Magic: The Gathering


Magic: The Gathering is a collectible and digital collectible card game created by Richard Garfield. Released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast, Magic was the first trading card game and has approximately twenty million players as of 2015, and over twenty billion Magic cards produced in the period from 2008 to 2016, during which time it grew in popularity.
Each game of Magic represents a battle between wizards known as planeswalkers who cast spells, use artifacts, and summon creatures as depicted on individual cards in order to defeat their opponents, typically, but not always, by draining them of their 20 starting life points in the standard format. 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 pencil-and-paper adventure 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 printed cards or on a computer, smartphone or tablet with virtual cards through the Internet-based software ' or such as '. It can be played in various rule formats, which fall into two categories: constructed and limited. Limited formats involve players building a deck spontaneously out of a pool of random cards 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. An organized tournament system played at the international level and a worldwide community of Pro Tour |professional Magic players has developed, as well as a substantial resale market for Magic cards. Certain cards can be monetarily valuable due to their rarity in production and utility in gameplay, with prices ranging from a few cents to thousands of dollars.

Gameplay

A game of Magic involves two or more players who are engaged in a battle acting as powerful wizards called planeswalkers. Each player has their own deck, either one previously constructed or made from a limited pool of cards for the event. A player starts the game with twenty "life points" and loses the game when their life total is reduced to zero. A player can also lose if they must draw from an empty deck. In addition, some cards specify other ways to win or lose the game. Garfield has stated that two major influences in his creation of Magic: the Gathering were the games Cosmic Encounter, which first used the concept that normal rules could sometimes be overridden, and Dungeons & Dragons. The "Golden Rule of Magic" states that "Whenever a card's text directly contradicts the rules, the card takes precedence." The Comprehensive Rules, a detailed rulebook, exists to clarify conflicts.
Cards in Magic: The Gathering fall into generally two classes: lands and spells. Lands provide mana, or magical energy, which is used as magical fuel when the player attempts to cast spells. Players can only play one land card per turn, with most land providing a specific color of mana when they are "tapped", with each land only able to be tapped for mana once per turn. Spells consume mana, typically with at least one or more mana of a specific color. More powerful spells cost more mana, so as the game progresses, more land will be in play, more mana will be available, and the quantity and relative power of the spells played tends to increase. Spells come in several varieties: non-permanents like "sorceries" and "instants" have a single, one-time effect before they go to the "graveyard" ; "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. Land, enchantments, artifacts, and creature cards are considered permanents as they remain in play until removed by other spell, ability, or combat effects. The set Lorwyn introduced the new "planeswalker" card type, which represents powerful allies who fight with their own magic abilities. Additionally, cards are printed and available within certain rarities, known as Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Mythic rare, with generally more powerful cards having higher rarities.
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 turning them sideways and other permanents as necessary to gain mana as 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. Tapped resources remain tapped until the start of the player's next turn, which may leave them without land to draw for mana to cast spells in reaction to their opponent, or without creatures to block attacks, so the player must also plan ahead for their opponent's turn. Most actions that a player can perform enter the "Stack", a concept similar to the stack in computer programming, as either player can react to these actions with other actions, such as counter-spells; the stack provides a method of resolve complex interactions that may result in certain scenarios.

Deck construction

Deck building requires strategy as players must choose among thousands of cards which they want to play. This requires players to evaluate the power of their cards, as well as the possible synergies between them, and their possible interactions with the cards they expect to play against. The choice of cards is usually narrowed by the player deciding which colors they want to include in the deck. This decision is a key part of creating a deck. In general, reducing the number of colors used increases the consistency of play and the probability of drawing the lands needed to cast one's spells, at the expense of restricting the range of tactics available to the player. Part of the Magic product line has been starter decks which are aimed to provide novice players with ideas for deck building.
Most sanctioned games for Magic: The Gathering under the DCI use the based Constructed format that require players to build 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, no more than four cards of the same named card. The pool of cards is also typically limited to the Standard rotation, which consists of the base sets and expansions that have been released in the last two years. The Standard format 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 DCI that allow different pools of expansions to be used or alter deck construction rules for special events.
Individual cards may be listed as "restricted", where only one copy can be included in a deck, or simply "banned", at the DCI's discretion. These limitations are usually for balance of power reasons, but have been occasionally made because of gameplay mechanics, for example, with the elimination of the "play for ante" mechanics in all formal formats, all such cards with this feature are banned. More recently, older cards have been banned from all formal play by Wizards due to inappropriate racial or cultural depictions in their illustrations in the wake of the George Floyd protests, and their images removed from the various online Magic databases explaining this. This included the Invoke Prejudice card which was displayed on the official card index site Gatherer "at a web URL ending in '1488,' numbers that are synonymous with white supremacy".
In the format, a small number of cards are opened for play from booster packs or tournament packs, and a minimum deck size of forty cards is enforced. The most popular limited format 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 altogether, and the direction of passing alternates left-right-left. Once the draft is done, players create 40-card decks out of the cards they picked, basic land cards being provided for free, and play games with the players they drafted with.

