What Is Magic: The Gathering? A Beginner's Guide to MTG

Magic: The Gathering, or MTG, is a trading card game in which two or more players each bring a deck and duel as spellcasters. You play lands for mana, spend it on creatures and spells, and attack to bring your opponent from 20 life to zero. Richard Garfield created it, and Wizards of the Coast published it in 1993.

How Magic: The Gathering works in one minute

Magic: The Gathering is a game about cards, mana and combat. Each player starts with a shuffled deck, seven cards in hand and 20 life. On your turn you may play one land, which makes mana of its color, and spend that mana to cast creatures, artifacts, enchantments and one-time spells. Creatures attack; your opponent blocks with theirs or takes the damage.

Most cards belong to one of Magic’s five colors: white, blue, black, red and green. A deck usually uses one or two of them, and each color plays differently. The full rules, step by step, are in how to play Magic: The Gathering.

What makes Magic different from other card games

Magic’s biggest difference from most card games is that you build your own deck. Wizards calls it “a collectible trading card game” with “thousands of cards so you can always find a way to express yourself on the battlefield.” Two players at the same table may hold completely different decks.

New sets arrive several times a year. Many visit a world, or plane, in Magic’s Multiverse, which Wizards describes as “an endless expanse of different worlds called planes,” and others are based on outside franchises such as Final Fantasy. The formats then decide which of those cards you may use: Standard uses recent sets, while Commander lets you use cards from across the game’s history.

A short history of Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering was designed by Richard Garfield, a mathematician who, as Star City Games tells it, finished his dissertation in combinatorial mathematics and published Magic in the same year, 1993. Wizards of the Coast released it as the company’s first trading card game, and Wikipedia records its general release on August 5, 1993.

Wizards of the Coast became part of Hasbro in 1999, and Magic is still published by Wizards today. The full rulebook, the Comprehensive Rules, is free to download from Wizards’ rules page; the edition on that page in early October 2026 took effect on September 25, 2026.

The five colors of Magic: The Gathering

The five colors of Magic, white, blue, black, red and green, are the backbone of every deck. The Comprehensive Rules name them in rule 105.1, and Wizards’ Arena guide describes play as decks “that generate five colors of mana.” Wikipedia’s account of the game’s design explains that each color stands for a different school of magic, arranged on a “Color Wheel” where neighboring colors are complementary and opposite colors are opposing.

For a new player, the colors are the simplest way to choose a deck. Wizards’ beginner Commander decks use one color each, and its Magic Academy column suggests two colors for a first deck of your own, so that each color covers the other’s weaknesses.

Magic: The Gathering around the world

Magic: The Gathering is printed and played well beyond the English-speaking world. Wizards’ own notes on Reality Fracture mention Collector Boosters “of any language” and Japanese Collector Boosters with cards printed in Japanese, and its website is available in more than ten languages, from Simplified Chinese to Spanish. Some special cards, such as Reality Fracture’s serialized headliner, are printed in English only, whichever language the pack is in.

The ways to play Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering is played in several places, and Wizards lists four main ones:

Local game stores also run weekly events and Prereleases before each new set; what an MTG Prerelease is explains how those work.

Beginner Boxes, Starter Kits and Theme Decks

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How people play Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering is played in many formats, each with its own deck rules. Commander, a multiplayer format with 100-card decks, is the one Wizards calls its most popular; Standard is a two-player format using recent sets; drafts and Prereleases have you build a deck from packs opened on the spot. Magic formats explained compares them all, and Modern vs Pioneer covers the two formats that keep older cards legal.

Where to start with Magic: The Gathering

Where to start depends on who you will play with. A pair of new players should get a Foundations Beginner Box, which teaches a first game turn by turn. Someone joining a Commander group should get a Commander precon; see the Commander precon hub. The options are compared in the best way to start Magic, and every product is in which Magic product to buy.

To build a first deck of your own, how many lands a deck needs gives the starting numbers. Buying for someone who plays? See gifts for Magic: The Gathering players.