99 Fun Facts About Magic: the Gathering

Who created Magic: The Gathering?

Richard Garfield reportedly hit on the idea while hiking near Multnomah Falls, after Wizards of the Coast's Peter Adkison asked him for a quick, portable game to play at conventions.

Magic: The Gathering sold out at which August 1993 convention?

Gen Con, in Milwaukee. Wizards sold every one of the 2.5 million cards it brought, and its founder Peter Adkison went on to buy the convention itself in 2002.

Magic's creator completed his doctorate in 1993 in which subject?

Combinatorial mathematics. He was teaching maths at Whitman College when Magic launched, and its success led him to quit academia in 1994 for full-time game design.

Which toy giant bought Wizards of the Coast in 1999?

Hasbro. Coverage of the deal billed Wizards as the 'Pokemon card maker', because it had launched the Pokémon trading card game in America earlier that year.

Wizards of the Coast took its name from one of founder Peter Adkison's sessions of which role-playing game?

Dungeons & Dragons. Adkison borrowed the name from a session he had played in the early 1980s, and in 1997 his company bought the game's publisher, TSR.

Which was the first Magic expansion, released in December 1993?

Arabian Nights was nearly printed with a different card back; the idea was dropped, and the small scimitar added to mark its cards became the game's first expansion symbol.

Which of Magic's five colours is described as representing intellect, logic, manipulation and trickery?

Blue. Its creatures tend to be weak, so blue decks win by control instead: countering an opponent's spells and even stealing their creatures.

Which basic land produces red mana in Magic: The Gathering?

Mountain. Basic lands are exempt from the four-copy limit, so a red deck can pack as many Mountains as its owner likes.

How much life does each player start with in a standard two-player game of Magic?

20. A player can also lose with life to spare: anyone who has to draw from a deck with no cards left is out of the game.

What is the minimum deck size for a constructed Magic deck?

60 cards is only the floor: there is no maximum, provided the player can still shuffle the deck in reasonable time.

A cast Magic spell goes where to wait for players' responses before it resolves?

Onto the stack, which resolves from the top down: the last spell cast happens first, so a reply always beats the spell it answers.

In Magic, turning a card sideways to show it has been used this turn is called what?

Tapping. The move is so central that the patent Wizards of the Coast won in 1997 for trading card games covers turning a card to show it has been used.

As of 2025, which Magic card held the record as the most expensive ever sold?

Black Lotus: a pristine Alpha copy sold for $3 million in 2024. It costs nothing to play and can be sacrificed for three mana, a head start so strong the card is banned or restricted everywhere.

Which artist painted the Magic card sold for $3 million in 2024, and helped design the mana symbols?

Christopher Rush illustrated more than 100 Magic cards. When he died in 2016, a Wizards designer wrote that the mana symbols were a fitting tribute, keeping him part of every card the company prints.

The Power Nine are limited to one copy per deck in which Magic format?

Vintage. No other tournament format allows the nine at all, and because the originals cost so much, many Vintage events let players use stand-in proxy cards.

Which Power Nine card lets a player take an extra turn for just two mana?

Time Walk. Its playtest text said a player 'loses next turn', and it was reworded before release because players read that as losing the game.

Wizards' 1996 promise never to reprint certain valuable cards is known as what?

The Reserved List. Wizards published it in 1996 after collectors complained that reprints were eroding the value of their cards, and confirmed in 2021 that it would stay.

Which card type, added in the 2007 Lorwyn set, summons a powerful ally such as Jace or Chandra?

Planeswalker. In the story every player is one as well, so these cards were designed to feel like bringing another player into the game on your side.

Roughly how many people had played Magic: The Gathering worldwide by its 30th anniversary in 2023?

Fifty million. That reach made Magic its parent company's first billion-dollar brand in 2022, the year an analyst warned the company was killing its golden goose by overprinting cards.

The Commander format was originally known by what name?

Elder Dragon Highlander is credited to Adam Staley's Alaskan play group: 'Highlander' for the film's line 'there can be only one', matching the one-copy rule, and Elder Dragon for the dragon cards that led each deck.

How many cards are in a Commander deck?

100, counting the commander, which waits outside the deck in the command zone and can be cast again each time it dies, for two more mana than before.

