Deck Primer / Description

Chris Page - Mishra's Factory - The Duelist Magazine #5 - Summer 1995
https://archive.org/details/duelist-5/page/12/mode/2up

Ben Bleiweiss - The Standout Enchantments - WOTC Website - 17-04-2002
About Animate Dead
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/standout-enchantments-2002-04-17

Omeed Dariani - All-Time MVPs: Library of Alexandria - The Sideboard Oneline - 29-07-2003
https://web.archive.org/web/20030811183049/http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=sideboard/feature/20030729a

Stephen Mendenian - Schools of Magic: History of Vintage – The First Ten Years - 20-10-2013
https://www.eternalcentral.com/tag/history-of-vintage/

Steve Menendian - Old School Magic: Chapter 9 – Reanimator Rises to the Top! - Vintage Magic - 16-05-2016
http://www.vintagemagic.com/blog/old-school-magic-chapter-9-reanimator-rises-to-the-top/

Histoire de Magic the Gathering - 1994 - Partie 3 - L'aube du Vintage - Terrain Basique Youtube - 25-03-2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEry8H7hkug

Easily the best card in Arabian Nights, the Library does something that lands practically never do: draw cards. While the Library’s contemporary Bazaar of Baghdad and Odyssey’s Cephalid Coliseum both offer bursts of cards at a disadvantage, the Library is an unabashed card-drawing machine. With a unique drawback, that the card only functions if you have seven cards in hand, the Library could be easily rendered useless by a flurry of discard or even a strong measure of early pressure forcing you to play out multiple cards quickly. Unless dealt with quickly, the Library is a lethal card. Having an uncounterable Howling Mine that, in a pinch, produces a mana, can overwhelm opponents in no time at all. We all know how important card advantage is in Magic. With a good amount of card advantage produced at a reasonable cost, any good deck should be able to beat any other good deck that is without the benefits of such card advantage. The Library is the perfect example of this premise. As a land, it can be played as early as turn one. Since it has no real drawbacks, it doesn’t even matter if you’re knocked out of Library range, because it just switches to a below-average land. It’s also interesting to note that Library of Alexandria is one of the very few cards in Magic that is based in reality. The Library of Alexandria was, obviously, located in Alexandria, Egypt, built by Greek occupiers in 235 BC. It was widely regarded as the single greatest collection of human knowledge in the ancient world, reputedly boasting over 500,000 works, which probably included a great deal of ancient philosophy, history, mathematics, and literature that has been lost to us. It is commonly believed that the library was burned down, though scholars debate who is actually responsible for that. The most famous suspect is Julius Caesar, but there are at least a couple of others that are as likely. Having arrived in Magic’s first expansion, Arabian Nights, the Library has been legal longer than most people have been playing. Since its debut, it has been an absolute staple in all but the most aggressive decks, as Type I (Vintage) has many, many ways to feed a depleted hand. When the control decks have powerful effects like Ancestral Recall and Timetwister (not to mention more current card-drawers) to get back to seven cards in hand, it’s not difficult to understand how easy it is to maintain a seven-card hand and maximize the Library’s potential. Type I is full of power cards that can do all sorts of things. Black Lotus is a ton of free mana. Time Walk is a cheap extra turn. Necropotence is a massive burst of cards. Balance is a global sweeper. Wheel of Fortune is new hands for everyone. The board is populated by the nastiest and most potent creatures printed in the last ten years who, thanks to the strength of the spells in the environment, can easily be wiped out. In a metagame like that, it takes something very special to make a splash. Think about how many cards per year make it from the latest expansions into serious Type I decks. Very few. Now, think about how many cards from expansions compare favorably with the Power 9 (the Moxes, Black Lotus, Time Walk, Timetwister, and Ancestral Recall). Only the Library is so powerful that many players consider it an unofficial member of that group (the Power 10). Though there were a couple good ways to break down the card-drawing the Library offered, Mind Twist being the most direct and powerful of them, players were hard-pressed to compete with an active Library of Alexandria. Often, by the time a player could find an adequate response, it was too late. Either the game was out of their hands or the Library had already given up so much card advantage that it would be an uphill battle to compete. In the worst case scenarios (for the Library’s controller), it would simply pay for itself before being nullified. However, all of the extra cards the Library offered made it difficult to foil through the use of spells. Often, the player with the Library would have access to counters to guard it vigorously. This made spell-based defenses against it very difficult. Practically the only card that could slip through and thwart the Library was Black Vise. It was cheap and attacked exactly what the Library offered: a big hand. Even it was not enough to curb the powerful land. The Library was one of the first cards to receive a direct hoser against it. In Antiquities, we were introduced to Strip Mine. Strip Mine was the first land that could destroy another land. It had numerous advantages over other cards that attacked the Library directly, like Sinkhole and Stone Rain. First, it was cheaper than those spells, which cost two or three mana. It only cost you your land drop. This meant that as quickly as your opponent could play a Library of Alexandria, you could remove it. At most, they could get a single card out of it, which was more than fair, considering what would happen if they actually got to use it unrestricted. On top of that, it was also uncounterable. There were no Interdicts or other ways to stop the Strip Mine, meaning that the Library was completely vulnerable. Over the years, other cards, which were not necessarily directed at countering the Library, have surfaced. Tempest’s Wasteland is every bit as effective as the now-restricted Strip Mine. Mirage’s Political Trickery is a nice way to swap out your island for a much better card. In general, there are plenty of ways to nullify the Library, but none of them have stopped it from seeing quite a bit of play. In the early game, an active Library of Alexandria meant dominance, allowing you to play two spells per turn, to your opponent’s one. If a player was able to draw it early and maintain the seven-card stipulation successfully (which is often harder than it seems) over the first few turns, he or she was often rewarded with an easy game, coasting on the coattails of "Library-lock". If his or her opponent was able to break out, either by playing threats and forcing the Library player out of the ivory tower or by using aggressive discard, it was a struggle to get back into Library range, but it was always a struggle worth fighting. The simple fact is that Library of Alexandria is a personal Howling Mine with a drawback that can be remedied when it comes up. Very few cards can offer a player this much power– and those that can are simply not in the same league as Library of Alexandria.
Omeed Dariani - All-Time MVPs: Library of Alexandria - The Sideboard Oneline - 29-07-2003

One notable creation that at least earned a nod from a Fallen Empires printing was known as “The Machine,” the brainchild of Mark Chalice, the Californian who would go onto enjoy several high place finishes in competitive tournament Magic, including 12th place at 1995 U.S. Nationals, third place at the Southwest Regionals that year, and multiple victories in local tournaments.50 Described in a later issue of The Duelist as using Hell's Caretaker and Animate Dead to "constantly recycle Triskelion's and Tetravasus," 51 The Machine is perhaps the first tournament successful “Reanimator” strategy. This strategy uses reanimation effects to cheat otherwise prohibitively expensive creatures into play, or to recur them for an additional bonus, or to return self-reanimating creatures, such as Nether Shadow into play. . Ultimately, Deep Spawn did not make the final list, but was a serious contender for The Machine as well as other early Reanimation strategies not only because of its size and strength, but also because it continued to generate new reanimation targets.
Stephen Mendenian - Schools of Magic: History of Vintage – The First Ten Years - 20-10-2013
https://www.eternalcentral.com/tag/history-of-vintage/