How Many Total Magic: The Gathering Cards Are There? - Paperwave #1

It's just one game, Michael. How many cards could there be? 10?

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How many total, unique Magic: The Gathering cards are there?

This question is trickier than you might think. 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. Although that certainly doesn’t make things any easier.

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. Quick aside - we are talking paper cards only here, and leaving digital products like Magic: Arena out of consideration. 

Total Unique Magic Cards

Let’s start with the easiest part of this to answer first. Magic maker Wizards of the Coast maintains a service called Gatherer, a comprehensive database of every Magic card ever printed. And Gatherer says there are 22,630 Magic cards with their own unique name.

So, that’s it, right?

As far as answers go, this is a pretty good one. There are nearly 23,000 uniquely-named MTG cards out there, each with their own rule text and in-game effect. At least until the next expansion adds another couple hundred.

But here’s where we go down the rabbit hole a little. Let me ask you this - would you consider these two cards to be the same card, or different cards?

They’re both copies of Remove Soul. They both have the same rules text and they both do the same thing in the actual game, which, as usual, is to allow the Blue player to stop anyone else from having any fun.

In Gatherer, these are considered a single card entry. But they’re clearly different in meaningful ways. They feature art from different artists, they have different frame colors, and they were printed in different sets, years apart. All of these differences don’t mean anything to the mechanics of the game. Remove Soul is Remove Soul. But they mean a lot to collectors. And, importantly, if you put them side-by-side, they look totally different. So no, they aren’t the same card.

Let’s go a little deeper. Would you then consider these two cards the same card, or different cards?

Now we’re getting into territory where someone unfamiliar with Magic might start to get confused. Same art, same card title. Same rule text. But if you look at the icon under the bottom-right of the art, you’ll notice that one of these versions of Remove Soul is from the 8th Edition of the game, and the other is from 9th Edition. This probably wouldn’t matter to most, but it certainly matters to a collector trying to collect a complete set of all 350/350 cards from 8th Edition, for example. Thanks to that expansion symbol, reprinted cards are clearly marked in a way that makes them easily identifiable from one another, even when nothing else about it changes. So, once again... different cards (if only slightly).

In fact, Remove Soul has been reprinted in 10 different Magic sets and has 10 total variations - some large, some small. So this single card, which has a single entry in Gatherer, actually has 10 total distinct printings for our counting purposes.

Every Remove Soul variant listed on Scryfall

Total number of Unique Magic Card Printings

“Okay, that’s easy enough” you might be thinking. “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.” 

That gets you to a total of roughly 49,998 total unique printings. 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. 

This is a very good number. 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. This is the total number of cards the Magic design teams created, designed to be played in-game, printed, and sold. 

Taking that total could work, yes. But more in a much more real sense... no.

There are a few more things we need to consider.

✨What about counting foil MTG cards?✨

Foil cards have their detractors, me included (I think they’re tacky and frequently make card art look worse). But they’re a part of the game. So let’s get into this for a bit, too.

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. The odds have varied and there are exceptions (don’t @ me) but very roughly about 1 in 45 to 1 in 100 total cards distributed in Magic booster packs will be a foil replacing a regular card. So… pretty rare. I’ll look at this in more depth in a future letter.

What this means in practice for us is that, since 1999, almost every new Magic card print also exists in a much more rare shiny foil version. Unlike the differences between the 8th and 9th Edition Remove Souls, the foil cards are the exact same print as its non-foil version. The foil is the same art, same expansion symbol, same card number, and so-on. The only difference is that it is shiny.

So there’s some debate over whether foil variants should count as a unique printing in the same way new artwork or a new expansion symbol more definitively count.

If you’re taking a “common sense” approach for what counts and doesn’t count as a unique MTG card - namely, that if you look at two cards side by side is there a clear and intended difference between them and way to tell them apart - then clearly foil card variants count as unique, different cards.

The argument against counting them in the total is that foil cards aren’t really design. They’re just marketing. A card reprinted in multiple sets, or with new art, new card frames, new flavor text… all of these are examples of a gameplay design, game balance, or artistic design decision. Foil cards only exist because someone figured out humans will pay more for shiny things.

