Pull a card.
Build a deck.
A random Magic: The Gathering card by color, type, and era — for deck inspiration, draft warm-ups, or settling "what does this card do" arguments. Fan-made, no signup.
Settings
Colors
Magic: The Gathering is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast. RandomGen is a fan tool, not affiliated. Card text is a plain summary.
About this generator
The honest truth about random Magic card pickers: most are useless. Magic has tens of thousands of printed cards, and a true uniform pull will hand you a Mercadian Masques common you've never seen, four times in a row. So we did the opposite of comprehensive — a curated pool of about 80 cards spanning Alpha to recent sets, weighted toward what Magic players actually recognize: format-defining commons, tournament staples, the iconic mythics everyone has a story about.
The take: recognition is more useful than exhaustiveness. Pulling Lightning Bolt and Dark Confidant tells you something about the deck forming in your head. Pulling Wood Elemental tells you to go check Scryfall for cards anyone has heard of. We optimized for the first thing.
Filters compose: pick the colors, lock to a type, narrow by era band, clamp the CMC window. The pool is filtered first, then a uniform draw via crypto.getRandomValues with rejection sampling — same approach the wheel uses. If your filters end up empty, we say so instead of inventing a card.
What it's not: a tournament tool. The card text shown is a plain-English summary, not the legal oracle wording. For deck registration and rules precision, use Scryfall. This page is for the moment before all of that — when you're staring at an empty list and need a single card to spark an idea. The D&D character generator is one click away for when game night switches gears, and the dice roller is permanently bookmarked.
What people use it for
Deck-building inspiration
Stuck on a Commander brew? Pull five cards in your colors. The first one that surprises you is your seed.
Draft warm-ups
Blind-evaluate ten random cards out loud before a draft. Forces you to articulate what you look for in a P1P1.
Trivia & bar bets
"What does this card actually do?" Pull cards and quiz the table. Forgetting how Stoneforge Mystic works is its own punishment.
Jumpstart play
Pull twenty cards each, build a 20-card deck on the spot, ship it. Stupidly fun lunchtime format.
Casual cube building
Random pulls are great prompts for "what should this slot be?" A brain dump, not a final list.
Streaming bits
"Build a deck around whatever chat pulls" content. Gives the chat something to react to.
How it works
The pool
About 80 cards live in this page as inline JSON — staples from each color pie plus iconic mythics legible even to lapsed players. The set spans Alpha through current standard, biased toward "cards you've heard of." Each entry has a name, mana cost, type line, rules summary, era tag, and CMC.
The pick
Filters apply first: colors, type, era, and CMC range narrow the pool. Then we draw one entry uniformly using crypto.getRandomValues with rejection sampling — same approach all RandomGen tools use. No Math.random, no modulo bias, every legal card has equal probability.
The shuffles
When you pull repeatedly, we use Fisher-Yates to avoid back-to-back repeats when the filtered pool is small. This is a comfort feature, not a uniformity guarantee.
State & sharing
Every filter and the most recent pull live in the URL via history.replaceState. localStorage remembers your last 10 pulls; click any chip to revisit. Nothing leaves your browser.
Common questions
Where does the card pool come from?
About 80 curated cards spanning Alpha through recent sets — staples, format-defining commons, and iconic rares. Small enough to feel like cards you've seen, not a wall of forgotten reprints.
Why not pull from every card ever printed?
Because the result would be useless. Magic has tens of thousands of cards; most of a true random pull would be commons you've never met. We chose recognizability over completeness — Scryfall is one click away when you want exhaustive search.
How do filters work?
Pick any combination of colors, a card type, an era, and a CMC range. The pool is filtered first, then a card is drawn uniformly. If the filter ends up empty, we say so instead of inventing one.
Are these the actual oracle texts?
No — short, plain-English summaries of each effect. Close enough for trivia and inspiration, not the official wording. For tournament-legal oracle text, look the card up on Scryfall or Gatherer.
Is this affiliated with Wizards of the Coast?
No. Magic: The Gathering is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast LLC. RandomGen is an independent fan tool. No card art, no partnership claims.
Can I use this for cube building?
It's a prompt machine for casual cubes — pull twenty, see which ones spark a draft seat, fill the gaps yourself. For serious cube design use CubeCobra; for late-night "what should I jam?" moments, this is faster.
Why are some pulls "off-color" from my filter?
Toggle on Multicolor or Colorless and they join the pool — a White + Blue filter with Multicolor on can produce a UWG card. Turn them off for strict mono-color pulls.
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Same neighborhood — different question.