Frantic Search | Illustration by Mitchell Malloy
A common complaint among MTG players the past few years is product fatigue. People report feeling overwhelmed by the number of cards and sets released. Which, it turns out, is a great thing to say to get upvoted on reddit while you buy a bunch of new cards! Seriously, though, to the extent that product fatigue is real, I hear about it most clearly from “Magic boomers” who speak wistfully of the days when they knew all the cards, which of course makes Commander easier to play.
To pick a boomer era marker, the turn of the millennium, players in mid-1999 had to grapple with just over 3000 different cards (counting every reprint and every language of, say, Dark Ritual as just one card). Foils weren’t yet a thing, and although there were oddities like the Collectors Edition and World Championship sets, it all felt more manageable. You could plausibly have every card memorized, and all of us had all the “good” cards in our heads.
But today, the story’s different, with a staggeringly large number of cards as well as an expanding roster of special arts and treatments and card styles. We’re going to try to get a handle on exactly how big that number is. Ready to count?
How Many Magic Cards Are There?
Curious Homunculus | Illustration by Filip Burburan
There are many different kinds of answers you might want to that question. We’ll take a crack at them all. We’re going to be using a lot of Scryfall searches for this, with links to the searches so you can see for yourself. Note that as new cards are released, these numbers will shift.
How many unique card names are there in paper? 26,819.
Okay, but now what about a count of all the reprints and special editions of those cards so we get a total of the number of unique prints in paper? 74,048.
Now it gets tricky. Foils. That 74,048 includes all the different foils that are unique, like surge foils (like all four versions of foil on Abbadon the Despoiler, for example). But it doesn’t include normal foils. The trouble is that a regular Magic card that has a foil and a nonfoil version appears as one entry in Scryfall, like +2 Mace, and can’t be winnowed further (Scryfall gurus, try it out. There are limits to the is:foil and is:nonfoil tags!)
There are 45,500 foil prints total, including multiple foil types for cards, but how many of those are “regular” foils, especially when a card is reprinted multiple times and thus has multiple foil/nonfoil slots in Scryfall?
To solve this, I used a bit of brute force. This is that mid ‘99 search I did in the introduction. Foils were introduced in Urza’s Legacy and 7th Edition, so all the sets before those lack a foil/nonfoil entry. If we just look at unique card names from Alpha to the advent of foils, that gives us 3075.
If we subtract that from the first number we generated, 26,819, we get 23,744 unique card names that existed. If we do the same with the Commander decks from Commander 2011 to today, each deck has about 80-90 unique nonfoil only cards (depending on how many basic lands they packed), with a few key foils, so if you let me use 85, with 93(!!?!!) decks, we’ve got about 7905, so 15,839. And the Duel Decks and stuff like Beatdown Decks, about 30 sets of two 60-card decks, with a few foils but the rest not, with about 75 cards in each box (not counting the multiple basics) for another 2250, thus, 13,589.
Add that to our number of unique cards strictly nonfoil and strictly foil to account for each of these versions of the cards getting both treatments, and we get 87,637.
We’ve got more problems: showcase frames, extended art, and borderless. There have been a profusion of new card treatments over the past few years. Searching those out is tough because sometimes the showcase frame is also borderless, like Strixhaven‘s Mystical Archive cards. And most of the time each of these versions is available in both foil and nonfoil, but sometimes not. Some card versions are only in foil and some are only in nonfoil. We can use some skillful searching to grab only the borderless at 1299, the showcase frames at 1478, and the extended art frames at 2210. Maybe we overestimate a touch by acting as if all of these could be foil and nonfoil, but let’s try it. Now our total is 92,624.
Almost 100k. Is that right? These numbers include Secret Lairs and other special printings.
What are we missing?
Multiple languages. The average number of other languages cards have been printed in since around 5th edition is 8, but of course, some of these products, like Duel Decks and various Masters sets have far fewer languages of print, so we’ll go with a slightly conservative average of 7 others, or 8, including English. That gives us a whopping 740,992 unique cards. Assuming I missed a few things, let’s round up to 750k.
