How do you play Magic: The Gathering - A beginner’s guide.

Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is a trading card game with well over 30 years under its belt and millions of players. It combines strategy with fantasy, set alongside a deep story across a multiverse of unique planes.

You play a powerful being called a "Planeswalker", a being that can freely travel the multiverse and call upon mighty spells to bring down your opponents.

There are many different ways to get involved with this beloved game, from collecting awesome cards with incredible artwork to playing in a tournament and winning sought-after prizes or just meeting your friends at the table and having a great time; MTG is all about the gathering.

This article will help get you started on a wonderful journey to this epic game, to making new friends at your local game store and how you can get started at slinging some spells.

 Let's get into it!

You don't need the most expensive Magic: The Gathering cards to get started. The first thing you'll need is a deck, also called a library. Don't have one? Don't worry! Many local game stores have a welcome deck you can pick up to try out. You can also get pre-built decks for different formats.

Let's not muddy the waters too much here with that, though. For this article, we will focus on 60 card-constructed formats. If you want to learn more about a 100-card singleton format called Commander, you can do with this article here.

 A great starting point for a deck is the starter kit, which not only gives you two constructed decks but also gives you a code for Magic Arena, the online version of the game so that you can play these decks online with your friends. If you want something with a little more bite to it, the Challenger decks are an excellent product for new and older players alike.

There are a few other Magic: The Gathering accessories you can bring to the table, like play mats, sleeves and deck boxes (I prefer dragon shield products, personally), but as a starting point, a deck is all you need.

It can be daunting at first glance to decide what sort of deck you want to play, and a handy way to decide is to talk about colour philosophy.

 Magic: The Gathering uses 5 colours, White, Blue, Black, Red and Green, also called the colour pie.

Each part of the pie has its own philosophy about game styles, and there are some overlaps between each colour identity.

White: This is the colour of protection and order. It tends to build an enormous army of smaller creatures quickly, making it harder for your opponent to block them all. It also has Life gain strategies and pieces that make your opponent use more resources than usual.

Blue: This is the colour of intellect and knowledge. Blue's strength lies in its ability to regularly draw cards, getting you to the spells you need much faster. It's also the colour of denial, with cards that counter your opponent's spells, stopping them in their tracks.

Black: This is the colour of death and power at any cost. Black's strengths lie in forcing your opponent to discard cards straight from the hand or sacrifice their creatures. Black also has access to a lot of spells that bring cards back from the graveyard and sometimes uses your life as a resource to cast stronger spells.

Red: Red is the colour of passion and chaos. Red is great at dealing direct damage to your opponents or getting to attack much faster than our opponents. Red can also have resource denial by destroying artifacts and land cards, making it harder for our opponents to cast their spells.

Green: This is the colour of Nature and growth. Its strength lies in getting a lot of mana to cast our spells quickly and having access to the most enormous creatures in the game. If you like the idea of hitting your opponent with a giant dinosaur, this is the colour for you.

 Got your deck? Great! Let's get down to a game.

The first thing we need to do is understand the basics. You win a game of Magic by reducing your opponent's life points from 20 to 0 by using creatures to attack and spells to stop them from getting too far ahead of you.

A player also loses the game if they go to draw a card from the deck and are unable to. There are ways to abuse this by making an opponent put cards directly from their deck to the graveyard - also called milling.

More often than not, you will usually use creature spells to claim victory.

You start a game by shuffling your deck and deciding who goes first, usually by rolling dice or flipping a coin.

Next, we draw a hand of 7 cards and whoever wins the dice roll or coin flip goes first. The player who goes first in a 1vs1 game doesn't get to draw their first card for turn.

We generally want to start our turn by playing a land card.

Lands are essential; they represent the mana you use to pay for spells. Each spell has a cost, and the amount of land you have allows you to cast them.

For example, the card Recommission costs 1 White mana, generated by the land card "Plains", and one mana of any other colour also called generic mana.

Whilst the card, Baleful Strix costs 1 Black mana, generated by the land card "Swamp", and 1 Blue mana, generated by the land card "Island".

This line here tells you what sort of spell it is.

Some cards have a one-time effect, like sorceries or instants; once used, they go to the graveyard.

Other spells stay on the battlefield. These are spell cards like Creatures, enchantments, Planeswalkers, Artifacts and Equipment.

To use any of these spells, you need to use mana produced by our land cards; you show that a land is used by turning it sideways, also called "tapping". Anything that is tapped will untap at the beginning of our next turn.

On your turn, you can play a land card and cast any spells before or after the combat phase, except for one type of spell called an instant, which you can play at any time, including your opponent's turn.

Each turn is made up of "phases" these phases tell you what you can do at any point; think of it as a step-by-step list of game actions.

A turn is made up of:

Beginning phase: You get to start each turn by untapping all your cards and drawing a new card for the turn.

Main Phase 1: You can play a land card for the turn and any spells you have the mana to play.

Combat: Here, you can attack your opponent with any creatures you have.

Main Phase 2: As before, you can play spells that you have the mana to play. You can even play your land for the turn here if you didn't already play one. There is no difference between the Main phases; it's totally up to you if you want to go to combat before or after you have played any spells.

Ending phase: This is the end of the turn, where some clean-up actions take place. More on this a little later.

Phases may appear quite daunting at first glance, but once you get into a game, it will all make sense. Now let's take a closer look at the combat phase.

ATTTTTTTAAAAAACCCK!

The main objective of a game of Magic is to reduce our opponent's life total to 0; creatures that you control will usually only attack your opponent and not the creatures directly.

Some advanced creature spells may change this ruling, and if an opponent has a Planeswalker card out on the battlefield, you can attack that instead of the player. For the most part, though, we win by dealing damage to our opponents.

 A Creature that has been summoned to the battlefield cannot attack the turn it was cast. This is because they suffer from "summoning sickness."

In combat, you declare any creatures you want to attack with, by tapping them. A tapped creature cannot be used to block an opponent's creature on your opponent's next turn.

After you have declared which creatures you want to attack with, your opponent gets to decide which of their creatures are going to block and then damage is dealt out all at once.

 When blocking attacks, a creature can be assigned however you feel. You can assign 2 creatures to block a single creature attacking you if you like, or you can decide to take the damage. It's totally up to you how you choose to block.

Let's take a closer look at a creature card.

 The creature card Ascendant Packleader has a power of 2 and a toughness of 1. This means it will deal 2 points of damage and will die if it takes 1 or more damage. When a creature dies, it goes to the graveyard. Any creatures that didn't die, are healed up to full toughness at the end of the turn.

You can cast some spell cards that will temporarily increase your creature's power and toughness. If they are an Instant, you can cast this spell after your opponent has declared a blocker, giving you enough power to kill their creature and maybe save your own.

 Some creatures have abilities, such as flying on Welcoming Vampire, which means it can only be blocked by creatures with flying or reach (another keyword ability)

Other creatures have static abilities, activated abilities and triggered abilities.

For example, Urza, Prince of Kroog, has a static ability that increases the power and toughness of Artifact creature cards by 2 and has an activated ability that costs 6 generic mana.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you are not sure what a card does, you can find more information on gatherer.wizards.com. Here you can find more detail on how a card works.

 Now all that's left is to get out there and get a game. One of the greatest parts of Magic: The Gathering is its community. There are always people ready to teach new players and get them involved. If you are ever unsure, ask, and someone will always be happy to help.

Welcome to the family.