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New to the game, or just want the vocabulary behind what you're browsing? Here's how to read a card, what rarity and color actually mean, and the formats you'll hear us talking about at the counter.
Every Magic card, from a 1993 print to this year's set, follows the same layout.
Rarity is about how many copies were printed, not how good a card is on its own -- some of the best-played cards in the game are commons. Exact pack contents have changed over the game's history and still vary by set; this is the modern Play Booster, the standard since 2024.
Other slots in a modern pack
Outside normal pack odds
Every card is one or more of five colors, or colorless. Each color has its own philosophy -- it's the closest thing Magic has to a personality system.
The format just means which cards are legal and how big your deck is -- ask at the counter if you're not sure which one a night is running.
Every format has its own current banned and restricted list, and those change more often than we can print — just ask us at the counter before you build around something specific.
Standard is the only format where the legal card pool actually shrinks over time -- here's how that works, and what a typical year of new Magic looks like on our shelves.
How rotation works: every year, the oldest sets in Standard age out and new ones take their place, so the legal pool stays around two years of sets. A card that's Standard-legal today won't be forever — if you're building around something new, it's worth checking it's not close to rotating out.
What a typical year of releases looks like
Not sure if something new is Standard-legal? It's always right on the back of the booster pack, and we keep the current legal set list posted at the counter.
A few keywords you'll see on cards constantly -- the full list runs past 200, but these cover most tables.
Want the full list? Every keyword ability, keyword action, and ability word we stock cards with is searchable as a filter on our Magic page.
This is the question we get asked the most: "which printing is this?" Here's how to tell early core sets apart, and how the card frame itself has changed since 1993.
The early core sets
The fastest way to tell them apart: flip to the copyright line at the very bottom of the card — every printing states the exact year. Border color narrows it to before or after 1995; the copyright line nails down exactly which one.
Frame eras
Curious what a set from a given era actually looks like on the shelf? Browse sets grouped by frame era on our Set Binders page.
In 1996, Wizards of the Coast pledged to never reprint a specific list of card names, ever, in any set -- a permanent promise to protect the value of the game's oldest and rarest cards. That list still exists today.
It covers just over 570 cards, almost entirely from the black-border era above (Alpha through a handful of early-to-mid-90s expansions) — nothing printed after 1999 has ever been added. A card either made the list back then or it never will.
A few names you'd recognize
We carry Reserved List cards on consignment when they come through the shop — look for the gold "RESERVED" badge, or jump straight to our Reserved List guide to see what's currently in stock.
Ready to see what's actually on the shelf? Browse Magic singles with real inventory and pricing.
Browse Magic singles