Magic: The Gathering

About Magic: The Gathering

Richard Garfield designed Magic in 1993 as a game you could play between rounds of something else. It became the something else. Thirty years of sets later it is the reference every other trading card game is measured against, and the only one whose earliest cards trade like fine art.

The formats are where the collecting happens. Standard rotates, Modern does not, and Commander turned a hundred-card singleton variant into the reason most cabinets get opened. A card's price follows the format it is legal in as much as its rarity.