Play Magic: The Gathering online over webcam

Paper Magic, played remotely

If you play Magic: The Gathering with physical cards, webcam play lets you keep doing that when your friends live somewhere else. Point a top-down camera at your playmat, and your opponent sees your battlefield live. The desktop app overlays health and status trackers on the video, so life totals are always visible to both players.

Why players love Magic: The Gathering

Magic is the original trading card game, and its huge card pool makes deckbuilding a form of self-expression. Players can tune a tight competitive deck for Standard or build a personal Commander deck around a favourite legend and sit down in a four-player pod. The mix of strategy, politics and unexpected interactions means no two games play out the same way, which is why so many playgroups have kept meeting for years.

Matchmaking, lobbies and Looking for Group

Use Quick Match in the desktop app to be paired with an opponent, create a lobby and invite a friend, or post in Looking for Group when you want a game of a particular style. Webcam games count toward your online record and rating.

Standard and Commander

Magic is supported with its own formats, Standard and Commander, each with its own starting life total and trackers. Commander adds commander damage and poison counters and can be set up for pods of up to four players, while Standard is a one-on-one format with Best-of-1 or Best-of-3 matches. Organizers can run Tournament: Online Play for webcam events or Tournament: Local Play for events at a shop.

Magic pack and deck building

The Magic: The Gathering pack includes a searchable catalog of 18,642 cards, a rules reference and tracking. On the web you can build and keep decks in the deck builder. The catalog helps you look up cards and organize lists; the cards in play are always your own physical copies.

At the table

Playing across the table at a shop or a kitchen? The web companion on your phone tracks the game, reports the result and shows the bracket. Local Play and online results are kept separate on your profile but share the same account and achievements.

Commander pods and one-on-one games

Commander is built for more than two players, so the Magic setup supports pods alongside one-on-one games, with commander damage and poison tracked next to life. Standard keeps to two players with a single life total and poison. A first-player roll-off is included, so you can settle who goes first without leaving the call.

Why play Magic over webcam

Paper Magic depends on seeing the board: tapped permanents, counters, the graveyard, the cards waiting to resolve. A top-down camera over your playmat shows all of that to your opponent at once, which is closer to sitting at the same table than a chat window is. Trackers handle the arithmetic so you can pay attention to the game.

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