Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1323: Collector Numbers

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Do I have 30 minutes of content about collector numbers? It turns out I do.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to another drive to work. Okay, so today is another of my series of, can I talk about this for 30 minutes? Today's topic is collector numbers. I'm going to talk all about collector numbers and see if I can fill up the time.

I think I can. I have faith them I can do it. Okay, so what are collector numbers? Somehow you don't know this. I guess I shall start with that. So on the bottom left hand of a car, written in white on black now is a number. It's right to the left of the rarity. There's like two lines in the bottom left. It's on the top line. There is a four-digit number. That four-digit number tells you what number in the set the card is. And the idea is, if you are collecting, it helps let you know what I'm missing. Oh, I'm missing number 23, you know, and you can try to collect that. So today I'm going to talk about how the collector number came to be, why the collector number exists, when the collector number started, how the collector number has changed.

Oh, so much to talk about. But yes, today's going to be all about the collector number. Okay, so in the very beginning, we go all the way back to Alpha, 1993, there was no collector number. Why? Why was there no collector number? So Richard Garfield's original vision of magic, was that he wanted you to discover magic as you played the game. So as Richard liked to say, the game was bigger than the box, right? That there's lots more pieces than any one individual person plays with.

And that part of the game was discovery. And the idea was when you play with other people, you will discover cards that you didn't know existed. So in order to sort of meet that idea, Richard was really big on let's not tell people what the cards are. what the rarities are. Like, it's, you know, it's a big sort of mystery that you've no idea. Now, a couple things.

First off, I always need to stress. Richard was making this game to be just an average game. And, you know, like, the phenomenon became as hard to sort of, for Richard to have wrapped his brain around or even plan for that. And the second thing is that while the Internet technically existed when magic came out, It was a very different animal than it is now. The visual component of it really hadn't happened yet. Like the ability to see pictures easily wasn't there.

It was mostly done through text. And while there were plenty of people on the internet, it was a small portion of today. I mean, today everybody's on the internet. Back then, some people were. I was, but the majority of people were not on the internet back then. or if they were in a very limited capacity. So I think Richard also misunderstood the information flow that was coming

and that there was a point at which is just too hard to contain information. But when Magic first came out, like for example, Magic comes out in Alpha, I buy cards. I have no idea. I don't even know necessarily, I mean, I understood there were rarities in the sense that some cards were harder to get than others. Did I know there were three rarities? Did I know what the rarities were? No. Did I know which cards were which rarity? No. Now, like I said, as you started opening packs, you started seeing certain cards again. And the cards you saw all the time, okay, maybe you could piece together those are commons.

And the cards you saw often, but not as much, maybe those are uncommon. And the cards you didn't see a lot, maybe those are rare. So, for example, the very first place that I ever saw, magic cards listed down with the names of the magic cards and the rarities of the magic cards was there was a magazine called Shadest Magazine. There was mostly a role-playing magazine. But when Magic came out, they had an issue where they listed all the magic cards, as much as they could figure out. They got some rarities wrong.

They might have been missing one or two cards. But anyway, it's a list. I'd never seen a magic list before. And in fact, I would trade based on that list, and there were cards that they listed as rare, for example. They were uncommon. Sirens Call, for example. they listed as rare.

I treat it as a rareful and I find it as a rareful and I find it a little, oh, it's an uncommon, not a rare. But anyway, so early magic, like there was a lot of mystery. In fact, in early magic at like the early events, early worlds and stuff,

we didn't even give out deckless. We didn't even tell people what the pros were playing. Like, oh, here's what they were playing. We didn't do that. But eventually, as magic sort of matured and sort of like kind of adapted itself to what it was,

So we get to Joel Mick. So Joel Mick was the first head designer. I mean, you could sort of argue that Richard, for a period of time, was the de facto head designer, obviously, in early magic. Joel was the first one to actually get the title at Wizards. And then after Joel, Bill Rose became head designer, then I became head designer. So it was, that was the history. But anyway, Joel actually went on after being head designer to being brand manager of magic. In fact, I believe he's the only person to both be head designer and brand manager magic at different points in time.

