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This Magic: The Gathering trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers thirty-plus years of the game: Richard Garfield and Wizards of the Coast, the 1993 Alpha release, the Power Nine and the record-breaking Black Lotus, the philosophies of the five colours, the rules of the stack, formats from Standard to Commander, the Pro Tour and its Hall of Fame legends, digital Magic from Shandalar to Arena, the great planes and villains of the lore, and the Universes Beyond era that put The One Ring in Post Malone's hands. It is written for game-store nights, Commander pods and anyone who has ever cracked a booster: the opening questions are easy for casual players, and the deep cuts will challenge judges and old-school collectors. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries and published records before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who created Magic: The Gathering?
Richard Garfield
Garfield was a maths PhD student who pitched Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison a fast game needing minimal equipment; the idea reportedly came to him hiking near Multnomah Falls.
Q 02In which year was Magic: The Gathering first released?
1993
Limited Edition Alpha shipped on 5 August with 295 cards, and by the end of 1994 more than a billion cards had been printed.
Q 03The game's creator completed his doctorate in 1993 in which subject?
Combinatorial mathematics
His thesis at the University of Pennsylvania was titled On the Residue Classes of Combinatorial Families of Numbers; he later designed Netrunner, King of Tokyo and KeyForge.
Q 04Which toy giant bought Wizards of the Coast in 1999 for about $325 million?
Hasbro
Two years earlier Wizards had bought TSR, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, for $25 million.
Q 05Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison named the company after what?
A guild in his D&D campaign
Adkison was a systems analyst at Boeing when he started the company near Seattle in 1990.
Q 06Which was the first Magic expansion, released in December 1993?
Arabian Nights
It had just 92 cards; Antiquities followed in March 1994 and the 310-card Legends that June.
Q 07Which of Magic's five colours is described as representing intellect, logic, manipulation and trickery?
Blue
White stands for order and peace, black for power and death, red for freedom and fury, and green for life and nature.
Q 08Which colour of Magic represents freedom, chaos, fury and warfare?
Red
Its cards lean on direct damage and haste, which is why the classic 'Sligh' aggro deck was built around cheap red spells like Lightning Bolt.
Q 09How much life does each player start with in a standard two-player game of Magic?
20
Commander doubles it to 40, and players draw an opening hand of seven cards.
Q 10What is the minimum deck size for a constructed Magic deck?
60 cards
Limited decks built from boosters need only 40, and apart from basic lands you may run at most four copies of any card.
Q 11When a Magic spell is cast it does not resolve immediately but goes where?
Onto the stack
Spells and abilities resolve from the top of the stack down, so the last one played happens first.
Q 12Turning a card sideways to show it has been used this turn is called what?
Tapping
Each land can be tapped for mana only once per turn, and players normally play just one land per turn.
Q 13Which zero-cost artifact, sacrificed for three mana of one colour, is the most expensive Magic card ever sold?
Black Lotus
Only about 1,100 were printed in Alpha; a graded Alpha copy sold for $3 million in 2024.
Q 21How many cards are in a Commander deck?
100
Every card except basic lands must be uniquely named, and players start with 40 life.
Q 22In Commander, taking how much combat damage from a single commander causes a player to lose?
21
Wizards took over management of the format from the volunteer Rules Committee in September 2024 after a wave of harassment over bans.
Q 23The Modern format allows cards from which core set onward?
Eighth Edition
Created in 2011, it deliberately excludes Reserved List cards; Pioneer, launched in 2019, starts at Return to Ravnica.
Which format allows only cards that have been printed at common rarity?
Q 14Which artist painted Magic's most expensive card and helped design the five mana symbols?
Christopher Rush
Rush illustrated more than 100 Magic cards and was the first non-Japanese artist to illustrate a Pokémon card; he died in 2016.
Q 15How many cards make up the game's infamous set of overpowered early cards, restricted in Vintage?
Nine
Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Timetwister and the five Moxen; all are restricted to one copy in Vintage and banned nearly everywhere else.
Q 16Which Power Nine card lets a player take an extra turn for just two mana?
Time Walk
Ancestral Recall draws three cards for one blue mana, and the Moxen act like lands you can play more than one of per turn.
Q 17Wizards' 1996 promise never to reprint certain valuable cards is known as what?
The Reserved List
The Power Nine are on it, which is a big reason Modern was created to exclude those cards.
Q 18Roughly how many unique Magic cards had been created by the early 2020s?
Over 20,000
Between 2008 and 2016 alone more than twenty billion physical cards rolled off the presses.
Q 19Roughly how many people had played Magic worldwide by 2023, according to the game's owner?
Fifty million
The game topped $1 billion in annual revenue for Hasbro in fiscal 2022.
Q 20The Commander format was originally known by what name?
Elder Dragon Highlander
Adam Staley's Alaskan play groups devised it in the late 1990s, naming it after the film Highlander and the game's Elder Dragons.
Pauper
Vintage, by contrast, allows everything but restricts its most powerful cards to a single copy.
Q 25In a Sealed Deck event, how many booster packs does each player open?
Six
The resulting deck must have at least 40 cards; a Booster Draft uses three packs passed around a table of eight.
Q 26Who won the first Magic World Championship, held at Gen Con in 1994?
Zak Dolan
The tournament was open to all comers and played as single elimination; the Pro Tour followed in 1996.
Q 27The Pro Tour debuted in 1996 in which city?
New York
It launched as 'The Black Lotus Pro Tour' with US-only events on 16-18 February 1996.
Q 28Which player, nicknamed 'Jonny Magic', topped the vote for the first Pro Tour Hall of Fame class?
Jon Finkel
The 2000 World Champion later became a professional poker player and hedge fund partner; head designer Mark Rosewater called him the game's most naturally gifted player.
Q 29German player Kai Budde, 'the Juggernaut', holds the record for how many individual Pro Tour wins?
Five
No one else has more than three; the Player of the Year trophy was renamed in his honour in 2024, and he died in January 2026.
Q 30Which player won the Magic World Championship in both 2018 and 2024?
Javier Dominguez
Seth Manfield took his own second title in Seattle in 2025.