Magic the Gathering

What is Magic the Gathering?

Magic: the Gath­er­ing (or Magic as it is often called) is a game. More specif­i­cally it is a col­lectible card game (also called a trad­ing card game.) This is the term used to describe a genre of games which involve trad­ing or col­lect­ing dif­fer­ent cards for the game. It does not all come in a sin­gle box such as Monop­oly or Scrab­ble, instead you buy packs in var­i­ous forms or types and get dif­fer­ent cards for the game.

The Story

In Magic, the story is that play­ers are pow­er­ful wiz­ards that are called “Planeswalk­ers.” These are beings who are able to cast spells or travel between “planes” such as you might have seen in fan­tasy movies. Magic has a rich fan­tasy theme sim­i­lar to those of The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia or Lord of the Rings. Each new set that they release brings in new char­ac­ters, new realms, and new places to be explored by play­ers and fans of the game.

How the Game Works

Each player brings their own deck of cards to the game, using their own deck to drive their game expe­ri­ence. Each player will draw cards from their own deck and use the cards to do var­i­ous things through­out the game. The goal of the game is to defeat your oppo­nent. The most com­mon way to win is to take your opponent’s “life” total from 20 to 0, there are numer­ous other ways to win or to lose the game but this is the most com­mon way.

The game is very rich and in depth, adding new cards and new mechan­ics to the game every 3–4 months. Imag­ine being able to sit down and play a game and have it con­tin­u­ally chang­ing every time you get together!

The Pro Tour

There is a Magic the Gath­er­ing Pro Tour that trav­els the globe to mul­ti­ple des­ti­na­tions around the world. At each Pro Tour stop play­ers com­pete for hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars in prize money. These events are usu­ally spread over three days with videos being pro­duced daily and a live web­cast of the Top 8 com­peti­tors play­ing on Sunday!

Exter­nal Links

To learn more about Magic look at these links:

• Wikipedia: Magic the Gathering
• PlayMagic.com — This page is by Wiz­ards of the Coast, the mak­ers of the game. This page has a large flash ani­ma­tion so if you’re on a slow con­nec­tion you might want to go get a cup of coffee.
• Magic the Gath­er­ing on BoardGameGeek.com