richard garfield

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.

[For Part One, please click here!]

Wizards of the Coast, owners of the whole Magic : The Gathering card game (as well as the patent for the very concept of collectible trading card games), holds events throughout the world for Magic players to congregate, play, and win prizes that range from free packs of cards to cars and $50,000+ jackpots. These events have been broadcast on ESPN and they’re pretty serious about the whole Tournament thing, but neither of these things makes attending an MtG event any less fun – even if you’ve never played before.

I was traveling with fellow writer Brian, who is an avid Dungeons and Dragons player and former Heroclix player, but who has never played Magic. As I mentioned previously, I hadn’t played since my mouthbreathing high school ‘friends’ started meticulously sanding the clothes off of their female action figures and I decided that my real-life girlfriend was superior in most aspects. This particular demographical observation isn’t a reflection upon Magic players, but it IS a reflection upon living in an isolated area in upstate New York. Brian and I arrived at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago (on the shores of the beautiful Lake Michigan) and set to work to learn the game properly.

We didn’t have to go further than the entrance to the event before we found a ‘LEARN TO PLAY’ area, all set up and ready to help us learn the ropes. Behind the desk was Christian, a volunteer from Canada and unofficial ‘Magic Cheerleader’, whose ebullience made the Learn To Play Booth a hub of activity and an interesting place to retreat to between games and interviews during the course of the entire weekend. With the excellent and studied teachings of Christian and Jeff, Brian quickly picked up on the game and before I knew it, we were entered into a mini-tournament on the main floor. I suddenly became very nervous. I hadn’t summoned a Benevolent Unicorn in over a decade, my old collection of Slivers and Angels was way back in New York, and my Serpent Generator was rusty. I could barely turn the crank.

Brian and I were placed into a group of eight players, and we were all handed three booster packs of cards. Brian began to tear open his first pack, much to the horror of the accompanying players, and we quickly learned that there were rules and decorum for this kind of thing. When the DCI Judge asked if anyone at the table hadn’t played Magic before, Brian raised his hand and was dismissed as the resident smartass – which he was, just not in this specific case. We got things sorted out and we began to play.

Despite having no cards at the beginning of the day, these 15-card boosters were here for us to make gaming decks out of – and to keep! Each player would take their favorite or most useful card from the pack, and pass the rest of the pack on to the next player, in a process that would be repeated until there were no cards left. Out of these completely random cards, the players were forced to test their skill at building a viable 40-card deck out of a limited palette (as well as bonus of potentially discovering a valuable card). Mostly, I just grabbed cards that looked neat – with a focus on cards that used white magic, using the strange Godhead of Awe as the focus of my deck.

When we were done assembling decks of cards, we were paired off by the DCI Judges. The DCI, or Duelists Convocation International, is an omnipresent force at these Magic tournaments. They provide decisions when cards might not make perfect sense to both players, they organize rounds, and they prevent cheating. Yes, despite all of the fun, there can be cheating, as with any event where a prize is at stake, but I was informed that sneaky players were very rare and not something that had to be dealt with often. Should any two players remain unsure about how two or more cards interact, a hand would fly up to the call of ‘JUDGE!’, and a DCI judge, in full referee regalia, would be fast to respond and resolve any issues presenting themselves. It was an efficient, powerful system to see in action.

I ended up playing against an amazingly patient guy named Patrick, who calmly explained everything I was unsure about. Honestly, any player who was paired against us was pretty much guaranteed a spot in round two, so I’m sure that they were pretty psyched about contending with bumbling idiots – even while they remained completely honest and even suggested better moves when one of our choices was not well-made. The game was played in ‘best two out of three’ terms, and when my resurfacing Magic skills actually won a match and Patrick & I went into a third round, it felt pretty good – even when I finally lost. It was just fun to play again, and mostly know what I was doing. It was like riding a bike. The very strong core rules, designed by mathematics PhD Richard Garfield, inform everything else within the game, and they’re easy to remember.

