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Magic: The Gathering

Collectible card game

  • 56 min read
  • 6 chapters

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Players in a game of Magic represent dueling wizards called "Planeswalkers". Each card a player draws from their deck represents a magical spell which can be used to their advantage in battle. Instant and Sorcery cards represent magical spells a player may cast for a one-time effect, while Creature, Artifact, Enchantment, Planeswalker, and Battle cards remain on the Battlefield to provide long-term advantage. Players usually must include resource, or Land cards representing the amount of mana that is available to cast their spells. Typically, a player defeats their opponent(s) by reducing their life totals to zero, which is commonly done via combat damage by attacking with creatures. Many other sources of damage exist in the game, in addition to alternative win-conditions.

Although the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the gameplay bears little similarity to tabletop role-playing games, while simultaneously having substantially more cards and more complex rules than many other card games.

Magic can be played by two or more players, either in person with paper cards or on a computer, smartphone, or tablet with virtual cards through Internet-based software such as Magic: The Gathering Online, Magic: The Gathering Arena, Magic Duels and several others. It can be played in various rule formats, which fall into two categories: constructed and limited. Limited formats involve players creating a deck spontaneously out of a pool of random cards typically with a minimum deck size of 40 cards. In constructed formats, players create decks from cards they own, usually with a minimum of 60 cards per deck.

New cards are released on a regular basis through expansion sets. Further developments include the Wizards Play Network played at the international level and the worldwide community Players Tour, as well as a substantial resale market for Magic cards. Certain cards can be valuable due to their rarity in production and utility in gameplay, with prices ranging from a few cents to millions of dollars.

Gameplay

A typical game of Magic involves two or more players who are engaged in a battle, acting as powerful wizards known as Planeswalkers. Each player has their own deck of cards, purchased and constructed from a limited pool of available cards. A player typically starts the game with a "life total" of twenty and loses the game when the total is reduced to zero. A player can lose the game if they must draw from an empty deck. Some cards specify other ways to win or lose the game. One of the "Magic Golden Rules" is: "Whenever a card's text directly contradicts these rules, the card takes precedence". According to CNET, the game has many variants; "Magic tends to embrace all that house ruling, making it official when it catches on. Commander started as a fan-created format, after all."

Cards in Magic: The Gathering generally have a consistent format, with half of the face of the card showing the card's art, and the other half listing the card's mechanics, often relying on commonly-reused keywords to simplify the card's text. Cards fall into two classes: lands and spells. Lands produce mana, or magical energy. Players usually can only play one land card per turn, with most lands providing a specific color of mana when they are "tapped" (rotating the card 90 degrees). Each land can be tapped for mana only once per turn.

Spells consume mana, usually requiring at least one mana of a specific color. More powerful spells require larger amounts and more specific combinations of mana. As the game progresses and more lands enter play, the available mana increases, allowing stronger spells to be cast. Spells come in several varieties: "sorceries" and "instants" have a single, one-time effect before they go to the "graveyard" (discard pile); "enchantments" and "artifacts" that remain in play after being cast to provide a lasting magical effect; "creature" spells summon creatures that can attack and damage an opponent as well as used to defend from the opponent's creature attacks; and "planeswalker" spells that summon powerful allies that act similarly to other players. Lands, enchantments, artifacts, creatures, planeswalkers, and battle cards are considered "permanents" as they remain in play until removed by other spells, ability, or combat effects.

Players begin the game by shuffling their decks and then drawing seven cards. On each player's turn, following a set phase order, they draw a card, tap their lands and other permanents as necessary to gain mana to cast spells, engage their creatures in a single attack round against their opponent who may use their own creatures to block the attack, and then complete other actions with any remaining mana. Most actions that a player can perform enter the "Stack", a concept similar to the stack in computer programming. The stack follows Last in First Out order, where the last card played onto the stack is the first card effect resolved. Either player can react to these actions with other actions, such as countering an opponent's spells, removing an opponent's creature, and/or protecting their own. The stack provides a method of resolving complex interactions that may result in certain scenarios.

