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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: 3, Informative) by G-forze on Sunday July 12 2015, @07:22AM
I started playing in 1996 when I got a starter pack from, of all people, my mother. I became fascinated by the games complexity and enormous variation, found some like minded people, and put a large part of my small teenager's budget on new cards. Later, in 2001, when I moved to another city for studies, I kind of left MtG behind me.
In 2014, I had just changed jobs, and found out that a lot of my new collegues had also been players earlier on. That re-lit the interest for many of us again, but after 14 years, my old decks were at quite a disadvantage, and some were incompatible with the rule changes. My old dragon deck, for instance, which included some of the most powerful dragons back in the day (Shivan Dragon, Rathi Dragon etc), was completely undone by all the new, IMO overpowered dragons that had been released since.
Back in my youth, I bought quite a bunch of expensive cards, too. The dual lands from the Revised set, I bought for about 20 euros each. Today, some of them sell for almost ten times that. I think, if I sold off all my most valuable rares, I could get back about the same amount I've spent through the years. Of course, investing in some stock would probably have given me a better payoff, but then I would have had to have another hobby, which would probably have cost me too. So in the grand scheme of things, I don't think MtG has been such a bad use of my money.
If I run into the term "SJW", I stop reading.