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Common questions
Who created Magic: The Gathering and when was it designed?
Richard Garfield created Magic: The Gathering while he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. He developed the game concept during a hike near Multnomah Falls in Oregon before bringing the idea to Peter Adkison.
What is the five-color system in Magic: The Gathering and how does it work?
The five-color system known as the Color Wheel dictates the strengths, weaknesses, and themes of every card in the game. White represents order, blue represents intellect, black represents power, red represents freedom, and green represents life, with each color drawing mana from specific land types.
When was the ante gambling rule removed from Magic: The Gathering?
The ante gambling rule was removed from Magic: The Gathering after the 1995 expansion set Homelands. This rule was originally included to encourage players to play with cards but became controversial due to regional restrictions on games of chance.
When did Wizards of the Coast establish the Pro Tour and what format does it use?
Wizards of the Coast established the Pro Tour in 1996 as a circuit of tournaments where players compete for cash prizes. The event takes place over three days with the first two days structured in a Swiss format and the final day featuring a single-elimination format.
How many Magic: The Gathering cards have been printed by 2018?
By 2018, Wizards of the Coast had printed over 20 billion Magic: The Gathering cards. Since the game's release, over 20,000 unique cards have been created.
Magic: The Gathering
Richard Garfield, a combinatorial mathematician and doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, sat in a coffee shop in 1991 and realized that the game he was designing could be more than just a pastime. He had spent years refining a concept called Five Magics, a system where players drew power from geographically diverse elemental sources, but the board game format felt too static. The breakthrough came during a hike near Multnomah Falls in Oregon, where he decided to apply his Five Magics concept to collectible color-themed cards. This shift transformed the game from a fixed board experience into a customizable deck-building engine, allowing each player to craft a unique identity through their card choices. Garfield's insight was that the game could be expanded indefinitely with new cards, a concept that would eventually make Wizards of the Coast millions of dollars. He brought this idea to Peter Adkison, a systems analyst for Boeing who had founded Wizards of the Coast, and Adkison immediately recognized the potential. The game was not just a product; it was a platform for endless creativity and social interaction, a vision that would eventually lead to the creation of a global phenomenon.
The Color Wheel of Magic
At the heart of Magic: The Gathering lies a five-color system known as the Color Wheel, which dictates the strengths, weaknesses, and themes of every card in the game. White represents order, peace, and light, drawing mana from plains and summoning soldiers that are collectively strong even if individually weak. Blue embodies intellect, logic, and manipulation, pulling its power from islands and using air and water to control the flow of the game. Black signifies power, death, and corruption, drawing mana from swamps and utilizing undead creatures and sacrifice mechanics to destroy opponents. Red stands for freedom, chaos, and fury, pulling power from mountains and favoring aggressive attacks and powerful fireballs. Green represents life, nature, and evolution, drawing mana from forests and dominating the battlefield with a wide array of creatures. The Color Wheel is not just a thematic device; it is a mechanical framework that ensures balance and variety in deck construction. Cards from colors that are aligned, such as red and green, often provide synergistic effects, while decks constructed with opposing colors, like green and blue, may lack favorable combinations but can deal with decks based on any other colors. The Color Wheel is used to ensure new cards are thematically in the correct color and do not infringe on the territory of other colors, creating a dynamic and ever-evolving game.
What is the Universes Beyond series and which brands are included?
The Universes Beyond series introduces cross-promotional elements with other brands as special cards that are legal to play in all formats. Included brands are Warhammer 40,000, The Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, Jurassic Park, Final Fantasy, and Spider-Man.
The original set of rules for Magic: The Gathering prescribed that all games were to be played for ante, a gambling mechanic where players removed a card at random from their deck before the game began, and the winner would take and keep both cards. This rule was partly inspired by the game of marbles and was added by Richard Garfield because he wanted players to play with the cards rather than simply collect them. 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. However, the ante concept became controversial because many regions had restrictions on games of chance, and the rule was soon made optional due to these restrictions and players' reluctance to possibly lose a card that they owned. The gambling rule was also forbidden at sanctioned events, and the last card to mention ante was printed in the 1995 expansion set Homelands. This early gamble, while innovative, highlighted the tension between the game's collectible nature and its competitive play, a tension that would continue to shape the game's evolution.