In Commander, taking how much combat damage from a single commander causes a player to lose?

21. Volunteers on a Rules Committee ran Commander until September 2024, when threats made against them over a round of card bans led them to hand the format to Wizards.

Which Magic format, created in 2011, allows cards from 2003's Eighth Edition onward?

Modern. The cut-off is no accident: Eighth Edition introduced the modern card frame, and the format takes its name from it.

Which format allows only cards that have been printed at common rarity?

Pauper began as an online-only format and proved so popular with players' physical cards that Wizards made it an official tabletop format in June 2019.

Who won the first Magic World Championship, in 1994?

Zak Dolan, the last American standing among European semi-finalists, beat French champion Bertrand Lestrée in the final of an event that anyone could sign up to enter.

Magic's Pro Tour debuted in February 1996 in which city?

New York. Players had to phone Wizards' offices to claim one of the places, which earned the event the nickname 'Pro Tour Speed Dial'.

Which player topped the vote for the first Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame class, in 2005?

Jon Finkel, nicknamed 'Jonny Magic', had retired by then; in 2008 he used his Hall of Fame invitation to enter Pro Tour Kuala Lumpur and won it.

Which player, nicknamed 'the Juggernaut', had won a record seven Magic Pro Tours as of 2025?

Kai Budde won all seven between 1999 and 2003. Wizards renamed its Player of the Year trophy after him in 2024, during the illness from which he died in January 2026.

Which player won the Magic World Championship in both 2018 and 2024?

Javier Dominguez had lost the 2017 final; his second title in 2024 made him only the second player, after Shahar Shenhar, to win the championship twice.

As of 2025, the largest Magic tournament ever held was a 7,551-player Grand Prix in which city?

Las Vegas. So many players signed up for the May 2015 Grand Prix that organisers had to split it into two parallel tournaments.

Which Magic client, launched in 2002, lets players redeem a complete digital set for the printed cards?

Magic Online. It went live in June 2002 selling digital booster packs; since 2022 Wizards has licensed its running to an outside studio, Daybreak Games.

The 1997 MicroProse Magic game, where the player fights Arzakon, was set on which plane?

Shandalar. Fans simply call the game by the plane's name to tell it apart from later Magic video games; the player roams it duelling five wizards, one for each colour.

Which Magic action-RPG was cancelled in June 2021, three months into its open beta?

Magic: Legends. Its producer admitted the game's vision had 'missed the mark'; the servers closed that October and players got back the money they had spent.

The man who became Magic's head designer in 2003 once wrote for which TV sitcom?

Roseanne. Mark Rosewater wrote two of its 1991 episodes; he discovered Magic later, from a customer at the game shop where he worked, and joined Wizards in 1995.

Ravnica, the setting of the 2005 block, is what kind of world?

A single planet-wide city, run by ten guilds that each pair two colours of mana; its myths and names borrow from Slavic folklore, and the game has returned there several times since 2012.

Which Ravnica guild combines blue and red mana?

The Izzet League, founded by the vain dragon Niv-Mizzet: its seal is redesigned often, each time looking a little more like a portrait of him.

The gothic-horror plane of Innistrad introduced which card mechanic in 2011?

Double-faced transform cards. A cursed villager is printed on one face and the werewolf on the other, so these were the first tournament cards without the usual Magic card back.

Which archangel of Innistrad imprisoned the plane's demons in the Helvault?

Avacyn ended up inside it herself: the demon Griselbrand dragged her in as she sealed him away, leaving Innistrad's humans without their protector.

The 'landfall' mechanic, triggered when a land enters the battlefield, debuted on which plane?

Zendikar. To match the 2009 set's 'priceless treasures' theme, Wizards slipped genuine cards from the game's earliest sets into a few booster packs in place of a basic land.

Which Eldrazi in Magic is a 15/15 flier that costs 15 mana?

Emrakul, the Aeons Torn debuted in 2010's Rise of the Eldrazi, a set full of little 'Eldrazi Spawn' tokens that can be sacrificed for mana, which helps players afford monsters this expensive.

Urza and his brother Mishra, whose war shaped Dominaria, first appeared in which 1994 set?

