Trading cards have existed for many decades, and collectible baseball cards have been around for over a century. But the concept of a trading card game wasn't born until August 1993, when Wizards of the Coast released Magic: The Gathering's first ever set. The Alpha set was an immediate success, and it helped MTG to carve out an important niche in the gaming market that grew into a phenomenon.

Naturally, being wildly successful, Magic inspired many similar games. Its two main competitors, Yu-Gi-Oh! and the Pokémon Trading Card Game, both took cues from MTG and put a twist on its formula while incorporating their own charming identities. Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! became wildly successful icons in their own right, but they still don't measure up to the first and best TCG ever made: Magic: The Gathering.

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How Pokémon & Yu-Gi-Oh! Almost Caught up to MTG

Pokemon Trading Card Game collage of Imakuni, Togedemaru, and an Unknown

To give credit where credit's due, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! launched just a few years after MTG's release, when the entire TCG concept was still fairly new, and both iterated significantly on MTG's fundamentals, introducing lots of new mechanics and themes. The trading card game experiment paid off for all three games, which all have active and devoted fanbases today. MTG, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon do share certain fundamental gameplay mechanics and features, but they are idiosyncratic in every way that counts.

It helps that Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! both have highly popular anime and manga series, as well as other media to support them -- more so than MTG does, even with its tie-in novels and comics. Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!'s TV shows and marketing were enormously successful, which gave them a significant popularity boost around the world. They also offer distinct aesthetics and themes to help set them apart: while MTG is more akin to a traditional fantasy setting like Dungeons & Dragons, its two competitors have a lighter and more cartoony tone. Pokémon's Pikachu and Yu-Gi-Oh!'s Kuriboh both appeal to Japanese pop culture's emphasis on cuteness, while politely distancing themselves from MTG and offering something unique and visually striking.

Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! both borrowed the essentials of what made MTG so successful but added their own spin, and it worked. The games are built upon foundational TCG concepts like Booster packs, card rarity, resource systems, monsters and spells, and a basic scoring system, with MTG's creatures becoming Yu-Gi-Oh!'s monsters and its land cards becoming Pokemon's energy cards. MTG wrote the rulebook on how to create and balance a trading card game while making it fun, with strategic depth and diverse visual styles, and all three games benefited from building upon MTG's genre-defining formula.

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Why MTG Still Reigns Supreme

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Most gamers have valid reasons for preferring one TCG over another, and all three of these TCG giants have wonderful things to offer. That said, MTG still retains its lead to this very day, even 30 years after Alpha's debut. The game had plenty of misfires and blunders along the way, ranging from its controversial ante rules to overpowered sets and card stock quality issues, but still, MTG remains the king of the genre it created.

By now, it seems clear that no TCG will ever beat MTG at its own game. It's the first, most definitive TCG experience -- the classic that made every other card game possible, and that can never be taken away. MTG offers clear advantages over its competitors with its diverse range of formats, enormous card pool, and appeal to players of all ages. MTG offers such a wide range of ways to play, far more than its two rivals, and developer Mark Rosewater even said that MTG is not a single card game but many games with the same core rules.

From traditional Constructed formats like Modern and Legacy to the multiplayer chaos of MTG's Commander format, players have so much to choose from. Pokemon and Yu-Gu-Oh! have some diversity in the way they're played, but in general are far more limited than MTG. Overall, Magic: The Gathering's sheer breadth and depth leave it standing tall over its competition as not only the first TCG but also the best one ever made.