How to tell magic: the gathering card rarity
One may quickly determine the rarity of any given Magic: The Gathering card by noting a few salient features and knowing their significance. Magic: The Gathering's cards fall naturally in a range of rarities, from common to quite rare. Generally speaking, rarer cards are more valuable and strong than more common ones, hence they are definitely worth looking for while developing a MtG deck. Luckily, the trading card game's rarity mechanism is simple to grasp; the cards themselves provide all the information required to rapidly indicate their rareness.
Magic: The Gathering Card Rarities Discern Easily
Magic: The Gathering has just four normal tiers of rarity: Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Mythic Rare. Two techniques allow one to easily identify the rarity of a card on contemporary MtG cards. Examining the expansion symbol printed on the card initially helps one understand how rareliness affects color. The second approach is to search the bottom-left corner of the card, where the initial will of the rarity will be printed together with other card information such the set number.
Reliance
Colour for the Expansion Symbol
Print First
Regular
Black,
K
Uncommon
Gold
u
Uncommon
Copper
R
Mythic Rare
Orange,
P
Remember also that Basic Lands and Tokens have their own suggestive initials, L and T respectively, which show in place of a normal rarity in the bottom left. Still, Basic Lands are usually counted as common cards in all respects, even black as their expansion symbols are. Although they are all finally designated with the same black Common expansion symbol as Basic Lands, the rarer Token apparently is to discover in booster packs the fewer cards in a set that let one to generate a specific Token.
Card rarities in Magic: The Gathering have not always been so obvious.
Especially, the color-coded expansion symbols were included into the 1998 Exodus set, the 14th MtG expansion, and the rarity of even older cards was just mentioned on separate card lists. Furthermore breaking the norm with their Common cards featuring a white expansion symbol and Time Spiral's (2006) timeshipped rarity insignia are the Coldsnap (2006) and Dominaria (2018). Special (S) cards have also been used historically; originally meant as always-available cards in drafted Commander games, the original two Special cards—Prismatic Piper and Faceless One—have since been promo cards.
Special cards only seldom show up and even then only in rather old sets (the most recent example being box toppers for 2018's Ultimate Masters), their presence is often seen as trivia rather than an active component of the game.
Learning a few basic guidelines makes it rather easy to tell a Magic: The Gathering card from the rarer one. This clarifies the amazing value of the contents of a booster pack, therefore enhancing the opening experience. The rarity indicators also go quite nicely with the rest of a card's design; the expansion symbol in particular helps to define its whole look.
