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Magic: The Gathering

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Magic: The Gathering (a.k.a. "Magic" or "MTG"), created by Richard Garfield and introduced by Wizards of the Coast in 1993, is the most enduring collectible card game and is regarded as the originator of that game genre. Though the original conception of the game drew heavily from the fantasy motifs of traditional role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons Magic's rules bear little resemblance to pencil-and-paper campaigns. The game plays like a strategy contest with an element of luck, like bridge. Games usually finish in well under an hour (compared to many hours, typically spread over a number of sessions, for traditional role-playing games). Software also allows Magic to be played online.

File:MagicTheGathering.jpg
Magic: the Gathering cards

Role-players were enthusiastic early fans of Magic, but the game achieved much wider popularity among strategy gamers. The commercial success of the game prompted a wave of other collectible card games to flood the market in the mid-1990s, although many of them were poorly designed and failed both commercially and in popularity. Although Magic's gross card sales have been surpassed in recent years, particularly by Japanese import games based on the Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! franchises, Magic's popularity continues to grow steadily. In 2003, after Magic: The Gathering had fulfilled the ten-year existence required for induction, Games Magazine selected it for its Games Hall of Fame, making it the 23rd game so honored.

Game play

In Magic, two or sometimes more players play the roles of so-called planeswalkers (powerful wizards) engaging in a magical duel to the death. Every player has a number of life points; once these reach zero (depleted by damage) he or she loses. In addition, if a player is unable to draw a card from his library (the deck of cards he started with) when required, or if the player has ten or more poison counters on him, that player loses. Some cards may also add a new win condition for the game. The last surviving player wins.

Players fight each other by playing lands and spells from their hand. To cast a spell one needs mana, magical energy, which is generated by land cards. There are thousands of different spell cards, which come from collectible sets (hence the term collectible card game or trading card game). The types of cards are:

  • Creatures: Summon a creature that can attack the other player or be used for defense. The creature remains in play until otherwise removed (through spells or death in combat)
  • Enchantments: There are two forms of enchantments, local and global. Local enchantments are attached to a permanent, modifying its characteristics, and are destroyed either directly or when the permanent to which they are attached is removed from the play zone. Global enchantments affect the entire play environment. Global enchantments persist until destroyed.
  • Artifacts: Create an object that remains in play until destroyed. Artifacts may have continuous effects like enchantments or may only take effect when activated by their owner. A sub-class of artifacts, called equipment, work similarly to creature enchantments; they can be attached to creatures, giving them additional abilities. Equipment, once in play, can be put on a creature card by paying a mana cost. When the creature leaves play, the equipment "unattaches" but remains in play.
  • Sorceries: Can only be played only on your own turn, during your main phase, and go to the graveyard after use.
  • Instants: Can be used any time a player has priority, and also go to the graveyard after use. Some older cards are of the type interrupt and mana source, however, these have been retroactively changed to instants.
  • Lands: The most basic resource of the game, because they provide the mana needed to play spells (sometimes in addition to other effects). A player may only play one land per turn. Lands are never considered spells.

In detail, playing spells works like this: The player announces the spell and declares targets (if any), then pays all costs - usually by tapping (turning sideways) a number of land cards. ("Tapping" a card indicates that its resources are being expended for the duration of the current turn.) Typical lands produce one mana of a particular type or color. There are five basic lands, and each produces a specific color of mana: Plains generate one white mana, Islands one blue mana, Swamps one black mana, Mountains one red mana, and Forests one green mana. This mana is added to the player's mana pool. The cost of the spell is most often a mana cost, displayed in the upper-right corner of the card. Some cards have alternate or additional costs.

Each player has a library where cards from the deck that have not yet been drawn are kept; a hand containing cards drawn but not yet played; an area on the table for his or her lands, creatures, etc. that are in play (cards in play are referred to as permanents); and a graveyard where spent spells or destroyed permanent cards are discarded. Players may never look into the libraries and may see their own hands only, but may view all the other cards on the table without restriction. There are also lesser-used zones called the "phased out" zone and the removed from game zone; in both cases only a few cards make use of it.

