Explore

Explore card art

There are many reasons to play games in general and Magic in particular. The aspect I'll focus on today is the joy of exploration.

One key element of any game's long-term enjoyment is replayability.  Games should be easy to learn but difficult to master, and each contest should have some degree of variety (or potential for it) to both require mastery and keep things interesting. If every game of chess went the same way, with the same pieces being moved to the same squares in the same order, what challenge (or fun) would that be? Replayability matters; players want to be in a familiar environment (knowing the rules, turn order, etc.), but have a new or fresh experience each time.

There are different ways Magic accomplishes replayability: deck customization, set rotation (if you're playing standard), library randomization (shuffling the cards before you begin a game), and card pool, our focus for today.

Magic has produced thousands of cards, and it's much harder than you'd think to tally the exact number.  Do you count only unique cards, or reprints too?  Do you count only standard expansions, or special 'one-off' sets?  What about the silver-bordered cards, produced only for casual play?  How about cards that have different names but are functionally identical?  This is another topic for another time; sufficient for today's purposes is that the latest estimates claim there are about 20,000 unique Magic cards.  Think about that. 

The card pool in Magic is so large that you can spend months and hundreds of games playing with cards from just one expansion and still never explore the entire set. And that's amazing.

Exploration is a joy in life. This world is much bigger than we'll ever know. You can spend your life traveling and not see every country, let alone state, city, or village. You can read 100 books per year for decades, and you'll have read just .002% of the 130 million books written (in English). And in Magic, no matter how much you play, you can still come across cards you've owned for years and "see" them for the first time- register their abilities and value. There's so much here to explore.

If you don't know how to explore this game, play in a draft some time. That forces you to choose cards you wouldn't normally (in a constructed environment), and see the cards from a different angle. And play a lot of different opponents, too- you'll encounter new cards and ways to use them than you ever dreamed possible. In this COVID time, it's easy to focus on restrictions and isolation, both of which may be with us in some degree for years. But in Magic, you can play digitally and explore to your heart's content. You'll never stop finding new things.