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 describe relationships between the schools, which can broadly affect deck construction and game execution. For a given color such as white, the two colors immediate 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 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:
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 |Legends and typically use a gold border. Their casting cost includes mana from at least two different colors plus additional mana from any color. Hybrid cards, included with , 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.
The color wheel can influence deck construction choices. Cards from colors that are aligned such as red and green often provide synergistic effects, either due to the core nature of the schools or through designs of cards, but may leave the deck vulnerable to the magic of the common color in conflict, blue in the case of red and green. Alternatively, decks constructed with opposing colors like green and blue may not have many favorable combinations but will be capable of dealing with decks based on any other colors. There are no limits to how many colors can be in a deck, but the more colors in a deck, the more difficult it may be to provide mana of the right color.

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 possessing 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.
A "mulligan" rule was introduced into the game, first informally in casual play and then in the official game rules. The most current mulligan rule allows players to shuffle an unsatisfactory opening hand back into the deck at the start of the game, draw a new hand with the same number of cards, and repeat until satisfied, after which any player who has mulliganed, will put cards from the hand they kept on the bottom of their deck equal to the number of times they mulliganed. In multiplayer, a player may take one mulligan without penalty, while subsequent mulligans will still cost one card. The original mulligan allowed a player a single redraw of seven new cards if that player's initial hand contained seven or zero lands. A variation of this rule called a "forced mulligan" is still used in some casual play circles and in multiplayer formats on Magic Online, and allows a single "free" redraw of seven new cards if a player's initial hand contains seven, six, one or zero lands. With the release of the Core Set 2020 a new mulligan system was introduced for competitive play known as the London Mulligan.
Confessing his love for games combining both luck and skill, Magic creator Richard Garfield admitted its influence in his design of Magic. In addressing the complaint about luck influencing a game, Garfield states that new and casual players tend to appreciate luck as a leveling effect, since randomness can increase their chances of winning against a more skilled player. Meanwhile, a player with higher skills appreciates a game with less chance, as the higher degree of control increases their chances of winning. According to Garfield, Magic has and would likely continue decreasing its degree of luck as the game matured. The "Mulligan rule", as well as card design, past vs. present, are good examples of this trend. He feels that this is a universal trend for maturing games. Garfield explained using chess as an example, that unlike modern chess, in predecessors, players would use dice to determine which chess piece to move.

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 wanted folks to play with the cards rather than collect them. For Magic, each player removed a card at random from the deck they wished to play with and the two cards would be set aside 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 rule was later made optional because of these restrictions and because of players' reluctance to possibly lose a card that they owned. The gambling rule is forbidden at sanctioned events and is now mostly a relic of the past, though it still sees occasional usage in friendly games as well as the format. The last card to mention ante was printed in the 1995 expansion set Homelands |Homelands.

Organized play

Magic tournaments regularly occur in gaming stores and other venues. Larger tournaments with hundreds of competitors from around the globe sponsored by Wizards of the Coast are arranged many times every year, with substantial cash prizes for the top finishers. A number of websites report on tournament news, give complete lists for the most currently popular decks, and feature articles on current issues of debate about the game. The DCI, which is owned and operated by Wizards of the Coast, is the organizing body for sanctioned Magic events. The DCI established the set allowances and card restrictions for the Constructed and Limited formats for regulation play for tournaments as well as for other events.
Additionally, the DCI maintains a set of rules for being able to sanction tournaments, as well as runs its own circuit. Local shops often offer "Friday Night Magic" tournaments as a stepping-stone to more competitive play. The DCI runs the Pro Tour |Pro Tour as a series of major tournaments to attract interest. The right to compete in a Pro Tour has to be earned by either winning a Pro Tour Qualifier Tournament or being successful in a previous tournament on a similar level. A Pro Tour is usually structured into two days of individual competition played in the Swiss format. On the final day, the top eight players compete with each other in an elimination format to select the winner.
won the right for this card to feature his design and likeness.
At the end of the competition in a Pro Tour, players are awarded Pro Tour #Pro Points|Pro Points depending on their finishing place. If the player finishes high enough, they will also be awarded prize money. Frequent winners of these events have made names for themselves in the Magic community, such as Gabriel Nassif, Kai Budde and Jon Finkel. As a promotional tool, the DCI launched the in 2005 to honor selected players.
At the end of the year the is held. The World Championship functions like a Pro Tour, except that competitors have to present their skill in three different formats rather than one. Another difference is that invitation to the World Championship can be gained not through Pro Tour Qualifiers, but via the national championship of a country. Most countries send their top four players of the tournament as representatives, though nations with minor Magic playing communities may send just one player. The World Championship also has a team-based competition, where the national teams compete with each other.
At the beginning of the World Championship, new members are inducted into the Hall of Fame. The tournament also concludes the current season of tournament play and at the end of the event, the player who earned the most Pro Points during the year is awarded the title "Pro Tour #Pro Player of the Year|Pro Player of the Year". The player who earned the most Pro Points and did not compete in any previous season is awarded the title "Pro Tour #Rookie of the Year|Rookie of the Year".
Invitation to a Pro Tour, Pro Points and prize money can also be earned in lesser tournaments called Grand Prix |Grand Prix that are open to the general public and are held more frequently throughout the year. Grand Prix events are usually the largest Magic tournaments, sometimes drawing more than 2,000 players. The largest Magic tournament ever held was Grand Prix: Las Vegas in June 2013 with a total of 4,500 players.

