Magic: The Gathering has four standard rarities, shown by the color of a card's expansion symbol: common (black), uncommon (silver), rare (gold), and mythic rare (red-orange). Rarity is a signal of a card's complexity and design space — how many words it carries, how unique its effect is, how much "wow" it's allowed — not a promise that it's stronger. Plenty of commons are format staples, and plenty of rares do nothing on their own until you build a deck around them.
The rarities in order
Every card in a modern Magic set is printed at one of four rarities. The rarity lives in the card's expansion symbol — the little set icon to the right of the type line — and it's encoded by color, so you can read a card's rarity at a glance without flipping it over.
| Rarity | Symbol color | What it signals | | --- | --- | --- | | Common | Black | Clean, repeatable, the backbone of Limited | | Uncommon | Silver | Synergy pieces, archetype signposts, role-players | | Rare | Gold / yellow | Build-arounds, splashy effects, most legends | | Mythic rare | Red-orange / bronze | The biggest bombs, marquee legends, chase cards |
There's also a fifth tier you'll see in modern sets: a special or bonus rarity, usually drawn in purple. It marks cards that occupy a dedicated special slot in a booster — reprints, serialized cards, or set-specific bonus-sheet cards — rather than the normal common-through-mythic progression. It's a printing-and-collation label more than a design tier, so for card design the four standard rarities are what matter.
What rarity actually means
Here's the idea that trips up a lot of new designers: rarity is a complexity budget, not a power level. A card's rarity tells you roughly how much rules text it's allowed to carry, how novel its effect can be, and how "build-around" it's meant to feel — not how good it is in a vacuum.
Walk up the ladder and the texture changes:
- Lower rarity = clean and repeatable. Commons are short, do one legible thing, and show up many times in a Limited pool. They're the format's backbone — the cards you draft a dozen of and that teach the set's mechanics.
- Higher rarity = more words, more unique effects, more splash. Rares and mythics get the paragraph-long abilities, the brand-new mechanics, the legends, and the flashy payoffs that make people lean in.
This is why power and rarity come apart so often. Many of the most-played cards in Magic's history are commons — efficient removal, a clean two-drop, a burn spell — because efficiency at low complexity is exactly what a common is for. Meanwhile a rare can be a build-around that's a dead card until your deck is constructed to abuse it. The mythic dragon that ends the game is rare because it's a splashy, deck-defining centerpiece — not because the rules guarantee it beats a common. Designing to rate rather than to rarity is the heart of designing balanced custom MTG cards.
How rarities show up in booster packs
Rarity is also a collation rule — it governs how often each card appears in a booster. The classic math most players remember is roughly one rare, three uncommons, and about ten commons per pack, with a mythic replacing the rare a fraction of the time.
Modern Play Boosters changed that arithmetic. Today's packs mix in extra slots — a guaranteed showcase or special card, a wildcard slot whose rarity varies, and a land — so the old "1 / 3 / 10" template no longer describes a pack exactly. Don't anchor on precise per-pack counts; anchor on the ratio — many commons, fewer uncommons, scarce rares and mythics. That scarcity is the lever: because a player opens far more commons than mythics, rarity quietly controls how often each effect shows up in a Limited environment, which is exactly what makes it a design tool.
Rarity as a design tool for a custom set
If you're building a custom set rather than a one-off card, rarity stops being trivia and becomes one of your sharpest tools. Spread across a whole set, rarity is how you pace complexity, teach your mechanics, and decide which effects are abundant versus precious. Use each tier for the job it's built for.
Commons: teach the set
Commons are your teaching layer. They should be simple, clean, and repeatable, and collectively they should introduce the set's core mechanics in their gentlest form. If your set has a keyword, a common or two should wear it plainly so a player meets the mechanic early and often. Commons are also the literal backbone of Limited — they're what people draft in bulk and build their curves from — so keep them honest, at rate, and easy to parse. The single best place to learn this discipline is creature design, where a clean common body is a building block; see how to design a custom MTG creature.
Uncommons: build the archetypes
Uncommons add the connective tissue. This is where synergy and archetype signposts live — the gold card that screams "draft this two-color pair," the tribal lord, the role-player that's mediocre alone but shines in the right deck. Uncommons can carry a second ability or one build-around hook, and they're plentiful enough that an archetype actually comes together in a draft. Think of commons as the vocabulary and uncommons as the sentences they let players write.
Rares and mythics: the payoffs and bombs
Save your bombs, engines, and complex cards for high rarity. Rares carry the build-arounds and splashy payoffs; mythics carry the marquee legends and the cards a whole deck is constructed to abuse. This is where text can run to a paragraph and where a creature's stats are allowed to push rate, because the constraint lives in scarcity instead of efficiency. The rule of thumb: if a card needs three paragraphs to explain itself, or it's the centerpiece your deck is named after, it isn't a common. Put your splashiest, most unique, most "wow" designs here — that's literally what the rarity is for.
Setting rarity in PipGlyph
In PipGlyph, rarity is a property you set when you design the card, and it renders right onto the card's expansion symbol — black for common, silver for uncommon, gold for rare, red-orange for mythic — so your custom card reads its rarity at a glance exactly like a real one. (For where the expansion symbol sits and what every other zone on the frame is called, see MTG card anatomy explained.)
Tagging each card's rarity as you build lets you lay the set out and audit its shape — checking that commons stay simple, uncommons carry the synergy, and the bombs sit at rare and mythic where they belong. That same structure is what makes custom sets and design challenges read as intentional: running a community card design challenge leans on exactly this, and you can browse how other designers spread rarity across their cards in the community gallery. Ready to try it? Spin up a card in the PipGlyph editor, set its rarity, and watch the expansion symbol change color as you decide how complex and splashy the card is allowed to be.
FAQ
What are the MTG rarities in order?
From most to least common: common (black expansion symbol), uncommon (silver), rare (gold or yellow), and mythic rare (red-orange or bronze). Modern sets also use a special or bonus rarity, usually shown in purple, for cards in dedicated special booster slots like reprints or serialized cards.
Does a higher rarity mean a card is more powerful?
No. Rarity signals complexity and design space — how many words, how unique an effect, how splashy a card is — not a guaranteed power level. Many commons are efficient format staples, and many rares are build-arounds that do nothing until you construct a deck around them.
What color is each rarity's expansion symbol?
Common is black, uncommon is silver, rare is gold or yellow, and mythic rare is a red-orange or bronze. The expansion symbol is the set icon to the right of the type line, and its color is how you read a card's rarity without any other text.
How should I assign rarity in a custom set?
Use commons to teach your mechanics with simple, repeatable cards; use uncommons for synergy pieces and archetype signposts; and save bombs, build-arounds, and complex paragraph-long cards for rare and mythic. Keep most of your set at common and uncommon so the rares and mythics still feel special.