Arabian Nights
Further Information

Q: What would have gone in the slot the Mountain occupied?

Answer: Desert Nomads. The full set of lands and alternatives is as follows:

  1. Mountain or Desert Nomads
  2. Island or Flying Men
  3. Swamp or Hasran Ogress
  4. Plains or Camel
  5. Forest or Wyluli Wolf

Q: Why do some of the Arabian Nights cards have those weird dark colorless mana circles?

Answer: As you may recall, of the eight quadrants' worth of cards for Arabian Nights, only one of them ran correctly the first time. That was Quadrant 1a, which had the mountain on it.

When I replaced all the mana symbols with the ones altered by Freehand to not melt down the imagesetting machine, there was a problem with the colorless mana symbols. So all the cards with colorless mana symbols except the ones on Quadrant 1a came out smaller and dark.

Specifically, they "overprinted". When there's black on the card, whatever the colored background is supposed to be gets printed down anyway. Otherwise, unless the black was exactly totally completely perfectly aligned with the other colors on the paper, you'd see a tiny white hairline where the black ink didn't cover the white hole beneath.

This is great for the black type, for example. Overprinting the black on top of the color means the type stays more legible even at smaller sizes. However, we do not want to overprint the mana symbols, because there needs to be white behind the light black dot pattern in order to have a light gray.

Alas, the Arabian Nights discs didn't knock out like they were supposed to. They overprinted whatever background they were against. Except for that one quadrant.