card games

Heaven only knows when & where I got these old cards (which makes me think it was at Georgine’s, where we toss things into boxes quickly), but I do know why I bought them.

First, it was the graphics which grabbed me — vintage graphics usually do. Second was the tiny product advertising for Kitchen Klenzer & Automatic Soap Flakes on four of the cards — cards which had “Meet The Missus” on them (also very intriguing, so let’s call that the third reason).

But reason number four was the real kicker — the corny jokes on them.

1Q: What part of a baseball park should be reserved for platinum blondes?
1A: The Bleachers. Ba Dum Bum!

14Q: What is meant by a joint bank account?
14A: The husband puts in the money — the wife draws it out. Har Har Har

I just knew these cards would be a journey of discovery. Or a silly night at home playing the game — if they all were there, something you usually don’t have a clue about at any sale. So home they came.

In order to know if I had all the cards — or indeed all the parts of the game — I needed to look at the cards. I have 48 of them. If there were only 22 pairs of question & answer cards, and only four of the “Meet The Missus” cards, then all I need is question card #4, and answer card #15. Am I only missing two cards from the deck? (Hey, no jokes about me not playing with a full deck!) Or is there more to this game?

Time to turn to the Internet.

Quickly I discover this is a rather rare set of cards. It belongs to a 1937 game, of which there were at least four versions, according to Kovels. As Kovels doesn’t offer much in terms of description, and has no photos, I can’t even begin to guess which — if any — my cards belong to.

My search continues…

I discover that the Meet The Missus game was in fact an advertising premium for The Fitzpatrick Brothers (of Chicago, Illinois) who sponsored a radio show of the same name. The show was the 1934 brain-child of Thomas Kivlan, a salesman for Chicago’s WBBM. A young Tommy Bartlett was the show’s host — yes, that Tommy Bartlett, of the famous water-skiing show & other attractions in the Wisconsin Dells. This is exciting to me because I’m originally from Wisconsin, and I’ve been to The Dells & Tommy’s attractions many times. I love discovering hidden connections in things!

While many may remember Bartlett for his radio days at WBBM hosting Welcome Travelers with Bob Cunningham, Jim Ameche, and Les Lear, Bartlett’s early radio fame had much to do with Meet The Missus.

Meet The Missus was a daily radio show, on at 3:00 in the afternoon in 1937, which catered to housewives. It quickly became so popular that spin-off shows, such as The Missus Goes to Market, were created. By 1940 Kivlan had gone from salesman to advertising executive — and Tommy Bartlett had become “the housewife’s pinup boy”.

The Missus radio shows were, as my cards indicate, corny. It’s not just my hip 2008 mentality being cruel to some old time radio shows — even Time in 1940 called them “the cutest, corniest radio programs in the U. S.” But the shows were wildly popular. The Time article says:

In its early career on the air, The Missus Goes to Market opened 10,000 new outlets for Automatic Soap Flakes. Similarly successful, Meet the Missus has attracted a million requests for a card game advertised on the program, and pulls 3,000 letters a week. Reveling in his success with the matrons, young Tommie Bartlett earns $22,000 a year, lives handsomely in a duplex apartment on Lake Shore Drive. A feature of almost every berry, corn and apple festival around Chicago, Bachelor Tommie has so far received 20 proposals of marriage, inherited $5,000 from one mike-struck listener.

Did you catch that part about the million requests for a Meet The Missus card game advertised on the program? Me too. But what was this game exactly? Do I have a complete one? And, if so, which one?

I continued to search. And then I found it — at least the cards look identical to mine.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m missing (at least) the game board (which is supposed to be made of heavy paper, measuring 18 inches square when unfolded), and the instructions (which were printed on the back of the mailing envelope). But that’s still not the worst of it.

It’s not just that I’m currently unable to play Meet The Missus, even if I’ve grown to adore it more minute by minute as I discover more about the game, but seeing those nifty gameboard graphics just makes me itch all the more… I need it, you see. The $150 may be entirely reasonable given its scarcity; but I don’t have it. And so that means I am unable to really meet this Missus.

Pooh.

