Fifth Dawn is Magic: The Gathering expansion set, which came out in May, 2004. It is the third set of Mirrodin block. There are 165 cards overall, a high number of them are artifacts. However, Fifth Dawn adds a new twist to artifact theme of Mirrodin and Darksteel: it encourages using colored mana for playing artifact spells (see Sunburst mechanic below). Fifth Dawn 's expansion symbol is small image of Helm of Kaldra, a card from this set.

Fifth Dawn was the first set to introduce a new card front design of artifacts: border color became more dark, so the artifacts would be less likely confused with white cards.

Mechanics

• Sunburst - the artifact card with Sunburst gets +1/+1 counter (if it's creature) or a charge counter (if it's a noncreature artifact) for each color of mana used to pay for it.
• Scry - "Scry N" means when you play this card, look at the top N cards of your library. Put any number of them on the bottom of your library and the rest on top in any order.
• The set also focuses on "cogs" (the artifacts that cost 1 or 0 mana, although they're not referred to as "cogs" in rules text) and on combo pieces. For example, it contains a cycle of four artifacts called stations that, when used together, formed an infinity combo, or a combination of cards that allows a player an infinite amount of some resource. They do not mention each other by name (and in fact are the first R&D designed combo not to do so), and so combinations of only two or three and some other card (such as March of the Machines from Mirrodin or Mycosynth Lattice from Darksteel) are also usefull. This combo is also the first R&D-designed infinity combo; previous ones had effects that put a normally expensive creature into play or only worked if another specific card was in play.

Notable Cards

• Eternal Witness is a cheap green creature that upon entering play, could return any card in its controllers graveyard to their hand. The effect is a duplicate of the out of print card Regrowth.
• Helm of Kaldra is the last and crucial part of Kaldra's equipment: when you have all three of them (Sword, Shield and Helm) in play you can put Kaldra token in play, equipped with these, resulting in a 9/9 indestructible creature with first strike, trample and haste. That card was given out on the prerelease events of Fifth Dawn.
• Crucible of Worlds - notable for being the result of You Make The Card 2 feature of magicthegathering.com. The visitors of the site "designed" the card by voting for the different aspects of the card and submitting card rules and flavor text.

External Links

• http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=magic/expansion/5dn - Official Fifth Dawn Page