Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering, often abbreviated MTG, is a strategic trading card game in which players take the role of powerful wizards — called Planeswalkers — who duel one another using decks built from a vast and constantly expanding pool of collectible cards.¹⁴ It was created by mathematician Richard Garfield and first published by Wizards of the Coast in 1993, and is widely identified as the first modern trading card game, pioneering a genre that would later inspire countless others, notably Pokémon.⁵¹⁴ The game blends strategy, chance, fantasy, collectability, and a distinctive art style, and remains one of the most popular and enduring card games in the world.¹⁴

Origins and design

Garfield was a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, and a lifelong tabletop gamer, when in 1991 he met Wizards of the Coast founder Peter D. Adkison over the internet.²⁴ Garfield had approached the company to pitch a board game about programming robots — RoboRally — only to be told the firm needed something more portable and cheaper to produce.²⁴ Magic was Garfield’s response, combining his interest in fantasy with Adkison’s idea of a “trading-card” format in which fans could buy and sell collectible cards like those of sports heroes.² The two settled on cards rather than a board game to avoid elaborate equipment, with the goal, in Garfield’s words, of creating “a game that was fun and portable and that could be played under an hour”.²

By Garfield’s own account, although about a dozen games directly influenced Magic in one way or another, its most influential ancestor was Cosmic Encounter, originally published by Eon Products and later re-released by Mayfair Games.²³ He had first played Cosmic Encounter in the mid-1980s and was intrigued by a piece with special powers that could change the rules of the game in mid-play, leading him to wonder what a game would be like if every piece were magic, each altering play in some unique way.²²³ The initial concept also drew on another card game Garfield had developed in 1985 called Safecracker, a design he regarded as not among his best.²³ He invented Magic in about three months, and after a period of test marketing the eight-person company released it from the basement of Adkison’s home in August 1993.²

Release and growth

The first set, known as Alpha, was released in August 1993, featuring a mix of creatures, spells, and artifacts, each with its own abilities and flavor text.²² It was the first trading card game of its kind in the world, and sold more than ten million cards in just six weeks even though Wizards of the Coast had estimated the first printing would last a year.² The game became an overnight success, and Wizards of the Coast recorded sales of about $50 million in 1994 — the first full year Magic was sold — an amount that doubled in 1995.² By 1998 the company had more than 500 employees and estimated sales greater than $100 million, with international offices in Antwerp, London, Milan, and Paris.² By that year over five million consumers had embraced Magic worldwide, and the game was available in nine languages and played in more than 52 countries.²

The game continued to grow over the following decades. From 2008 to 2016 — a period of unprecedented popularity — Wizards of the Coast printed a great many cards across booster packs, starter decks, Commander decks, and other products.⁶ By 2018 Magic reached more than 35 million players across 70 countries.⁷⁸ In February 2023 Hasbro, the toymaker that owns Wizards of the Coast, announced that Magic had become its first billion-dollar brand, surpassing the sales of other lines such as Transformers and G.I. Joe; the game generated nearly $1.1 billion in revenue in 2022, up 7 percent from the year before and accounting for 18 percent of Hasbro’s overall revenue.⁵⁹ By then more than 50 million people had played Magic, including the rapper Post Malone and the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt.⁵ The game has spawned a cottage industry of video games, comic books, a Caribbean cruise, and an animated series in development for Netflix.⁵

Gameplay

Each player builds a deck and, in a standard game between two or more players, aims to reduce an opponent’s life total from a starting 20 to zero.¹⁹¹⁴ A game begins by shuffling the deck — once placed within reach it is known as the library — and drawing an opening hand of seven cards, with an optional mulligan allowing a dissatisfied player to redraw.¹⁴¹⁹ Players may take a mulligan repeatedly, then place a number of cards equal to the times they mulliganed on the bottom of the deck.¹⁴

The two basic card types are lands and spells.¹⁹ Lands are tapped — turned sideways — to produce mana, the resource used to pay for spells, while creature cards carry a power and toughness used in combat.¹⁹ A spell’s cost is printed in the upper right corner of the card; a creature such as Sanctuary Cat requires a single white mana, generated by tapping a Plains, while Walking Corpse costs one black mana plus one mana of any color.¹⁹ A creature’s power, the first of two numbers in its lower right corner, is the damage it deals, and its toughness is the damage it can absorb in a turn before being destroyed.¹⁹ Creatures may attack once per turn during the combat phase, but only if they have been on the battlefield since the start of that turn; tapped creatures cannot block.¹⁹

A turn proceeds through a fixed sequence of phases: an untap step, an upkeep and draw step, a first main phase for playing a land and casting spells, a combat phase, a second main phase, and an end step at which excess cards above seven are discarded.¹⁴ Beyond ordinary lands and creatures, players cast one-time instants and sorceries, deploy enchantments and artifacts that remain on the battlefield, and summon Planeswalker cards from the multiverse.¹⁹¹⁷

Cards are organized into five colors — white (Plains), blue (Island), black (Swamp), red (Mountain), and green (Forest) — each tied to a distinct philosophy, such as order and protection for white or knowledge and manipulation for blue.¹⁴ While reducing an opponent’s life to zero is the most direct victory, a player also loses by attempting to draw from an empty library, by accumulating ten or more poison counters, or through alternate win conditions printed on certain cards.¹⁴ The game is played across numerous formats, including the rotating Standard — typically the sets from the past two years — the non-rotating Modern, Commander, Draft, and Sealed.¹¹¹⁴ Decks vary by format, from 60-card constructed decks to 100-card singleton decks in which each card is unique.¹⁴

Magic’s sets draw heavily on real-world cultures and history as inspiration for their settings, a practice players have debated as the game has worked through an ever-wider range of source material.²¹ More recent sets have ranged across worlds drawn from collaborations and original planes, including Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Aetherdrift, Edge of Eternities, Secrets of Strixhaven, and a Marvel Super Heroes crossover.¹¹²⁰

Digital versions and competitive play

Magic developed a long history of organized competitive play, with the first Magic Pro Tour dating to 1996.⁷⁸ In December 2018, at The Game Awards, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast announced a $10 million esports program for 2019, split between tabletop tournaments and digital competition; it included a Magic Pro League of 32 top-ranked players on $75,000 contracts and a $1 million Mythic Invitational at PAX East in Boston.⁷⁸ Wizards of the Coast President Chris Cocks framed the move as “evolving our tournament structure to include a $10 million prize pool”.⁷

The franchise’s principal digital form is Magic: The Gathering Arena, a free-to-play digital collectible card game developed and published by Wizards of the Coast for PC, Mac, Android, and iOS.¹⁵¹⁶ Described as the first fully digital representation of the game, it launched in beta in 2018 and was released on Steam on May 23, 2023.⁸¹⁸ It offers a tutorial system, formats such as Draft and Brawl, esports qualifiers in the Arena Premier Play League, and unlockable collectible decks, and is supported by in-app purchases of gold and gems.¹⁵¹⁶ Cocks called it the company’s “most valuable tool for engaging new players,” noting that it attracted players when pandemic restrictions kept them home.⁵ The mobile version has drawn more than five million downloads and a 4.6-star rating across hundreds of thousands of reviews, though some players have criticized its monetization and connectivity.¹⁵¹⁶ An earlier client, Magic Online, was the original digital platform serving fans of older formats such as Legacy and Modern, and was described in review as the best software representation of Magic released to that point, in many respects surpassing the physical card game.¹²⁰