Magic Basics

Who this is for: anyone who has never played Magic: The Gathering, or who last played long enough ago that the basics feel fuzzy. By the end you’ll know what a card is, what the card types do, how mana and colors work, where cards live during a game, how you cast a spell, and how you actually win. Commander adds a few twists on top of this — we flag them as we go and cover them properly in later chapters.

🆕 New players: read this top to bottom. Everything later in the guide assumes the vocabulary introduced here. 🔁 Returning players: skim for the 🔁 callouts — a handful of card types and templating conventions are newer than you might remember. 🎯 Commander-specific: Commander is a particular way to play Magic. The rules below are the shared foundation; the Commander-only rules live in The Commander and beyond.

What a Magic card is

A Magic game is played with cards. Most cards represent something you can play into the game; a few you’ll never own (like tokens the game creates). Every card has, at minimum:

a name,
a mana cost in the top-right corner (what you pay to play it) — except lands, which have none,
a type line telling you what kind of card it is,
a text box with its rules,
and, for creatures, a power and toughness in the bottom-right.

That’s the whole anatomy. Everything else is a variation on it.

🔁 Returning players: mana costs are still the curly-symbol notation you remember (a number for generic mana, colored pips for specific colors). What’s changed most since the early 2000s is the number of card types — see below.

The card types

Every card is one or more of these types. The big split is between permanents (cards that stay on the table once played) and non-permanents (cards that do something once and then leave).

Permanents — stay on the battlefield:

Land: your mana engine. You play one land per turn (no cost), and tap lands to produce mana. The five basic lands — Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, Forest — make white, blue, black, red, and green respectively.
Creature: something that can attack and block. Has power (damage it deals) and toughness (damage it can take before dying).
Artifact: usually a colorless object — equipment, mana rocks, gadgets. Some are creatures too (artifact creatures).
Enchantment: a persistent magical effect that sticks around and keeps doing its thing.
Planeswalker: a powerful ally with loyalty abilities you activate once per turn.

Non-permanents — do their thing, then go to the graveyard:

Instant: a spell you can cast almost anytime, including on someone else’s turn or in response to something.
Sorcery: a spell you can only cast on your own turn, when nothing else is happening (an empty stack, during your main phase).

And one more permanent type you may not have seen:

Battle: a newer permanent type that enters with defense counters; players attack it, and dealing with it can flip it into a reward.

🔁 Returning players: two of these are newer than the original game. Planeswalkers arrived in 2007 and have evolved (the old “planeswalker redirection” rule is long gone). Battles are newer still (introduced 2023) — if you stopped playing before then, this type is genuinely new to you.

🎯 Commander-specific: your deck is built around a commander — a legendary card that starts in a special zone. Which cards can be commanders (and a recent change letting certain legendary Vehicles/Spacecraft qualify) is covered in The Commander.

Mana and the five colors

You pay for almost everything with mana, the game’s resource. Mana comes in five colors plus colorless. The five colors are abbreviated WUBRG:

Letter	Color	Feel (very roughly)
W	White	order, protection, going wide
U	Blue	knowledge, control, card draw
B	Black	power at a cost, death, recursion
R	Red	speed, damage, chaos
G	Green	growth, big creatures, ramp

Colorless mana (written C) is mana with no color, produced by some lands and artifacts. Generic costs (the plain numbers in a mana cost) can be paid with mana of any color or with colorless.

You produce mana by tapping sources — rotating a card sideways to show it’s been used this turn. A tapped land or creature is “spent” until it untaps (normally at the start of your next turn). Tapping is also how most creatures attack and how many abilities are paid for.

🆕 New players: the simplest loop in Magic is “tap a land for mana, spend the mana to cast a spell.” Master that and the rest builds on it.

🎯 Commander-specific: a commander’s colors define your deck’s color identity, which limits every card you can include. That’s a deckbuilding rule unique to the format — see Deckbuilding.

Where cards live: the zones

At any moment, every card is in one zone. The ones you’ll touch constantly:

Library: your face-down deck. You draw from the top.
Hand: the cards you’re holding, hidden from opponents.
Battlefield: the shared table where permanents live once played. (Older players may know this as “play” or “in play.”)
Graveyard: your discard/dead pile, face-up. Destroyed creatures, spent instants and sorceries, and discarded cards go here.
Exile: a “removed from the game” zone for cards set aside by certain effects.
Stack: where spells and abilities wait to resolve — the subject of Anatomy of a Turn.

🎯 Commander-specific: Commander adds one more zone — the command zone — where your commander begins the game and can return to. We cover it in The Commander.

🔁 Returning players: “the battlefield” is the current name for what you probably called “in play,” and “exile” replaced the old “removed from game” wording. Same ideas, modern words.

Casting a spell

The basic sequence to play most cards:

You have priority (it’s a moment when you’re allowed to act).
You announce the spell and put it on the stack.
You pay its costs — usually by tapping lands for mana.
Players get a chance to respond with instants or abilities.
When everyone passes, the spell resolves and does what it says.

Lands are the exception: playing a land isn’t a spell and doesn’t use the stack. You just put it down (once per turn) and it’s there.

The full machinery of priority, the stack, and responding is explained step by step in Anatomy of a Turn. For now, the takeaway is: spells don’t happen instantly — they go on the stack, and people can react.

The goal: reduce your opponents’ life

Each player has a life total. You win, most often, by reducing every opponent’s life to 0 — by attacking with creatures, burning them with direct-damage spells, or draining them with other effects. There are other ways to win and lose (decking out, special win conditions, and a Commander-only damage rule), all collected in Winning and Losing.

🎯 Commander-specific: two numbers differ from one-on-one Magic. You start at 40 life (not 20), and games are usually multiplayer free-for-alls, so “your opponent” is really “three opponents.” On top of the normal life rule, taking 21 combat damage from a single commander also eliminates you — that’s the 21-point commander damage rule, detailed in Combat. The 40-life start and the multiplayer structure come from the official format rules.

🆕 New players: don’t worry about commander damage yet. Just internalize: get everyone else to 0 before they get you there.

What to read next

The shape of a single turn → Anatomy of a Turn
How fighting actually works → Combat
What makes a deck a Commander deck → The Commander
Any term you didn’t recognize → Glossary

Sources: general rules (card types, zones, mana, the goal) paraphrase the Magic Comprehensive Rules (SOURCES.md S1). Commander-specific notes — 40 starting life, multiplayer free-for-all, and 21 commander damage — trace to the official Commander format rules (SOURCES.md S2, and fact #3 in the fact→source map). No rules text is quoted at length.