7 ms·

The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong

96 points by superbyte 2y ago

marssaxman 2y ago
> One day they found a trap door hidden in the woods near the fort, which opened to reveal a rusty ladder leading to a series of underground bunkers filled with broken doors and graffiti. That's funny: I think it is quite likely that I once found that same trap door and descended that same ladder. It's quite a magical place.
mock-possum 2y ago
[flagged]
- aridzone 2y ago
  [flagged]
- 2024throwaway 2y ago
  I'm not sure why this is surprising. Prison labor in the US is an extensively documented horror.
  - paleotrope 2y ago
    You didn't read the part about it being in Belgium?
    - culi 2y ago
      Which, btw, is currently on a nationwide prison strike since early April.[0] At least Belgium prison strikes get some press. Unlike the US ones. In 2016 we had the largest prison strike in this nation's history[1] and I didn't see a peep about it in any major newspaper [0] https://www.brusselstimes.com/998003/indefinite-prison-strike-in-full-swing-across-belgium https://www.brusselstimes.com/998003/indefinite-prison-strik... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S._prison_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S._prison_strike
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
getwiththeprog 2y ago
Linked from the article are the pre release testing cards.. According to Garfield - it all went wrong after this! Magic with it's twice a year new sets and pay-to-win is not what he had envisioned. https://www.magiclibrarities.net/955-rarities-alpha-beta-gamma-playtest-cards-english-cards-index.html https://www.magiclibrarities.net/955-rarities-alpha-beta-gam...
- yetihehe 2y ago
  Everything always goes wrong when it leaves it's small niche and starts being monetised. The thing that mattered no longer matters, only money.
  - alisonatwork 2y ago
    Magic was monetized from the beginning. It was the precursor to loot boxes in modern computer gaming and used the same hooks that get people addicted to gambling to encourage sales of booster packs.
    - paleotrope 2y ago
      I remember getting addicted hard to find those booster packs. It's funny we always look down on the people that would buy single cards from binders though
    - lupire 2y ago
      The article covers how this is not true and how the transition to loot boxes was how it went wrong. The start is meandering but the meat is that the end.
      - alisonatwork 2y ago
        I think the hook is the same with loot boxes, gacha and booster packs. You pay money for the thrill of not knowing what you are going to get. For some people that thrill is addictive, so they keep spending more money for that brief moment of excitement. From my perspective the idea of a game being compelling because of the mystery doesn't work with PvP because the fundamental mechanic pushes people to learn the meta so they can win. If the original goal of Magic was to allow people to feel the wonder of discovery, either it should have been a PvE game with a GM, or the booster packs actually are a core mechanic that provide the thrill of the unknown, in which case the game was structured from the start to make money.
neonate 2y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20240514162813/https://defector.com/the-creator-of-magic-the-gathering-knows-exactly-where-it-all-went-wrong http://web.archive.org/web/20240514162813/https://defector.c... https://archive.ph/lH00w https://archive.ph/lH00w
itsdrewmiller 2y ago
The guy who invented the power 9 complaining about these new designers making rares that are too good… right. Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.
- rat87 2y ago
  Spells have mostly gotten slightly weaker. But creatures have only grown more and more powerful. As for rares I don't think Richard Garfield ever intended to make it an expensive game. Magic is one of if not the first trading card game they didn't really know what they were getting into. They thought people might buy a handful of random cards (not 4x best card) and everyone might use different cards (whatever they had lying around). Closer to traditional kitchen magic. He never intended the game to be so expensive. And mythic rares weren't a thing for the first decade and a half.
  - empath75 2y ago
    Early on my playgroup literally just mixed all their cards together. We didn't really think of it as being "my deck" or whatever when we were playing unlimited. It wasn't really until Legends came out that anybody in my group of game friends started taking collectability or competitiveness seriously.
- ipqk 2y ago
  Balancing a game is hard. You can hardly blame anyone for getting it wrong on their first attempt. But getting it wrong 30 years later…
  - throwup238 2y ago
    I think the ruleset in MTG especially with all the mechanics introduced is way too complicated to balance at this point. It's got the card game equivalent of Turing completeness and the best they can do is ban cards that turn out to be too powerful from competitive games as their utility is discovered.
mxwsn 2y ago
Part of the original magic that Garfield talks about, the player experience of discovering a world of cards you've never seen before, is captured by recent video games like Inscryption (especially) and Slay the Spire. Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outside the game as in Magic the Gathering. Dominion randomly sets 10 cards to be accessible to players, out of ~500 for an extremely huge number of combinations, such that each 10-set is always new. Dominion shines as card value, and the value of card interactions (e.g., in a combo or engine), can vary significantly by the random 10-set context. In a sense this gives a tremendous sense of novelty, significantly more than playing Magic the Gathering.
- orlp 2y ago
  A very recent game that also captures this in a unique way is Balatro. The cards that you play are ordinary playing cards, but the way you modify how they score and what cards you have in your deck is a cool discovery process.
  - mxwsn 2y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation! Balatro is quite fun
- awithrow 2y ago
  Its probably the nostalgia talking but a lot of the early magic was the art as well. It was professional enough to look good but not so polished that it didn't have its own character. I had favorite artists and it was always fun just admiring the art. The new cards just don't capture me the same way. Something about them is too polished or too homogenized. They don't leave any room for imagination. I feel the same way about D&D artwork as well. No surprise that both D&D and MTG are owned by the same parent company.
  - sshine 2y ago
    They have a lot more narrative control over the artwork now. A thing I disliked (as a kid) about the old cards, as they transitioned to these more homogenised styles, was how wildly different the cards looked. It didn’t feel like one game, and there were many artistic styles I simply didn’t like. But looking back now, the old cards artwork is so much more iconic; in part because of the nostalgia, but in part because each card is different from those drawn by other artists, you remember them better apart.
paulpauper 2y ago
She was right. After Magic: The Gathering debuted at Gen Con in 1993, six months of product sold out in six weeks. that was like the original bitcoin. anyone who still held on to those cards , especially the power 9 or dual lands, made a killing
mrbluecoat 2y ago
> We send all the flattened Magic packaging and booster packs to the prison and the inmates do the product fulfillment. Was that a joke or serious? I was enjoying the article until that abrupt end and it just felt dark. A company forcing imprisoned humans to distribute their product?
- valbaca 2y ago
  Are you unfamiliar with the Prison Industrial Complex? Are you unfamiliar that slavery is illegal in America except for prisoners?
  - paleotrope 2y ago
    Again, this was in Belgium.
- rodgerd 2y ago
  Prison labour underpins a great deal of the machinery of capitalism, even in nominally free countries. Serfdom never really left the building.
edfletcher_t137 2y ago
"This wasn't just nostalgia talking. There seems to be something objectively more magical, more infinite-seeming and treasurable about this smaller, more limited version of Magic." Not that I ever had the chance to play the pre-release version of the game, but the explosion of complexity has made me yearn for exactly this, a "smaller, more limited version"... so much so that I wrote https://twmtg.computerpho.be/ https://twmtg.computerpho.be/ to try and capture it (and also, admittedly, as a bit of a joke/dig)
- jdknezek 2y ago
  You might look into Mindbug[1]. It uses a few, very streamlined mechanics. It plays quickly - 3 life, 10 cards. But there is a ton of card variety, and wildly powerful cards, because the mindbug mechanic makes each game self-balancing to a degree. I believe Garfield also gave creative input during development. [1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/345584/mindbug-first-contact https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/345584/mindbug-first-con...
fennecbutt 2y ago
When the suits saw dollar signs and got directly involved. Aka where everything goes wrong.