When it was all said and done and we were both removed from competition, another player walked up to Brian and handed him a stack of at least 300 extra cards that said player didn’t want to lug home with him. It was a moment of camaraderie and generosity that would encapsulate the entire weekend and everyone we’d meet there. Can I stress enough that these are events that you want to go to, even if you have only the most remote interest in games? It might not be the best place for a guy to go looking for a date, but if you’re a chick, you pretty much have the pick of the litter. Also happening nearby in Chicago were a gathering of Masons, Lollapalooza, and the Black Womens’ Expo – and more than a few attendees of these events wandered curiously into the gaming hall.

My gaming loss marked the temporary end of my professional Magic career, but that didn’t stop Brian and I from procuring packs at the Magic Pro Shop booth and playing until 2 AM up in the hotel room. Down on the main floor, a ‘Gunslinging’ area was set up during the day for players to match decks against champions, designers, and even Richard Garfield himself – so even if you weren’t close to being in a tournament, you could claim the glory of playing against one of the game’s luminaries, win or lose.

The idea that the genesis of this was all in a small collectible card game was staggering.

By Sunday afternoon, the top eight players had been sorted out. WotC was liveblogging every deciding game onto their website, where they catalogued every match-up and crucial move to the captive audiences at home. Crowds gathered, people were forced out of competition, and professional gamer Michael Jacob from Livonia, MI came out on top, having beat out 8th place contender and close hometown friend (and guy with awesome hair), Mark Herberholz, early on.

Herberholz, a former $40,000 Magic winner, and recent graduate from Michigan State University, who was suitably crestfallen. “So close, but so far!” said Herberholz, “I think I’ve reached a certain level where I’m considered to be one of the best in the game that’s still playing, so right now the goal was to make the National team and finish in the top three, but since I didn’t do that and I came really close, it’s almost more disappointment than if I had just lost early on.”

Despite Mark’s disappointment, his position in the World Championships is already assured, so things remain both onward and upward. He seemed content to have at least been bested by a friend, and he told us that his interest in Magic has not waned. He has plans on hunting down a job at Upper Deck so that he can continue to compete in Wizards tournaments as a non-employee. Like many players, he was introduced to the game by bored friends who had found an excellent outlet for themselves. In his case, it was a $40,000 outlet.

Mike Jacob was thrilled to have won the final match against Sam Black, netting a prize of $5000, a big trophy, and a place in the World Finals. In our post-game interview, he credited a card called ‘Skred‘ in his ultimate victory over Black. He quickly launched into MtG language in the interview, and for as much as I understood at this point, I felt officially initiated into the club.

“It was a choice that nobody else in the tournament had done. I usually do play a lot of unique cards. Like, there’s a 3 mana 4/4 that can’t block that most people dismissed, and there was a 3/3 haste available, and I played this one instead because I thought it was better against the field”, said Mike. “It feels pretty good. I made a lot of really tight plays, and that’s how I got here.”

When we asked what his favorite part about the game was, he quickly replied, “Definitely the people. I just have so many friends that I met through this game, and I get to see them once a month, maybe twice a month at the other tournaments I go to. If I was gonna go to San Francisco, I could call three people and have a place to stay. How many people can say that they have friends all over the United States?”

This was an answer that we heard many times from many players. Even above the idea of free lodging across the US, the friendships that were made through the game were the most enduring, solid aspect of the gaming community. When asked if he’s let his friend Herberholz hold the trophy, he jokingly said “No, definitely not! He’s had enough accomplishments!”

As fellow players walked through the hotel lobby, they frequently shouted congratulations to Mike, who accepted them modestly. As a professional gamer who often wins $20,000 to $40,000 in various gaming systems, he has no plans on stopping anytime soon. Good luck in this year’s World finals in Memphis, Mike!

While crowning the US Champion was the purpose of the weekend, it wasn’t the extent of everything the weekend held for visitors within the complex world of Magic. Stay tuned for more, including an interview with Richard Garfield himself and some of the more collectible aspects of the game.