Magic boasts a thriving official tournament system, in which the game is played for cash and scholarship prizes, but is also known to be very well supported by casual gamers who only play with friends at schools, clubs, or home.
Though the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, Magic bears little resemblance to those pencil-and-paper campaigns. Each wizard draws upon magical spells, items, and fantastic creatures to do battle. In the game's primary fictional setting, each duel represents a battle between very powerful wizards called " planeswalkers", who can travel different between planes of existence. Each player builds a deck of cards, chosen from those which he or she owns (with certain restrictions as discussed below) to be used in a duel against an opponent. Over 7000 unique cards have been produced for the game, with about 600 new ones added each year. Each Magic card, 89 by 66 mm in size, has a face, which displays the card's name and rules text, as well as an illustration appropriate to the card's concept, but with no game value. Magic: The Gathering cards are produced in much the same way as normal playing cards. The game plays as a strategy contest not unlike chess, but like most standard card games, there is an element of luck due to the random distribution of cards during shuffling.
Magic inspired an entirely new game genre, and continues to endure with an estimated six million players in over seventy countries worldwide and on the Internet 1. and introduced by Wizards of the Coast in 1993. Template:Infobox Game Magic: The Gathering (colloquially " Magic" or " MTG"), is a collectible card game created by Richard Garfield, Ph.D.