And one of the things that he and his brand team were really big on is trying to make the set or magic in general more friendly to collectors. And so they did things like adding in the expansion symbol, or not the expansion symbol that was done before that. They did the rarity symbol, you know, the rarity coloring on the expansion symbol to tell you what, rarity things were. So you knew if something was a common or an uncommon or rare, myth that rare would come later. But another thing they did, starting in Exodus, which is the third set in the Tempest block, they started putting collector numbers. So the idea was that they took the cards and they would put them in order and then number them. So when the collection number first appeared, it appeared below, on the card, the artist's name

was center justified. So it was centered. So it would be the artist of the card. Below that would be the copyright information, you know, the legal text. And then to the right of that would be the collector number. And the way the collector number worked when it was first appeared, it was a three-digit number, and then it would say out of, you go slash a three-digit number. I'm 120-250, which means of the 250 cards in this set, I'm the 120th card.

That is how collector numbers started. That was the very beginning. And I think early days when there was a premium version of a card, they put a little star next to it, I believe is how it worked. So, then in Magic 2015, they moved it,

and there started to be two lines in the bottom left-hand corner. So in Magic 2015, they changed it so I think the rarity, I think it was the collector number than the rarity. It's now the rarity than the collector number. So one of the things that happened at some point is the way printing works is as printers have gotten more advanced, they now have scanners essentially. So the idea is if cards have some indicator on them that can be processed. into the computer that does the scanning, the printers have the ability

to recognize specifically what cards. In the old days, when we printed cards, you would make different sheets, and you would cut them up and put them in the hopper. Not to get too into the weeds of this, but when you make a magic booster, you basically print cards on big sheets, 10 by 10, 11 by 11, 11 by 10,

different sizes, and then you chop them up in a normal card size. You put them what's called a hopper, and then let's say the pack has 15 cards, 14 cards, whatever's in it. You fill that many hoppers, and then it spits out one card from each hopper. And usually the way it works is each slot is a different rarity. This many are common. This many are uncommon.

This one is rare, rare mythic rare. And that's how we control rarities and stuff. Or at least that's old school how we did it. Nowadays, with a readable thing, I mean, I should say at some level, that is how it's done now, but the ability to scan the cards and read the cards allows more flexibility of the printers to do things. I can't, I mean, I'm not supposed to get into the technicality of it, and I don't know the technicality of it, so. But anyway, so when they changed over, the collective numbers went from being in white at the bottom of the card to being in left, in black.

Written in white but against black. Early on, in Exodus, the original collector number was just against the back of the card. What was behind it was the texturing of the color of that card. Now, in the bottom left,

there's a little black area, which has white text against black. That is to make it scannable language so that the printers can read it. Now, that is information that you, the players can read. So it does serve double duty it will say the rarity.

It says the artist. It usually says what set it is, the 3-digit code for the set. So there's a bunch of information that is there. Some of which is for you, the consumer, I mean, all that is for you the consumer, but also it is for the printer so that they can scan the text and interact with the text.

So the collector number, so the original version of Exodus, were centered below the artist credit and was put to the side of the collector number. I mean, I'm sorry. The collector number is put next to the legal tax, the copyright.

And then now it is lower left corner. There's two lines. It's on the top line. Originally, it was... I forget it. At one point, the... The rarity was to the... At one point it was the right to it,

then they moved to the left of it. But anyway, it sits there with a rarity. The other change that got me... made is what they call inside numbering, I think they call it. So it used to be so many slash out of so many. When they change it, they, A, changes from a three-digit number to a four-digit number. The reason for that is we are now making things with enough variance in things that we need of the flexibility of being able to go to four numbers.

And the second thing is they stopped doing out of how many. The thing we used to do is we used to, so when we're numbering things, there are a lot more things in a set than just the cards in the main set. There are variants in Brewster Fawn and, you know, there's just infinite, you know, borderless, alternate art, extended art, showcase. So there's a lot of different things that can appear. So the way the collector numbers worked for a while is the numbering out of so many was in the main set.

