If you collect a card that is expected to exist in following sets, you might be able to remove some versions from your wants list. These cards don’t exist:
| Set | Card | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Limited Edition Alpha |
|
It is said Wizards of the Coast wasn't content with the art received for Volcanic Island and designed another card based on it: Birds of Paradise. According to Jesper Myrfors, who was art director back then, there was no art available for CoP: Black so that he had to create one himself in no time. It was the only digital art for a Magic card in these days. |
| Italian Renaissance | Piety | |
| Portuguese 4th Edition BB and WB |
|
All missing Portuguese cards are ante cards. Portuguese Magic was mainly introduced for Brazil, where gambling is forbidden. |
| Portuguese Homelands | Timmerian Fiends | |
| Portuguese Ice Age | Amulet of Quoz | |
| Traditional Chinese and Korean 4th Edition |
|
The Chinese censorship removed some cards showing barely dressed creatures or religious motives. |
Simplified Chinese 5th Edition
99 cards were taken out:
Missing Chinese Foils
Some sets were printed in Chinese but had no foil versions. Boosters of these contained English foil cards instead:
— Traditional Chinese Urza’s Legacy
— Traditional Chinese Urza’s Destiny
— Traditional Chinese Mercadian Masques
— Simplified Chinese Invasion
Russian Coldsnap and Streets of New Capenna
Wizards had planned to release Coldsnap in all active languages. But theme decks were cut in Chinese, and Russian doesn’t exist at all. Hence, it was the only standard legal booster set not supporting all of the then active languages.
Streets of New Capenna was announced but never officially distributed. Very few set booster boxes are known to exist, so probably not all cards are available.
Misleading Data in the Web
Several non-existing localized versions of sets are listed to exist in the official Wizards of the Coast data base Gatherer and older existing ones are not. This erroneous data has more or less been used for all multilingual online stores and community made MTG card search sites. The correct info can be found in the old Wizards of the Coast product archive. The language info there is only valid for booster packs, other products may exist in fewer languages:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161106024608/http://magic.wizards.com:80/en/game-info/products/card-set-archive
Be cautious about circulating spread sheets which aim to list all sets and languages they were printed in. I have not yet seen one that’s both complete and correct.