A guide to the different types of Magic foil
Foil has been getting special treatment in the CCG game since 2001, and over the following 20 years, we have seen every possible variation, from rainbow-infused shooting sparkles to etching, texture, and even pixels.
While all of this monochromatic rainbow magic might be a little hard to keep track of, understanding all the different types of Magic foil can help play a huge role in card collecting pursuits. Alongside being in demand, MTG foils are also high-value cards, thus making them a crucial collectable if interested in deck building or competitive formats. To help get your foil on in one of the best free PC games, here is everything you could ever want to know about Magic: The Gathering’s foil variants.
Every type of Magic foil overview
Every Magic foil archetype falls into one of three broad categories. There are evergreen foils which are applied to multiple sets and rotated regularly, set-specific foils, and reserved foils. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it should offer some insights into the variety of ways that foils have been printed.
Evergreen foil cards have a shiny finish and fall into one of four different types:
The first widely available evergreen foil was Lightning Dragon from Urza’s Saga. This card was extremely popular when it first arrived, but this would only be the start of something much, much bigger.
At the time, a baby step towards making foil variants more broadly available, Wizards revealed in 2019 that they had plans to revisit Urza’s Saga with a new printing of evergreen Lightning Dragons featuring shiny new alternate art. It was a huge boon for collectors, but an even bigger boon for Wizards’ art department.
If you look at every pre-2003 foil card ever released, you find a shooting star icon that appears in the lower right-hand corner. It has long been presumed that this icon denotes which cards are evergreen foils along with a dash of extra rarity whenever it pops up.
Magic foil doesn’t adhere to one recurring standard because it is specifically art dependent, and most Wizards art directors have been keen to give their spin on foils. Evergreen foil styles have had a distinct aesthetic among them, with one exception, and it’s rainbow style. With shooting star cards being the most common, it also tends to appear on some of the most recognisable, memorable cards from throughout Magic’s history.
For obvious reasons, the most popular foil printing runs from Eighth Edition to now, lovingly referred to as Core Foil. It has a fluffy, holographic rainbow effect that covers the whole card in a swirl of magical radiating particles, almost to the point that you can’t even see the art anymore.
There are some sets that feature darker foils that don’t quite hit the rainbow mark, such as Future Sight, Lorwyn, and Shadowmoor. The evergreen foil style for these sets is typically brushed, with a lighter and more matte finish. Innistrad, although technically a set before Eighth Edition, has foil cards with a noticeable grain effect. Others, such as Shards of Alara, have etched foil cards with a grainy and textured appearance.
From the Vault sets typically feature an even shinier and glossy foil variant. They do have some constant features, though, for example, each reverse of these special bundles features a number of coins under the art. These Protective Shields or Vaults, as they have been nicknamed, have more reflective and varnished foils than most. They are also quite pretty, too.
The only set to feature dual-rainbow foil cards is the Brothers’ War. Wizards printed a small run of these cards as part of a Commander expansion in 2015. The art on these cards is a found perspective of the brothers Urza and Mishra locked in a tense battle, and each has its own rainbow holofoil on either side of the card.
The first two planeswalker- dedicated sets, The Unfinity and Multiversal Legends, both got Galaxy foil printing, an upgrade to a scattered starburst pattern. It has a dreamy and swirling fashion that brings an embossed, three-dimensional appearance to the card.
The first two sets to get gilded foil cards were Imprisoned and Exiled, which saw golden frame and embossing in the traditional Magic pattern that evokes comparisons to worn, luxury books and regal objects. Both Streets of New Capenna and Spectrum-Spring reprinted these frames, too, with even more gold, giving the cards a luxurious frame which matches with the reserved rarity of mythic-level.
