How Many Magic Cards Are There? 33,357 as of November 2026

There are 33,357 unique Magic: The Gathering (MTG) cards as of 13 November 2026. That is every different card that has been printed on paper, from Alpha in 1993 to Star Trek, which came out today. We counted them in Scryfall's card database, and each card counts once however many times it has been reprinted. Leave out the joke cards that only exist in Un-sets and the total is 32,746. Count every printing instead, with each reprint, new art and special frame counted separately, and it is 99,949.

The number you see quoted depends on what is being counted, which is why other sites disagree. The table below gives each count, what it includes and the exact search we used, so you can run it again yourself.

How Many Magic Cards Are There? The Numbers at a Glance

All figures are from the Scryfall API on 13 November 2026. "Unique cards" means one entry per card name and rules text. "Printings" means one entry per set and version.

If someone asks how many Magic cards exist, the most useful answer is the first row: 33,357 different cards. The other rows count the same cards in different ways.

Unique Cards vs Printings: Why the Answers Differ

A unique card is one card name with one set of rules. A printing is a physical version of that card: a particular set, a particular art, a particular frame.

The two counts drift apart because popular cards get reprinted constantly. Sol Ring has 135 paper printings on Scryfall and Lightning Bolt has 64. Each is one unique card. In the other direction, 12,364 cards, more than a third of the card pool, have only ever had one printing.

That is why the published counts disagree. The older figures still in search results range from 22,630 card names in a 2021 newsletter to 23,318 unique cards on Wikipedia, which dates from September 2016. The "one million cards" figures rely on an estimate of how many languages each printing appeared in. Scryfall lists each language as its own printing, so it doesn't need an estimate: 542,763 paper printings across every language, including tokens and variants.

How Many New Magic Cards Come Out Each Year?

Since 2021, Magic has added about 2,000 new cards a year, and 2026 has already set a record: 2,536 new cards by 13 November, with seven weeks still to go. In the 1990s and 2000s the usual figure was 450 to 800.

We counted a card as new in the year of its first printing (not:reprint year=YYYY, unique cards, paper only, joke cards removed). The year totals add up to 32,728, within 18 of the 32,746 total, so almost every card has a first-printing date.

41% of all Magic cards were first printed in 2020 or later. Yearly output doubled between 2016 and 2024. Part of the growth is Commander: most main sets now come with preconstructed Commander decks that contain new cards. Wizards also releases more sets than it used to; 2026 has seven expansions, four of them Universes Beyond crossovers (what that means for the game).

The 2026 sets so far are Lorwyn Eclipsed, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Secrets of Strixhaven, Marvel Super Heroes, The Hobbit, Reality Fracture and Star Trek. Our MTG release schedule has the dates and what is coming in 2027.

How Many Magic Cards Are There of Each Type and Colour?

More than half of all Magic cards are creatures: 18,290 of 32,746, or 56%. The other four main spell types are nearly equal at about 11% each. Card types overlap, so an artifact creature counts as both an artifact and a creature, and the rows add up to more than the total.

The five colours are within about 200 cards of each other. White has the most single-colour cards and green the fewest. For what each colour does, see our guide to the colour pie.

Every colour search also used game:paper -is:funny. Double-faced cards whose faces differ in colour show up in more than one row, which is why the rows add up to 32,915 rather than 32,746.

How Many Cards Are on the Reserved List?

571 cards are on the Reserved List, in 1,477 printings, as of 13 November 2026 (Scryfall search is:reserved). That is 1.7% of all Magic cards. No card has been added since Urza's Destiny in 1999, and in 2002 Wizards ruled out adding cards from any later set. Wizards has promised never to reprint these cards in a tournament-legal form, so the number of copies can only go down.

The list includes the Power Nine, the ten original dual lands and a long tail of 1990s rares that few people have heard of. That long tail is why an old card can be worth checking even when the name means nothing to you. Our guide to which Magic cards are worth money explains how to spot them, and the complete Black Lotus guide covers the best-known card on the list.

How Many Cards Are on MTG Arena and Magic Online?

16,440 cards can be played on MTG Arena, about half the paper card pool, and 687 of them have never been printed on paper. 638 of those come from Arena's Alchemy sets, which are designed for digital play only; the rest are from Jumpstart: Historic Horizons and Arena's beginner decks. Magic Online carries 31,360 cards, close to the whole paper pool; only one Magic Online card has no paper printing.

Format legality shrinks the pool further. On 13 November 2026, 5,460 cards are legal in Standard, 23,012 in Modern and 32,642 in Commander. Our guide to every MTG format explains which cards each format allows.

How Many Magic Sets Are There?

There are 144 main Magic sets: 119 expansions and 25 core sets, from Alpha in August 1993 to Star Trek on 13 November 2026. One of the 144, Through the Omenpaths, was released only on MTG Arena.