Game play is turn-based. During a turn, the active player untaps his tapped cards (returns them to their upright state), draws one card, plays at most one land from his or her hand, casts as many spells as he or she wants to and can afford (with mana), and may attack another player with one or more creatures. In order for a creature to be used as an attacker, it must have been in play before the current turn starts. The attacking player taps the creature card by turning it sideways to indicate he or she is attacking with that creature. The defending player may declare some of his or her creatures as blockers. Attacking creatures deal damage to their assigned blockers (equal to their power) and are likewise damaged by them. A creature that amasses in one turn more than a specific amount of damage (its toughness) dies and goes to its owner's graveyard. Unblocked attackers deal damage to the player they attacked, reducing that player's life points. All damage dealt to creatures that did not die is healed at the end of the turn.

The protocol for resolving spell cards and other abilities is known as the stack, or the LIFO (Last In, First Out) rule. The stack works like this: A player may play any number of successive spells or abilities when he or she has priority. However, none of these actions will resolve (that is, take effect) until the player with priority passes it to the other player, and that player passes in return. If the second player adds anything more to the stack, they go "on top" of the actions already there. When both players pass in succession, the top action on the stack resolves. If both players pass when there are no actions on the stack, the game moves on to the next phase. This protocol may sound complicated in writing, but in practice it is usually instantaneous.

Some spells have effects that override normal game rules (e.g., allow you to play more than one land per turn). Spell effects may contradict each other, and it is one of the more difficult aspects of gameplay to resolve these conflicts. A detailed and thorough rulebook exists to clarify conflicts. The so-called "Golden Rule of Magic" is that if a card's text overrides a game rule, follow the card.

Deck building

Preparation for a game takes place far in advance of actual play. Beginners may start out owning only a starter deck of 60 cards -- which is also the normal deck size and can serve as a first deck. Usually though, more and more cards are collected and traded so that serious players have a large trove of cards from which they have to select 60 (normally) for their next deck. Due to the many possibilities, two players seldom enter matches with the same decks (excepting Constructed tournaments, in which certain deck types tend to predominate).

Building a deck is mainly about balancing various aspects. First, you should be aware of the principal probabilities involved. Constructed tournament decks must contain at least 60 cards. For the sake of simplicity, we will assume a 60-card minimum requirement for this discussion. Larger decks are possible, but usually will not buy you much except unreliability (imagine the one card you need being buried in a library of 80 or 100 cards). One normally cycles through the deck by drawing one card per turn.

Most spells have a color, which means that they require a number of mana points of a specific color to cast (they may require additional mana of unspecified color as well). Some spells (only artifacts) need only colorless mana, or mana not of any particular color; very few spells require more than one color. Normally, land will produce a single color of mana; most lands that produce more than one color, or more than one mana, have drawbacks, such as dealing damage to you when you use them.

The best players agree that one fundamental aspect of deck building is balancing mana sources (lands) and effects (spells). Having a lot of black spells but few or no swamps will do you no good. More generally, there needs to be enough land to support your spells. Most decks contain a ratio of about three spell cards for every two land cards. This is not a static ratio, as some deck strategies focus on playing only low-mana spells (to include fewer lands, and therefore have more room for spells in the deck), and some use more expensive spells with more powerful effects (and thus require more lands).

The five colors of the game (white, blue, black, red, and green) each have different strengths and weaknesses, which are discussed below. For this reason, it is often worthwhile to play two or more colors, so that the strengths of one compensate for the vulnerabilities of the other.

However, adding more colors than is necessary to a deck can result in inconsistent draws. In a deck with four or five colors, it is quite probable that the player, having shuffled his deck and drawn a hand of seven cards to start the game, will end up with lands of two different colors, and spells of the other colors, and thus be unable to cast anything. Therefore, it is normally recommended to restrict one's deck to a smaller number of colors -- such as only including Island and Swamps, to support only blue and black spells.

