Magic: The Gathering

Two players, each a wizard, each with a deck of spells. You start at 20 life, and you reduce your opponent to zero. Magic invented this entire genre in 1993 and it has spent thirty years being the most mechanically ambitious game in it.

Its defining idea is the resource system. Lands are cards in your deck, you play one per turn, and they produce the mana that pays for everything else. That means every game has a real economy: you can be flooded with lands and nothing to cast, or full of spells you cannot afford. Managing that curve IS the game.

• Five colours: White (order, protection), Blue (control, card draw), Black (sacrifice, removal), Red (speed, damage), Green (creatures, ramp).
• The stack: spells do not resolve instantly, they go on a stack and players can respond. This is where Magic gets its reputation for depth.
• Enormous format variety, from cheap 2-player Standard to the enormous social Commander tables.
• A card printed in any year can be worth pennies or thousands. The secondary market is its own hobby.

• Mana cost, top right. Generic numbers plus coloured symbols. This is what you pay.
• Type line, middle. Land, Creature, Instant, Sorcery, Artifact, Enchantment, Planeswalker or Battle, plus subtypes.
• Rules text, below. What it does. Keywords like Flying, Trample, Deathtouch and Haste are shorthand for rules you learn once.
• Power and toughness, bottom right, on creatures only. Damage dealt and damage survivable.
• Set symbol and rarity: common, uncommon, rare, mythic rare.

1. 1

   Untap

   Untap everything you tapped last turn. Tapping is how cards pay costs and attack.

2. 2

   Upkeep

   Triggers that say "at the beginning of your upkeep" happen here.

3. 3

   Draw

   Draw one card. The player going first skips this on turn one.

4. 4

   First main phase

   Play one land. Cast creatures, sorceries, artifacts, enchantments, planeswalkers.

5. 5

   Combat

   Declare attackers, then your opponent declares blockers, then damage happens simultaneously. Both players can cast instants at each step.

6. 6

   Second main phase

   Cast anything you held back to see how combat went.

7. 7

   End step and cleanup

   End-of-turn triggers, then discard down to seven cards.

The starting recipe that has worked for thirty years: 60 cards, roughly 24 lands, roughly 36 spells, and up to four copies of any non-land card. Fewer colours means more consistent mana, and two colours is the sweet spot for a first deck.

• Curve matters. A good deck has cheap plays for turns one to three, not just expensive bombs.
• Removal is not optional. Have answers to a creature you cannot beat in combat.
• Card draw keeps you from running out of gas. Most losses at kitchen tables are from an empty hand.
• Sideboard of 15 in competitive play, swapped between games of a match.

• Commander (EDH). 100 card singleton decks led by a legendary creature, 40 life, usually four players. This is the most played format in the world and the most social.
• Standard. Only recent sets are legal, and older ones rotate out. Cheapest competitive entry.
• Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, Vintage. Progressively larger card pools and progressively more expensive.
• Pauper. Commons only. Extremely cheap, surprisingly deep.
• Limited (Draft and Sealed). You build a deck from packs you just opened. The best format for learning, and the one where card collections do not matter.

Magic's story is about Planeswalkers: rare individuals whose spark lets them travel between worlds. Each set visits a plane, and each plane is a fully realised setting: gothic horror on Innistrad, neon cyber-fantasy on Kamigawa, Norse myth on Kaldheim, an entire noir city on Ravnica.

• You, the player, are cast as a Planeswalker. That is why the card types work the way they do.
• The long-running villains have included Nicol Bolas, an elder dragon planeswalker, and the Phyrexians, a body-horror machine faith that spent decades as a slow-burn threat before a multiverse-wide war.
• Every set tells a self-contained story on its plane, and the flavour text on commons is where most of it is actually written.
• Universes Beyond crossovers put other franchises on Magic cards. Purists hate it, sales disagree.

You can play thousands of games without knowing any of this. But the reason people keep the cards is usually the art and the world behind it.

Magic on this platform is collect-only: real cards from real sets, ingested from Scryfall, opened as packs with published odds. The duel engine here is Yu-Gi-Oh shaped, so a Magic card can never enter a duel deck, by design.

• Open packs from the card shop in Discord. Which sets are on the shelf depends on what has been ingested.
• Cards land in your binder on the website, which is public and shareable.
• Duplicates feed trading, the market, and set completion rewards.
• Everything costs Bolts, the server currency you earn by turning up. No real money, ever.

• The official beginner rules and the MTG Arena client, which teaches the game far better than any article.
• Scryfall for searching every card ever printed, which is also where our ingest gets its data.
• EDHREC if Commander is where you land: it shows what everyone else plays with your commander.
• Ask in our Discord. Bring a decklist, leave with seventeen opinions.