Antiquities told the brothers' feud only in fragments, through the flavour text on its cards; the full story waited for a 1998 novel and, in 2022, a whole set named The Brothers' War.

Which 2006-07 Magic block reprinted 121 old cards in their original frames as a bonus?

Time Spiral. The block's theme was time itself: its three sets dealt in turn with Magic's past, an alternate present and a possible future.

Which musician bought the one-of-a-kind One Ring card from Magic's 2023 Lord of the Rings set?

Post Malone, a keen Magic player, paid about $2 million for the card, which a retail worker in Toronto had pulled from a booster pack weeks earlier.

Which Magic deck archetype wins through the interaction of specific cards rather than by attacking with creatures?

Combo, short for combination. A classic example is the Storm deck, which strings cheap spells together in one turn so that its final spell copies itself once for each of them.

Which board game of his own was Magic's creator trying to get published when he first met Peter Adkison?

RoboRally. Adkison judged the robot-racing game too costly to produce and asked for something quick and portable instead; Wizards finally published it in 1994.

Which early Magic gambling rule required each player to risk a random card from their deck?

Ante. The winner kept both cards, an idea borrowed from playing marbles for keeps; worries that it turned games into illegal gambling helped end it, and cards that mention it are now banned.

Which expansion introduced Magic's multicoloured 'gold' cards?

Legends, in 1994, also gave the game its first legendary creatures, the cards every Commander deck is now built around.

Which Magic set debuted the red-orange 'mythic rare' rarity, which replaces about one rare in eight?

Shards of Alara. The rarity came in a 2008 package of changes: sets shrank, and every booster pack swapped one of its commons for a basic land.

Which movie monsters appeared on promotional cards in Magic's 2020 set Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths?

Godzilla and other kaiju from Toho's films were printed as alternate versions of Ikoria's monsters. One, 'Spacegodzilla, Death Corona', was dropped from reprints as COVID-19 spread.

Which Japanese franchise's trading card game did Magic's publisher release in English from 1999 to 2003?

Pokémon cards sold so fast in 1999 that some sports card series were discontinued because the printers were busy making them.

Which word, a relic of a planned family of card games, is printed on the back of every Magic card?

Deckmaster was a brand meant to group Magic with games such as Jyhad and Netrunner. The grouping was abandoned, but the card back is locked, so the logo remains.

Which 1994 artifact gave Magic its slang verb for putting cards from a library into the graveyard?

Millstone sent two cards at a time from a library to the graveyard, and 'mill' stayed player slang for decades before becoming an official keyword in Core Set 2021.

Which one-mana red instant from Magic's very first set deals 3 damage to any target?

Lightning Bolt proved so efficient that later versions were toned down: Shock, printed in 1998, costs the same but deals only 2 damage.

Which keyword lets a Magic creature attack on the turn it arrives, ignoring so-called summoning sickness?

Haste was named retroactively: for years, older cards simply spelled the ability out as 'may attack the turn it comes into play'.

Which one-mana Magic artifact, adding two colourless mana, comes in nearly every preconstructed Commander deck?

Sol Ring is banned in Legacy and limited to a single copy in Vintage, yet Commander players get a fresh one in almost every boxed deck.

Which kind of card is exempt from the four-copy limit in constructed Magic decks?

Basic lands have no cap because every deck needs mana. A few oddball cards, such as Relentless Rats, carry their own text allowing any number of copies.

Which telepathic planeswalker from Vryn became the Living Guildpact, arbiter of Ravnica's ten guilds?

Jace Beleren won the title by solving the mystery of a hidden maze, which left a mind-reader as the living judge of every guild dispute.

Which Magic plane of gods, heroes and monsters was modelled on Greek mythology for its 2013 debut?

Theros was a 'top-down' design: the team began with the myths and their tropes and made cards to fit, the reverse of starting from gameplay.

Which city names the Magic mulligan adopted in 2019: redraw seven cards, then bottom one per mulligan?

London hosted the 2019 Mythic Championship where the rule was first tested, just as the earlier Vancouver mulligan took the name of the city where it was trialled.

Besides running out of life, a Magic player loses when an empty library stops them doing what?

Draw a card from an empty library and the game is lost, a rule that lets some decks win without ever dealing a point of damage.

