The Magus Circle Characters Guide: All 6 Playable Mages

Mastering your scribing hand is only half the battle when entering the cosmic war of By Witchlight's rogue-lite spellcaster. Choosing the right caster defines how your runs unfold, making a deep understanding of The Magus Circle characters essential from your very first planetary descent. Whether you prefer slinging missiles from afar or executing devastating close-range blade strokes, navigating The Magus Circle characters will determine whether you escape with rare boss trophies or fall to the encroaching horde.

In this comprehensive guide, we break down everything currently known about the six playable mages, their distinct starting spells, their unique active abilities, and the exact extraction steps required to assemble the entire Circle.

Complete Overview of The Magus Circle Characters

The Magus Circle centers around six playable mages defending humanity's greatest ally across four hostile planets. Each member of the roster is named after popular drinks, featuring unique visual themes, emotional backstories, and tailored skill trees. Unlike traditional auto-firing horde survival games, your choice of caster dictates the primary arcane sigil you will draw manually during combat.

Every character brings three distinct mechanical layers into a run:

• A signature starting spell with its own specific drawing gesture.
• An innate active ability or panic button tied to an independent cooldown.
• A personalized metaprogression skill tree and personality quirks revealed inside the manor hub.

Because starting spells dictate your muscle memory in the opening minutes of a run, learning how each caster handles early waves is vital to consistent extractions.

How to Unlock Every Mage in The Magus Circle

When beginning your adventure on the official release of The Magus Circle on Steam, you do not start with the entire roster unlocked. Completing the full Circle requires specific operational steps tracked directly on the planetary deployment console.

The deployment screen plainly states the primary objective for unlocking roster slots: you must extract with Leviathan material on each character. Rather than allowing a single powerhouse caster to farm materials for the entire manor, the game requires you to personally pilot each mage through a successful planetary expedition and escape carrying boss remnants.

To complete your roster and earn the coveted "Everybody is Here" achievement, follow this progression loop:

1. Launch a run using your currently unlocked caster on the available planet.
2. Survive the advancing tides of cosmic creatures while gathering mana crystals and leveling up your offensive spells.
3. Defeat the planetary Leviathan boss when it spawns at the climax of the run.
4. Locate the extraction sigil and accurately draw the four-pointed star shape inside the circle to secure your Leviathan trophy.
5. Return to the manor hub to register the harvested Leviathan material into that specific character's collection slot.
6. Spend accumulated pink gems—the manor's central currency, which begins with 300 on a fresh save file—to fund unlock services and character room renovations.

According to launch-week community reports, the achievement for securing all six mages held a rare 0.1% unlock rate, indicating that mastering multiple character kits requires patience and focused run routing.

In-Depth Kit Breakdown for All Playable Mages

Selecting among The Magus Circle characters means adapting to vastly different spell shapes, movement profiles, and tactical panic options. Here is how each confirmed caster operates under combat conditions.

Milk: The Agile Starter Witch

Milk serves as the recognizable face of the game, featured prominently across the mansion hub, tutorial sequences, and official credits art. Identified by her blonde hair and bunny ears, Milk provides the most straightforward entry point for beginners.

• Starting Spell: Magic Missile. Drawn as a straightforward sigil, this spell fires fast, low-cost homing projectiles that allow players to eliminate threats while maintaining safe positioning.
• Innate Passive: Grants bonus movement speed when hovering near clusters of enemies.
• Active Ability: An immediate burst of movement speed to slip away from encircling swarms. Community testing shows that pairing this with the Bunny Form tarot card enhances her evasive profile, transforming her temporarily into a rapid bunny.
• Combat Application: Player reviews emphasize that Milk relies heavily on kiting. While her single-target damage with Magic Missile is reliable, she lacks the immediate screen-clearing burst of casters like Matcha, making auxiliary area-of-effect spells like Fireball or Thunder Storm essential pickups during level-ups.

Matcha: The Crowd Control Powerhouse

Matcha presents an anxious, panicky demeanor—frequently screaming in comic distress during story interactions—yet his battlefield prowess is among the strongest in the current meta.

• Starting Spell: Ink Pool. Players draw an ink pool on the ground to slow approaching hordes and inflict continuous area damage.
• Synergies: Community reports highlight that Ink Pool acts as an exceptional damage multiplier when combined with Fireball or Magic Missile, turning projectiles black and increasing overall output by approximately 25%.
• Active Ability: An explosive screen-nuke panic button that vaporizes crowded swarms when you are boxed into tight corners.
• Story Encounter: Unlocking Matcha opens his dedicated wing in the manor, triggering a narrative fishing excursion where you catch a mackerel to secure his friendship and advance the hub storyline.

Rum: The Close-Quarters Melee Caster

Rum shifts the traditional ranged survival dynamic into an aggressive, in-your-face combat style. Rather than casting from the perimeter, Rum excels at close-quarters engagement.

• Starting Spell: Magic Sword. Rum slashes through oncoming packs using sweeping arcane blade arcs. Player feedback notes that her signature strike sigil is so distinct that players initially confused it with the four-pointed extraction sigil during launch week.
• Metaprogression Priority: Player reviews specifically cite Rum as a character whose skill tree upgrades are mandatory rather than optional. Investing in her survivability and attack-arc metaprogression turns her from a vulnerable brawler into an unstoppable offensive engine capable of going near-infinite in prolonged encounters.

Anchan: The Tactical Wisp Specialist

Anchan introduces a high-skill tactical mechanic centered around pet manipulation and remote area denial.