Development

Inception

had an early attachment to games during his youth: before settling down in Oregon, his father, an architect, had brought his family to Bangladesh and Nepal during his work projects. Garfield did not speak the native languages, but was able to make friends with the local youth with playing cards or marbles. Once back in the United States, he had heard of Dungeons & Dragons but neither his local game store nor his friends had a copy, so he developed his own version of what he though the game would be based on the descriptions he had read, which considered closer to Clue, with players moving from room to room fighting monsters with a fixed end-goal. When Garfield eventually got copies of the Dungeon & Dragons rulesets, he was surprised that it was a more open-ended game but was "dreadfully written". Dungeon & Dragonss open-endedness inspired him, like many others, to develop their own game ideas from it. For Garfield, this was a game he called Five Magics, based on five elemental magics that were drawn from geographically-diverse areas. While this remained the core concept of Five Magics, Garfield continued to refine the game while growing up, often drastically changing the base type of game, though never planned to publish this game.
In 1991, Garfield was a doctoral candidate in combinatorial mathematics at University of Pennsylvania and had been brought on as an adjunct professor at Whitman College. During his candidacy, he developed his ideas and had playtested RoboRally, a board game based on moving robots through a factory filled with hazards. Garfield had been seeking publishers for the title, and his colleague, Mike Davis, suggested the newly formed Wizards of the Coast, a small outfit established by Peter Adkison, a systems analyst for Boeing in Seattle. In mid-1991, the three arranged to meet in Oregon near Garfield's parents' home. Adkison was impressed by RoboRally but considered that it had too many logistics and would be too risky for him to publish. He told Garfield and Davis that he liked Garfield's ideas and that he was looking for a portable game that could be played in the downtime that frequently occurs at gaming conventions.
After the meeting, Garfield remained in Oregon to contemplate Adkison's advice. While hiking near Multnomah Falls, he was inspired to take his Five Magics concept but apply it to collectible color-themed cards, so that each player could make a customizable deck, something each player could consider part of their identity. Garfield arranged to meet with Adkison back in Seattle within the week, and when Adkison heard the idea, he recognized the potential that this would be a game that could be expanded on indefinitely with new cards in contrast to most typical tabletop games; Adkison later wrote on the idea on a USENET post "If executed properly, would make us millions." Adkison immediately agreed to produce it.

Initial design

Garfield returned to Pennsylvania and set off designing the game's core rules and initial cards, with about 150 completed in the few months after his return. The type of gameplay centered on each color remained consistent with how Five Magics had been and with how Magic: The Gathering would stay in the future, such as red representing aggressive attacks. Other games also influenced the design at this point, with Garfield citing games like Cosmic Encounter and Strat-o-matic Baseball as games that differ each time they are played because of different sets of cards being in play. Initial "cards" were based on using available copyrighted art, and copied to paper to be tested by groups of volunteers at the university. About six months after the meeting with Adkison, Garfield had refined the first complete version of his game. Garfield also began to establish the narrative of the game around "Dominia", a Multiverse |multiverse of infinite "planes" from which players, as wizards, can draw power from, which would allow for the vast array of creatures and magics that he was planning for the cards.
Simultaneously, Adkison sought investment into Wizards of the Coast to prepare to publish the game. The company had already committed to completing The Primal Order rulebook, aimed to be compatible with most other role-playing systems on the market, which most investment was drawn to. He had to bring in a number of local Cornish artists to create the fantasy art for Garfield's cards, offering them shares in Wizards of the Coast in payment. After The Primal Order was published in 1992, Wizards of the Coast was sued by Palladium for copyright infringement, a case that was settled out of court and with the result that a second printing of The Primal Order removed the rules relevant to Palladium's system, but this case also financially harmed Wizards of the Coast. Adkison decided to create a separate company, Garfield Games, for publishing the card game.
While the game was simply called Magic through most of playtesting, when the game had to be officially named a lawyer informed them that the name Magic was too generic to be trademarked. Mana Clash was instead chosen to be the name used in the first solicitation of the game. However, everybody involved with the game continued to refer to it simply as Magic. After further legal consultation, it was decided to rename the game Magic: The Gathering, thus enabling the name to be trademarked.

First releases

By 1993, Garfield and Adkison had gotten everything ready to premiere Magic: The Gathering at that year's Gen Con in Milwaukee that August, but did not have the funds for a production run to have shipped to game stores in time. Adkison took a single box of cards with a handful of complete decks to the Wizards booth at Origins Game Fair hoping to secure the funds by demonstrating the game. Among those he demonstrated to were representatives of Wargames West, manufacturers of historical tactics games; the representatives eventually brought their CEO over, and after seeing the game, took Adkison to dinner and negotiated funding terms. Adkison returned with, enough to make the necessary orders.
Magic: The Gathering underwent a general release on August 5, 1993. After shipping the orders, Adkison and his wife drove towards Milwaukee while making stops at game stores and demonstrate the game to drum up support for Gen Con. Their initial stops were quiet, but word of mouth from previous stops spread, and as they traveled south and west, they found larger and larger crowds anxiously awaiting their arrival. Garfield met up with Adkison at Gen Con, where their shipment of 2.5 million cards had been delayed a day. Despite this, by the end of the convention, they had completely sold out.
Magic was an immediate success for Wizards of the Coast. By October 1993, they had sold out their supply of 10 million cards. Wizards was even reluctant to advertise the game because they were unable to keep pace with existing demand. Initially Magic attracted many Dungeons & Dragons players, but the following included all types of other people as well.

