Beginner Series
What Is Magic: The Gathering?
Two or more people sit down with decks they built themselves and try to reduce each other to zero life, using cards that are each allowed to break the rules in their own small way. That last part is the whole game, and it is why Magic has lasted since 1993.
The Short Answer
Magic: The Gathering is a card game for two or more players. Each of you brings a deck you assembled yourself out of a pool of tens of thousands of different cards. You take turns playing lands, spending the mana those lands make to cast spells, and attacking with the creatures those spells put on the table. When a player's life total reaches zero, they are out.
That description would fit a lot of games. What makes Magic itself is the sentence printed on nearly every card: a card is allowed to contradict the rules. The rulebook says you draw one card per turn, and then a card says draw three. The rulebook says creatures can be blocked, and then a card says this one cannot. Playing Magic is mostly the practice of reading what is actually in front of you rather than what you assumed.
It was published by Wizards of the Coast in 1993 and invented the trading card game as a product category. Cards come in randomized packs, so no two players own the same collection, and no two decks that sit down across from each other have met before.
What You Are Actually Doing
Every turn you get one land. That is the tightest constraint in the game and everything else grows out of it. A land taps to make one mana, mana pays for spells, and so the size of what you can do on turn six is roughly six. You cannot skip ahead by wanting to.
So a game has a shape. The early turns are cheap: a land, a small creature, a card that makes an extra mana so your fourth turn behaves like your fifth. The middle turns are where the decks start actually interacting, because both of you now have enough mana to threaten something and enough to answer it. The late game is whichever deck built toward something that ends the conversation.
Your deck is the argument you brought. It is 60 or 100 cards you chose from an enormous pool, and choosing them is at least half of what people mean when they say they play Magic. Plenty of players spend more time building decks than playing them, which sounds like a criticism and is not. What actually goes in a deck, slot by slot →
You need expensive rare cards to have a real deck.
You need a deck with a plan. A 40 dollar preconstructed Commander deck is a complete, functional deck that plays well against other precons, and most tables are playing something in that neighborhood. The famous expensive cards buy consistency and speed at the very top of the game, and they are almost entirely irrelevant to whether your Tuesday night is fun.
The Five Colors
Magic has five colors of mana, and they are the closest thing the game has to a set of personalities: white, blue, black, red and green. A card's color decides which lands can pay for it, and much more importantly it decides what the card is allowed to do at all.
That last part is the piece newcomers underestimate. Blue does not deal damage to players well, and no amount of wanting it to changes that. Green cannot reliably destroy an enchantment by drawing a card at it. Each color is good at some things and deliberately bad at others, and picking colors is picking which problems you will be able to solve.
Wrath of God ↗
White. Order imposed on the table: every creature dies, including yours.
Counterspell ↗
Blue. Knowledge and control. The spell never happens at all.
Rhystic Study ↗
Blue again, and the most notorious card in Commander. Everyone pays, or you draw.
Lightning Bolt ↗
Red. Three damage, one mana, no conditions. Red does not negotiate.
Llanowar Elves ↗
Green. Growth: a creature that makes more mana, so next turn is bigger.
Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon ↗
Black. Ambition at a cost, and a dragon made of disease.
Most decks play one, two or three colors. More colors means more of the game's tools are available to you and a manabase that is harder to build, since every land now has to produce the right color at the right time. That trade is the oldest tension in deckbuilding. The color pie, color by color →
What Is on a Card
Six things, in the same places every time. The name is top left. The mana cost is top right, and it is what you pay to cast the card. The art is the middle. Under it is the type line, which says what kind of card this is and therefore what rules apply to it. Under that is the rules text, which is the part that gets to contradict the rulebook. Bottom right, on creatures only, is power and toughness: how much damage it deals and how much it can take.
Serra Angel ↗
Name, cost, art, type line, rules text, power and toughness. Every part labelled below.
Sol Ring ↗
An artifact: no color, no power, and it stays on the table making mana.
The type line is the one worth learning first, because it silently determines almost everything. A creature can attack and can be attacked and cannot do anything the turn it arrives. An instant can be cast at nearly any time, including on somebody else's turn. A sorcery can only be cast on your own turn with nothing else happening. A land is not a spell at all and is played rather than cast. Every card type, and what each one changes →
Two words that come up constantly and are worth having now: permanent means a card that stays on the table once it resolves, which is creatures, lands, artifacts, enchantments, planeswalkers and battles. Spell means a card on its way to resolving, which is anything you cast. Instants and sorceries are spells that never become permanents, since they do what they say and then go to the graveyard.
A Turn, Roughly
Untap everything you tapped last turn. Draw a card. Play a land if you have not this turn. Cast whatever you can afford. Attack with creatures that have been on the table since before this turn started. Cast anything else you can still afford. Pass.