The colors of Magic

The equilibrium between the five colors is one of the defining aspects of the game. The various strengths and weaknesses of each color are attributed to the fact that each color represents a different "style" of magic. Because the trade-offs between the abilities of each color are integral to keeping the game balanced, it is helpful to discuss the various color philosophies.

White is the color of equality, order, law, righteousness, and light (although not necessarily "good.") Typical white creatures include knights, soldiers, and angels. Within the game, white's strengths lie in healing damage; launching tactical creature assaults; removing opposing enchantments; and imposing additional rules that all players must abide by. White's weaknesses include its difficulty in answering threats through direct removal, and the fact that many of its most powerful spells affect all players equally.

Blue is the color of knowledge, illusion, reason, ingenuity, and trickery. Typical blue creatures include wizards, merfolk, and air spirits. Blue's cards are best at letting you draw additional cards; giving you control of opposing creatures; "unmaking" cards in play by returning them to their owner's hand; and canceling your opponent's spells as they are being played. Blue's weaknesses lie in that it has by far the weakest creatures of any color and it has only limited ways of dealing with opposing threats once they have entered play, and its main strength is its ability to prevent opponents from playing spells.

Black is the color of death, darkness, plague, selfishness, and greed (although not necessarily "evil.") Typical black creatures include zombies, undead, and necromancers. Within the game, black cards are best at killing opposing creatures; making your opponent discard cards in his hand; raising your own creatures from the dead; and giving you the option to trade your own life points for more powerful effects. Black's weaknesses include the fact that it cannot remove opposing artifacts or enchantments, and many of black's best cards can harm you if you are not careful.

Red is the color of destruction, war, passion, chaos, and anger. Typical red creatures include goblins, barbarians, and fire spirits. Red is one of the best colors at destroying opposing creatures, artifacts, and lands; for trading long-term resources for short-term power; and for playing spells that deal damage directly to your opponents. Red's weaknesses include its inability to deal with enchantments, and the fact that it has limited options if you are trying to interfere with your opponents' ability to play spells. Red also has the vast majority of cards that involve random chance.

Green is the color of life, nature, growth, instinct, and interdependence. Typical green creatures include beasts, elves, and druids. Green has many creatures, of all sizes; it is excellent at being able to bring more lands in play and generate more mana; and it has ways of adding points to its life total. However, green has difficulty removing opposing creatures from play, and has almost no strategies that are not creature-based.

In addition to the five separate colors, there are other types of cards that have no color, or require multiple colors:

Artifacts are considered colorless, and as they do not have colored mana in their cards, they can be played in combination with any colors. Artifacts represent machines, devices, robots, magical items, and weapons. In practice, Artifacts work best with blue, and worst with green.

Land cards are also colorless and although their primary function is a resource in order to play the above kinds of cards, a very few have other abilities that are color aligned.

Gold or multicolor cards, which comprise the smallest minority of cards, are cards that require two or more colors to play. Accordingly, they can be played only in decks that use all of the colors that are required to play them, unless there is an alternative way to cast the spell.

Card sets

Wizards of the Coast releases Magic cards in expansions and base sets. Expansion sets are usually smaller than 200 cards and are printed in limited supply. They expand the game by adding new cards. There have been numerous base sets and expansions; for a full list, see the main article on this topic: Magic: The Gathering sets.

Organized play

See main article Duelists' Convocation International

Magic: The Gathering has grown a lot since it was first introduced in 1993, and a large culture has developed around the game. Magic tournaments are arranged almost every weekend in gaming stores. Larger tournaments with hundreds of competitors from around the globe sponsored by Wizards of the Coast are arranged many times every year. Large sums of money are paid out to those players who place the best in the tournament, and the winner receives sums upward of US$30,000. 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 Duelists' Convocation International (or DCI) is the organizing body for professional Magic events. The DCI is owned and operated by Wizards of the Coast.

There are two basic types of organized play, Constructed and Limited.