Deck construction

Deck construction requires strategy; players must choose cards to play from thousands of options, requiring players to evaluate the power of their cards, the possible synergies between them, and their possible interactions with the cards they expect to play against. This "metagame" can vary by location and time period. The player restricts the choice of cards by deciding which colors to include in the deck. Starter decks, which are part of the Magic product line, are aimed at giving novice players ideas for deck construction. Players expand their card library for deck construction through booster packs, which have a random distribution of cards from a specific Magic set and are defined by rarity. These rarities are known as Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Mythic Rare; more-powerful cards are generally the rarest.

Most sanctioned games for Magic: The Gathering under the Wizards Play Network (WPN) use a Constructed format that require players to create their decks from their own library of cards. In general, this requires a minimum of sixty cards in the deck, and, except for basic land cards and cards that have text superseding this rule, no more than four cards of the same named card. The Standard format, by including mostly recently released cards, helps to prevent "power creep" that can be difficult to predict with the size of the Magic card library and help give newer players a fair advantage with long-term players. Other Constructed formats exist that allow for use of older expansions to give more variety for decks. A large variety of formats have been defined by the WPN which allows different pools of expansions to be used or alter deck construction rules for special events.

Commander is a 100-card constructed format that makes many changes to typical deck construction rules. In Commander, each of the one hundred cards must be uniquely named, excluding basic land cards. Each player must also denote a legendary creature to be their Commander, which is able to be played at any time, without needing to draw it. All other cards in the deck must share their color with the commander. Additionally, Commander also allows any cards from any set release to be used, excluding any specific cards that have been banned from play and most cards from parody sets. Commander as a format has a separate ban list than other Constructed formats.

In Limited formats, a small number of cards are opened for play from booster packs or tournament packs, and generally a minimum deck size of forty cards is enforced. One of the most popular limited formats is Booster Draft, in which players open a booster pack, choose a card from it, and pass it to the player seated next to them. This continues until all the cards have been picked, and then a new pack is opened. Three packs are opened in total, and the direction of passing alternates left-right-left. Once the draft is done, players create decks out of the cards they picked, basic land cards being provided for free, and play games with the players they drafted with.

Limitations

In the event individual cards are listed as "restricted", only one copy can be included in a deck; other cards are "banned" at WPN's discretion. These restrictions are usually imposed for balance-of-power reasons but have been occasionally made because of gameplay mechanics. For example, with the elimination of the "play for ante" mechanic in all formal formats, all cards with this feature were banned. During the COVID-19 pandemic, which drew more players to the online Magic games and generated volumes of data of popular deck constructions, Wizards of the Coast was able to track popular combinations more quickly than in a purely paper game, and in mid-2020, the company banned additional cards that in specific combinations could draw out games far longer than desired.

Wizards of the Coast has banned some old cards from all formal play due to inappropriate racial or cultural depictions in their text or illustrations in the wake of the George Floyd protests, and their images have been blocked or removed from online Magic databases. This includes a card called "Invoke Prejudice", which was displayed on the official card-index site Gatherer "at a web URL ending in '1488', numbers that are synonymous with white supremacy".

Colors of Magic

Most cards in Magic are based on one of five colors that make up the game's "Color Wheel" or "Color Pie", shown on the back of each card, and each representing a school or realm of magic: white, blue, black, red, and green. The arrangement of these colors on the wheel describes relationships between the schools, which can broadly affect deck construction and game execution. For a given color such as white, the two colors immediately adjacent to it, green and blue, are considered complementary, while the two colors on the opposite side, black and red, are its opposing schools.

The Research and Development (R&D) team at Wizards of the Coast aimed to balance power and abilities among the five colors by using the Color Pie to differentiate the strengths and weaknesses of each. This guideline lays out the capabilities, themes, and mechanics of each color and allows for every color to have its own distinct attributes and gameplay. The Color Pie is used to ensure new cards are thematically in the correct color and do not infringe on the territory of other colors.