But, if the Tommy Bartlett Show could continue this year, it’s 55th year, despite there being no more lake for a water show (Lake Delton literally vanished in 15 minutes this past June), then this collector can keep her spirits up and her eyes down, looking for more pieces of this old vintage game.

You can learn a lot from Tommy Bartlett, a man who never water skied yet started a water skiing show — and ended up in the Water Ski Hall of Fame. OK, so the guy slipped on a pair of water skies at his 70th birthday party, but still…

Bartlett himself was said to be a collector. Not just of tourist attractions and things to put in them (like one of Russia’s three spare core modules for the space station Mir, which is a main attraction at the Tommy Bartlett Exploratory), but of paperweights. In that old Time article, it was said that Bartlett listed lawyers’ offices, barbershops, & funeral parlors as the places he haunted, considering them to be the “best bets” for adding to his collection of (at that time) 150.

Maybe that’s where I’ll start my searches for the missing parts of my Meet The Missus game.

*****

Side Note: Tommy Bartlett died September 6, 1998 at the age of 84. It’s rather fitting as that was a Labor Day weekend, which is the end of the show season in the Wisconsin Dells. It is purely coincidental that this, another Labor Day weekend, is when I decided to dig through the box that had these cards in them & do my research. However, the serendipity, as it usually is in collecting, is delightful.

It was something of an honor to be able to sit down with Richard Garfield, the father of Magic : The Gathering, and thereby an influential force in my psychological development. Despite battling against a bad cold, Garfield was courteous enough to answer all of the questions that Brian (a writer for Geek Monthly, who was also covering the event) and I posed to him about Magic and himself.

Garfield has had two actual Magic cards based on him and his name. First off, there’s Phelddagrif – a flying purple hippopotamus, and in a later set of intentionally jokey cards, ‘Richard Garfield Ph.D.’ appears as a nearly omnipotent ‘Legendary Human Designer’.

So, where did it all come from?

“I had been designing games for years. In fact, I was structuring my life around the assumption that I couldn’t get into game design as a living, because it’s a hard place to make a living. At the same time, I was trying to do games seriously on the side, and I was going into academics. I love math, and was teaching and learning math, and I figured I could fit some game design in.

“I think Magic came about from one particular thing I like to do with games – modify them. So, when we played chess, we often played chess with different rules. We’d, for instance, play ‘Bomb Chess’. We’d choose a guy who had a bomb on him and you could blow him up as a move. We’d play Monopoly where every time you passed go, you’d play Poker, and things like that. I loved doing that, and my friends enjoyed it, so I think that Magic was my way of learning to extend that to other people, because when people make their deck, they’re really constructing a game in a similar fashion to the way I like to modify games.”

Did you like fantasy stuff while you were growing up?

“I did, but I wasn’t a fantasy nut. I was the last one of my friends to read The Lord of the Rings and so forth, and I did like Dungeons and Dragons, but what I really like in fantasy is the shared fantasy that anything is possible, and the shared mythos that everybody has. There are so many parts of fantasy that you don’t need to explain. You see a troll – you’ve got a lot of ideas of what it does, and that works well in a very flexible, expandable game.”

So, where did the seed of Magic come from?

“Well, the epiphany, and there was a ‘Eureka‘ moment, was in ‘91 in Oregon. I suddenly realized that not all of the players had to have the same equipment in the game, and that seems obvious now, but back then it was a real revelation. And it was such a revelation in fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and at the same time I wasn’t 100% sure that you could make a game like that. I got people excited about what this game might be like, but the examples I had on hand didn’t work well. For instance if I said ‘let’s play poker’ but you could make your own deck, or ‘let’s play chess’ but you could choose your own army – none of those are good games. You need a new foundation, a new paradigm, and it was a few months after that when I began to figure out techniques for making it work.”

So you decided on the fantasy aspect because anything was possible?

“Ultimately, yes, although I did play around with some other ideas while I was casting this around, like science fiction, and I did some abstract design that was more Uno-esque and that sort of thing.”

Why is it called Magic : The Gathering?