And then when numbers started appearing above the number, that number, it meant other things beyond what's in the main set. That confused people. That numbering thing definitely, people did not quite get that. And so we changed over. I, there's some people that really liked that. I definitely got some complaints of people that like having that number so that it tells you on the card itself, oh, how many cards am I collecting in the set? I had passed that information along. Oh, the other thing about that, People ask this, so I will answer this question. So sometimes we do alternate art versions of things.

And depending on how different the card is, if it's just like extended border, sometimes they keep the same number. Most of the time it gets a unique new number. Because the idea is a different version of the card. It's technically a different version of the card. And a lot of people have asked for us, could we ever like keep the same colloquy. electric number for cards that are the same, but do some other, you know, it's 25A, 25B. So I've been told that that's not how the scannable stuff works for the printer, that we can't

add ABC. The one place when this came up, so a personal story, is when we made unstable, the third onset, in order to get a greenlit, one of the things that we agreed to do was do some experimental things and that there's a lot of printing. Printing is constantly changing. And so the idea at the time was, hey, why don't we test the boundaries of what new printing can do? And so we'll do a set that's a little more out there

that can experiment with that stuff that isn't going to impact, you know, like unsets are nice in that they, there's something you can buy you can play with, but they don't, they don't impact tournaments. You know, they're sort of, there's a barrier between most of the unconsets. cards, at least until we started doing the internal legal ones in infinity. But there's a barrier between them. So the idea for unstable was, oh, we'll test this weird printing stuff. So one of the things that the printers have talked for a long time that they one day will be

able to do was print on demand is what they call it. So imagine, for example, that instead of just printing, like right now we print cards, we just print onto sheets many, many, many times. Imagine if there's some ability to do individual. like you could change each card individually. So the idea is, imagine you have a card that slightly changes what it does,

you know, that the text could vary from card to card. Now it turns out that's a lot harder to do and it's not that they can't do it as much as it's really good expensive and not viable to do. But anyway, we were experimenting with that. So we had a bunch of cards

in Unstable for a while that had a variant built into them. That we'd make a long, of things that it could be, and the card could be one of many variables. That was the idea for the variable printing. When it came time to make, even though unstable took forever to make, ended up 13 years or something. Like, it got pushed back many, many times.

Many years it got pushed back. The printing still was not up to the point when we needed to print the set. In fact, I don't think that printing's here now. I don't think that technology at a way that we could do what exists now. But anyway, so we decided in Infinity that we would have a bunch of cards, I think it was six in total that had different versions. And I think there were six versions of the six cards, meaning that we had a card with the same name,

but with six slightly different rules text to them. And so the idea is that you would, that if you got the card with that name, maybe your card isn't the same as somebody else who has the card with the same name. Because we wanted to surprise people, we didn't tell people about it. And in the collector number, we didn't differentiate it.

Now, once again, it's hard to differentiate only because there's no ABC. Now, we could have numbered them differently, which in retrospect probably showed up. But anyway, we didn't. And even today, a lot of people that sort cards. Now, luckily, there's not an infinite demand for some of these un-cards and unstable

that have different versions. But there are different versions of them. In fact, I have a little bit... Later, I will talk about some cards that fell in that camp. But we got a lot of feedback from people when Infinity came out. and Stable came out that that was just a nightmare from collecting because there was no way other than looking at the card and seeing the text was different there was no way to easy to delineate the cards but anyway so let's talk a little bit about how we what order how are these made how are the collector numbers chosen so the way the collector numbers are chosen is originally they were arranged by frame now a lot of people think they were arranged by color and they sort of were

but only in the sense that each color was a different frame. So I think when they first did it in Exodus, there were the five colors. There was multicolored, which at the time was just gold. All multicolors had the same gold frame. There was no pin lines yet. And there were colorless artifacts. There were non-basic lands and basic lands.