The concepts behind each of the colors on the Color Wheel, based on a series of articles written by Mark Rosewater, are as follows:

  • White represents order, peace, and light, and draws mana from plains. White planeswalkers can summon individually weak creatures that are collectively strong as a group such as soldiers, as well as powerful creatures and leaders that can strengthen all of the player's creatures with additional abilities or strength. Their spells tend to focus on healing or preventing damage, protecting their allies, and neutralizing an opponent's advantages on the battlefield.
  • Blue represents intellect, logic, manipulation, and trickery, and pulls its mana from islands. Its magic is typically associated with the classical elements of air and water. Many of Blue's spells can interact or interfere with the opponent's spells as well as with the general flow of the game. Blue's magic is also associated with control, allowing the player to gain temporary or full control of the opponent's creatures. Blue creatures often tend to be weak but evasive and difficult to target.
  • Black represents power, death, corruption, and sacrifice, drawing mana from swamps. Many of Black's creatures are undead, and several can be sacrificed to make other creatures more powerful, destroy opponent's creatures or permanents, or other effects. Black creatures may be able to draw the life taken in an attack back to their caster, or may even be able to kill creatures through a deathtouch effect. Black's spells similarly coerce sacrifice by the player or their opponent through cards or life.
  • Red represents freedom, chaos, fury, and warfare, pulling its power from mountains. Its powers are associated with the classical fire and earth elements, and it tends to have the strongest spells such as fireballs that can be powered-up by tapping additional mana when cast. Red is an offense-oriented class: in addition to powerful creatures like dragons, red planeswalkers can summon weak creatures that can strike quickly to gain the short-term edge.
  • Green is the color of life, nature, evolution, and indulgence, drawing mana from forests. Green has the widest array of creatures to draw upon, ranging across all power levels, and generally is able to dominate the battlefield with many creatures in play at once. Green creatures and spells can generate life points and mana, and can also gain massive strength through spells.

Most cards in Magic: The Gathering are based on a single color, shown along the card's border. The cost to play them requires some mana of that color and potentially any amount of mana from any other color. Multicolored cards were introduced in the Legends expansion and typically use a gold border. Their casting cost includes mana from at least two colors plus additional mana from any color. Hybrid cards, included with Ravnica, use a two-color gradient border. These cards can be cast using mana from either color shown, in addition to other mana costs. Finally, colorless cards, such as some artifacts, do not have any colored mana requirements but still require a general amount of mana to be spent to play.

A specific "colorless" mana system was introduced around 2016. This is mana without any specific color, represented by a diamond-like shape in a gray circle. Colorless mana costs for a card can only be met with sources that produce colorless mana, and cannot be met with any other colored mana source, compared to "generic" mana costs which can use any colored or colorless mana source.

Luck vs. skill

Magic, like many other games, combines chance and skill. One frequent complaint about the game involves the notion that there is too much luck involved, especially concerning drawing too many or too few lands. Early in the game especially, too many or too few lands could ruin a player's chance at victory without the player having made a mistake. This in-game statistical variance can be minimized by proper deck construction, as an appropriate land count can reduce mana problems. In Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012, the land count is automatically adjusted to 40% of the total deck size.

Gambling

The original set of rules prescribed that all games were to be played for ante. Garfield was partly inspired by the game of marbles and added this rule because he wanted the players to play with the cards rather than simply collect them. The ante rule stated that each player must remove a card at random from the deck they wished to play with before the game began, and the two cards would be set aside together as the ante. At the end of the match, the winner would take and keep both cards. Early sets included a few cards with rules designed to interact with this gambling aspect, allowing replacements of cards up for ante, adding more cards to the ante, or even permanently trading ownership of cards in play. The ante concept became controversial because many regions had restrictions on games of chance. The ante rule was soon made optional because of these restrictions and because of players' reluctance to possibly lose a card that they owned. The gambling rule was also forbidden at sanctioned events. The last card to mention ante was printed in the 1995 expansion set Homelands.

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