Magic 101

So, as it’s my first Magic: The Gathering article, I thought a good way to start would be an intro into the game. I will say now that this won’t be a brief introduction by any means, Magic has been consistently in production for 20+ years which is amazing when compared to pretty much any other game ever. Such a lifespan means that Wizards of the Coast are doing something very right to keep bringing people back to the game or into the game, but it also means that there is a rich history to Magic: The Gathering and even after playing for about fifteen years, I’m still finding out cool, new things about it.

(These are the symbols that appear on the related lands representing the colour each produces.)

We’re going to start with what the game is. Magic: The Gathering is a fantasy based, trading card game, (meaning you can trade your cards with your friend’s cards to improve your decks.) full of Angels, Demons, Elves, Werewolves, Wizards, and more. You explore from the expansive landscapes and intricate, beautifully designed cities to the Gothic-horror stricken hamlets and the encampments of an army waging war fueled by the rage of Dragons itself while traveling through the endless Multiverse. The game centers around five main colours wherein you use Mana to play Spells and Creature to reduce your opponent’s life total to zero. This can happen a multitude of ways which we will look at later.

First let’s take a look and have a run-down of some of the specific bits you’ll need to know on a Magic: The Gathering card.

Top left corner: The name of the card.                    

Top right corner: The Mana cost, this Creature requires one green and one colorless to cast meaning you need two Lands one of which being a forest. The converter Mana cost for this Creature would be two. (The collective number in the Mana cost).

Top center: This is the art; the art will change from time to time with reprinting of the same card.

Center left: The word or words to the left of the dash are the card type. (More on that later) and the word or words to the right of the dash is the sub-type, in this case this Creature is a Bear.

Bottom center: This is the text box, this can contain key words or abilities, or in this case the italics is flavor text, a few lines to give you a little backstory to the card.

Bottom right: These two numbers are a Creature’s power (Left of the slash) and toughness (Right of the slash). In this Creature’s case, it has two power meaning it can deal two damage, and it has two toughness meaning it can take two damage before it dies. In the case of a Planes-Walker this would be where the Loyalty is. 

The coloured frame: The colour of this indicates what colour the card is,

We’ve had a look at a Magic card, now I think it’s time we learned about the other card types and what they all do.

There are seven different card types;

Land: Lands are permanent card types, there are five Basic Lands; Plains, Island, Mountain, Swamp and Forest, and these can be tapped (turn sideways) to generate the corresponding coloured Mana; White, Blue, Red, Black and Green, and that Mana can be used to play your Spells and Creatures.

Creature: Creatures are a permanent card type (meaning that it doesn’t go straight to the Graveyard when its cast but instead will reside on the Battlefield (The area of play)) and are used to attack your opponent or block their attacking Creatures, more on these later.

Instant: Instants are cards that can be played at any time providing you have the Mana to cast them. They provide benefits and then are immediately put into the Graveyard (Discard pile) after they have been cast.

Sorcery: Like Instants, Sorceries give you a benefit and then are put into the Graveyard, unlike Instants, Sorceries can only be cast in your Main Phases.

Artifact: An Artifact is a permanent card type. Artifacts in play may grant you a benefit, but they can also come in the form of Artifact Creatures, (Which work the same as normal Creatures but with the added card type Artifact) or Equipment. Equipment are Artifacts that will have a Mana cost to cast it and an Equip cost; a Mana cost in the text box you can pay at sorcery speed to attach the Equipment to the Creature. When a Creature that is Equipped dies, the Equipment becomes unattached and remains in play.

Enchantment: Enchantments work in much the same way as Artifacts, they are permanent card types that will often provide you or your Creature with a benefit or your opponent or their Creature with a negative. Also like Artifacts, there is a sub-type of Enchantment called Aura, and these work in the same way as Equipment but without an Equip cost. When you cast an Aura, you attach it to a Creature straight away. The way Auras differ to Equipment is when the Enchanted Creature dies. If a Creature would die with an Aura attached to it both leave the Battlefield and are put into the Graveyard instead.