Later on, we would get colorless cards. So here's the order, if you ever wondered the order. So the idea is the cards are stuck in the following order. First is what I would call true colorless, meaning not artifacts. Colors, like the Aldrazi. Coloss didn't until Rise of the... I think Rise Aldrazi was the first one to have colorless that isn't an artifact. So that goes first.

We show you the colors cards first. Then we show you the white cards, then the blue cards, then the black cards, then the red cards, then the green cards. Then we show you the multicolored cards. Then we show you the colorless artifacts. then we show you the non-basic lands, then we show you the basic lands. And then in each grouping,

it is done in alphabetical order. So here's all the colors cards alphabetized. Here's all the white cards alphabetized. And alphabetized, I mean by the English name. So there, and there definitely is, the evolution of numbering has evolved. The one thing about multicolor, for a while, hybrid was separated

from traditional multicolored. Eventually, they were joined together. Multicolor, by the way, does subdivide. Multicolor actually divides by the color pairings. So I'll talk about two-collar. There is three-color stuff as well. Two-color will go in sort of Wuberg order for allies, then Wooberg order for enemies. So white-blue, blue, black, black, red, red, green, green, white, then white, black, blue, red, black, green, red, white, green,

So it goes in that order. And then in three-color, I assume it goes by shard. So it will go like white, blue, black, then blue, black, red, green, red, green, white, green, white, blue. And then it goes by wedge. I'm trying to remember the wedge. So wedge, the opposite color is in the middle,

and that's the center color. So it's like red, white, black. I'm trying to remember the top of my head. Then it is green, blue, red. Then it is white, black, green. Then it is... What's red? Red is...

Oh, red is blue. Red is blue, red, white. And green is black, green, blue. Anyway, so, and there's an order. The four color, I think, start with missing green, then missing red. They go in order of what they're missing. Anyway, so there is an order to it. And one of the things that's really interesting is that what order things go in is definitely not necessarily always that simple.

So I'll give an example, a little story. So when Miriden came out, original Miriden, we introduced artifact lands for the first time. I was really enamored with them. Okay, we ended up having to ban a lot of them. But I was very enamored with them. They were cool things. And so the question is, okay, well, these aren't just artifacts. They're not just lands.

Clearly, they're non-basic lands. So do I put them with the artifacts or do I put them with the non-basic lands? And this is a, I mean, the editors, so the editors are fundamentally in charge. of the collector numbers. That is something that they have to do. So they have to make a judgment call. I think in the case of the artifact lands,

probably with Dell, the decision was made, oh, well, these are more lands than artifacts, meaning you're going to want to search them out when you're looking for your lands, and probably in play, you'll think of them more as land. So they put them with the lands.

And a lot of this has to to do with trying to figure out where you want to stick things and how you want to do it. Like, for example, we, multicolored was definitely sort of, took a little while to figure out how we want to do. And then we did a Lara, Shards O'Lara, in which the entire set was multicolored. And so that really made sure that we sort of understood how to do things. And like I said, there's a period of time where hybrid was separated and eventually we decided that it was just cleaner to go, look, hybrid is a green white hybrid card is like, you know, is a green-white card and it's multi-collar,

so let's stick it with the green-white cards. Oh, so let's talk a little bit about the making of the... So the way it works is, at least the old-school way it used to work, is the editor was in charge of doing the collector number. So what that meant is, at a point in the process where the names had been finalized, they then say, okay, I'm going to take each grouping, put them in the order that the groupings have to go,

then I have to alphabetize them in that grouping, And then I have to assign a collector number to them. And it was hand-done. So one of the stories I tell is there's a card. I forget the set, it was it. I think it's Apocalypse, I think. There's a card called Spirit Links, was the name of the card. And so it was a creature.

The challenge of it, though, was eventually in future site, we would make a card, we would make the ability LifeLink. but before the ability LifeLink was called LifeLink, the most common nickname for it was SpiritLink. And the reason for that is there's a card in Legends, which is the first card. It wasn't technically the first card. There's a black card in Arabian Nights.

