The late 1990s, early 2000s was a special time for Magic: The Gathering - and it showed through their booster packs.
Following the incredibly popular Urza block, Wizards of the Coast decided to go in a different direction with booster pack design.
It was 1999, and by now, everyone seemed to be copying off of Magic in terms of booster pack design. So, to stand out again, they decided to change around the art. How so? Well, they simply slid the image to the left.
Generally it was about what they were doing otherwise. What experience level it was at, fancy expansion logo. The two follow-ups in the block continued this on, including having only one piece of artwork that follow up expansions in the blocks had been doing for years.
The next block up was Invasion. While the artwork slide over stayed, the foil color changed from the normal silver to bronze-ish.
And on the back, the Hasbro era officially kicked in with the new Wizards of the Coast logo appearing on them.
Planeshift and Apocalypse kept up the same design too. However, confusion over the packs was still a thing, so Magic upped the color change for the fringes of the packs for the Odyssey block in 2001. Colors were everywhere, with the Sixth and Seventh Edition boosters having green and copper colored foil. Odyssey had a distinctive red border:
Torment was plain black:
And Judgment was back to regular.
By 2002, Magic decided to change things up again. Magic being sought after once again, they upped the number of different pack images from three to five. The art shift over was gone with a full image being back on. And the level ovals? Well, ok, those stayed. The shiny foil edges were gone, too. Essentially they went from the flashy packs the mid to late 1990s foil era to the more image and logo heavy card packs of the 2000s. And Onslaught was the first one to do it.
And more changes came with the following two expansions of the block, Legions and Scourge. Rather than just have one piece of artwork for boosters, they had a few others.
By now, it was 2003. Booster packs were no longer shiny on the outside, opting for the matte image look. Well....just or the Onslaught block. The Mirrodin block was coming up and they decided to go back to foil for a bit. But that's for next time.