• Starting Spell: Wisp. Unlike direct projectile or ground-pool spells, Anchan summons a drifting arcane orb that must be manually guided into enemy lines. Steam forum feedback notes that steering the slow-moving Wisp requires distinct precision, functioning best when played with a mouse rather than trackpads.
• Strategic Importance: Beyond standard planetary runs, Anchan plays an essential role during the third planet's narrative endgame sequences. Community reports confirm that when final sigils spawn obscured behind dense forest trees, Anchan's specific mechanics provide the necessary tools to navigate the terrain without timing out.
• Technical Notes: Anchan's active skill initially suffered from an interaction softlock, which was officially resolved in the version 1.0.2 hotfix update.

Coffee and Chicha: The Manor Specialists

Coffee and Chicha anchor the vital crafting, culinary, and alchemical infrastructure inside the manor hub, bridging the gap between planetary excursions and character growth.

• Coffee: The resident potion master. While early patch notes humorously remarked that Coffee grew weary of running potion tutorials for new apprentices, her station allows players to concoct defensive brews, invulnerability elixirs, and emergency restoration flasks using gathered seeds and planetary reagents.
• Chicha: Oversees the manor's recipe compendium. Linked through narrative interactions with Trinket's garden store, Chicha utilizes harvestable planetary crops—such as the radish required for the Dark Chicha recipe—to produce lasting buffs that boost base stats across all your deployed casters.

Manor Allies and Supporting Cast

Your journey through The Magus Circle characters extends beyond the six battlefield casters. The sprawling manor hub houses eccentric allies who govern shop inventories, modifiers, and run-altering mechanics.

• Curio: A sharp-tongued corvid shopkeeper who runs the central hub emporium. Players unlock Curio's services using keys found during runs, gaining access to relic slots, feather artifacts, and the manor's primary bounty board.
• Odds: The enigmatic host of the manor's high-stakes wager system. Meeting Odds grants the "Odd Indeed" achievement, allowing daring casters to risk gambling chips on planetary modifiers for massive material payouts.
• Trinket and Honey: Oversee the estate's greenhouse and vegetable plots. Through unlocked narrative memory cutscenes, Trinket shares carrot cake and teaches your casters how to cultivate crops for kitchen recipes.
• Jean: A faithful feline companion familiar who can accompany mages into planetary runs. Player guides heavily praise Jean on labyrinthine maps—such as the third planet's dense forest—because this pet automatically retrieves distant chests that would otherwise force players into deadly dead ends.

Progression, Tarot Cards, and Sigil Mastery

Maximizing the effectiveness of The Magus Circle characters requires understanding how the drawing mechanics intersect with character metaprogression. The game offers deep build customization through its 20 baseline spells and 600 augmenting upgrades.

Mastering Sigil Shapes and Sizes

The drawing engine rewards dynamic input scaling through mid-run level-up augmentations:

• Large Sigils: Drawing oversized spell shapes significantly increases area-of-effect radius and total spell power, ideal for Meteor strikes and Matcha's Ink Pools.
• Small Sigils: Scribing miniature glyphs dramatically accelerates your attack speed, enabling rapid-fire casts for Milk's Magic Missiles or burning strike chains.

Reversible Tarot Cards

Metaprogression boards permit players to fine-tune each caster's stat thresholds using tarot cards that feature reversible alignments. If a meta card offers +1 Maximum Health, players have the tactical option to invert the card, transforming it into a flat +10% Movement Speed boost instead. This allows you to tailor defensive stats specifically to Rum's melee requirements or augment Milk's inherent evasive advantages.

Input Hardware and Accessibility Settings

Because manual scribing demands steady coordination while dodging hordes via standard directional controls, selecting the right hardware configuration is essential:

• Drawing Tablets: Officially recommended by developer By Witchlight. If utilizing a tablet on Windows systems, ensure Microsoft Ink is disabled in your peripheral driver software to prevent drawing recognition lag.
• Touchscreens: Native touch support on compatible displays and Steam Deck offers intuitive gesture tracing, allowing players to flick sigils directly onto incoming enemy swarms.
• Accessibility Assist Modes: Players experiencing gesture fatigue or using controllers can utilize built-in accessibility toggles to slow down time while drawing, freeze time entirely during a cast, or map spells to direct button presses where the engine automatically scribes the sigil.

Frequently Asked Questions About The Magus Circle Characters

How many playable characters are in The Magus Circle?

There are six playable mages featured in The Magus Circle characters roster: Milk, Matcha, Coffee, Chicha, Rum, and Anchan. Each caster possesses their own dedicated skill tree, active ability, and starting spell.

How do you unlock new characters in The Magus Circle?

To unlock additional playable characters, you must defeat the Leviathan boss on a planetary expedition and successfully extract with the Leviathan material while piloting each specific mage. Progress is tracked on the planetary deployment console, and completing the roster rewards the "Everybody is Here" achievement.

Which mage should beginners use first?

Milk is the optimal starting choice among The Magus Circle characters. Her signature Magic Missile spell provides safe, long-range homing attacks, while her innate passive and active skills offer generous movement speed boosts to escape encroaching hordes.

Can you change a character's starting spell?

Currently, each mage begins their run locked to their signature starting spell (such as Milk with Magic Missile, Matcha with Ink Pool, and Anchan with Wisp). However, as runs progress, players expand their spell bar up to five slots by learning additional offensive and defensive spells discovered through level-up reward scrolls.