Magic Curiosities: Cards, Abilities, Illustrations, CMC and more

How many cards were printed in Magic: the Gathering?

Magic has a total of 19784 cards printed. It's quite a thing!

Have you ever wondered how many cards there are of each cost and by color? Which color had the most cards printed (was it the infamous blue?)?

Important: For all counting purposes, the game rules were followed. X cost cards, X is considered 0. Alternative cost cards, alternative cost is not considered. Cards with devoid are considered colorless.

Which colors in Magic have the most cards printed?

To make it easier I put everything in a table (I love a table) as we see below:

Let's go to the impression ranking:

1st place – White

2nd place – Black

3rd place – Red

4th place – Green

5th place – Blue

6th place – Multicolored (Ravnica, was that you?)

7th place – Colorless

8th place – Lands

That's what you didn't expect: blue is not the most printed color, but it still remains the most hated by many.

Number of cards printed by cost

We can see that there is a curve in the increase in cost vs. number of cards printed.

With this, we can see that most of the printed cards have Converted Mana Cost (CMC) equal to 3. This may indicate that turn 3 cards are already starting to have a higher power level. But of course, this is not standard.

In early editions, the lower cost cards had a higher power level, and this was fixed during the Magic years. The cost of cards is related to their power level (higher cost creatures tend to have higher power and toughness, while spells have effects that can be considered a win condition in a match).

Now, when building your deck, think and analyze your mana curve a lot. This can generate your victory.

Magic: the Gathering, as it is a turn-based game, the mana cost of spells greatly influences the matches. We can see that Wizards of the Coast really believes in this so much that they follow a pattern when it comes to creating the edits and maintaining the numbers. Any drastic change in this paradigm can affect the game directly.

Wizards has a formula they've had for a few years to keep the game alive and healthy, but sometimes they get it wrong. In this article, we killed the curiosity of numbers and saw that we can use it to analyze our decks.

Amount of Magic card by rarity

Now let's take a look at the number of cards by rarity.

It seems that blue won in the number of rares, to the happiness of some and the sadness of others. I started to do an analysis in relation to cost x rarity. I made only two colors, but we can see that it follows the same pattern. The higher the cost, the greater the rarity.

With all these numbers, we see that Wizards of the Coast have a recipe for the development of the cards in relation to their cost x rarity and print quantity.

In addition to being a game, Magic is also considered a collector's item. With that in mind, I'm bringing facts about all Magic illustrators.

All Magic Artists

There are many artists! We have a total of 766 artists who have already done their amazing illustrations and a total of 46984 cards.

Which Magic artist has the most card arts?

1st Kev Walker – with a total of 883 illustrations. Example card: Damnation

2nd John Avon – with a total of 869 illustrations. Example card: Lotus Field

3rd Mark Tedin – with a total of 605 illustrations. Example card: Chaos orb

4th Dan Frazier – with a total of 571 illustrations. Example card: Berserk

5th Greg Staples – with a total of 547 illustrations. Example card: Aria of Flame

Magic artist duos who have worked together the most

1st Zoltan Boros & Gabor Szikszai – with a total of 261 illustrations. Card example:

2nd Greg Hildebrandt & Tim Hildebrandt - with a total of 100 illustrations. Card example:

3rd Jana Schirmer & Johannes Voss - with a total of 38 illustrations. Card example

If you intend to be a Magic collector, starting with the artist is one of the best ways.

Magic has 28 years of history; the amount of existing cards is huge and so are the abilities. In this article, I will bring all the abilities that exist in the game.

In the game's Comprehensive Rules, we have two terms to describe abilities: Keywords Actions and Keywords Abilities.

In the list below, I bring you all the abilities that are found in the rules, with the edition in which it first appeared, in addition to the year and number of cards that have that keyword.

Altogether, there are 188 keywords, building a nice list of abilities. Some of them made history being considered too powerful, others are so strong that they name entire decks.

Dredge became the name of a deck.

And what about this extremely lethal monk?

This one was released and started getting banned everywhere.

That ability that makes every Draft player's heart happy.

This list gives you a good starting point for organizing your collection or even creating fun decks by choosing a ability as a base.