If you don’t know, beginning in 1999 you had a small chance of any regular card in your MTG booster pack being replaced with a shiny “foil” version of that card instead. ✨What about counting foil MTG cards?✨įoil cards have their detractors, me included (I think they’re tacky and frequently make card art look worse). There are a few more things we need to consider. This is the total number of cards the Magic design teams created, designed to be played in-game, printed, and sold. After doing this research, this is the number I would most broadly tend to use if someone asked me how many total cards Magic there are. That’s the total number of unique MTG cards you could identify through different art, different expansion symbols, different printing years for reprinted cards, and so-on. That gets you to a total of roughly 49,998 total unique printings. “Just take the 22,630 total unique cards in Gatherer, and multiply that by the number of different printings per card, like the 10 versions of Remove Soul.” “Okay, that’s easy enough” you might be thinking. Total number of Unique Magic Card Printings Let me ask you this - would you consider these two cards to be the same card, or different cards? At least until the next expansion adds another couple hundred.īut here’s where we go down the rabbit hole a little. There are nearly 23,000 uniquely-named MTG cards out there, each with their own rule text and in-game effect. And Gatherer says there are 22,630 Magic cards with their own unique name.Īs far as answers go, this is a pretty good one. Magic maker Wizards of the Coast maintains a service called Gatherer, a comprehensive database of every Magic card ever printed. Let’s start with the easiest part of this to answer first. Quick aside - we are talking paper cards only here, and leaving digital products like Magic: Arena out of consideration. We may not come out of this with a fully comprehensive answer, but let’s get into it and see what we can figure out. Although that certainly doesn’t make things any easier. And not just because the collectible card game game has been around for almost 30 years and now has 88 expansions, each adding several hundred cards. This question is trickier than you might think. ( Originally published in Paperwave : a free newsletter focused on board and card games, Lego, art books, and other cozy objects likely to spark joy with nerds).
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