Short answers, pulled from the story.
Richard Garfield created Magic: The Gathering during the early months of 1991, and the game underwent general release on the 5th of August 1993. Garfield developed the core rules and initial cards while working as a doctoral candidate in combinatorial mathematics at Whitman College.
The Color Wheel divides magic into five colors: white blue black red and green. White represents order peace and light from plains, blue represents intellect logic manipulation and trickery from islands, black represents power death corruption and sacrifice from swamps, red represents freedom chaos fury and warfare from mountains, and green represents life nature evolution and indulgence from forests.
Twenty-three thousand three hundred eighteen unique cards have been produced as of late releases with six hundred to one thousand added annually. First cards were printed exclusively in English but current sets appear in eleven languages including Simplified Chinese Traditional Chinese French German Italian Japanese Korean Portuguese Russian and Spanish.
In 2018 Wizards announced that 2019 would be the last season for The Pro Tour eliminating Nationals the World Magic Cup and Team Series. Starting with partial seasons in 2019 the new structure split digital and tabletop play with separate Mythic Championships for Magic: The Gathering Arena and tabletop play.
Each Magic card measures approximately sixty-three millimeters by eighty-eight millimeters and displays an illustration alongside rules text. Half of the face shows the card's art while the other half lists mechanics often relying on commonly-reused keywords to simplify the card's text, and cards fall into two classes: lands and spells.