“Well… there’s a few answers to that. When it first came out, we said ‘the gathering’ was a gathering of friends, a gathering of people, and a gathering of cards. It seemed like a good descriptor for our first set. We were expecting our second set to be ‘Magic : Ice Age‘, and to have chapters in this book going along, but that was before we sort of ran them all together. So all the cards are now part of Magic : The Gathering – which originally going to be like the first chapter.

“My name for it was ‘Magic’, and the reason we didn’t use that is simply because ‘magic’ is a hard thing to own, and there were all sorts of really terrible names that were floating around that we could own – but Magic : The Gathering was a good final resting spot because we could own ‘Magic : The Gathering’ and people could still call it ‘Magic’.

What were some of the other ‘terrible’ names that were floating around?

“Let’s see… the one that was closest to being used was ‘Manaclash’, which actually became a card in the game – a joke about that name. And then there was also ‘Manaflash’. There was a big debate about whether calling them flash cards was too academic, or cool. Oh, ‘Lords of Dominia’ was another.”

What is your involvement with the game now?

“The last card set I designed was published two years ago – Ravnica. I’m still working with Wizards – or sort of hanging out with Wizards, I should say – but I’ve got no real relationship with Magic other than going to shows right now. I occasionally pitch them some game ideas, and certainly wouldn’t be surprised if one day in the future I work on another set, but currently, my involvement is pretty much right here.”

Do you still play?

“I play off and on. Usually when I go to a show like this, I begin playing again and learn what the environment is like, and hang out and do some stuff like that, do some different Magic play formats, but then I quit. And mostly that’s just to get stuff done. Magic is one of the very few games that I have to stop playing in order to get stuff done. There’s a few other paper games that I play that way, a few computer games, and eventually I just have to put ‘em down. But I love returning to them. It’s a lot of fun. It’s not something you can really get bored with.”

What do you do outside of Magic? You have a Ph.D. in MATH!

“I haven’t been working with math since ‘94. Magic came out in ‘93 and it grew for a year before I left academics – but I do teach a game design class at the University of Washington in their Honors Department. We’re building the curriculum – we teach one class a year. You can’t major in game design, but they’re talking about that. They don’t have enough courses yet.

“Even though it’s in the Computer Science Department, our focus on games in universal – not just on the computer. So somebody who sits in our class will see examples from games that are thousands of years old through World of Warcraft and Doom and games published in the 70s, 60s, 50s, back in the 1800s – we have a very historical sense of games.”

What’s your favorite game that’s come out recently?

“I play all sorts of games, and I’m in and out of touch with various genres of games. My favorite computer game of recent years has been Quadradius. It’s a small Flash game, and it’s outstanding. I’ve gotten together with the designer because I liked his designs so much and it’s almost totally unrecognized – though Wizards did recognize it; they gave it an award. And what I like about it is in a very special area of games for me, which is computer games almost entirely seem to focus on player skill. That is, you can sit down and play a game with some people and the most skillful player will win, time and time again. For some games, that’s okay, but one of the things I really like about paper games is that I can find a game for any audience, and everybody can have a fun time playing it. Quadradius has a hell of a lot of luck and a hell of a lot of skill, and it’s like in the poker sort of area.”

What do you like most about the MtG game, or the culture, or… whatever?

“I think the breadth of player that play it. It’s not just one type of player that plays Magic. People play for different reasons. Some people are very competitive and like to minimax their decks, and they’re sort of like the old hot rod tinkerers, where they’re trying to get their engines to perform as much as possible. Other people are interested in driving to old Edsels, or flashing around in weird cars of their own construction, so to speak. There’s a remarkable expressiveness in a Magic deck. That’s what I like the most.”

What your favorite mana color to play?

“Well, the true answer there is that I like to play whatever’s not being played, so if nobody’s playing green, I want to make green work, and I’ll play with green. For an answer which is less tethered to the environment, I’d have to say blue – but what I don’t particularly like in blue is the countering – the counterspelling. I like the trickiness of blue, so I don’t necessarily like preventing you from doing what you want to do, but I like the meta-game stuff in blue and all the weird stuff blue can do. There was a certain point when I became one of the game’s most fierce critics of blue’s counterspelling abilities, because one too many of my decks just got completely shut down, and that’s just no fun. I don’t mind that blue makes me think, but when I want to have something to think about.”

