So You Want to Play Magic the Gathering.

A few months back, I got back into Magic the Gathering. I learned that my girlfriend and her family frequently played the game, and so I decided to dust off some old decks I had made all those years ago and join them one night. I hadn’t played the game since middle school, well over a decade ago at this point, and so even though the game still felt familiar to me, I was understandably pretty rusty. Needless to say I lost almost all the game I played that night, but I was back in the game and loving it. During this time, I became reacquainted with the rules of Magic. If anyone was ever wondering what Magic the Gathering was and how to start, well this is as good a place to start as any.

Magic the Gathering is a card game that was created by Richard Garfield and published by Wizards of the Coast in 1993. It is actually the first ever trading card game, which makes it stand out among others since it is, well, the first. since then, magic has grown exponentially in both popularity and size, with tens of millions of players worldwide, and literal billions of cards produced (no joke. From 2008 to 2016, over twenty billion Magic cards were produced).

Magic is traditionally a game that is involved two players. There can be more, but most games are with two. Each player has a deck of Magic cards, either a pre-built deck one that was put together by said player, which signify spells that the players cast at one another to try and achieve victory (We will talk more about victory later). Both players start with twenty life points, which might not sound like a lot, but numbers in magic tend to be pretty small for simplicities sake.

A deck must have at minimum 60 cards to be legal to play. There is no maximum deck size, but typically staying as close to 60 cards as you can is the best way to go. In addition, players cannot have more that 4 copies of any given card in their deck, excluding lands, which are the resource that players use to cast their cards/spells. There are five different types of lands in the game: Plains (white), Islands (blue),Swamps (black), Mountains (red), and Forests (green). Without lands, players cannot cast spells, and so an average Magic deck will have at least a third of its cards dedicated to lands. 

To do almost anything in magic, you must tap cards. To tap a card is to turn it sideways to show that it has been used for the turn. You do this when you use a land to make mana, when you attack with a creature, or when you activate an ability that has the tap symbol as part of its cost . When a permanent is tapped, you can’t tap it again until it’s been untapped. As your turn begins, untap your tapped cards so you can use them again.

There are a few different types of cards in Magic. Those types are land, creature, artifact, enchantment, planeswalker, instant and sorcery. Everything other than instants and sorceries are permanents, meaning that after you cast them, they stay on the field until forcibly removed by a player action.

To cast a spell in Magic, you must pay its mana cost  by tapping lands to make the amount and type of mana which that spell requires. That cost will be in the upper right corner of the card. Most cards specify what kind of land is needed to by tapped in order to cast it, but just as many can also be cast, or partially cast using any type of land. this is denoted by a number within a grey circle, while the specific land needed to cast is shown by that lands symbol. For example, if you were trying to cast a spell that costs three lands and two islands, you would have to tap two islands, but after that you could tap any color land to finish casting that spell.

Once a spell has been cast, one of two things happens. If the spell is an instant or a sorcery, you follow the instructions on the card, and then you put the card into your graveyard. The graveyard is there card go when they leave the field, either after their effect ends, or if they are removed from the field in the case for permanents. If the spell is a creature, artifact, or enchantment, you put the card on the table in front of you.

Now that the basics are out of the way, we can discuss how to win. The most common way to win in Magic is to attack with your creatures. If a creature that is attacking an opponent isn’t blocked, it deals damage equal to its power to that opponent. The middle phase of each turn is the combat phase. In the combat phase, you choose which of your creatures will attack. Tap your creatures to show that they are attacking. Your opponent can then choose which of their creatures will block, if they want to. Tapped creatures can’t be declared as blockers. Once all blockers have been chosen, each creature, both attackers and blockers, simultaneously deals damage equal to their power to the others toughness (power and toughness are shown in the bottom right of a card). An attacking creature that isn’t blocked deals damage to the player it’s attacking. If damage is dealt to your opponent, they lose that much life.

If a creature is dealt damage equal to or greater than its toughness over the course of a single turn (whether it be combat damage, damage from spells or abilities, or both), that creature is destroyed, and it goes to its owner’s graveyard. If a creature takes damage that isn’t enough to destroy it in a single turn, that creature stays on the battlefield, and the damage wears off at the end of the turn.

These are just the basics of Magic the Gathering. There are more advanced and extensive rules out there (the official rulebook is huge but largely dedicated to specific card interactions). Needless to say, if anyone were to read this and try to pick up the game, hopefully they would have a pretty decent understanding of how it works.