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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.
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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?
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday July 12 2015, @01:51AM
The article doesn't really state what set Magic apart, thus the question at the end. Where it began is covered in the first two paragraphs of the excerpt. Where it is going next is after the ellipsis.
Often when you paraphrase too much, accusations fly about putting words in the article's mouth, or imparting spin. When your excerpt takes too much from TFA, flak comes in about fair use or how readers are made to read too much. So one approach is to try to excerpt the most representative lines (a challenge sometimes because some authors don't write in quotable chunks); I choose that because it seems the most honest to me.
Washington DC delenda est.