There was a story that you had proposed to your wife through Magic cards.

“It is true. I asked my fiancee (at the time) what her favorite artist was, and she told me Quinton Hoover, and so I contacted him and asked him to make a piece of Magic art for me called ‘Proposal’. A friend of mine out at the company marked up cards using the art – using the layout program, he made these cards that looked exactly like real cards, using land cards with film attached to them, and he gave me nine of them because I wanted to stack my deck. Even though I did not – I played fair. I played with one, which I viewed as fair. I don’t know if it was really fair. And I played with her for hours before I was able to cast the spell. She was just cleaning my clock, but eventually I managed to get it in play, and it said ‘Allows Richard to Propose marriage to Lily. If she accepts, both players win and we mix our decks as a shared deck’. And so I got a Royal Assassin out of it also.”

[Editor's note : Quinton Hoover's 'Proposal' card was stolen at a Tokyo show in 1999. The art has otherwise never been revealed.]

What was the casting cost?

“It cost four, all white. Later on, I actually made cards for the birth announcement for my kids. So, four green was my first child, ‘Splendid Genesis‘ was her card, and four blue mana was ‘Fraternal Exaltation‘, her brother. The Proposals were not genuine cards, though, in that they looked like real cards, but weren’t really printed.”

So they won’t help you win a game?

“Arguably, one of the will get you a wife. There are nine of those [birth announcement] cards – we gave one to each of our bridesmaids and our wedding party, and one to the artist, and one to the man who put these cards together. They were actually printed for me by friends at Cartamundi, there’s probably around 100 of each of those. I sent them out in cards to people.”

So, Magic is HUGE. Is there anything we left out?

“Well, the most important thing on my mind right now is that I just released a couple of games – Schizoid on XBOX Arcade, in case anybody is interested in what I’m working on, and Spectromancer is about to come out. The beta is on Spectromancer.com, and that’s going to be on PC. We just found a new distributor after our old one fell through, but I can’t talk about it right yet. For both of those, I had a lot of partners in the game design element, and Spectromancer was done with a Belorussian partner – real clever guys I met when I was in Grand Prix Moscow.”

How do you feel about the fact that your game idea has spawned such a vast collection of players?

“It’s very gratifying. Every time I come to one of these events, I’m overwhelmed all over again, and I’m grateful that the stars aligned on my game concept and it really caught on, because I’ve certainly seen a lot of great concepts not catch on in the past. So, it’s certainly way bigger than me.”

There’s even more to come. Click here for part one and click here for part two of the 15th Anniversary of Magic Celebration.

I first laid my hands on Magic cards back in 1994, when I was an exceptionally cool 13 year old.

It was a hot summer day and I was helping out at a tag sale in the driveway of a family friend. Since he collected all kinds of comics and cards and toys (with the sole intent of eventually profiting from them), it was always fun to help out and take home anything that he didn’t feel like packing away into his dank garage again. On this particular afternoon, I was handed my first set of Magic : The Gathering stuff – a sealed box with a paperback-sized first edition rulebook and a good handful of cards – all with pictures of dragons and warriors and magical items on them. And it felt special.

I was very much into Dungeons and Dragons at the time, drawing serpentine beasts in the corners of my notebooks, listening to Jethro Tull, and fascinated with the Renaissance Faire for reasons that extended slightly beyond the bounteous cleavage present, so everything synced up sublimely. I spent the rest of the afternoon figuring out the puzzle of the cards – what symbol meant what, the terminology and the rules, and trying to understand the high concept that playing cards didn’t need to be emblazoned with hearts and clubs in order to be useable. This was, after all, the very first example of a collectible card game (or CCG) since 1904. It was a lot to take in.

