Magic: The Gathering (1)

​BY HUGO RICHARDS

The card game Magic: The Gathering (will be referred to as Magic through the rest of the article) is a deckbuilding game where you have 60 cards in a deck, and you compete with up to 4 other players to be the last player with life remaining. 

In the game, you have 25 land cards in five colors (red, blue, white, black, or green). Land cards are cards that you need to use to play different cards. If you don’t have enough land cards to play the card, then you can’t play that card. The last 35 cards are made up of instants, creatures, and sorceries. The colors of your cards should mostly match up as cards have land costs to play them.

Magic was first publicly shown in the Origins Game Fair. Magic originated as a game that the creators made flippantly, because they wanted to make a board game, but they thought that the publishers didn’t have enough equipment to produce it. They then told the publishers to make a card game that could be played on the go. As a result, the publisher came up with the game that is now known as Magic: The Gathering. 

Here are some fun facts about Magic: 

• The original deck size for Magic was forty cards which has changed over time to be sixty cards today. 
• There are two Magic cards that have been only printed once, which makes them immensely rare. Their names are 1996 World Champion, which was embedded in the trophy of the 1996 World Championship, and the Shichifukujin Dragon, which was made to commemorate the opening of the DCI Tournament Center in Japan. A third fun fact about Magic is that it has had one ever non-product card in a booster pack. Booster packs have 16 cards, and fifteen of them are proper Magic cards, while the last one has a token or a card on how to play, while the other side is normally an ad for Magic. But once they had an ad for a movie, the movie The Sorcerers Apprentice, which they had done product placement in. 

Sources: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/25-more-random-things-about-magic-2016-06-20

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