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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 hemocyanin on Sunday July 12 2015, @08:52PM
on second thought, making playing cards that have the exact same back image would be hard and players would eventually learn which back corresponds to which face -- kind of like a marked deck. I suppose one way around this would be to glue faces to regular playing cards, but that seems sort of a lousy option. Maybe Avery should make some perforated playing card sheets with a card image on one side and printable on the other.