Magic: The Gathering
1993 collectible card game
Magic: The Gathering (colloquially known as Magic or MTG) is a collectible, tabletop, and digital collectible card game created by Richard Garfield. It was released by Wizards of the Coast in 1993 as the company's first trading card game. From 2008 to 2016, over twenty billion Magic cards were printed as the game grew in popularity. For the 2022 fiscal year, Hasbro—the parent company of Wizards of the Coast—announced that Magic had generated $1 billion in annual revenue. By 2023, Magic had amassed approximately fifty million players worldwide.
Players in a game of Magic represent dueling wizards called "Planeswalkers". Each card a player draws from their deck represents a magical spell which can be used to their advantage in battle. Instant and Sorcery cards represent magical spells a player may cast for a one-time effect, while Creature, Artifact, Enchantment, Planeswalker, and Battle cards remain on the Battlefield to provide long-term advantage. Players usually must include resource, or Land cards representing the amount of mana that is available to cast their spells. Typically, a player defeats their opponent(s) by reducing their life totals to zero, which is commonly done via combat damage by attacking with creatures.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q207302. The Library of Congress control number is sh95005383. 5 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1993, 2008, 2016 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Magic: The Gathering” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.