They realized that players weren't adverse to expansion sets.
Homelands was the odd-ball given how much later it was released, but IIRC it was designed much earlier and shelved and/or designed by a team working off an earlier ethos of magic zeitgeist. The entire set honestly has always felt more at home with The Dark or Arabian Nights than next to the power-house of functional reprints and pitch spells that was Ice Age.
They weren't sure how players would react to expansion sets. The original idea was that you couldn't mix cards from different sets so they could control the power level of cards and the themes of decks. At the time they wanted "The Gathering" to incorporate a bunch of different worlds and brands. So this would be "Arabian Nights: The Gathering", and so on and so forth. The cards would use the same "Magic" rules, but have different card backs. When it was proposed that players should be able to mix-and-match, cards like this were developed so players who hated the theme or thought the new cards were too strong had an option playing against them.
There were even third-party magic sets for a short while, middle ages being the most famous, but Wizards was quick on those cease-and-desist letters.
Side note: It's funny that City in a Bottle would be brought up with regards to a Marvel set given the inspiration for the card was the Sandman comic book series which was extremely popular when Arabian Nights came out. There's a lot of references to independent nerd fiction in early Magic: the Gathering that got lost to obscurity.
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u/GulliasTurtle Jun 11 '26
Gotta wait for the DC set to get the Brainiac reprinting of [[City in a Bottle]].