Magic : The Gathering, or MtG, is a card game in which you, the player, represent a powerful wizard. Using a store of magic powers (your deck of cards), you summon creatures to attack your opponent and defend yourself with, and cast spells to various ends – make a creature stronger, or take away the life points of another player, or give a creature a special ability, and so on. If an opponent’s monster or spell manages to break through your battlements, you lose some points off of your life total. It’s that simple and that complex.

Using a vast, vast variety of Magic cards (well over 45 standard sets worth), the player constructs their own deck of roughly 60 cards to go into battle with. In this deck, the player includes Land (which provides magic for spells), all manner of creatures from dragons to moths, and a good deal of magical spells to help and hinder the creatures at battle. Given that three or four sets of 100+ cards have been coming out consistently every year since 1993, the variety of cards that is presented to the player is staggering. The biggest challenge for a competitive player is to see past this huge collection of beautiful, challenging cards and to hone their Magic deck into a finely tuned machine – and then hope that their most effective cards happen to enter their hand quickly from the randomized deck. It’s very tempting to make an army of Merfolk or Tree People or Giants, but will it work effectively in battle?

MtG has undeniably been the standard, driving force behind all of today’s popular collectible card games : Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Upper Deck’s Vs. system, and so on. To remain consistently selling millions of cards over a 15 year period is a testament to the universal appeal of MtG as a paramount example of strategic gaming, as well as stellar aesthetic sensibilities.

My own history of collecting the game is something that informed many of my ‘collecting’ attitudes. We were still in those fabled pre-internet days, so I was completely unaware that any cards existed outside of my basic set until I came across more by accident. I remember long car rides with my uncle to hunt down packs of new, mysterious cards. Legends, Antiquities, The Dark, Fallen Empires – all different aspects of this world that we were dueling in, represented in collections of new creatures and spells. We’d tear open the plastic packs of randomized cards and celebrate the new, rare additions to our armies or lament the quintriplicate cards that we were cursed with. Of course, multiples of the same card in your deck can work to the player’s advantage, but when you pull your 35th Uncle Istvan card, they lose their appeal quickly and you begin considering avunculicide. Or, like one player I met this weekend, sent all of the guys into battle in one deck and see what happens. An army of indestructible, ticked off, old Russian men with axes is nothing to scoff at.

For a variety of reasons, I faded out of playing in 1999. The local game shop was shutting down, so the generous owner was no longer going to be around to give me a free pack or two with every purchase I made. At least a quarter of my early collection was accumulated through the generosity of John Callahan. The gaming friends I had introduced the game to became more interested in drawing naked bits onto the Elves than actually using them effectively in a game. I began focusing on art and writing. The rules were starting to get convoluted. Still, even after I stopped playing, I collected the cards for a few more years, very casually, because I remained in love with the artwork, which did an excellent job of making the Magic universe a little more real. Over time, I even started communicating with some of the cards’ artists about art and illustration, and learned a few things that remain an influence on my own art-things to this day.

So, I suppose that MtG played a far more integral part in my mental and creative development than I’d previously realized, and when I attended the 15th Anniversary Celebration / 2008 US National Championships in Chicago this past weekend, it all came back to life, as strong as ever. My huge boxes of unused Magic cards that were once on their way to eBay were relevant again, and I was already leaps and bounds into creating a collection of these things – this time for play. The rules of the game had gone back to basics, the art was better than ever, and I had more fun playing games in a weekend than I can ever recall having.

I’d always sensed that there was a real culture behind the game, but when I heard that there were worldwide tournaments of Magic, broadcast on ESPN and with thousands of dollars in prizes, it was just a little intimidating. I’m not competitive by nature. Hell, my uncle and I used to glue our own art and text onto existing Magic cards just for fun, and I hid behind the telephone pole during high school baseball.

I quickly learned that there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of – the strange lexicon, the hardcore players, the structure of the tournament – everything was saturated with goodwill, a solid code of polite and moral gaming, and above all else, the fun of matching wits and skill against other players from around the United States – whether you were a seasoned champion, or a complete neophyte. I learned new games, relearned an old one, and was quickly reminded why I was so enraptured with the game in the first place.

You can’t get this at a comic con. Stay tuned for an exhaustive recap of the thrilling weekend.