How Do I Identify Card Sets?
Most Magic cards have an expansion symbol in their center-right, below the illustration. This symbol tells you which set the card is from.
Promotional Cards
These cards do not belong to a traditional set and can be tricky to identify. Look for these signs that a card is promotional.
Commonly Misidentified Sets
Cards from these sets are easy to misidentify. That’s because these sets are composed of reprints of earlier cards with their original expansion symbols. To check whether a card is actually from one of these three sets, look for the crucial feature that identifies it as a reprint.
Most Yu-Gi-Oh! cards have a card number which identifies its set, region and place in the set.
These numbers are formatted as “SET-RN999”:
- “SET” is the two-, three- or four-character set prefix
- “RN” is the one- or two-letter regional abbreviation
- “999” is the card’s number in the set
Note: Series 1 cards do not have card numbers, and some older cards did not have regional abbreviations for every region.
Finding the Card Number
A card’s number is usually in the center-right of the card under the illustration. On Pendulum Monster Cards, the card number is in the bottom left corner.
Pokémon cards have been printed in English since 1999. Besides the first set (Base Set), every set has an expansion symbol which identifies cards from that set.
Finding the Expansion Symbol
On cards printed before the Expedition Base Set (2002), the expansion symbol is located in the center-right of the card, just below the illustration.
Since Expedition Base Set, most cards have an expansion symbol in the bottom right corner. The following types of cards have a symbol in the bottom left corner instead:
- Trainer Cards
- Energy Cards
- GX/EX Cards
- Promotional Cards
