Playing is that simple - part 1

After spending some time talking about the game in general it is time to get into more specifics. Today I am going to explain the rules of the game and by the end of the post anyone should be able to start playing their first game of Magic: the Gathering. If this sounds too optimistic I will point out to something that quite a lot of people who have been long enough in the game know:

Magic is easy to learn and hard to master.

If you have been overwhelmed by the abundance of articles and various Magic related content over the net, it is because there are many people trying to master the game. This content is there for them. Maybe soon you will also be among those looking for it trying to improve your play. Right now you are here to learn how to play and see why millions of people enjoy Magic: the Gathering. For such a simple task one post will suffice.

Elements of a card

I am going to start with briefly talking about the types of cards. There are seven of them - lands, creatures, instants, sorceries, artifacts, enchantments and plainswalkers. All cards have one thing in common - how the "fixed" elements are placed on them. Let's look at this classic green card for example:

Always in the top left corner you will find the name of the card. In this case we are looking at Llanowar Elves.

On the top right you can see see a black tree in a green circle - this is the mana cost. There are four more such symbols each associated with one of the colours. The mana cost is there to tell you how much mana you need to pay in order to cast the spell. In this case you need one green mana.

Underneath the name and the mana cost is the illustration of the card. It serves no purpose in the game but greatly helps recognize a card (especially when Magic is being printed in nine different languages). Cards that appear in different sets may have different illustration. Nevertheless, they are still considered the same card.

We get to the middle portion, where we have the card type (on the left) and the expansion symbol (on the right).

This card tells us it is a creature (you might have guessed it) and it has the types Elf and Druid (subtypes to a card type are come after the hyphen). Creature types can be important as we will see talking about the green and the red decks that Bragster.com sends in their intro packs. One last thing worth mentioning is that a card can be two or more types, e.g. an artifact creature.

The expansion symbol tells you from which expansion this card is. I will go into detail about the importance of this when I talk about different formats in a future post. The colour of the expansion symbol represents the rarity of the card. It can be black (as with Llanowar elves), which stands for common, silver, which stands for uncommon, gold meaning rare and platinum, which is found on the cards of mythical rarity. The rarity shows you the likelihood of finding a certain card in a booster box. Since this has nothing to do with how the game is played, it will also be covered in another post.

In the lower part of the card, taking almost as much space as the illustration are the rules text and the flavor text. Either one may or may not be present and the latter is for flavor reasons only, it doesn't affect the gameplay. The former, on the other hand is pretty important since it tells you what the card can and can't do and how it is used. In our case we are looking at a card that has the ability to add one green mana to your mana pool. What's mana pool? You'll find out in just a few paragraphs.

Finally, there are the figures in the bottom right corner. These are only found on creature cards and represent their power (first number) and toughness (the second one). The power tells you how much damage the creature does to other creature, players and planeswalkers. The toughness is there to tell you how much damage the creature can take before it dies. For example if two Llanowar elves fight on the battlefield each one will receive 1 damage from the other and will die.

You may notice I am missing the text in the bottom left corner. This is because it contains information relevant for collectors of the cars such as number of the card in the set, artist who did the illustration, etc. This information does not affect the games played.

Card Types

With this being said, let's go back to the card types and see what is the difference between them. First I am going to set lands outside and refer to the other six types as spells. The reason for this is that in Magic all the non-land cards you have in your deck are the tools for achieving victory. To be able to use your tools you have to pay mana, which you get from your lands. This is why lands are more of a resource than a tool. Lands come in five basic types, each producing a single colour of mana - plains for white, islands for blue, swamps for black, mountains for red and forests for green. There are also lands that produce more than one colour and ones that produce colourless mana, which can be used to cast spells whose cost can be fully or partially paid with any colour of mana.

Next I am going to separate the cards into permanents and non-permanents. The permanents enter the game area (known as "the battlefield") and stay there until something destroys them and puts them into the zone known as "the graveyard". They include the creatures, enchantments, artifacts, planeswalkers and lands. The instants and the sorceries have one-shot effects and the cards that represent them go straight into "the graveyard".

Finally the cards can be divided, according to when they can be played. Since this has a lot to do with the turn structure covered in part 2 of this post, I'll leave it at that. Now I will just go through each card type one by one:

Land - a permanent used to pay for spells

Creature - a permanent that can attack and block as well as have additional abilities

Enchantment - a permanent that affects the game in some way. Enchantments with the type Aura need to be attached to another permanent to have their effect

Artifact - a permanent, much like the enchantment in function. Artifacts with the type Equipment can be equipped on creatures you control

Planeswalker - a permanent representing an ally, fighting on your side. They are a bit complex and quite cool, which mean they get a separate post

Sorcery - a spell that can only be cast during your turn

Instant - a spell, that can be cast at any time

Quite a lot to read and digest, right? Trust me, knowing all this will become a second nature after only a couple of games. And after reading all this you are almost ready to start playing. Part 2 is coming really soon but in the meantime you can put everything you just learned about card types in context by looking through the thousands of cards in Wizard's card database The Gatherer or by looking at the descriptions of the Bragster decks I am about to post.