Eighth and all future core sets until Core Set 2020.
 * The Urzatron set was added and found its way into many tournament decks during its inclusion in core sets.
 * The Circle of Protection series, a perennial core set entity, remained in the set but changed from common to uncommon.
 * Counterspell</c> was not printed in Eighth Edition or since. It had been deemed that a hard counter costing just was too powerful. Cancel</c> from Time Spiral would become the hard counter at.
 * Merfolk were not printed in Eighth Edition.
 * Llanowar Elves</c> was removed from the core set.