How does one play Magic: the Gathering???
I'm not a rulebook, nor am I a person next to you that can teach you the game, but if you really want a primer on how Magic works because you somehow stumbled upon here, I can give you a quick rundown:
It's played with, a library, or deck of cards. You have life totals, which the goal of the game is to bring their life total to 0 or less to win. To do that, normally, you will want to summon creatures by paying their mana costs to play their cards. To pay such costs, you'll need to play lands, which will generate mana. You can play one land per turn, thus creatures will be stronger the more mana they require to cast, since they'll normally require you to wait longer and spend more of your every-turn resources. There's also spells that will not put something in play but instead just do an effect before going into the graveyard, or discard pile. There's also a super discard pile called exile because we have ways to pull stuff out of the graveyard in this game.
Mana costs are on the top right corner of the card (shown to the left of here) and lists the amount of and types of mana needed to cast the spell. In most scenarios, a mana cost can be any amount of generic mana (the number pip) followed by specific colored mana. (the colored pips/pips with symbols) Generic mana costs can be paid with anything, mana costs with symbols meanwhile need that specific color of mana.
A turn in Magic goes like this: start of turn you untap your cards on the board, (Turn them upright again. The opposite of tapping.) trigger any upkeep effects, (anything that says "at the beginning of your upkeep") then draw your card. You get two main phases, one before combat and one after. It's here you can play all of your cards.
Summoning Creatures puts them in play with summoning sickness, which means they cannot attack or do anything that involves tapping until your next turn. Creatures also have power and toughness, (shown on the bottom-right of the card) power being the amount of damage they deal when they attack and toughness being the amount of damage they can take before dying. Damage on creatures is removed at the end of each turn.
Combat involves tapping your creatures (turning them sideways) to declare attacks to your opponent. (Only your opponent and some specific card types are valid attack destinations. Attacking a creature requires something else.) After which, your opponent may have their creatures block your attackers. Any number of blockers can block one creature, and tapped creatures cannot block. If a creature is unblocked, then it deals damage to the opponent as normal. If it is blocked, the attacker and blocker(s) deal damage to eachother at the same time. There are many ways to change how this goes, but I'll leave that to you to find out. Basically, attack with creatures, get rid of or avoid their blockers, and win.
There's also artifacts and enchantments, which are also played and put in front of you but generally do supportive effects. Aura enchantments are a subtype of enchantment that is attached to something instead and modifies whatever it's attached to. If the thing the Aura's attached to leaves play, the Aura goes into the graveyard. Equipment (shown right) are the same thing but also require a cost to attach it to a creature, and it sticks around if the thing it's equipped to leaves.
Instant and sorcery spells, meanwhile, are one-time effects that are cast, do its thing, and are then put in the graveyard. The difference between the two is that sorceries can only be played during your main phase and not in response to anything, just like most other cards. Instants meanwhile can be played at just about any time, including as a response to someone casting a spell or activating an ability, or a lot of things really.
Creatures (and everything really) can have abilities on them, either activated, as denoted by the cost followed by a colon; triggered, which will usually begin with "if" or "whenever"; or static abilities, which is active at all times provided the card is in play. (Which you can assume is the case if it doesn't hint it's one of the other ability types.) Your lands, though it'll almost never say, are assumed to have abilities inherent to the type of land it is. For example, Plains will have the ability to tap for white mana, even if there's no text on the card that says so. Generated mana is removed at the end of each phase, (which are your main phases, steps in combat phase, etcetera) so you normally can't store up mana in this game. There is however leaving lands untapped to pay for spells and abilities when it's not your turn.
Plenty of cards that aren't way too wordy will have reminder text on them (in italics) to teach you how certain keywords function. (like double strike) So a lot of the mystery words you may not know about, usually, you can learn just by picking up a common card with that keyword. Creature types are a subtype of creature that simply exist to categorize the creature card. (Like Angel.) Cards will care about it but you don't have to memorize anything. The same goes for subtypes of artifacts and enchantments.
Finally, as a bonus from me, some extra tidbits.
- A card that's legendary you can only have one of at any time on your side of the battlefield. You may have up to 4 in your deck as usual but if you try to place more than 1 on the field you must immediately move one of them into the graveyard.
- "Permanents" and "spells" refer to two supercategories of card types. A permanent is any card that goes on the battlefield when played, and spells are any card that can be cast except for lands, which are not cast and thus cannot be responded to.
- "Casting" a spell means to play it from your hand, and then wait for any responses, not just from opponents but from you as well. This all touches up on a mechanic of Magic called the stack that we continue to try to live in blissful ignorance of and if you don't want to really learn how to play this game, you can ignore it as well.
If you need to look up terms I use I have a term page you can thumb through. Otherwise you're on the web. Use a search engine. This should be all you need, but hey, I have a guestbook if you have a suggestion.