Constructed

Constructed tournaments are tournaments in which a player comes with a pre-constructed deck, built according to the restrictions of the DCI and the tournament type. (Currently, the only supported Constructed tournament types are Type 1, which permits the use of cards from virtually any Magic set, with the exception of those on the Banned list which may not be used and the Restricted list of which only one may be used per deck; Type 1.5, which bans both cards on the Type 1 Banned and Restricted lists but allows cards from almost every set as well; Extended, which currently uses cards from Sixth Edition, Tempest and all subsequent sets; Type 2, or Standard, which currently uses Eighth Edition, Onslaught and all subsequent sets; and Block Constructed, which permits only cards from the current block of three sets). Decks must consist of no fewer than 60 cards, and no more than four of any one card. The basic lands, however, may be used in any quantity.

Additionally, a 15-card sideboard is permitted, from which a player may tweak his or her deck during a match to better deal with their opponent's strategy. Following the first game of a best-of-three match, each player is permitted to replace any number of cards in his or her deck with an equal number of cards in his or her sideboard. The original deck configuration is restored at the conclusion of the match.

Limited

Limited tournaments are based on a limited card pool. Three common types of limited tournaments are sealed deck, where players receive a sealed tournament pack of 75 cards, 30 of which are basic lands, and two booster packs of 15 cards; Rochester draft, where players each receive three booster packs of 15 cards, each pack is opened, the cards are placed upon a table, and the players draft one card at a time until the pack is exhausted and the next player's pack is opened; and a booster draft, where each player opens one booster pack, selects a single card, then passes the rest to the next player over. Therefore, in sealed deck tournaments, each player has 75 cards from which to build their deck; in drafts, 45 cards. Any number of basic lands may also be added to the deck. The decks in limited tournaments need only be 40 cards, to allow for the limited flexibility of the decks; all the unused cards function as the sideboard.

Playing Magic on the Internet

  • Magic Online - the official Internet-based version of Magic, provides for play against other people connected to the Internet. It recreates Magic: The Gathering gameplay closely, enforcing an extensive and actively updated knowledge of the game rules, provisions for social and card trading interactions, visual presentation of the same card art as the physical cards, and near-parallel release of new card sets both as physical and online cards. Magic Online does not charge for time online or per game played. Instead, the online cards must be purchased. Prices for online cards are comparable to prices for physical cards, at least in the United States. Each player's purchased cards "reside" on game servers. The Internet-wide accessibility and lack of the need to congregate with other players in a tournament setting provide an alternative comparable, and in some ways exceeding, playing with physical cards.
  • E-League.Com - Magic can be played online free of charge through E-League. The software used is a freeware program called Apprentice, not affiliated with DCI or Wizards of the Coast. E-League has its own ranking system and player base.
  • Generic Collectible Card Game (in beta testing as of November 2003) - Generic Collectible Card Game (also known as GCCG) is a program intended to support online play of multiple collectible card cardgames like Magic online. It is a free open source program running on Linux, Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. Every player starts with the same amount of money (not real money), that can be used to buy closed card sets or cards from other players. Players create decks with these cards and then play against other players for money, cards or fun.
  • Magic Workstation - This shareware program (not affiliated with DCI or Wizards of the Coast) is a powerful tool that enables users to build decks and compete in online play.
  • MTGPlay - MTGPlay is a freeware program (not affiliated with DCI or WIzards of the Coast) similar to Apprentice. Unlike Apprentice, MTGPlay is under active development, supports card art, and allows for games with more than two people. Official community site located at mtgplay.com.

Secondary market

Although Wizards of the Coast only sells cards in sealed packs (a single pack of 15 random cards retails for about US$3.50), there is an active secondary market in individual cards among players and game shops. Wizards intentionally publishes different cards in different quantities: a pack contains eleven common cards, three uncommon cards, and one rare. The prices of individual cards vary accordingly. Common cards, due to their abundant supply, rarely sell for more than a few cents unless they are particularly old or powerful. Uncommon cards and weak rares typically cost $.25-$1. The price of useful rare cards rises sharply. The most expensive cards in Standard tournament play are usually around $10-20. In the whole of Magic there are approximately 20 cards that routinely sell over $100. All of them are cards that have not been reprinted since 1994. In 2003, after the rotation of the extended tournament format and in combination with the first Type 1 Championships, the prices for such old, tournament-level cards had a large, unexpected price increase. Cards that had sold at $20 for years surged to $100+, and prices are still increasing, but now mostly due to speculation by card dealers in the secondary market.