Expansions

The success of the initial edition prompted a reissue later in 1993, along with expansions to the game. Arabian Nights |Arabian Nights was released as the first in December 1993. New expansions and revisions of the base game have since been released on a regular basis, amounting to four releases a year. By the end of 1994, the game had printed over a billion cards. Until the release of Mirage |Mirage in 1996, expansions were released on an irregular basis. Beginning in 2009 one revision of the core set and a set of three related expansions called a "block" were released every year. This system was revised in 2015, with the Core Set being eliminated and blocks now consisting of two sets, released biannually. A further revision occurred in 2018, reversing the elimination of the core sets and no longer constraining sets to blocks. While the essence of the game has always stayed the same, the rules of Magic have undergone three major revisions with the release of the Revised Edition |Revised Edition in 1994, 6th Edition |Classic Edition in 1999, and Magic 2010 in July 2009. With the release of the 8th Edition |Eighth Edition in 2003, Magic also received a major visual redesign.
In 1996, Wizards of the Coast established the "Pro Tour |Pro Tour", a circuit of tournaments where players can compete for sizeable cash prizes over the course of a single weekend-long tournament. In 2009 the top prize at a single tournament was US$40,000. Sanctioned through the DCI, the tournaments added an element of prestige to the game by virtue of the cash payouts and media coverage from within the community. For a brief period of time, ESPN2 televised the tournaments.
By April 1997, cards had been sold. In 1999, Wizards of The Coast was acquired by Hasbro for $325 million, making Magic a Hasbro game.
A patent was granted to Wizards of the Coast in 1997 for "a novel method of game play and game components that in one embodiment are in the form of trading cards" that includes claims covering games whose rules include many of Magics elements in combination, including concepts such as changing orientation of a game component to indicate use and constructing a deck by selecting cards from a larger pool. The patent has aroused criticism from some observers, who believe some of its claims to be invalid. In 2003, the patent was an element of a larger legal dispute between Wizards of the Coast and Nintendo, regarding trade secrets related to Nintendo's Pokémon Trading Card Game. The legal action was settled out of court, and its terms were not disclosed.
While unofficial methods of online play existed previously, ', an official online version of the game, was released in 2002. A new, updated version of Magic Online was released in April 2008.
In February 2018, Wizards noted that between the years of 2008 and 2016 they had printed over 20 billion Magic: the Gathering'' cards.

Production and marketing

Magic: The Gathering cards are produced in much the same way as normal playing cards. Each Magic card, approximately 63 × 88 mm in size, has a face which displays the card's name and rules text as well as an illustration appropriate to the card's concept. 18,970 unique cards have been produced for the game as of 2016,
many of them with variant editions, artwork, or layouts, and 600–1000 new ones are added each year. The first Magic cards were printed exclusively in English, but current sets are also printed in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
The overwhelming majority of Magic cards are issued and marketed in the form of sets. For the majority of its history there were two types: the Core Set and the themed expansion sets. Under Wizards of the Coast's current production and marketing scheme, a new set is released quarterly. Various products are released with each set to appeal to different segments of the Magic playing community:
Shards of Alara also debuted mythic rares, which replace one in eight rare cards on average. There are also premium versions of every card with holographic foil, randomly inserted into some boosters in place of a common, which replace about one in seventy cards.
As of 2018, the number of consecutive sets set on the same world varies. For example, although Dominaria takes place in one set, the Guilds of Ravnica block will take place over three sets. In addition, small sets have been removed due to developmental problems and all sets are now large. Prior to this change, sets were put into two-set blocks, starting with a large set and ending with a smaller one three months later. Prior to 2016, expansion sets were released in a three-set block. These sets consist almost exclusively of newly designed cards. Contrasting with the wide-ranging Core Set, each expansion is focused around a subset of mechanics and ties into a set storyline. Expansions also dedicate several cards to a handful of particular, often newly introduced, game mechanics.
The Core Sets began to be released annually in July 2009 coinciding with the name change from 10th Edition |10th Edition to Magic 2010. This shift also introduced new, never before printed cards into the core set, something that previously had never been done. However, core sets were discontinued following the release of Magic Origins, on July 17, 2015, at the same time that two-set blocks were introduced. Wizards of Coast announced on June 12, 2017 that they plan on revamping and reintroducing a , and Core Set 2019 was released on July 13, 2018.
In addition to the quarterly set releases, Magic cards are released in other products as well, such as the Planechase and Archenemy |Archenemy spin-off games. These combine reprinted Magic cards with new, oversized cards with new functionality. Magic cards are also printed specifically for collectors, such as the From the Vault and Premium Deck Series sets, which contain exclusively premium foil cards.
In 2003, starting with the 8th Edition |Eighth Edition Core Set, the game went through its biggest visual change since its creation—a new card frame layout was developed to allow more rules text and larger art on the cards, while reducing the thick, colored border to a minimum. The new frame design aimed to improve contrast and readability using black type instead of the previous white, a new font, and partitioned areas for the name, card type, and power and toughness. The card frame was changed once again in Core Set 2015, which maintained the same templating, but made the card sleeker and added a holo-foil stamp to every rare and mythic card to curtail counterfeiting.
For the first few years of its production, Magic: The Gathering featured a small number of cards with names or artwork with demonic or occultist themes, in 1995 the company elected to remove such references from the game. In 2002, believing that the depiction of demons was becoming less controversial and that the game had established itself sufficiently, Wizards of the Coast reversed this policy and resumed printing cards with "demon" in their names.
In 2019, starting with Throne of Eldraine, booster packs have a chance of containing an alternate art "showcase card". This is to increase the reward of buying boosters and making it more exciting.
A new format, "Jumpstart", was introduced in July 2020 alongside the Core 2021 set. These are special themed 20-card booster packs, based on nearly 500 cards, several being reprints of cards from previous sets, with 121 possible packs available. Each is a curated set rather than random selection of cards, built around a theme, such as "Pirates" or "Unicorns". Each theme has a small number of possible card sets on that threme, distributed on a rarity basis, such that the specific booster that a player purchases will still be a random selection. Because many are reprints, not all Jumpstart cards are available to be used in the various Constructed formats but can be used in other modes of play. Jumpstart was designed to make it much easier to get into Magic by eliminating the deck-building but still providing some customization and randomness that comes with card acquisition and deck building. A special Jumpstart format was introduced for these boosters, where players select two desired themes, and are given a random booster from those themes and sufficient land cards to make a 60-card deck.

