Staples
Which cards do the job
Curated, ranked card lists by function and by cycle. Which cards actually do the job, what they cost, and when to skip them.
All 12 staples guidesMagic: The Gathering
Every rule, every staple, every format, in one place
Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game of roughly thirty thousand cards and a few hundred pages of rules. Most references give you the card text or the opinion, never both. MTGHQ gives you the rules citation, the current price, and a straight answer about whether the card is worth playing.
- Guides
- 50
- Cards priced daily
- 114
- Topics covered
- 50
Prices update every day
- Steam Vents$9.84Lorwyn Eclipsed
- Blasphemous Act$1.06Commander Legends
- Birds of Paradise$15.15Ravnica Remastered
- Lightning Greaves$4.57The List
Card data comes from the daily Scryfall bulk export and Commander statistics from EDHREC. Every page states when its figures were last checked, because a six month old price presented as current is a lie of omission.
What is covered
Eight sections, each answering a different question about the same game, ordered the way you would actually work through them: where to play, which cards, how to build, what to buy.
Formats
Where and how to play
How each format plays, what the metagame looks like right now, what is banned, and what it costs to get in.
All 5 formats guidesDecks
How to build it
Full decklists with card by card reasoning, upgrade paths at three budgets, matchup notes, and mulligan guidance.
All 2 decks guidesProducts
What to buy, and whether to
What is actually inside every booster, bundle, and precon, what it is worth, and whether it is the right buy for you.
All 7 products guidesWhere to start
I am new to MagicStart with Commander. It is the most played format, the most forgiving of a mistake, and a complete deck costs about forty dollars.A card did something I did not expectThe glossary quotes the Comprehensive Rules by number and works through the interactions people actually get wrong.I have a precon and want it betterTen cards and about twenty-five dollars makes it play like a deck twice the price. The order you change them in matters more than the cards.How many lands should I runWork it out from your actual curve rather than inheriting a rule of thumb built for somebody else's deck.