Note that if you search with the “lang:any” string on Scryfall, this number is instead 419,387, but Scryfall is still filling out their catalog with older cards in multiple languages. You can see that in their records for the first set that was printed in nine languages, 4th Edition, that nothing seems to show up in that many prints, and it’s usually more like seven. Some day we’ll have a more definitive answer here (or if I had a month to go set by set and calculate with the unique number of foils and that particular set of languages…), but until then, I think we should estimate higher.
I think it's important to include this element, as Lightning Bolt in Japanese and Italian are physical products that have so many more things different on the cards than, say, the Lightning Bolts from M10 and M11!
If you want to add everything printed, including unplayable cards ranging from gold-bordered cards in the World Championship decks to tokens to art cards to punch out token inserts, we've got 2818 of those, which is 22,544 when multiplied by 8. For you completionists who just want the number of rectangles! I’m not going to include that because I want legal, playable cards in my total.
And there’s 242 Playtest cards, if you care.
Are we there yet?
Well, not quite.
What If You Include Digital-Only Cards?
What about Alchemy, at least one of you is crying out in your personal wilderness!
A bigger question than Alchemy is the number of digital cards on those platforms overall. Is a digital version a different entity than a paper version, especially if they look the same? Psst, they aren’t actually cards. They are bits of code. I’d argue each card there is a different unique print, like cards in multiple languages. These are in another language, although it might just be C+.
Arena is 9695 cards, a total which climbs to 13832 when looking for unique prints and treatments. I wondered about that, as there seem to be so many different styles on Arena, but I checked and that search has all seven Thalia, Guardian of Thraben versions I have, so okay!
Arena is in 10 languages right now, so 138,320!
Magic Online is 24,458. Sadly, MTGO is English only.
For those of you who don’t consider a digital card different than a paper card, you might like to know that if we look to unique cards (Alchemy, different unique looks and treatments, etc.) on MTGO and Arena, we end up with 6399 fully unique digital cards with no equivalent in paper. If we’re doing that, I’m going to add the 12 “Astral” cards from the old PC game, commonly known as Shandalar for 6411! If you want to ignore languages (as most other counts of this problem on the internet do), you get 92,624 plus 6411 or 99,034, almost 100k.
But I’d say they’re all different, cards in different languages, digital prints, etc. If we add the unique cards online to our total we get about 937,131.
I may be missing some things in this list, but I’m pretty sure we’re not at a million yet.
Yet.
When do we get there?
Soon.
2023 produced 9133 unique prints in paper, which we can multiply by 8 for languages to get 73064, 3118 unique prints on Arena, which multiplies by 10 to 31,180 and 5832 on MTGO.
That’s 110,076.
We’ll be comfortably into the million range by the time of Standard rotation, 2024, perhaps earlier depending on the pace of non-premiere set releases. It would be kind of neat if we crossed that line with the release of Outlaws of Thunder Junction, Magic’s 100th expansion (a term that doesn’t include core sets, etc.). Will that happen? That’s hard to figure out, it seems, because there are so many sets!
How Many MTG Sets Are There?
If you define a set as something with booster packs, that gets us to about 140. If every release, including Alchemy drops, Secret Lair drops, Duel Decks, etc. are included you get about 375.
Wrap Up
Rafiq of the Many | Illustration by Michael Komarck
Choose your approach:
- Unique card names: 27k
- Unique prints: 92k
- Unique prints including digital: 99k
- Unique prints across digital and multiple languages: 937k.
Whatever your preferred frame of reference on this question, we are creeping up on milestones!
Odds are, however, there are already thousands more printed between the time this was last updated and the when you're reading this! Does a million cards sound like a crazy number? Too low? Too high? Let me know in the comments, or on the Draftsim Discord!
Thanks for reading and stay safe!
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