Tabletop Game / Magic: The Gathering

The standard Magic card back. Its design is meant to resemble the cover of a Spell Book.

"You are a planeswalker..."

Magic: The Gathering is a Collectible Card Game, produced in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast ^note  Now the owners of that other great geek game, Dungeons & Dragons and now a subsidiary of Hasbro, it was the first true Collectible Card Game,^note previous attempts mostly involved baseball cards the Genre Popularizer, and even today it remains one of the most popular tabletop fantasy genre card games in the world.

Each game is a duel between powerful mages (the players) known as "planeswalkers." Planeswalkers deploy a wide array of spells, creatures, artifacts and enchantments (all represented by cards) as they vie to dominate entire realms ("planes")—or, if you prefer, to reduce the opponent's life total to zero. Notable gameplay elements include:

• The "Color Pie": The game features Color-Coded Wizardry in five different flavours: White^note light, law, purity and order, Blue^note water, air, logic, knowledge and the mind, Black^note  death, ambition, pragmatism and power, Red^note fire, passion, chaos and aggression and Green^note harmony, tradition, destiny and nature. Each color is convinced it has the only correct way of looking at the world, resulting in Opposing Combat Philosophies; there are complex interrelations between them; and players can use any number of them at the same time, but only by giving themselves problems with...
• The Mana system: To cast spells, players need the correct amount and color of mana. Mana is typically gained from Land cards... but you can only play one Land per turn. At a stroke, this brings the "Awesome, but Impractical"^note good spells cost more mana, "You're Nothing Without Your Phlebotinum"^note not getting enough land is frustratingly plausible and "Limited Move Arsenal"^note having spells of one color and lands of the other is frustratingly plausible tropes into the game. Finding a balance between the limits of your colors (pushing you to play more colors) and the likelihood of a mana mismatch (pushing you to play fewer colors) starts creating challenges because...
• It's "collectible": Wizards of the Coast have, as of October 2020, released over 21,000 unique cards into the game, and add an average of 700 new ones every year. This gives you a chance to create a deck that no one else on earth has. (And of course, once you realize that your deck would benefit from one of the cards you don't, you want to buy more cards.)

For a more complete analysis of gameplay (which is, of course, the heart of any game), we wrote a Useful Notes page for your enjoyment.

The game spawned several Video Game adaptations. Some of the more prominent ones:

• Magic: The Gathering: A 1997 Card Battle Game by MicroProse. It contained both a free-dueling mode, allowing you to build decks and battle them against AI opponents, and a campaign mode, where you could travel across the land of Shandalar exploring, dueling enemies, collecting cards, and eventually battling a Big Bad. Notable in that when the game was in Development Hell, Sid Meier was brought in to give it more focus.^note It would also be the last game Meier ever worked on for Microprose, founding Firaxis afterward.invoked
• Magic: The Gathering Online: released in '02, it was the first official way to play the game over the Internet. It has garnered a fair bit of revenue over the years, especially since Wizards offer (very limited) ways to convert digital cards into physical ones and vice versa.
• Duels of the Planeswalkers: A more modern adaptation available on The PlayStation Store, Xbox Live Arcade and Steam, originally released in 2009. It received Numbered Sequels in summer of each succeeding year, coinciding with new Core Set releases, and Wizards explicitly positioned it as their Gateway Series to new players.
  • Magic Duels: Wizards eventually stopped releasing yearly sequels, in favor of a single Free-to-Play game that receives regular updates, usually with new cards and story missions. Unlike a lot of other Free To Play card games, purchasing packs in Magic Duels will always give you new cards. Once you have four of a card (the max allowable in a deck), it is removed from the card pool. Otherwise, it is very similar to the other Duels games. On November 26th 2019, official support of the game ended and has been removed from online storefronts, however multiplayer is still possible for those who own it at the time of writing this.
• Magic: The Gathering Arena: In July 2017, Wizards announced that they would no longer update Magic Duels in preparation for a new Free-to-Play game named Magic: The Gathering Arena. It takes cues from Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft in terms of visual styling and some of its collection bonuses: for instance, players have a chance to draw "Wild Cards" from packs which can be exchanged for a single copy of a card at that rarity. It has taken over as the main digital method of playing the game.
• Magic: The Gathering – Tactics: A 2011 Turn-Based Strategy for PC and PlayStation 3 inspired by Magic. The gameplay bears little to no resemblance to the original card game, but the flavor of it is retained.
• Magic: Legends, a Diablo-inspired MMORPG by Cryptic Studios which, like Tactics, is only using the lore of the MtG multiverse for its foundations, with hybridizations of the mana system and hand-of-cards mechanics. Released into beta in March 2021, it was canceled less than six months later.
• SpellTable: Not really a game, but rather a client allowing players to play games of paper Magic online through the use of webcams along with features such as life total trackers and a built-in card database to look up cards players are using. Created in response to COVID shutting down in-person play, its creators were later hired by Wizards, who then co-oped the application and further expanded upon it.
• Magic Spellslingers was released on for mobile phones and Steam on 10 August 2022. Formerly called Valor's Reach, it had been in soft launch for several years. If this is the first you've heard of it, that tells you something about the advertising budget allotted to the game (approximately $0). It further hybridizes the game with Hearthstone.^note Players gain 1 Mana Crystal a turn. The player who goes second draws an extra card and gets a 1-use "Fragile Mana Crystal." Damage is persistent between turns, and creatures do not tap to attack. Only five creatures can be played at a time. Instants have been converted to "Trap" cards that activate according to specified criteria. Artifacts have limited numbers of uses. Planeswalkers define what cards you can play, alter your starting life total, and each have a passive power: Liliana's, for instance, gives +1/+1 to any creature that her power up cards that enter play from her graveyard; Nissa gains 1 Life whenever she plays an extra mana crystal; while Chandra deals 4 damage to the opponent's face when the game starts.
• ...And more.

A film adaptation languished in Development Hell at 20th Century Fox for years, and was eventually canceled when Disney purchased the studio in March 2019. By June of that year, Netflix had acquired the rights, and announced that The Russo Brothers would create a Netflix original series for them. Joe and Anthony have since stepped away, but the series is still in development, with Brandon Routh to voice Gideon Jura.

The official Magic website can be found here.

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Due to length, the trope list for this work has been split across several pages:

• Gameplay Tropes
  • Gameplay Tropes A to I
  • Gameplay Tropes J To Q
  • Gameplay Tropes R To Z
• Flavor and Story Tropes
  • Flavor And Story Tropes A To G
  • Flavor And Story Tropes H To O
  • Flavor And Story Tropes P To Z
• Color Tropes
• Factions
• Individual Character Tropes
• Audience Reactions and YMMV
• Additionally, the pages for individual Magic novels and comics can be found here.

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