Test your Magic: the Gathering card instincts with a free fan-made game

Free, fan-made Magic: the Gathering game Mana Match challenges players to test their colour wheel knowhow and guess a card’s colour from its name alone

Magic the Gathering card art: A woman pumps her first after solving an equation

Okay, card game connoisseurs, how well do you know Magic the Gathering’s colour pie? You may be aware that White gets Vigilance and Green gets Trample, but what colours are a Spirited Companion or a Vector Asp? That’s the kind of challenge you’ll face in Mana Match, a free webgame built by Reddit user Collypops, which tasks players with correctly guessing a Magic card’s colour, when the only information provided is its name.

Built over a weekend and shared for free in the r/MagicTCG subreddit on Tuesday, Mana Match seems like the perfect little addictive toy to fiddle with if your day’s simply been going too productively so far. It’s surprisingly challenging too, especially on higher difficulty levels which give you the full five MTG colours to choose between. (On Easy mode, it’s a less daunting 50/50 choice.)

You might think matching a Magic: the Gathering card name to its colour would be straightforward. It’s just basic reading comprehension: planty-sounding things are Green, angry-sounding things are Red, right? But it’s not as easy as it looks, especially as there are a few red (or perhaps green, black, or blue) herrings sprinkled in. How are you supposed to know a Devilthorn Fox is White, for instance?

By default, Mana Match sets you up guessing Creatures, but you can set this to Instants, Enchantments, Planeswalkers, or whatever floats your boat. Of course, if you play a whole lot of Magic: the Gathering, you might have an edge. Perhaps only a slim one, though, as there are a total of 17,402 cards in Mana Match’s database. Reckon you know them all?

A screenshot of free Magic: the Gathering game Mana Match showing the card Mesa Chicken

Mana Match’s creator Collypops has been taking suggestions on the r/MagicTCG subreddit since sharing the game, and says they plan to update it with features like colourless and multicoloured cards over the next few weeks.

Play Mana Match enough and you’ll be a walking, talking MTG encyclopedia. You’ll need our guide to all the MTG sets if you really want to round out your knowledge, however. And if you don’t care about the colour of your cards, just whether they win games, here are our picks for the most powerful MTG cards of 2021.