Ninth Edition

Ninth Edition (9th Edition) is a Magic Core Set that was released on July 29, 2005.

Set details
Ninth Edition featured 359 white-bordered cards. The nine cards (starter-level "vanilla" creatures) are exclusive to the Core Game pack. The set featured many popular cards from older expansions. Some of the reprints for the set were decided upon through public voting on the Daily MTG website run by Wizards of the Coast. Many reprints received new artwork. Ninth Edition was the last Magic set to be printed with white borders.

Marketing
Ninth was sold in 15-card-booster packs, 5 different theme decks, a fat pack and a Core Game (which was a 2-Player Starter Set), but not in tournament packs. The boosters featured artwork from Elvish Champion, Serra Angel, Hell's Caretaker, Rathi Dragon and Mahamoti Djinn. The set featured randomly inserted premium black bordered versions of all cards. Ninth Edition was also the second and last set to feature box-toppers in booster boxes. The release card was Force of Nature. The Ninth came with both 24-card Demogame boosters and 10-card sampler packs.

With Ninth Edition, came a change to the fat pack. The fat pack now contained two boxes with card dividers and a mini-poster built into the reverse of the card box wrapper.

Ninth Edition was the first Magic set printed in the Russian language. All Russian language cards from the edition have black borders, while other languages have white borders. A Russian Shivan Dragon promotional card was given out to participants instead of the Force of Nature promo issued everywhere else. The popularity of the Russian set was partially responsible to the change-over from to printing Core Set cards with the more popular black borders permanently.

Mechanics
Ninth Edition featured only mechanics present in previous expansions. However, it did modify the list of mechanics considered suitable for Core Sets. Trample and Protection returned after having been removed from 6th Edition onwards.

The set introduced Auras, a new name for a kind of card that's been around since the beginning of the Magic game. An Aura is just a type of enchantment that's attached to another permanent in play.

Ninth Edition is the first core set to include the artifact subtype Equipment that was introduced in the Mirrodin block. Both equipment (Loxodon Warhammer and Vulshok Morningstar</c>) moved up in rarity when added to Ninth Edition.

Creature types
In general, the creature types of older cards were updated only as they were reprinted. In this way, many cards in the Ninth Edition core set were updated to sync them up with the conventions used in the Kamigawa block and the Ravnica: City of Guilds set. Most of the changes revolved around the "race-class" model, wherein most sentient creatures have both a species and a job. Samite Healer</c>, for example, was changed from a Cleric to a Human Cleric, and Raging Goblin</c> changed from Goblin to Goblin Berserker. Every artifact creature that didn't have a type before was given one; Dancing Scimitar</c> was now a Spirit and Ornithopter was a Thopter. A lot of cards with old obscure types were updated to have ones that made a little more sense. Clone</c> was now a Shapeshifter, for instance, and the Lords such as Elvish Champion</c> were given types to match their art. In addition, the creature type of the token created by Rukh Egg</c>'s ability was changed from Rukh to Bird. Note that the following creature types were eliminated: Behemoth, Clone, Force, Hell's-Caretaker, Monkey, Nekrataal, Rukh and Will-O'-The-Wisp.

Cycles
Ninth Edition has 3 cycles and 3 matched pairs.

Cards added to Ninth Edition

 * Boiling Seas</c> replaced Boil</c> as the red "Destroy all Islands" at the same casting cost, but Boiling Seas is a sorcery while Boil is an instant.
 * The Lucky Charms cycle was replaced with the improved version from Darksteel.

Theme decks
The preconstructed theme decks are:

Core set changes

 * Notable changes
 * Birds of Paradise had been in every core set since Alpha up until Ninth Edition, leaving Standard for the first time in the game's history. Birds of Paradise would return to Standard with Ravnica: City of Guilds.
 * Stone Rain</c> had seen print in every core set up until Ninth Edition.
 * Walls were not printed in Ninth Edition as they seemed out of flavor, but they did return in 10th Edition.