Although the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the gameplay bears little similarity to pen-and-paper games, while simultaneously having substantially more cards and more complex rules than many other card games. A player defeats their opponent typically (but not always) by casting spells and attacking with creatures to deal damage to the opponent's 'life total', with the objective being to reduce it from 20 to 0, or 40 to 0 in some group formats.
Ī player in Magic takes the role of a Planeswalker, a powerful wizard who can travel ('walk') between dimensions ('planes') of the Multiverse, doing battle with other players as Planeswalkers by casting spells, using artifacts, and summoning creatures as depicted on individual cards drawn from their individual decks. Released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast (now a subsidiary of Hasbro), Magic was the first trading card game and had approximately thirty-five million players as of December 2018, and over twenty billion Magic cards were produced in the period from 2008 to 2016, during which time it grew in popularity. Magic: The Gathering (colloquially known as Magic or MTG) is a tabletop and digital collectible card game created by Richard Garfield. Some (order of cards drawn, varying card abilities)