A Magic player loses the game on collecting ten of which counters, dealt by creatures with infect?

Poison counters are a second route to victory: ten of them end the game however much life the player has left, and infect damage skips life totals entirely.

Which term names the italic lore or quotations on a Magic card that have no effect on play?

Flavor text carries the game's storytelling and jokes. Reminder text is italic too, but it sits in brackets and explains how a rule works.

Which flagship Magic format, originally called Type 2, drops its oldest sets each year in a 'rotation'?

Standard arrived in 1995 and became the flagship of tournament play, while its older sibling Type 1 lives on under the name Vintage.

Which Magic necromancer struck a pact with four demons, including Griselbrand, to regain her youth and power?

Liliana Vess then spent years trying to escape the contract, and killed Griselbrand herself with a cursed relic called the Chain Veil.

Which dragon planeswalker, tyrant of the desert plane Amonkhet, was the villain beaten in War of the Spark?

Nicol Bolas spent several sets collecting a planar portal and an army of embalmed warriors, only for that undead army to be turned against him.

Which biomechanical villains of Magic, led by Elesh Norn, 'compleat' victims into more of their own kind?

Phyrexians spread like an infection that even planeswalkers could catch, and their leader styled herself the Mother of Machines.

Which 2007 Magic set, on an idyllic plane inspired by Welsh folklore, introduced the planeswalker card type?

Lorwyn broke another habit too: the plane has no humans at all, with hobbit-like kithkin taking their place.

Which keyword lets a Magic attacker push its excess combat damage past the blockers to the defending player?

Trample works only on the attack: the rules give it no effect at all when the creature is blocking or dealing noncombat damage.

Which white-bordered printing, the second Magic set ever, reissued the same cards as the Alpha and Beta runs?

Unlimited Edition set a lasting precedent: for the next fourteen years, a white border told players that a core-set card was a reprint.

Which Magic plane, first modelled on Sengoku-era Japan, returned in 2022 as a cyberpunk city of ninja and samurai?

Kamigawa's first visit was themed as 'Shinto gone wrong', a war between mortals and their spirits, before the sequel reimagined the plane.

Which Magic plane, introduced in 2019, blends King Arthur's Camelot with the Grimms' fairy tales?

Eldraine is the home of the royal twins Rowan and Will Kenrith, planeswalkers who had first appeared a year earlier in the Battlebond set.

Which Magic plane sets the Sun Empire's dinosaur riders against pirates, merfolk and a legion of vampires?

Ixalan made Dinosaur an official creature type, and older cards such as Raptors were rewritten to join the new tribe.

Which artificial Magic plane, where living things are part metal, hosted the artifact-heavy block of 2003?

Mirrodin introduced Equipment, gear that creatures can pick up and wield, which has been a staple of the game ever since.

Which Magic keyword makes any amount of a creature's damage enough to destroy the creature it hits?

Deathtouch lets a humble 1/1 trade with the biggest monster on the table, because a single point of its damage counts as lethal.

Which Magic keyword stops only opponents from targeting a permanent with their spells and abilities?

Hexproof differs from its cousin shroud, which stops everyone from targeting the permanent, including the player who controls it.

Which artifact subtype, new in the Magic set Kaladesh, becomes a creature only while other creatures operate it?

Vehicle cards sit inert until creatures with enough total power 'crew' them, which turns them into artifact creatures until the end of the turn.

Which enchantment subtype, gaining one counter a turn until it is sacrificed, debuted in the Magic set Dominaria?

Saga cards tell a story chapter by chapter: a lore counter arrives each turn, and the card is sacrificed once the final chapter has played out.

Which Magic card type, new in 2023's March of the Machine, enters with defense counters and can be attacked?

Battle cards were the first permanents to be placed sideways, and each has a protector who is the only player allowed to block for it.

Which Magic keyword action lets a player look at the top cards of their library and send any to the bottom?

Scry first appeared in the set Fifth Dawn and later became the first mechanic ever to be brought back in a core set, in Magic 2011.

Which company, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, did Magic's maker Wizards of the Coast buy in 1997?

TSR had put out its own collectible card game, Spellfire, before Wizards bought the company together with Five Rings Publishing for $25 million.

