Magic Creature Types Analysis

Magic: The Gathering is a game made for humans by humans... except of course for the nefarious Gleemax. This fact is true of most (if not all) table top games, but it's especially relevant to this discussion of the types of creatures that exist in the Magic universe. Because Magic is also a game of creatures, which players summon to fight for them: of the seven card types in the game, creatures are by far the most numerous, with more than 8,000 creature cards in the official Magic database. (Enchantments are the next most common type, and their total barely cracks 2,000.) And, as might be expected in a game played primarily by humans, the relative majority of all creatures in the game are of the Human subtype.

In addition to being a game of humans and creatures, Magic is also game of colors, since most cards in the game are identified with one of the five colors of mana: White, blUe, Black, Red, Green. So the next logical question when talking about humans in Magic is how they are broken down across the color wheel. To answer this question, I'm turning to some research I did after the release of the Magic 2015 expansion. The last core set of its kind, M15 was actually released in mid-2014, so while the numbers won't be exactly accurate, the general trends should still hold true. To exhibit these trends, here is a list of the top 40 creature types in Magic, color coded to reflect the most common color among each creature type:

Just reading down the first three columns should give you a pretty good idea of the kind of fantasy world in which Magic takes place and the kinds of creatures that occupy this world. The next step is to give you a quick overview of each color's most common creature type, but first I want to explain why each color has two columns devoted to it. This is to distinguish the total number of creatures that have a particular color in their mana cost (which could be just one out of multiple colors) from the creatures that contain ONLY that color in their mana cost. So for example, there are 676 total white-aligned human creatures, 581 of which are mono-white, and 95 of which are multicolored with white being just one of its elements. A small distinction perhaps, but it may become important later.

Sticking with White-aligned Humans (notice I've steered clear of saying "white humans" to avoid confusion with the caucasian ethnicity), I do not find it surprising that the majority of human creatures in the game are associated with white mana. White is the color of order and law, and any human who plays Magic has to have at least somewhat of an orderly mind: not only to learn and remember all the rules, but also to construct an effective deck, and to keep track of all the complicated twists and turns that happen while playing an actual game.

The most common type among blue creatures is not a race (as in "the human race"), but rather a class, which is a term in the popular role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons to describe an adventurer's chosen occupation. The prototypical blue class is Wizard, which makes sense because the discipline and knowledge required for casting spells are very blue attributes. Now it was kind of a tautology when I said that Magic was a game made by humans for humans, but it's also a game made by wizards (quite literally by the Hasbro subsidiary Wizards of the Coast, which also publishes D&D) and arguably made FOR wizards. I know that Magic players technically take on the role of Planeswalker, powerful mages that can travel between the many worlds of the Magic multiverse, but I mean come on, the main thing you do in the game is cast spells, which is the most wizardy thing possible.

Race and Class are terms used in DnD, but Magic uses the term Tribes to describe creature types that work well in a deck together. The reason for that is to account for creatures such as Black's most common type, the Zombie. Being a zombie is something that happens to a creature and has nothing to do with race and class - it's neither an innate characteristic of that creature nor something that creature chooses to do. However "Tribal Zombies" is a perfectly legit Magic term to describe a deck made out of mostly creatures of the Zombie type. Which, if you follow the metagame, is a good strategy to become familiar with, since the next Magic expansion set takes place in the gothic horror themed plane of Innistrad.

Moving around the color wheel to Red, we find the other color that has humans as its most common creature type. (Humans are the second-most common type in the other three colors.) But since we've already talked enough about humans, let's move on to Red's second most common creature type, and also skip ahead so we can compare it directly to Green's most common: Goblins and Elves, respectively. Both of these races show up in the "Big 3" touchstones of the fantasy genre, in my opinion: Dungeons & Dragons, The Lord of the Rings, and the computer game EverQuest, with the difference that Elves are most commonly aligned with Good (i.e. you can play as Elves) and Goblins are usually Evil (i.e. you usually fight against them). They're also similar, at least in the world of Magic, in that they work well together, and they're much better in numbers. In fact, the first Magic product that provided two themed Decks specifically designed to Duel against each other was called Duel Decks: Elves vs. Goblins.