Writing and storyline

The way Magic storylines are conceived and deployed has changed considerably over the years. The main premise of Magic is that countless possible worlds exist in the Multiverse |Multiverse, and only unique and rare beings called Planeswalkers are capable of traversing the Multiverse. This allows the game to frequently change worlds so as to renew its mechanical inspiration, while maintaining planeswalkers as recurrent, common elements across worlds. Players represent planeswalkers able to draw on the magics and entities of these planes to do battle with others.
Garfield established enough of this story for the game when it was first published. With the first sets, most of this story was told through the cards flavor text, and because most of the creatures and the keywords were based on common fantasy tropes, there was no significant driver for a backing narrative. In some cases, narrative was demanded to help with new gameplay mechanics and keywords that did not fit standard fantasy tropes, but these were still limited to flavor text. The first expansion Arabian Nights designed by Garfield was based on One Thousand and One Nights folklore and include figures from that like Aladdin.
With demand for more expansions, several different teams within Wizards' research and development separately worked on these upcoming sets, with the card designers taking the lead in creating their narratives. Each of these teams had different approaches for implementing that in the cards. For example, the next expansion was Antiquities, its design led by Skaff Elias. Elias' team wanted this set to focus on the use of colorless artifacts, and came up with the narrative idea of a battle between two brothers skilled in artifact use at a point in time before the other realms of magic had established themselves. This would tie into both their planned cards as well as help define the differences between the color mana schools better. Elias' planned out elaborate timelines, but as the set was only 100 cards, most of this was left on paper, giving players only glimpses of the larger picture through flavor text. In the case of Homelands the designs had two writers craft a story first and then worked alongside them to implement that into the cards for that set. Still, few elements of any of these sets were shared save for the common connection to the plane of Dominaria.
Separately to Wizards of the Coast's own attempts at storytelling, in 1994, Wizards gave exclusive licenses to Harper Prism to publish novels, and to Armada, an imprint of Acclaim Entertainment, to publish comic books. Neither of these were developed in concert with the game and created divergent ideas to the game.
Wizards wanted to try to create a more cohesive universe with the next major expansion, Weatherlight, comparable to other works like Star Wars. Mark Rosewater and Michael G. Ryan developed a long-term story arc that would cross through several expansions as well as into the comics, magazines, and novels. With the cards, a small team of dedicated writers were used to make sure there were a consistent voice to the flavor text to help emphasize the story elements. This saga was intended to last the next five years, but several factors came into play by the time the Urza block was released: there was a change in leadership in oversight of Magic: The Gathering and the direction it was heading, players were not interested in the lead characters of the saga, and players had found it difficult to follow the a narrative from the cards alone. Around the same time, Wizards had regained control on the license to publish novels and comics, and it was decided to now make the novels the primary route for the story of Magic: The Gathering, to tie in closely with the cards designed for the expansion. This approach was used through the Onslaught |Onslaught block in 2003, after which Wizards had found that novels were not a sufficient means to build out the details for cards; novels would be focused on how characters change over events, while the game presented a character at a single moment, and a novel could not flesh out all the other supporting elements that the card designers needed to build their sets without weighing down the readers.
Following Onslaught, the narrative of Magic: The Gathering took a more distanced approach. Once an idea for an expansion is presented, preliminary work is done simultaneously by the research and development team and by the creative staff to build out the basic gameplay concepts and the setting of that expansion, respectively. Once both sides agree to that, the two teams then proceed primarily on individual routes towards their end production. Brady Dommermuth, the creative director in 2006, said that "generally the cards provide the world in which the novels are set, and the novels sometimes provide characters represented on cards. But cards also introduce their own characters that might not appear in the novels. In short, the Magic creative team and the novelists work largely in parallel and inform each other as much as possible." Wizards further transitions to ebooks as well as having their creative staff write more in "Uncharted Realms", a weekly column on the company's website. In 2013, the company saw that even with continued growth in player numbers, printed novel sales had fallen greatly and ebook sales remained flat, and made the decision to discontinue the larger narrative works in favor of having the creative team provide story coverage and shipments as of the "Uncharted Realms" column.
This approach continued through 2017. Then, Wizards hired novelist and scriptwriter Nic Kelman as their Head of Story and Entertainment. Kelman's task was to assemble all of the lore established from previous card sets and the published novels, comics, and other materials as to create the game's "cosmology" or the story bible that established all the known planes and elements of those planes, the individual Planeswalkers and their connections to others, and other details that then could be passed not only to the teams developing new cards but also to those expanding the franchise with new novels and other content. This allows for highly connected events between the external media and the game; one example established the death of a major Planeswalker in the novel War of the Spark: Ravnica that was published just prior to the release of the new set War of the Spark, the first novel published by Wizards in several years, with the set containing cards referencing that death.

