Most modern Magic: the Gathering players know the game has been around for 30 years, but it’s hard to pinpoint the exact date the TCG classic was released. The earliest iterations of Magic weren’t the sweeping boon you know today, and cards look drastically different.
Magic: the Gathering is one of the longest-running TCGs out there that’s still getting a, quite frankly, obscene, number of expansions every year. The game is more relevant than ever, with hundreds of content creators building their careers around it and millions of fans playing the game with each other in person, online, via the mobile app, or in their local game stores each week. But without the in-depth research I’ve done, there’s no way I could have told you when it first came out.
When was Magic: the Gathering first released?
Magic: the Gathering was initially released in 1993. The very first set was called Alpha Limited Edition, which was quickly followed by a larger print run of Limited Edition Beta in October 1993. This Limited Edition run debuted at the Origins Game Fair of that year, and there are said to be roughly 2.6 million and 7.8 million of those cards, respectively, in existence. Given that not many people knew about the game back then, records are shoddy, so that number is really quite rough.
The printing system was changed between Alpha and Beta, so Alpha cards remain unique to this day. Due to their cornering, they actually had special rules in tournaments requiring players to use a deck consisting entirely of Alpha cards, if any, were used at all. this meant that they became undesirable for a time, though obviously, today, they’re the most desirable MTG cards on the planet.
These are the only sets that haven’t had an expansion name, and even from the game’s conceptual stage, the idea was to expand on it year after year. I got into MTG with the Brother’s War set for the Transformer cards, and I can’t even tell you how many new mechanics have been introduced since then, but it feels like at least one with every major expansion.
How many Magic: the Gathering sets have there been?
At the time of writing, April 2024, we’re fast approaching the release of the Outlaws of Thunder Junction set for Magic: the Gathering. This will be the 100th set for the TCG, but Wizards of the Coast has more planned throughout the year. With all the information I have now, there will have been 106 sets for Magic: the Gathering by the end of 2024.
As I’ve already mentioned, Wizards of the Coast is showing no sign of slowing down the game’s release schedule. While it must balance releases with player budgets, meaning it can’t release a new set every month, it’s also clearly interested in bringing more sets to the table in future years.
One way it appears to be doing this is with smaller, quicker-to-produce sets of cards, such as the March of the Machine: Aftermath and Assassin’s Creed sets. Both of these have a smaller run of new and reprinted cards, and the play boosters contain fewer cards in each pack. If the game moved to have more of these and prices dropped, I could see more set releases each year.
