Magic: The Gathering

Card Game
The back of a Magic card
Designer	Richard Garfield
Publisher	Wizards of the Coast
Release date	August 5, 1993; 32 years ago (1993-08-05)
Type	Collectible
Players	2 or more
Skills	Card playing Basic arithmetic Reading
Age range	13+
Chance	Some (order of cards drawn, varying card abilities)
Website	magic.wizards.com

Magic: The Gathering (colloquially known as Magic or MTG) is a collectible, tabletop, and digital collectible card game created by Richard Garfield.^[1] Wizards of the Coast released Magic in 1993 as its first trading card game. As of February 2023^[update], it has amassed approximately fifty million players.^[2][3][4][5] From 2008 to 2016, over twenty billion Magic cards were printed as the game grew in popularity.^[6][7] For the 2022 fiscal year^[update], Hasbro announced Magic had generated $1 billion in annual revenue.^[5][8]

Players in a game of Magic represent powerful dueling wizards called Planeswalkers. Each card a player draws from their deck represents a magical spell which can be used to their advantage in battle. Instant and Sorcery cards represent magical spells a player may cast for a one-time effect, while Creature, Artifact, Enchantment, Planeswalker, and Battle cards remain on the Battlefield to provide long-term advantage. Players usually must include resource, or Land cards representing the amount of mana that is available to cast their spells. Typically, a player defeats their opponent(s) by reducing their life totals to zero, which is commonly done via combat damage by attacking with creatures. Many other sources of damage exist in the game, in addition to alternative win-conditions which do not check life totals.

Although the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the gameplay bears little similarity to tabletop role-playing games, while simultaneously having substantially more cards and more complex rules than many other card games.

Magic can be played by two or more players, either in person with paper cards or on a computer, smartphone or tablet with virtual cards through Internet-based software such as Magic: The Gathering Online, Magic: The Gathering Arena, Magic Duels and several others. It can be played in various rule formats, which fall into two categories: constructed and limited. Limited formats involve players creating a deck spontaneously out of a pool of random cards typically with a minimum deck size of 40 cards.^[9] In constructed formats, players create decks from cards they own, usually with a minimum of 60 cards per deck.

New cards are released on a regular basis through expansion sets. Further developments include the Wizards Play Network played at the international level and the worldwide community Players Tour, as well as a substantial resale market for Magic cards. Certain cards can be valuable due to their rarity in production and utility in gameplay, with prices ranging from a few cents to tens of thousands of dollars.