Scryfall lists 1,060 set entries released by today, but that figure is inflated. 62 are digital-only releases, and of the 998 paper entries, 217 are token sets, 297 are promo groupings and 103 are memorabilia such as art series. Leaving out tokens, promos, memorabilia, minigames, Vanguard and digital releases leaves 365 paper sets that contain playable cards. That includes 45 Commander products, 21 Masters-style reprint sets and 26 Duel Decks.

You can browse the recent sets, with what each booster box is worth, on our MTG sets page.

How Many Magic Cards Have Been Printed in Total?

Wizards of the Coast does not publish how many physical Magic cards it prints. Neither does Hasbro. The most recent figure Wizards has given is from its 25th-anniversary facts page in February 2018: more than 20 billion Magic cards were printed between 2008 and 2016. That page has since been taken down; Wikipedia cites it through an archived copy. Any lifetime total you see beyond that is an estimate, not a published number.

Wizards doesn't publish print runs for individual sets either, so there is no official way to say how many copies of a given card exist. What can be counted is variety: Scryfall lists 542,763 paper printings across every language Magic has been printed in.

Magic vs Pokémon: How the Card Counts Compare

The two games count cards differently, so the closest like-for-like comparison is printings: one entry per card per set.

So Magic has far more different cards, about five printings for every English Pokémon card, while Pokémon prints far more copies. The Pokémon Company publishes its production total each year. Its "Pokémon in Figures" page gives more than 85 billion cards produced in 16 languages and sold in over 90 countries and regions, as of the end of March 2026.

The 20,811 Pokémon card count comes from the Pokémon TCG API (pokemontcg.io), a community-run database, not from The Pokémon Company. It lists each card once per set and number, the same way Scryfall counts a Magic printing, and covers English releases only, so treat it as a close count rather than an official one. For the top of that market, see the most expensive Pokémon cards.

What Is the Average Magic Card Worth?

Most Magic cards are worth less than a dollar. We checked every paper printing that had a US price on Scryfall, 96,798 of them, on 13 November 2026. Scryfall's US prices are TCGplayer market prices, and its search uses the lowest US price it has for each printing. For most printings that is the non-foil price; for the roughly 12,000 that only come in foil, it is the foil price.

These numbers count each printing once, not each physical copy. In a real collection the share of cheap cards is much higher, because a set's commons are printed in far larger numbers than its rares. That is why unsorted bulk trades at a few dollars per thousand cards, and why, in nearly every collection, a few cards hold almost all the value.

About 100,000 printings, and only 120 of them sell for $1,000 or more. The value in Magic sits in a very small corner of the card pool.

To find the cards in your own collection that are worth something, start with which Magic cards are worth money, then how to value Magic cards for the pricing apps. Our most valuable Magic cards of 2026 shows what the top of the market looks like, and where to sell Magic cards covers what each selling venue pays.

How We Counted

Every number in this article comes from the Scryfall API on 13 November 2026. We read the total_cards value of a search, rather than adding up pages of results, and kept to Scryfall's limit of two requests a second. The method:

1. Unique cards use Scryfall's unique=cards mode, which returns one result per card name and rules text, whatever the number of printings.
2. Printings use unique=prints. Scryfall's default search shows the English version of each printing, or the printed language when there is no English version. Adding lang:any counts every language.
3. Extras (tokens, emblems, art cards, planes, schemes and cards from non-tournament "memorabilia" sets) are left out unless the table says otherwise.
4. Joke cards are cards from Un-sets and other products Scryfall marks as is:funny. -is:funny removes cards that exist only in those products.
5. Digital-only counts use in: rather than game:, so that a paper card with one digital printing isn't counted as digital.
6. Sets come from Scryfall's /sets list, counting only sets released on or before 13 November 2026.

You can type any of these searches into scryfall.com and get the same totals, plus whatever has been added since. The counts rise with every release, and we will update this page when new sets come out.

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Citations & Resources

• Scryfall: API documentation, the source of every count in this article
• Scryfall: Search syntax reference (game:, in:, is:reserved, not:reprint, unique modes)
• Wikipedia: Magic: The Gathering, citing Wizards' 2018 25th-anniversary facts page for the 20 billion cards printed in 2008–2016
• The Pokémon Company: Pokémon in Figures, cards produced as of end of March 2026
• PokeGuardian: Pokémon card production passes 85 billion
• Pokémon TCG API: community-run English card and set database used for the Pokémon count
• Wizards of the Coast: Official Reprint Policy, the rules behind the Reserved List
• MTG Wiki: The Reserved List, its history and rules

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Related Guides

• What MTG Cards Are Worth Money — the markers that find valuable cards in a collection
• Most Valuable Magic Cards 2026 — record sales and the most expensive cards today
• Black Lotus MTG — the best-known card on the Reserved List
• MTG Release Schedule 2026 and 2027 — every set, with release dates
• MTG Sets — every recent set with what its booster box is worth
• Is Magic: The Gathering Dying? — the revenue figures behind the growth in new cards
• MTG Formats Explained — how many cards each format allows