But it's the card that kind of made it popular. And so a lot of people talked about the ability from that card. So a lot of people referred to it as Spirit Link. So Spirit Links did not have LifeLink on it, or the unnamed Lifelink ability. on it. And so I'm like, okay, that's wrong. Like, you don't want to call something Spirit Links, and it doesn't have what players

casually refer to as SpiritLink. So I went to Dell, I believe, and I, Dell Logger, our head editor, I went to Dell, and I said, okay, we can't call this Spirit Links. It conveys something

about the card that's wrong. We don't want to name if people believe a card mechanic that that's something it doesn't do. So if you have a card called Spirit Links, you're going to, at the time, especially, you don't think of it's lifelick. So the challenge was Dell had already done all the collector numbers and it was late enough in the process

that changing collector numbers just was off the table. So what we had to do is I had to find a new name for the card but I had to be within the band meaning I couldn't be earlier than the collector number before it I couldn't be later than the collector number after it. And so we ended up doing this changing the name

from Spirit Links to Spectral Links. So the card in the final set was Spectral Links. So that was such an interesting thing having to do that. So in the great designer searches, we've done three great designer searches. It's kind of like a reality show where we have people apply. We narrow down to usually eight people. We do tests and then we narrow people out until we have final three people and we bring them to the office. And one of the things I've done for all three final days of the great designer search is we do a live challenge.

We give them something that they haven't encountered before. and a lot of it is sort of to watch them interact like all the other challenges they have lots of time to work on it they have days to work on it. This is like, hey, I want to see how you fare on the top of your head because sometimes in magic we got to do things really quick and

want to see how they function. So one of the stuff, I think of the second grade is on search, the challenge involved changing a card last minute and I kept the restriction of the collector number saying, okay, you have to change the card, we can't use this card, you need a brand new card, but not only does it have to fit here,

and fit the needs of the set. You have to come up with the name of the card, and the name of the card has to be within this band. Anyway, it was a quirky restriction, but that came from actual reality of having to do that. So anyway, eventually, to the relief of the editors, they created a script, which now means that there's a button they can push

that will collect a number of everything, and if something changes, it's much, much easier to read right now, and change the collector numbers than it once was. So I'm not sure we'll have the spiraling, spectral story of modern day. So, like,

there was constantly ongoing questions about it. Like, for example, I've talked with the artifact of Lans of Mirrenan. Strixhaven had double-faced cards. Originally, those went in their own space before multicolour, since

some of them were one, well, the ones that were one color that went into another color. And eventually we decided that they just go along with if they're monocolor in both sides, they go in the monocolor section. If they're one color into a second color, they go into multicolored in that multicolor section.

Same with when we did adventures in Throne of Eldrain, or so wilds of Eldrain. Like, you know, where do they go? I think they ended up having their own category, I believe, because they're a weirdie. They're both.

It's a monocolor card, but it has an off-color activation. Or not activation, off-color, adventure spell. I know in Brothers War, they made the decision of all the artifacts were colorless, meaning the mana values were all generic mana, because we were really trying to capture antiquities that era. But a lot of cards had activations and did things that made the card very much that color. So we ended up in Brothers War putting the color-affiliated artifacts in the monocoucala. section with their color.

And that's the other thing is, on a case-by-case basis, we have general rules, and we follow those general rules. You know, colorless white, blue, black, red, green, multicolor, colors, non-lands, mostly artifacts. Non-basical lands, basic land. That's basically the order we do. But every once in a while, we'll get something that doesn't quite neatly fit in that,

and then we have to figure out what to do that when we get it. Okay, guys, my fine. a little piece of trivia for you is there are four cards that mention collector number by name three or four

depending how you want to count it. Do you know what they are? So first and foremost, these are all un-cards and the reason for that is there's a rule that says that all cards with the same English name have to mechanically identical. So if a card,

and there's a particular card, we want the rule treating that card the same for every copy of that card. So the challenge is there are some things like the rarity, the artist, the collector number that can change between versions because we reprint cards. Well, maybe we reprint a card, and when we reprint the card, we change the rarity of the card. And obviously, we change the artist of the card, most likely.