Regardless, the foiled cards are still clearly different. According to my research on independent MTG card database Scryfall there are 28,124 duplicate foil versions of existing Magic card prints.

If we add these foils to the total unique printings, we’re up to 78,122 total unique Magic cards in existence.

Out-of-Game Magic Extras

We’re almost there - stick with me a bit longer!

78,122 total unique Magic card prints + total foil variants almost gets you to the final number. It isn’t down-to-the-card accurate (more on this in a sec) but it is a really good ballpark.

There are still a few more things to consider though, like extras and bonus cards that aren’t actually playable as part of the game. These cards are still collectible, are generally numbered, and are considered by lots of people, including me, to be part of the general MTG collecting scene.

I’m seriously obsessed with the new art series cards

Example: recently Wizards of the Coast has started printing ultra-cool “art cards.” One whole side is filled with a piece of card art, and the reverse includes a few details about the piece. They aren’t a part of the actual game. They don’t have a card title or rules text or anything else like what we’ve discussed so far. Even so, you can be sure that loads of collectors have at the back of their binders a complete set of art cards, as well as other out-of-game extra cards like tokens, checklists, and punchcards.

So it’s worth considering them when asking the question of how many total Magic cards exist.

By my count there are 5614 unique foil and non-foil out-of-game extra cards. Adding them to our total brings us to 83,736 total Magic cards.

A Word on Magic Card Translations

Finally, and critically, evvvvvverrrything we’ve  been discussing here has only been in reference to the English-language version of Magic. The game is currently localized into 10 other languages, including Italian, Russian and Japanese. For the purposes of this tabulation we’re only considering English card printings, as the non-English editions are just card translations, and almost never change anything else about the cards or art.

...with one exception. Because this is Magic and nothing is ever easy so of course there is an exception.

In 2019 Wizards worked with Japanese artists (including Yoshitaka Amano!) to create 36 stunning alternate-art Japanese versions of existing cards. These alt-art versions were followed up in Fall 2021 with another 63 full-frame Japanese-language-only alt-art treatments, including Demonic Tutor, which may be my single favorite MTG card printing ever and I have to own it even though it costs over $100 and starting this newsletter may or may not have all been an excuse solely to acquire this card.

We have to count them. They’re too good not to.

So when we’re discussing “Every MTG card ever made” I think it’s reasonable to exclude vanilla card translations, as they’re more akin to changing subtitles on a film, but non-English printings with unique art and other characteristics specifically unique to those cards almost certainly must be included in the grand total.

Add these 93 cards and a few other misc. alt-art non-English cards brings us to a grand total of…

84108 total collectible Magic the Gathering Cards.

Why is this so hard?

Magic is a weird game with a long history. Creator Richard Garfield made a card to propose to his wife. Every once in a while Wizards releases a non-tournament-legal set of joke cards that are nothing but callbacks and potty humor. There used to be bonus cards with bios of real world pro players. Do these and other oddities count? TBH I’m not sure.

And more importantly, the third-party resources I referenced heavily when putting together this newsletter (Scryfall, Gatherer, and MTGJson mostly) are also inconsistent with each other on points like these, although they’re all ridiculously comprehensive and consistent in their own ways. So when one says there’s 52,000 unique card printings and another says 50,000, it’s hard to account for that discrepancy and to know which number to take.

As a result of these edge-case disagreements and the game’s breathtaking combination of longevity and publishing velocity, it is surprisingly challenging to answer what should be a fairly simple question. 

Regardless, fuzzy as it may be, I think we’ve finally arrived at some pretty decent grand totals. Let’s go:

Too Long; Didn’t Read: The Total Number of Magic: The Gathering Cards Ever Printed Is…

This has been a journey but I appreciate you going on it with me (please like and subscribe). There are a few ways to total up how many unique MTG cards exist, all equally valid:

1. There are about 22,630 total printed Magic cards with their own unique names and in-game rules text.

2. There are around 49,998 total unique English-language Magic cards, when separately counting cards with unique printings like alternate art or cards reprinted in several editions. 

3. If you add in foil variants there are about 78,122 total unique in-game cards.

4. If you include token cards, art cards, non-English alt-arts and other extras you end up with a grand total of...84108 total unique Magic the Gathering cards ever printed.

...give or take a few thousand :)

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