As new sets come out, occasionally older cards are reprinted. If a card is expensive because of its play worthiness, reprinting will often increase the original version's value, because there are more tournament formats in which it is now legal and hence a higher demand among players. However, if the card is primarily attractive to collectors, reprinting will decrease the original's value, since it is now less scarce. To protect the value of certain old cards that are highly desirable to collectors, Wizards of the Coast has formulated an official reprint policy, which includes a list of cards they promise never to reprint.

Criticisms of Magic

Over the years, several criticisms have been voiced regarding Magic: the Gathering and the evolution of the game over its decade of existence.

Expense

Many players feel that, with new expansion sets being released at a rapid pace, they must spend large sums of money merely to stay competitive. Magic tournaments offer two main formats, Type I and Type II. In Type II, most cards are disallowed within two years of being released, forcing players to continually adapt their decks (and, thus, buy or trade for new cards). In Type I, nearly every card ever printed is allowed, and some cards necessary in certain decks cost $100 or more. However, the vast majority of Type I tournaments currently being run allow the use of proxies (mock-up cards; usually just a worthless card with the unobtainable card's name written on it), in order to spare players the expense of having to buy the most expensive deck components.

It should be noted that Magic can also be played in a casual atmosphere with more or less static decks, with no pressure to purchase new cards. Also, sealed-deck and drafting tournament formats have become popular in recent years. In these modes of play, the amount of money one is able or willing to spend on building a deck is irrelevant.

Mana-screw

A design-related criticism of Magic centers upon a property known as "mana-screw". Each player draws from a deck containing both land and spells and usually have no choice in what they draw. The cards being randomly shuffled together, players will inevitably experience long "streaks" characterized either by a severe deficit or surplus of land. After all, an arrangement where, say, one land appeared at every third card would be highly unlikely to occur by random chance.

Mana-screw is the subject of bitter debate within the Magic subculture. As it often spells death to a player's development within a match, defeated players often blame their losses on mana-screw. To counteract the possibility of mana-screw, many players arrange their deck as to evenly distribute lands and spells, a practice known as mana-weaving. If done before shuffling, it is legal but also merely an ineffective display of superstition: it will have no impact upon the land/spell distribution of a sufficiently randomized deck. When done after shuffling, however, mana-weaving is highly illegal, and many DCI tournament players have been suspended for precisely that offense.

Whether or not mana-screw constitutes an actual design flaw is a matter of controversy. Some Magic players, such as one-time Pro Tour winner Zvi Mowshowitz, agree that it does, but that it represents a relatively minor one, especially since Magic was designed to incorporate luck and randomness and not to be a game of pure skill, and was also one of the first games of its kind. Other Magic players are emphatic that mana-screw is not a design flaw. A well-designed deck, they argue, will rarely get mana-screwed; avoiding mana-screw is part of what sets apart good deckbuilders from bad deckbuilders. Furthermore, a mulligan rule exists. Mulligan allows a player at the start of the game to shuffle his or her initial hand into his or her library and draw a new hand with one less card; this can be done multiple times, drawing one less card than the previous hand each time. Determining whether or not to mulligan is an important part of Magic's skill element.

It has been suggested that Magic would be made a better game if basic lands and spells were shuffled separately and players had the option of which to draw. Such a variant emerged shortly after Magic's popularization, around 1995.

Patent

Magic was the basis for a controversial patent obtained by Wizards of the Coast, which inhibits the development of other games in the collectible card game genre. See trading card games for a full discussion of the patent issue.

Well-Known Players

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