Magic the Gathering CCG

Magic: The Gathering is the game that invented the category. Released in August 1993 by Wizards of the Coast from Peter Adkison's Seattle garage, Magic was the first commercial trading card game, and everything called a CCG, TCG, or LCG for the next three decades is a descendant of its original design.

The game

Richard Garfield's 1993 design set the entire template: a resource system (lands), variable card rarities (common, uncommon, rare), tournament-legal formats that shift over time, and a color-pie identity system (white, blue, black, red, green) that every imitator has borrowed in some form. Players are planeswalkers casting spells, summoning creatures, and racing each other down from 20 life.

The context

Wizards expected to sell ten million cards in the first year. They sold that in six weeks. Alpha and Beta printings in 1993 were tiny and are now legendary, the Black Lotus and the original dual lands trade in five and six figures at auction. The 1994 rush to print Unlimited, Revised, Arabian Nights, and Antiquities established the booster-expansion economy that the whole hobby still runs on.

What it meant

Magic is where competitive trading card games exist as a financial instrument as much as a game. The Pro Tour launched in 1996, Wizards got acquired by Hasbro in 1999, and the game has never stopped printing. The secondary market tracks specific cards the way collectors track early comic books, with a live-updating price graph and a speculation economy parallel to the actual gameplay.

The collector angle

This archive catalogs the Magic catalog for completeness, but Magic is the unique CCG where the vast reprint machine keeps the game in active print while specific old cards appreciate. Everything pre-Seventh Edition (2001) is retro-adjacent; anything Alpha, Beta, or Unlimited from 1993 to 1994 sits in museum territory. If you're a collector who came up through any of the games this site archives, Magic is the gravitational center that pulled or repelled your whole collecting history.