There Are 1,072,934 Magic Cards — But it’s Not That Easy to Say

Last updated on March 10, 2026

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 over 3,000 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 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.

Paper

How many unique card names are there in paper? 31,371.

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? 93,132.

Foils and Precons

Now it gets tricky. Foils. That 93,132 includes all the different foils that are unique, like extended art 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 58,779 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 3,075.

If we subtract that from the first number we generated, 31,371, we get 28,296 unique card names that existed. If we do the same simple addition among the Commander decks from Commander 2011 to today, unique nonfoil only cards total to 5,343. Add from the Duel Decks which are 1,945 cards to get (28,296+5,343+1,945=) 35,584 cards.

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 94,363.

More Treatments

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 2,822, the showcase frames at 2,110, and the extended art frames at 3,301. Now add these to our running total is 102,596.

Just over 100k. Is that right? These numbers include Secret Lairs and other special printings.

What are we missing?

Languages

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, including English. That gives us a whopping 718,712 unique cards.

Note that if you search with the “lang:any” string on Scryfall, this number is instead 503,361, 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 M10 Lightning Bolt and the M11 Lightning Bolt!

Unplayables

If you want to add everything printed, including unplayable cards ranging from the 1,418 unique tokens to silver-bordered, gold-bordered cards in the World Championship decks to art cards to punch out token inserts, we've got 5,677 excluding unreleased spoiled cards. I skip those because I want legal, playable cards in my total.

And there’s 755 low-art Playtest cards, if you care.

Are we there yet?

Well, not quite.

What If You Include Digital-Only Cards?

Oracle of the Alpha | Illustration by Nino Vecia

What about Alchemy? At least a few of you cry out in the 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 14,926 cards, a total which climbs to 22,913 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, so 221,930!

Magic Online is 29,252. 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 7,367 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 7,379! If you want to ignore languages (as most other counts of this problem on the internet do), you get 38,768 mechanically unique cards.

How Many Magic Cards Are There?

There are about 1.05 million Magic cards. How did we get there? I counted all the differences: take the 38,768 unique cards, account for 58,779 in additional foils and treatments, plus 718,172 non-English cards, 5,278 non-playables (the tokens, art cards, etc.), 755 playtest cards, Arena's 221,930 cards in their languages, and 29,252 MTGO cards and you arrive at our total of 1,072,934. Or, about 1.07 million Magic cards.

So, a little snapshot of one year:

2025 produced 6,664 unique prints in paper, the heavy play of 3,249 versions on Arena, and 5,052 cards on MTGO.

Expect another thousand by the time of Standard rotation. I estimate that we crossed the million mark with the release of Outlaws of Thunder Junction, Magic’s 100th expansion (a term that doesn’t include core sets, etc.). That’s hard to figure out, it seems, because there are so many sets!

How Many MTG Sets Are There?

There are 215 sets and counting if you define a set as something with booster packs. To jog your memory, that includes expansions, Alchemy sets, Core sets, non-Standard sets, Un-sets and Masters sets. If you include every release, like Secret Lair drops, Duel Decks, and Promos etc. you get more than 1,000.

Wrap Up

Rafiq of the Many | Illustration by Michael Komarck

Choose your approach:

• Unique card names: 31k
• Unique prints: 93k
• Unique prints across digital and multiple languages: 1.07 million.

Whatever your preferred frame of reference on this question, we race past milestones!

Odds are, however, there are already thousands more printed between the time this was last updated and the when you're reading this! And to think we pick them one at a time in Draft. Let me know in the comments, or on the Draftsim Discord.

Thank you for counting with me and stay safe.