What is Magic the Gathering?
Background
Magic: The Gathering (colloquially known as Magic or MTG) is a tabletop and digital collectible card game created by Richard Garfield. Released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast, Magic was the first instance of a trading card game and had approximately thirty-five million players as of December 2018. Magic can be played by two or more players and can be played in various rule formats. New cards are released on a regular basis through expansion sets. There exists a substantial resale market for Magic cards due to the fact that certain cards can be valuable because of their rarity in production and utility in gameplay, with prices ranging from a few cents to tens of thousands of dollars.
Lore
A player in Magic takes the role of a Planeswalker, a powerful wizard who can travel ("walk") between dimensions ("planes") of the Multiverse, doing battle with other players as Planeswalkers by casting spells, using artifacts, and summoning creatures as depicted on individual cards drawn from their individual decks. A player defeats their opponent typically (but not always) by casting spells and attacking with creatures to deal damage to the opponent's "life total," with the object being to reduce it to 0. Although the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, the gameplay bears little similarity to paper-and-pencil games, while simultaneously having substantially more cards and more complex rules than many other card games.