Planes-Walker: This is a Planes-Walker, they may look complicated but I assure you they work in a very simple way. Each Planes-Walker enters the Battlefield with an amount of Loyalty shown by the number in the bottom right. The positive and negative numbers on the left-hand side of the text box are how much you increase or decrease your Planes-Walkers Loyalty by and the text to the right of the colon is the effect of doing so. You can only use one ability per turn and at Sorcery speed, (meaning in your Main Phases) and when a Planes-Walker has zero Loyalty, its put into the Graveyard. Damage dealt to a Planes-Walker from Creature or Spells is shown by removing that much Loyalty.

So, we know what the game is, we’ve learned about the different card types and even taken a look at a Planes-Walker. Onto the playing.

How to play:

A Standard Deck contains sixty cards with just over a third of that being lands, each player shuffles their deck of cards or “Library” and draws seven cards for their opening hand to start the game. You play one Land each turn while using them to play Spells in your hand.

In Magic: The Gathering there is what’s called a turn cycle, a series of different steps that make up your turn. The turn cycle consists of seven steps; Untap, Upkeep, Draw, Main phase 1, Combat step, Main phase 2, End of turn.

Starting at the top with Untap. This is the first step in your turn, in this step you would untap any tapped permanents; Lands or Creature that have attacked for example.

Nothing often happens in your Upkeep but there are some Artifacts, Enchantments and Creature that can interact in your upkeep, this is called a triggered ability and this will usually happen just as a result of entering your Upkeep.

The Draw step is where you take or “Draw” one card from the top of your library into you hand.

Your Main phase is where you can start putting cards on the Battlefield, this is the step where you can play Lands, Creature, Sorceries, Artifacts, Enchantments and Planes-Walkers as well as Instants which can be played at any time.

In your Combat step is where you can use the Creatures you’ve cast to attack your opponent; you do this by turning sideways or “tapping” your Creatures and declaring an attack (Creatures cannot attack the same turn you have played them, they must have been under your control for one full turn, unless that Creature has Haste in the text box then it may attack in the same turn it was played). When you attack, you must attack with all chosen Creatures at the same time, you cannot choose to attack with one Creature, wait for your opponent to block and then attack with another Creature, all blockers must be declared simultaneously as well. If your Creature goes unblocked, then it deals damage equal to its power to the defending player. If that Creature is blocked by a Creature your opponent controls, both deal combat damage to each other. When this happens, the power of your Creature is subtracted from the blocker and vice versa. Example: If a 2/2 Creature attacks and is blocked by a 2/2 Creature, both those Creature will deal two damage to each other and both will die. If a 2/2 attacks and is blocked by a 2/3 however, both would deal two damage to each and just the 2/2 will die with the 2/3 having two damage on it until the End of Turn.

Your Second Main phase is much like the first where you can play all types of cards as long as you have the required Mana. 

When you go to your End of Turn all damage done to Creatures remaining on the Battlefield is removed along with other temporary effects from other Spells. (The card will tell you if the effect is until the End of Turn). You also have a maximum hand size of seven cards so if you have more than seven at the end of your turn you must discard the difference.

How to Win:

As I alluded to previously, the main way to win is to get your opponent’s life total to zero. This is done by attacking them or playing spells that deal damage to your opponent or cause them to lose life. Other ways include; “Decking” your opponent. This happens when a player fails to draw a card because they have no remaining cards in their library. “Poisoning” your opponent. Infect is a keyword that causes Creatures to deal damage in the form of Poison counters. For Creatures that have blocked and taken that damage, this means permanent -1/-1 counters, but if that damage connects with a player, accumulating ten Poison counters results in losing the game. There are some cards, usually the very expensive or incredibly awkward cards, that have an effect resulting in a player winning/losing the game. (See Door To Nothingness.)

Deck building:

Because Magic: The Gathering is TCG, you have control over the cards you play in your constructed decks, you have cards you don’t need are wont use? Trade them to your friends for ones you will use. Like I said earlier, a constructed deck contains a minimum of sixty cards and this is going to made up of about a third lands and just under two thirds Creatures and Spells. You are only allowed to put a maximum of four copies any chosen card in your deck, except for Basic Lands which you can play as many as you like. (Note: The card will say if it’s a Basic Land, if the word Basic doesn’t appear before the word Land then it’s a Non-Basic Land and you can have a maximum of four copies in your deck.)

