Collecting

The hobby of collecting Magic: The Gathering cards includes seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining items that are of interest to an individual collector.

Collecting as part of the game design

As Magic: The Gathering was the first a trading card game (TCG) or collectible card game, played with specially designed sets of cards. While trading cards have been around for longer, TCGs have especially been designed to combine the appeal of strategic gameplay with collecting.

A wide variety of collections

Collecting is a childhood hobby for some people, but for others a lifelong pursuit or something started in adulthood. Collectors who begin early in life often modify their aims when they get older. Some novice collectors start purchasing items that appeal to them then slowly work at learning how to build a collection, while others prefer to develop some background in the field before starting to buy items.

Collections differ in a wide variety of respects, most obviously in the nature and scope of the cards contained, but also in purpose, presentation, and so forth. The range of possible cards for a collection is practically unlimited, and collectors have realized a vast number of these possibilities in practice, although some are much more popular than others.

Influence of collectors

Early on, for the Unlimited Edition, Wizards of the Coast instructed Carta Mundi to change the black border on the card frame to white, in order to maintain the collecting value of the initial Limited print run.

The Reserved List was created to preserve the value of older cards on the secondary market.

Starting with Exodus, Collector number were added to the information below the text box on the cards.

Products aimed at collectors

• Collectors' Edition and International Edition
• Collector's Boosters
• From the Vault series.
• The Signature Spellbook series.