The Tournament That Built a League
In 1996, Wizards of the Coast established the Pro Tour, a circuit of tournaments where players could compete for sizeable cash prizes over the course of a single weekend-long tournament. The Pro Tour would take place over three days, with the first two days structured in a Swiss format and the final day featuring a single-elimination format to select the winner. At the end of the competition, players were awarded Pro Points depending on their finishing place, and if they finished high enough, they would also be awarded prize money. Frequent winners of these events made names for themselves in the Magic community, such as Luis Scott-Vargas, Gabriel Nassif, Kai Budde, and Jon Finkel. The Pro Tour added an element of prestige to the game by virtue of the cash payouts and media coverage from within the community, and for a brief period of time, ESPN2 televised the tournaments. The Pro Tour was a groundbreaking concept that transformed Magic from a casual pastime into a competitive sport, with players earning invitations to compete in major tournaments and the right to compete in a Pro Tour had to be earned by either winning a Pro Tour Qualifier Tournament or being successful in a previous tournament on a similar level.
The Digital Revolution and the Pro League
In 2002, Magic Online, often shortened to MTGO or Modo, was released as an official online version of the game, allowing players to compete in digital formats and build their collections without the need for physical cards. A new, updated version of Magic Online was released in April 2008, and by 2018, Wizards of the Coast had printed over 20 billion Magic: The Gathering cards, with over 20,000 unique cards created since the game's release. In 2019, Wizards of the Coast announced a new organized play structure for Magic: The Gathering, splitting into digital and tabletop play with separate Mythic Championships for Magic: The Gathering Arena and tabletop play. The Magic Pro League (MPL) included the top 32 players from the previous season, who were given a $75,000/year salary and the opportunity to win much more money in exclusive tournaments. The new system consisted of several interconnected circuits, including the Player's Tour, the Magic Pro League, Challengers/Rivals, Tabletop Mythic Championships, and Arena Mythic Championships. However, in 2021, it was announced that the competitive play system would undergo another shift, with Wizards of the Coast stressing a return to in-person play and the disbandment of The Magic Pro League after the 2021, 2022 season, as competitive Magic would no longer be supported as a full-time, high-paid esports profession.
The Storyteller's Multiverse
Each Magic card has an illustration to represent the flavor of the card, often reflecting the setting of the expansion for which it was designed, with much of Magic's early artwork 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, leading the art direction team 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, and when older cards are reprinted in new sets, 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. At the back of each card, at the end of the word Deckmaster, a pen stroke is visible, which is a printing error which was never corrected, as all card backs have to look the same. As Magic has expanded across the globe, its artwork has had to change for its international audience, with artwork edited or given alternate art to comply with governmental standards, such as the portrayal of skeletons and most undead in artwork being prohibited by
The Art of the Card
the Chinese government until 2008.
Wizards of the Coast has introduced special cards and sets that include cross-promotional elements with other brands, typically as promotional cards, not legal for Standard play and may not be playable even in eternal formats. Four promotional cards were sold at HasCon 2017, featuring three other Hasbro brands, Transformers, Nerf, and Dungeons & Dragons, and a special three-card set based on characters from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic 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, and the Secret Lair promotional series has been used to introduce crossover cards from other brands, including cards based on AMC's television show The Walking Dead, paintings from Bob Ross, and characters from Stranger Things, Fortnite, and Street Fighter. In 2022, cards illustrated by mangaka Junji Ito were released as Special Guest cards, and the 2024 Secret Lair release featured cards based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail, including a Tim the Enchanter card based on the standard Prodigal Sorceror card which has been nicknamed Tim in honor of the film character by the Magic community. The Universes Beyond series has been used to bring more crossover properties into Magic, such as Warhammer 40,000 and The Lord of the Rings,
The Crossover Craze
with sets for Doctor Who, Jurassic Park, Final Fantasy, and Spider-Man released or scheduled for release, and all future Universes Beyond sets will be made legal to play in all formats.