That is the honest version and it will carry you through your first several games. The formal version has five phases with named steps inside them, and it matters mainly because some cards care exactly when something happens. The five phases, in order →
The one genuinely non-obvious rule underneath all of it is that spells do not simply happen. A spell goes on a stack, everyone gets a chance to respond to it, and the last thing added is the first thing to resolve. That is why a counterspell can be cast after the spell it answers, and it is the single idea that makes the most beginner confusion evaporate. How the stack works →
How a Game Ends
Reducing an opponent to zero life is the usual way, and in a two-player game it is very nearly the only way you will see. There are five in total, and they are all worth knowing because decks get built around the unusual ones.
Running out of cards deserves a note, since it surprises people: an empty library does not kill you. You lose the next time you are asked to draw and cannot. In Commander that is a real and deliberate win condition, because a hundred-card deck is a resource somebody can attack directly.
Decks and Formats
A format is a set of rules about what your deck may contain and how the game is set up. The cards are the same. What changes is which of them are legal, how many of each you may run, how much life you start with and how many people are at the table.
Commander is the one most people mean now when they say they play Magic. Four players, 40 life, and a deck of exactly 100 cards with no duplicates other than basic lands, led by a legendary creature that sits in its own zone and can be cast again every time it dies. The no-duplicates rule is why it stays interesting: your deck cannot be four copies of your best card, so it has to be a hundred different ideas that get along. Every format, compared →
Where It Came From
Richard Garfield designed Magic as a game that could be played in the gaps at conventions, something you could finish while waiting for a table to open up. Wizards of the Coast published it in 1993 and it did not behave like a card game that could be finished in fifteen minutes: the first print run sold out, and so did the reprints.
The idea nobody had had before was that the deck is bought in pieces and assembled by the player, so the game's content is the collection rather than the box. Every trading card game since is a variation on that, and Magic is still running, with new sets several times a year.
Two consequences of that longevity are worth knowing. The card pool is enormous and still growing, which is why formats exist to bound it. And a small number of cards from 1993 were printed before anyone knew what they were doing, which is why Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall are banned nearly everywhere and cost what they cost.
Where to Start
This page is the what. The how has two answers depending on which game you are actually trying to learn, and both are already written up here in full.
The short version, if you want it now: if you are learning the rules, download Magic Arena and play the tutorial, because a computer enforcing the rules teaches them faster than a person can explain them. If you are learning Commander specifically, Arena does not have it, so buy a preconstructed deck and find three people. Those are genuinely different starting points and picking the wrong one is the most common way people bounce off.
FAQ
What is Magic: The Gathering?
A card game in which each player brings a deck they built themselves and casts spells from it to reduce the other players to zero life. It was published by Wizards of the Coast in 1993 and was the first trading card game, meaning the cards are sold in randomized packs and every player's deck is different. A game is a conversation between two or more decks that have never met, which is most of why people still play it three decades later.
Is Magic: The Gathering hard to learn?
The basic loop is simple: play a land, cast something with it, attack. Most people are playing an unassisted game within an hour. What takes longer is that every card is allowed to change the rules, so learning Magic is less about memorizing a rulebook than about reading the card in front of you. Nobody knows every card, including people who have played for twenty years, and that is a normal state to be in rather than a gap to close.
How long does a game of Magic take?
A two-player game usually runs 10 to 20 minutes. A four-player Commander game is a different animal and typically runs 60 to 120 minutes, because there are four decks, four times the life total and three people who have to be dealt with rather than one.
How much does it cost to start playing Magic?
A preconstructed Commander deck is around 40 dollars and is playable out of the box against other precons, which is the most common way people start. Magic Arena and Magic Online are free to download if you want to learn the rules before spending anything, though Arena does not support Commander. The expensive cards you have heard about are almost entirely optional.
What are the five colors in Magic?
White, blue, black, red and green. They are not just costs, they are what your deck is allowed to do: white makes rules and armies, blue draws cards and says no, black trades life and resources for power, red deals damage immediately, and green makes mana and large creatures. Most decks use one to three of them, and the trade is that more colors means more options and a less reliable manabase.
What is the difference between Magic and Commander?
Commander is a format of Magic, not a separate game. Same cards, same rules, with four changes: decks are exactly 100 cards with no duplicates, you start at 40 life, you play with four people, and you have a legendary creature called your commander that you can cast repeatedly from a zone outside your deck. It is by a wide margin the most played way to play Magic.
Once you are playing, track it
TurnZero HQ records every Commander game you play, so you find out which of your decks actually wins rather than which one you remember winning. Free on iOS, Android and the web.
Get Started Free