When Building your decks, you want to take into consideration the mix of all your Spells and Creatures, you don’t want to have too many ways of dealing with your opponent’s Creatures without drawing any of your own to go on the offensive. The number of Lands you’re playing is key as well, too few and you won’t draw them as often as you might need. This is particularly annoying when you’re playing multiple colours and don’t draw enough of one colour resulting in what is termed “Mana Screwed”. Too many and you could find that they show up to frequently resulting in a similar term, “Mana Flooding”. When playing multiple colours, your colour split will vary deck to deck. The things to look out for are how color intensive your Spells are to play, and what turns you would want to play what Spells meaning what coloured Lands would you want to see more often.

 Another thought while deck building is what is known as “Mana Curve”. This is to do with the increasing amount of Mana turn to turn and the cost of your cards through those turns. For example, when you draw your opening hand and have a one Mana Creature, a two Mana Creature and a three Mana Creature, providing you can make all three Land drops by turn three you are on curve hitting plays on all three of your turns. Not all decks need to worry about a Mana Curve in game, control decks tend to play cards out of order in a more reactive game plan, waiting for the right time to make their move.

While building any deck however, keep the Mana Curve in mind, just because your cards don’t need to be played on specific turns you don’t want to find yourself with a lot of high Mana cost cards in your deck with not much to do in the early game.

With access to a lot of different cards that do cool and interesting things, you can find cards to suite whatever your style of play is. If you’re an impulsive player and prefer to rush in in a more smash and grab tactic? An aggressive Creature deck may be for you full of low cost, fast Creatures to get in some early damage before your opponent knows what’s hit them. Or maybe you would rather a more thought out approach, covering all outcomes just in case and staying one step ahead, then you can build all sorts of control decks and have all the answers. You wanna have fun and show off the power of you deck, finding subtle ways that all your cards can interact with each other to maximize the end result? Then combo decks are your jam, taking a couple of turns to set up your perfect hand and then exploding out of nowhere into infinite cards or damage or even Creatures to overwhelm your opponent with.

Need to Know-Rules:

A couple of bits that you will need to know about when playing Magic: The Gathering:

The Mulligan Rule. When you draw your opening hand, if you don’t like what your deck has thrown up for you, you have the option of shuffling it back into your library and then drawing six cards as your new hand, you can repeat this as many times as you like drawing one fewer card each time. After you’ve resolved your Mulligans you get to “Scry one”, Scrying is a keyword allowing you to look at a number of cards on the top of your library and choosing to put any number of those on the bottom or the top of your library in any order. For instant, if a card says “Scry 2” you look at the top two cards.

The Stack: Whenever a player plays a Spell (Creatures are included in spells) it goes on the Stack; this is like a place for a card to be while it’s not in your hand or in play/resolved. A card being here gives the opposing player the opportunity to play things in response to it or not. The way The Stack works in simple terms is “First one in, Last one out”, meaning if you play a Spell and then your opponent plays a Spell in response, your opponent’s Spell will resolve before yours does because yours was on the Stack first and therefore under your opponent’s.

Legendary Rule: A Legendary permanent will specify their Legendary status in the card type line. If a player controls two or more legendary permanents with the same name, that player chooses one of them, and the rest are put into their owners' graveyards. This is called the “legend rule.” Only one copy of a given legendary card may be in control by a same player at the same time. A similar rule applies to Planes-Walkers just without the word “Legendary” appearing on the card. If a player controls two or more Planes-Walkers that share a sub-type (The text to the left of the dash in the center Text line of the card), that player chooses one of those Planes-Walkers and puts the rest into the Graveyard. For example, if you control two Jace Planes-Walkers, even if the cards have different names, the sub-type would still say Jace, meaning one will need to be put into the Graveyard due to the built-in legend rule of Planes-walkers.

 I hope reading this has given you a little insight into Magic: The Gathering and maybe enough curiosity to head to your local games store to find out more. My future MTG articles will be delving into different aspects of the game however I will try and do a consistent piece on the workings of the game for beginners. Keep checking back for more MTG news and stratergies.