Now that we know the top creature type of each color, let's go a little more in-depth. We've seen the races most associated with Red and Green, but the other three colors get into the racial game as well. The Blue race of choice is Merfolk, which are sort of like a cross between Disney's The Little Mermaid and the Sahuagin from D&D. It's a little bit of a stretch to call Vampires Black's top race, because some mythologies see vampirism as an affliction rather than a genetic characteristic, but I think it mostly works the latter way in Magic. The most numerous non-human White race is Cat, but only some of the cards of that type represent the anthropomorphic Leonin (akin to EverQuest's Vah Shir), as opposed to lions or tigers etc. White also has the most Kithkin, which are Magic's version of Halflings or Hobbits, and most Magic Dwarves are Red.

W NOTE: Spirits are basically
Magic's version of ghosts.

We've talked about how the Wizard class from Dungeons and Dragons is well represented in Magic, but in fact many of D&D's 12 classes make appearances on Magic card types. Starting at the top of the color wheel, we see that White boasts a good amount of Clerics, which are the prototypical healer class in both games, in that they both excel at preventing damage and regaining lost life (or hit points). White also has the most creatures with the subtype Knight (which can be roughly equated to Paladins in D&D) and Monk, making it the most Dungeon-y color.

U NOTE: Illusion is a school of Magic in D&D.
B NOTE: Horror is the only creature type that's also a film genre.

Blue doesn't have a whole heck of a lot of creature types that correlate with D&D classes: the only one in its top ten is Rogue, which it technically shares with Black, since there are more overall Blue Rogues (including multicolored, or Gold, cards), but more Mono-Black ones. Black also leads in creatures of the Assassin type, which is a special type of Rogue in D&D Fifth Edition. Black also has a good amount of Warriors, Shamans, Clerics, and Knights, but since these classes are covered in other colors (and one of them isn't even in the newest version of D&D), I'll leave them out here. Suffice it to say that Black shares elements with many other colors, but that versatility usually comes with an extra cost.

R NOTE: Dragons are one half of D&D.

Red has the lead in Warrior creatures, which share the most with the Fighter class - willing to be on the front lines in combat, dealing a lot of damage with little regard for their own well-being. There are some elements of the fighter class represented in the Soldier creature type, which is predictably best represented by White mana, because you need a strong sense of order to work as part of a team on the battlefield. But this is not a perfect correlation because not all professional soldiers have what it takes to be an adventuring Fighter. Red also predictably has the lead in Berserkers and Barbarians, each of which could be combined under the Barbarian in D&D, a class which is fueled by pure rage.

G NOTE: Beast is a good way to
describe most of Green's creatures.

The true D&D class that's most represented by Green creatures is Druid, and it's important to note the differences across the two formats. Magic Druids usually help you find lands or create mana, whereas D&D Druids are known as shapechangers, a feature usually reserved for Shamans in Magic (which are no longer a class in the new version of D&D). Needless to say then, Druids are extremely useful in Magic, since mana is the resource that all decks need to cast their spells. There are actually more Green Warriors than there are Druids, but we've already talked about them because there are more Red Warriors than Green ones. While there are no Ranger creature types in Magic, there are several cards with Ranger in the name: these cards are mostly green and they range in types from Scout and Archer to Soldier and Warrior. There are only three cards in all of Magic with Bard in the name: they are all Green, two of them are Rogues, and one is strangely enough a Shaman.

So that's (hopefully) all the information you could ever want about creature types in Magic: The Gathering. If you're hungry for more info, you can check out the official Gatherer database, but I actually prefer the lower-key magiccards.info. But there's also a world of Magic that's totally separate from the mechanics on the cards themselves, which is explored in the art, flavor text, and fan fiction that appears weekly on the official Magic site (if you know where to look. It is a confusing site). And remember, just keep telling yourself that it's totally cool to be a nerd.