The article implies that Final Fantasy was inspired to use "MP" from Ultima III, which used it as an abbreviation of "magic points". The article then goes on to say that the first game to explicitly use "MP" to mean "mana points" was Dungeon Master, which came out the same year as Final Fantasy, but was not a JRPG.

> Before MTG though?

Don't know about JRPGs, but at least some American tabletop RPGs used the term "mana" relating to magic earlier than M:tG -- e.g., GURPS used "mana levels" to describe the strength of the ambient magical field (not as "magic points") since at least the publication of the first edition of GURPS Fantasy in 1986.

I remember playing home-brew D&D games in the late seventies. MP were manna points.

Whether it mana from polynesia or manna from Exodus is was ambiguous for broadly but spottily educated seventeen year olds.

But yes, I am sure that any rigid tracing of the term in role playing to 2 or 5 sources is going to fail.

Squaresoft's Secret of Mana came out the same year at M:TG, 1993.

Here's the Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_of_Mana. I never played the game myself, but the article mentions that mana was used as "spell points", and that

> The story takes place in a fictional world where mana represents an ethereal, but finite, energy source.