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How Magic the Gathering Began, and Where it Goes Next

posted by cmn32480 on Saturday July 11 2015, @02:17PM   
from the its-just-a-card-game dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

The game originated in the early 1990s in the mind of Richard Garfield, at the time a graduate student working towards a PhD in combinatorial mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. A life-long tabletop gamer, he had approached a publisher to pitch an idea for a game about programming robots, only to be told that the company needed something more portable and cheaper to produce.

Magic was Garfield's response, and it involved one major innovation that set it apart from any game previously released.
...
Magic's latest set marks a turning point for the game. Magic Origins focuses on five of the game's most popular recurring characters – a move that provides a jumping-on point for new players intimidated by over two decades' worth of accumulated storylines.

I played D&D, Gamma World, Traveller, and many RPG's avidly into college, but when I first saw Magic and its $20 price for a single card I discovered there were lines I would not cross. As an adult I have a civil engineering friend whom I've watched over the last decade and a half disappear and then emerge, going cold turkey, only to re-submerge for another year. For those who took up Magic, why did you take it up and do you still play?

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Original Submission

• The Chess of Cards (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2015, @03:08PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 11 2015, @03:08PM (#207888)

  I remember this game not too many years after it got started, around 1996. Back then we would typically describe it as a strategic game like chess but with cards rather than a fixed set of pieces on a board. Without even considering any of the novelty such as the story lore on the cards or the artwork which typically was very good, and still remains rather solid to this day, the focus was on the game itself. I don't know if there was ever a card game that was as well thought-out as Magic; the library is beyond enormous over the years and all the dynamics are compatible with one another. There have been revisions to the rules over time for those intimately familar with the rules (which feels like reading a legal document at this point!) but you can literally use the first cards ever printed along with what is being printed today and the game works. Decipher's Star Wars card game may have been a good challenger with regard to providing a similar grand level of strategic options, but things didn't go as planned for them when the license was not reviewed effectively killing the game off overnight.
  
  I still have a handful of cards but haven't decided yet if I will try to get rid of them or hang onto them anyway. The trouble isn't the will to play -- it's a fun game any way you look at it -- but having someone to play with became troublesome. If you're not trying to break into the "pro" world then you don't need to worry too much about unloading thousands of dollars into buying cards. Playing casually with friends that also aren't dumping money heavily balances everything out; nobody is going to be disturbingly unbalanced unless you simply build decks poorly. The popularity and "pro" circuit and tournaments certainly help Wizard's business model. I'm sure it's more than intentional that the cycle of permitted cards keeps shifting along with what sets are being released, compelling you to get on an upgrade treadmill indefinitely until you call it quits and get off.
  
  It does feel like chess, with literally thousands upon thousands of pieces to choose from and no limit such as the size of a chess board. There is no maximum to the size of the deck and no limit to the play field on the table. People have their own house rules that go beyond the official rulebook to support play styles such as team play. It's impressive Wizard is still generating new ideas that stick with each new expansion they create to keep people interested and refreshing the flavour of the game time and time again.

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