How many cards (2024)?

The Grand Calculatron

How many Magic cards have been made? I looked at that question and the difficulty it creates in this post from 2020. Today, I simply update the numbers. This post will focus on how many unique cards have been made.

As with last year, Scryfall will be our guide. Any commands shown below were typed into the main Scryfall search bar. And all results are accurate only as of this writing—9 November 2024—as the numbers are always changing.

The first query: how many unique Magic cards have been made? Using Scryfall's syntax, we search as follows, and get the result (presented immediately after and copied from Scryfall's explanation):

• not:reprint  
• 29,609 cards where the cards aren’t reprints

Cool. But this includes funny cards . . . let's drop those:

• not:reprint not:funny  
• 29,008 cards where the cards aren’t reprints and the cards aren’t funny

Now let's remove those digital-only cards:

• not:reprint not:funny not:digital  
• 28,269 cards where the cards aren’t reprints and the cards aren’t funny and the cards aren’t digital prints

Great. Now let's look at how many unique cards have appeared in core sets:

• not:reprint st:core  
• 1,824 cards where the cards aren’t reprints and the set type is core

And now expansions:

• not:reprint st:expansion  
• 21,791 cards where the cards aren’t reprints and the set type is expansion

All that remains are cards that weren't in core sets or expansions:

• not:reprint -st:core -st:expansion  
• 6,232 cards where the cards aren’t reprints and the set type is not core and the set type is not expansion

Oops, that includes funny and digital cards. Adjusting:

• not:reprint -st:core -st:expansion not:funny not:digital  
• 5,073 cards where the cards aren’t reprints and the set type is not core and the set type is not expansion and the cards aren’t funny and the cards aren’t digital prints

Alright, I think that's it for today. So in summary, as of today,

• 28,269 unique Magic cards have been released in core sets, expansions, or other special releases that are not funny and not digital only [+4,035 from last year]. The breakdown:
• 1,824 unique Magic cards in core sets [+139 from last year]
• 21,791 unique Magic cards in expansions [+2,256 from last year]
• 5,073 unique Magic cards in special releases [+1,939 from last year]

The numbers are always changing; here's a screenshot on how the numbers have changed over the past few months. Note that the "-is:" or "-st:" syntax is interchangable with "not:" in some cases:

That's a lot of Magic cards, and quite a jump from last year (4K more unique cards!!). And, since I started this in 2020, the overall number has increased by ~8K. Magic has been around for 31 years . . . in the last five, they have gone from 21K to 29K unique cards. It's getting to be a lot.