Understanding parts of a Magic card

Card Name

On the upper left corner,  the name of the spell, creature or land.

Mana Cost

On the upper right corner,  it states how many mana it costs to cast the spell.  To do almost everything in the Magic game, you need mana, which can be obtained from lands.  There’re five colors of mana.  A card indicates here what kind of mana it requires.  If it is a number in a gray circle, it means mana of any kinds.

Type Line

Immediately below the picture and on left, it states the type of the card. Whether it is land, artifact, instant, sorcery, creature, enchantment or planeswalker.  There’re other subtype or supertype which would show up here, too.

Expansion Symbol

On the right-hand side of the Type Line is the expansion symbol which gives you information about the Magic set of the card and its rarity.  Common cards are black, uncommon cards are silver, rare cards are gold and mythic rare cards are red-orange.

Text Box

The Text Box is under the Type Line.  It describes the abilities and the effects of the card, sometimes also the action you must take.  There’s also something called Flavor Text inside the Text Box.  It has no effect at all on game play, hence it’s in italics to be distinguished.  Basically just some saying that feels cool.

Collector Number

The set of little number at the bottom of the card tells you the collector number of the card.  For example, “100/250″ indicates that this card is the 100th of 250 cards in the Magic set it’s from.

Power and Toughness

If it is a creature, there is a group of numbers on the lower right-hand corner.  It tells you the Power (the first number) and the Toughness (the second number) of the creature.  Power is the amount of damage it can do in combat and Toughness is the amount of damage it can take before it goes to the graveyard.  If it’s a planeswalker card, there will be only one number at this spot which is the Loyalty Counter.

To check out some collectible cards of MTG, visit Magic Collectible Cards.