Artwork

Each card has an illustration to represent the flavor of the card, often reflecting the setting of the expansion for which it was designed. Much of Magic's early artwork was commissioned with little specific direction or concern for visual cohesion. One infamous example was the printing of the creature Whippoorwill without the "flying" ability even though its art showed a bird in flight. The art direction team later decided to impose a few constraints so that the artistic vision more closely aligned with the design and development of the cards. Each block of cards now has its own style guide with sketches and descriptions of the various races and places featured in the setting.
A few early sets experimented with alternate art for cards. However, Wizards came to believe that this impeded easy recognition of a card and that having multiple versions caused confusion when identifying a card at a glance. Consequently, alternate art is now only used sparingly and mostly for promotional cards. When older cards are reprinted in new sets, however, Wizards of the Coast usually prints them with new art to make the older cards more collectible, though they sometimes reuse well-received artwork if it makes sense thematically.
As Magic has expanded across the globe, its artwork has had to change for its international audience. Artwork has been edited or given alternate art to comply with the governmental standards. For example, the portrayal of skeletons and most undead in artwork was prohibited by the Chinese government until 2008.

Promotional crossovers

Wizards of the Coast has introduces specials cards and sets that include cross-promotional elements with other brands typically as promotional cards, not legal for Standard play and may be unplayable even in eternal formats. A special three-card set based on characters from was sold as both physical product and digital items within MTG Arena to support the Extra Life charity. The "Ikoria, Lair of Behemoths" set released in April 2020 included 16 kaiju monsters from Toho as promotional cards, such as Godzilla.
Separately, elements of Magic have been brought into Dungeons & Dragons. The first such crossover was a D&D ruleset for the plane of Ravnica, a Magic expansion introduced in 2005 and 2006 and later revisited in a 2018 expansion. The rulebook was published also in 2018 to correspond with the newer expansion's release.

Reception

Critical reviews

reviewed Magic: The Gathering in Pyramid #4, and stated that "Not only is Magic the best gaming bargain to come down the pike in memory; not only is it the most original idea in years; it's also a delightfully addictive game that you and your friends will find impossible to put down."
A 2004 article in USA Today suggested that playing Magic might help improve the social and mental skills of some of the players. The article interviewed players' parents who believe that the game, similar to sports, teaches children how to more gracefully win and lose. Magic also contains a great amount of strategy and vocabulary that children may not be exposed to on a regular basis. Parents also claimed that playing Magic helped keep their children out of trouble, such as using illegal drugs or joining criminal gangs. On the other hand, the article also briefly mentions that Magic can be highly addictive, leading to parents worried about their children's Magic obsession. In addition, until 2007, some of the better players had opportunities to compete for a small number of scholarships.
Jordan Weisman, an American game designer and entrepreneur, commented,
"I love games that challenge and change our definition of adventure gaming, and Magic: The Gathering is definitely one of a very short list of titles that has accomplished that elusive goal. By combining the collecting and trading elements of baseball cards with the fantasy play dynamics of role-playing games, Magic created a whole new genre of product that changed our industry forever."
In 2015, The Guardian reported that an estimated 20 million people played Magic around the world and that the game had a thriving tournament scene, a professional league and a weekly organized game program called Friday Night Magic.
A July 2019 article in Bloomberg reported that "Magic is part of the 'franchise brands,' a segment that accounted for $2.45 billion in net revenue for the company last year, bigger than its emerging, partner and gaming brand units combined. Cocks said Magic accounts for a 'meaningful portion' of that, with KeyBanc estimating the game’s contribution is already more than $500 million—including both the physical cards and the nascent digital version. Of the franchise brands, only Magic and Monopoly logged revenue gains last year". , in open beta testing since September 2018, is a free-to-play digital collectible card game with microtransaction purchases based on Magic. Brett Andress, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, predicts Magic: The Gathering Arena adding as much as 98 cents a share in incremental earnings to results by 2021. Joe Deaux, for Bloomberg, wrote that "nearly 3 million active users will be playing Arena by the end of this year, KeyBanc estimates, and that could swell to nearly 11 million by 2021 according to its bull case scenario—especially if it expands from PCs to mobile. That’s just active users, and registered users could be higher by the millions. Already, according to Hasbro, a billion games have been played online".