Which name was used to first solicit Magic after a lawyer called the one-word title too generic to trademark?

Mana Clash never caught on: everyone involved kept calling the game Magic, so a subtitle was added to make the original name trademarkable.

Which Magic brand puts outside franchises such as Warhammer 40,000 and Doctor Who on tournament-playable cards?

Universes Beyond grew so central that from 2025, beginning with Final Fantasy and Spider-Man, its sets were made legal in every format.

Which free-to-play digital version of Magic, fully released in 2019, hands out 'Wildcards' to swap for any card?

MTG Arena spent nearly two years in beta before that launch, during which the Dominaria set arrived in the app on the very day of its paper release.

Which 1998 release was the first satirical Magic set, full of joke cards that are not legal in tournaments?

Unglued was not a commercial hit, yet its unique land cards, the only ones in the set that tournaments accept, are still sought after.

Which 1995 Magic expansion, the first playable without any other product, introduced snow-covered lands?

Ice Age was built to stand alone, so its designers reprinted staple cards from the basic set alongside the new snow theme.

Which old Magic penalty cost players life for every unspent point in their pool until the Magic 2010 rules update?

Mana burn nearly vanished a decade earlier, in the Sixth Edition rules update, but designer Mark Rosewater fought to keep it, then later fought to have it removed.

Which Magic team format has partners sit together, take their turns as one and share a life total of 30?

Two-Headed Giant has headlined a Pro Tour, in San Diego in 2007, and in 2018 it received a booster set of its own, Battlebond.

Which Magic format, created in autumn 2019, allows cards from the set Return to Ravnica onward?

Pioneer's starting line was no accident: Wizards said beginning with Return to Ravnica made the new format as different from Modern as it could be.

Which Magic draft format swaps fresh boosters for an owner's hand-picked pool of at least 360 cards?

Cube pools usually hold just one copy of each card, and the format reached the top level in 2012 at the Magic Players Championship.

Pearl, Sapphire, Jet, Ruby and Emerald are five famously powerful artifacts from Magic's first set sharing which name?

Mox artifacts cost nothing to play and each adds one mana of a single colour, like lands with no one-per-turn limit, so tournaments restricted them to one copy apiece.

Since the Exodus set of 1998, a silver expansion symbol on a Magic card has marked which rarity?

Uncommon cards wear silver, rares gold and commons black. Before colour printing improved, every expansion symbol was black whatever the rarity.

Which Alpha artifact is flipped onto the table from at least a foot up, destroying every nontoken permanent it touches?

Chaos Orb inspired a possibly apocryphal tale of a player tearing the card into pieces to scatter over an opponent's side, only for the judge to rule it illegal.

Which banned Magic sorcery makes the players stop and play an entire subgame using their libraries as decks?

Shahrazad is named for the legendary teller of stories within stories, so the card creates a game within a game, and whoever loses it forfeits half their life.

Which early Magic keyword, mostly on white cards, let small creatures attack as one group?

Banding was retired because, in head designer Mark Rosewater's words, even the top players in the world were confused by it.

Mark Rosewater's scale of how unlikely a Magic mechanic is to return is named after which notorious mechanic?

Storm copies a spell once for every spell cast before it that turn, and Rosewater has called it probably the most broken mechanic Magic ever created.

Which golem, built by Urza as a probe for time-travel experiments, later inherited Urza's planeswalker spark?

Karn was made of silver because Urza's studies showed that no other material could pass through temporal energies unharmed.

Which 2019 planeswalker card, soon banned in several formats, turns artifacts and creatures into 3/3 Elk?

Oko, Thief of Crowns can strip any threat of its abilities while raising his own loyalty, and the first bans came within weeks of his October debut.

Which mechanic from Magic's Ikoria set, a creature kept outside the deck, had its rules rewritten within weeks?

Companion originally let a player cast the chosen creature straight from the sideboard; since June 2020 it costs three mana just to move it to hand first.

Which skyship and her crew star in the Magic storyline running from Tempest in 1997 to Apocalypse in 2001?

Weatherlight was also the name of the 1997 expansion that began the tale, Wizards' first attempt at a cohesive story world in the manner of Star Wars.