Pop culture

Is Magic: The Gathering becoming too complex?

The oldest trading card game in the world turns 30 next year.

By Andrew Nguyen

August 7, 2022

For a new generation of players picking up Magic: The Gathering, complexity is a hurdle that needs to be overcome before a person can even start playing the game.

But having a game that involves a lot of strategy isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it may be what is attracting new players to the game in the first place. Magic's player base tripled in the two years prior to the pandemic.

As the oldest trading card game in the world is set celebrate its 30th birthday, many Magic players have asked the question: Is the game becoming too complex?

For this analysis, we looked at the length of card text, card art and frequency of set releases using the Scryfall API, which contains data on every card in Magic's history — more than 23,000 in total — as a way to measure complexity.

An ever expanding card pool

The two most popular formats in Magic are "Standard" which includes roughly 2,000 cards from the most recent sets. Cards rotate in and out of the format once a year.

The other is "Commander," where players have access to the entire card pool of more than 23,000 unique cards dating all the way back to the game's inception.

A byproduct of the game's complexity is the sheer number of cards added to Magic with every new set release.

There has been a more than 150 percent increase in the number of cards printed this decade compared to the first decade of Magic's history.

If you started playing Magic in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic

A total of 18,515 cards have been released since March 2020. This year alone, there have been more than 5,000 cards released.

Reading between the lines

The cards themselves have also gotten wordier.

For Mark Rosewater, Magic's lead designer, one metric that is looked at internally is unique words, specifically "how many total unique words appear in rules text."

On average, a card's oracle text is 10 percent longer when comparing cards from the first decade of the game to the current decade.

There were 21 new abilities introduced since 2020 such as Blitz, Companion, Connive and Mutate.

Eye spy

When looking across the table, a card's art is one of the ways that players are able to distinguish one card from the other.

Two years ago, the game introduced "showcase frames" which are variations of cards with a dramatically different art style — adding to the game's visual complexity.

Since March 2020, there have been 587 cards with showcase frames released.

As the game continue grows, the creators of the Magic understand the need to make the game accessible to newer players.

Complexity helps to keep the game fresh and exciting as the design of the game ventures to new planes, introduces new abilities and adds new characters.

For formats such as Commander, where the card pool does not rotate, the complexity of the game will inevitably continue to grow.

Code and analysis for this project can be found on Github.