Awards

In addition, several individuals including Richard Garfield and Donato Giancola won personal awards for their contributions to Magic.

Legacy

The success of Magic: The Gathering led to the creation of similar games by other companies as well as Wizards of the Coast themselves. Companion Games produced the Galactic Empires CCG, which allowed players to pay for and design their own promotional cards, while TSR created the Spellfire game, which eventually included five editions in six languages, plus twelve expansion sets. Wizards of the Coast produced , a game about modern-day vampires. Other similar games included trading card games based on Star Trek and Star Wars. Magic is often cited as an example of a 1990s collecting fad, though the game's makers were able to overcome the bubble traditionally associated with collecting fads.

Secondary market

There is an active secondary market in individual cards among players and game shops. This market arose from two different facets: players seeking specific cards to help complete or enhance their existing decks and thus were less concerned on the value of the cards themselves, and from collectors seeking the rarer cards for their monetary value to complete collections. Many physical and online stores sell single cards or "playsets" of four of a card. Common cards rarely sell for more than a few cents and are usually sold in bulk. Uncommon cards and weak rare cards typically sell from 10¢ up to $1. The more expensive cards in Standard tournament play - a rotating format featuring the newest cards designed to be fairer and more accessible to newer players - are typically priced between $1 to $25. A second format, Modern, comprising an intermediate level of power and allowing most cards released since roughly 2003, has staple cards that often value between $5 and $100, with higher rarity and demand but reprints every few years intended to keep the format affordable. Foil versions of rare and mythic rare cards are typically priced at about twice as much as the regular versions. Some of the more sought-after rare and mythic rare cards can have foil versions that cost up to three or four times more than the non-foil versions.
A few of the oldest cards, due to smaller printings and limited distribution, are highly valued and rare. This is partly due to the Reserved List, a list of cards from the sets Alpha to Urza's Destiny that Wizards has promised never to reprint. Legacy-only cards on the Reserved List, which are barred from reprint under a voluntary but genuine legal obligation, are in short supply due to smaller print runs of the game in its oldest days, and may be worth $200 to $1,000 or higher. And certain Vintage cards - the oldest cards in Magic, with most on the Reserved List, such as the so-called "Power Nine" - can easily cost more than $1,000 apiece.
The most expensive card that was in regular print is the Black Lotus, copies of which are worth thousands of dollars at minimum. In 2019, a "Pristine 9.5 grade" Beckett Grading Services graded Alpha Black Lotus was bought by an anonymous buyer, for a record $166,100.
The secondary market started with comic book stores, and hobby shops displaying and selling cards, with the cards' values determined somewhat arbitrarily by the employees of the store. Hobbyist magazines, already tracking prices of sports trading cards, engaged with the Magic secondary market by surveying the stores to inquire on current prices to cards, which they then published. With the expansion of the Internet, prices of cards were determined by the number of tournament deck lists a given card would appear in. If a card was played in a tournament more frequently, the cost of the card would be higher. When eBay, Amazon, and other large online markets started to gain popularity, the Magic secondary market evolved substantially, with the site TCGPlayer.com launched in 2008 being the first that not only complied the pricing data but allowed for players to buy and sell cards for Magic and other CCGs directly via the site. TCGPlayer developed a metric called the TCG Market Price for each card that was based on the most recent sales, allowing for near real-time valuation of a card in the same manner as a stock market. Buying and selling Magic cards online became a source of income for people who learned how to manipulate the market.
Today, the secondary market is so large and complex, it has become an area of study for consumer research called. Some people make a career out of market manipulation, creating mathematical models to analyze the growth of cards' worth, and predict the market value of both individual cards, and entire sets of cards. Magics economy has also been tied to the introduction of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, as Magic cards represent a physical asset that can be converted back and forth into the virtual currency. Nearly all of Magics trading market is unregulated, and issues related to insider trading based on planned changes to the game have occurred. Active Magic financial traders have gained a sour reputation with more casual Magic players due to the lack of regulations, and that the market manipulations makes it costly for casual players to buy single cards simply for purposes for improving decks.
As of late 2013, Wizards of the Coast has expressed concern over the increasing number of counterfeit cards in the secondary market. Wizards of the Coast has since made an effort to counteract the rise of counterfeits by introducing a new holofoil stamp on all rare and mythic rare cards as of Magic 2015.

Academic analysis

There are several examples of academic, peer-reviewed research concerning different aspects of Magic: The Gathering. One study examined how players use their imaginations when playing. This research studied hobby players and showed how players sought to create and participate in an epic fantasy narrative. Another example used online auctions for Magic cards to test revenue outcomes for various auction types. A third example uses probability to examine Magic card-collecting strategies. Using a specific set of cards in a specialized manner has shown Magic: The Gathering to be Turing complete. Further, by proving this, the researchers assert that Magic: The Gathering is so complex as to be Turing complete and capable of being "programmed" to perform any task, that in terms of playing an actual game of Magic, "the winning strategy is non-computable", making it an improbable challenge to device computer opponents that can play Magic.

Franchise

Magic: The Gathering video games, comics, and books have been produced under licensing or directly by Wizards of the Coast.