And most likely, we change the collector number. So cards with the same name can have different qualities of those things. So we don't mechanically care about those things so that we follow the general rules. But, unsets, they don't care. So one of the fun things of unsets is mechanically care about things that normally we can't mechanically care about.

So we do have four cards, three or four things, how do you want to do it, that care about a collector number. Okay, at home, can you name them? You can pause. I think if you can name them. Okay. So the first one showed up in Unhinged,

It's called first come first served. It's one in a white. It's an enchantment. It says creatures, basically in combat, the creature with a lower collector number has first rank. So if you get in combat with somebody, between the two of you, if you have the lower collector number, you get first rank.

Now, this is, I was very proud. This is my design. I think all of these were my design. The thing that I loved about this design was, it did a very cool white thing, which is it creates a rule that everybody has to follow that on the surface seems, seems pretty fair. Everybody has to follow the same rules,

but it's actually not that fair. Do you know who comes first after Cullis in card numbers? White does. So is white card going to have a lower number than everybody that isn't white or Culles? Yes, they are. So white benefits by its rules in a way that might not be obvious

but it does. And I like that about it. I like to sort of cool that, like, well, this card prioritizes white. And that white's the one making the rules and it helps white. So I thought that was pretty cool. Then in Unstable, we had three cards, although one of the cards

has the same name as they talked about earlier. An Effable Blessing is an enchantment. So the way it worked was, so in Effable Blessing and the other card I'm going to talk about Night in the Kitchen Sink were both these cards that had alternate versions of text on them. There's six different versions of text.

So, Neffable Blessing, you always had to choose something, and then whenever that thing got played, you drew a card. So this particular card, you choose even or odd, and then whenever you play a collector number, a card, if it's a collector number is the chosen, even or odd, then you get to draw a card. So the idea of this was, I was trying to get you to build just weird decks. Well, you know what's a weird deck?

An odd collector number deck, or an even collector number. deck. That is not something you've ever done before. But this card sort of encourages you to do that, which I thought was fun. The other card, which has two versions of it, that's why I'm not sure whether it is one or two cards.

Night of the Kitchen Think, a Kitchen sink. It is white-white for a 2-2, and it has First Reich, because it's a knight. But each version of the card has a different protection. That is the variant we had on the cards. There's six different cards. And they all have

very weird, un-ish things. So one of them is protection from cards with an even collector number and one of them is protection cards with an odd collector number. And once again, I just like the idea that

this is one of the funs with doing unsets is most cards do not care about the collection number. So all of a sudden, like, oh, well, I die to this removal spell, but not that removal spell. And I might die to this version of the same removal. spell from a different set, but not another version from that set. The way it works in the goals and rule on unsets is the physical card you're using

is the thing you get the qualities from. Unlike normal magic, where all the cards are the same name are mechanically the same in Oracle. In Unplay, you have to use the actual card you're playing with. Whatever artist is on that card, whatever collector number is on that card, that's the thing you use. So anyway, those, so we have messed around a little bit mechanically with. collective number, but only in unspace, since we can't do that in normal cards.

So anyway, guys, I'm now driving into work. I actually did it. I talked for 30 minutes about collector numbers. Like I said, there's a lot of, I don't know. The thing I find interesting is some of my podcasts, I do very general talk, and sometimes I get very specific, and they're fans of each. So for those of you out there that, like, wanted to know more about collector numbers, I probably have the most definitive podcast ever done on collector numbers.

But anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. Like I said, one of the thing that's really important is there's a lot of functionality in magic and collector number is a good example of that. Other than a few un-cards, collector number doesn't really impact the game at all. But it is something like, you know, when you're collecting, like it's very easier to think about right now that when I'm collecting the cards tell me the numbers on the cards and the rarity in the cards. And there's a lot of things to aid me in collecting. You know, early magic was not that at all. And so it is, as someone who lived through the time where there was no knowledge, like you were on your own, you had to figure it out to the time where we do a lot of stuff to tell you and stuff. It's nice to see that progression.

But anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed my talk about collector numbers. But as I'm now at work, we all know what that means. It's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.