More than 30 years after its introduction, Magic: The Gathering continues to have a stranglehold on tabletop gamers’ attention and wallets. Nick Zarzycki’s fascinating feature doesn’t just chronicle Magic‘s history and development in a way outsiders (like yours truly) can understand, or explain the economics behind its continuing evolution. Most interestingly of all, it does so through the eyes of Richard Garfield, the man who designed the game to begin with—and watched it become a juggernaut only tenuously connected to his original brainchild.*
Convinced that Magic couldn’t survive by relying on its collectibility alone, Garfield thought the metagame of sports, which made it socially acceptable to spend tens of thousands of hours on a game, might save it from becoming a fad. He and Elias ended up using professional tennis—with its glitzy tournaments, rankings horserace, big fat winnings and transcendent star system—as a template for the Magic Pro Tour, which launched in 1996.
It’s easy to understand why Garfield left Wizards of the Coast a few years later: The entire history of the game sounds like a series of unending crises and social engineering experiments. But it goes even deeper than that: The more you look, the more you realize that there was never a time when Garfield wasn’t struggling to tame his creation.
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