Other traditional games

In 2015 Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro published Magic: The Gathering – Arena of the Planeswalkers. Arena of the Planeswalkers is a tactical boardgame where the players maneuver miniatures over a customizable board game, and the ruleset and terrain is based on Heroscape, but with an addition of spell cards and summoning. The original master set includes miniatures that represent the five Planeswalkers Gideon, Jace, Liliana, Chandra, and Nissa as well as select creatures from the Magic: The Gathering universe. They later released an expansion Battle for Zendikar featuring multi-color Planeswalkers Kiora and Ob Nixilis and a colorless Eldrazi Ruiner, and a second master set Shadows Over Innistrad which has 4 new Planeswalkers and also includes the addition of cryptoliths.

Video games

There are currently two official video game adaptions of Magic: The Gathering for online play. ', first introduced in 2002, allows for players to buy cards and boosters and play against others including in officially-sanctioned tournaments for prize money. ', introduced in 2019, is fashioned after the free-to-play Hearthstone, with players able to acquire new cards for free or through spending real-world funds. Arena currently limited online events with in-game prizes, but is currently being positioned by Wizards of the Coast to also serve as a means for official tournament play, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic. Both Online and Arena are regularly updated with new Core and Expansion cards as well as all rule changes made by Wizards.
In addition, Wizards of the Coast has worked with other developers for various iterations of Magic: The Gathering as a card game in a single-player game format. Microprose developed 1997 ' and its expansions, which had the player travel the world of Shandalar to challenge computer opponents, earn cards to customize their decks, improve their own Planeswalker attributes and ultimately defeat a powerful Planeswalker. Stainless Games developed a series of titles starting with 2009's ' and culminating with 2015's Magic Duels, a free-to-play title. The Duels series did not feature full sets of Magic cards but selected subsets, and were initially designed around a challenging single-player experience coupled with an advanced artificial-intelligence computer opponent. Later games in the series added in more deck-building options and multiplayer support.
Additional games have tried other variations of the Magic: The Gathering gameplay in other genres. Acclaim developed a real-time strategy game ' in 2003, in which the player's abilities were inspired by the various cards. Acclaim also had made a 1997 arcade game Magic: The Gathering — Armageddon, a Breakout-style trackball-based game, but only as many as six cabinets were known to have been made. Hiberium and D3 Publisher developed ', combining deck building with match-3-style casual gaming. This was released in December 2015 as a freemium game and continues to be updated with new card sets from the physical game. Cryptic Studios and Perfect World Entertainment have announced plans to create a Magic: The Gathering massively multiplayer online role-playing game, to be released for personal computers and consoles.
In addition to official programs, a number of unofficial programs were developed to help user to track their Magic: The Gathering library and allow for rudimentary play between online players. Examples of such programs included Apprentice, Magic Workstation, XMage, and Cockatrice. These programs are not endorsed by Wizards of the Coast.

Novels

originally had an exclusive license to produce novels for Magic: The Gathering, and published ten books between 1994 and 1996. Around 1997, the license reverted to Wizards, and the company published its own novels to better tie these works to the expansion sets from 1998 to about 2011.

Comics

In September 2011, Hasbro and IDW Publishing accorded to make a four-issue mini-series about Magic: The Gathering with a new story but heavily based on MTG elements and with a new Planeswalker called Dack Fayden, the story of which mainly developed in the planes of Ravnica and Innistrad. The ongoing series started in February 2012.

Film

In January 2014, 20th Century Fox acquired the rights to produce a Magic: The Gathering film with Simon Kinberg as producer and TSG Entertainment, and Allspark Pictures as co-financers, after Universal Pictures allegedly dropped the film from their schedule. In June 2014, Fox hired screenwriter Bryan Cogman to write the script for the film. In 2019 following Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox's assets, the film along with numerous other properties in development at Fox were cancelled.
In April 2016, Enter the Battlefield, a documentary about life on the Magic Pro Tour was released. The film was written by Greg Collins, Nathan Holt, and Shawn Kornhauser.
The production team behind The Toys That Made Us will produce a documentary Igniting the Spark, The Story of Magic: The Gathering.

Television

In June 2019, Variety reported that Joe and Anthony Russo, Wizards of the Coast, and Hasbro's Allspark Animation have teamed with Netflix for an animated Magic: The Gathering television series. In July 2019 at the San Diego Comic Con, the Russos revealed the logo of the animated series and spoke about doing an live action series.

Parodies

In 1998, PGI Limited created , which was a parody of Magic: The Gathering. Wizards of the Coast, which owned the rights to Magic: The Gathering, took active steps to hinder the distribution of the game and successfully shut out PGI Limited from attending GenCon in July 1998. In an attempt to avoid breaching copyright and Richard Garfield's patent, each starter deck of Havic had printed on the back side, "This is a Parody", and on the bottom of the rule card was printed, "Do not have each player: construct their own library of predetermined number of game components by examining and selecting game components from reservoir of game components or you may infringe on U.S. Patent No. 5,662,332 to Garfield."
Four official parody expansions of Magic exist: Unglued |Unglued, Unhinged |Unhinged, Unstable |Unstable, and Unsanctioned |Unsanctioned. Most of the cards in these sets feature silver borders and humorous themes. The silver-bordered cards are not legal for play in DCI-sanctioned tournaments.