96 points by superbyte 2y ago

> One day they found a trap door hidden in the woods near the fort, which opened to reveal a rusty ladder leading to a series of underground bunkers filled with broken doors and graffiti. That's funny: I think it is quite likely that I once found that same trap door and descended that same ladder. It's quite a magical place.

mock-possum 2y ago

[flagged]

aridzone 2y ago
[flagged]
2024throwaway 2y ago
I'm not sure why this is surprising. Prison labor in the US is an extensively documented horror.
- paleotrope 2y ago
  You didn't read the part about it being in Belgium?
  - culi 2y ago
    Which, btw, is currently on a nationwide prison strike since early April.[0] At least Belgium prison strikes get some press. Unlike the US ones. In 2016 we had the largest prison strike in this nation's history[1] and I didn't see a peep about it in any major newspaper [0] https://www.brusselstimes.com/998003/indefinite-prison-strike-in-full-swing-across-belgium https://www.brusselstimes.com/998003/indefinite-prison-strik... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S._prison_strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_U.S._prison_strike
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

getwiththeprog 2y ago

Linked from the article are the pre release testing cards.. According to Garfield - it all went wrong after this! Magic with it's twice a year new sets and pay-to-win is not what he had envisioned. https://www.magiclibrarities.net/955-rarities-alpha-beta-gamma-playtest-cards-english-cards-index.html https://www.magiclibrarities.net/955-rarities-alpha-beta-gam...

yetihehe 2y ago
Everything always goes wrong when it leaves it's small niche and starts being monetised. The thing that mattered no longer matters, only money.
- alisonatwork 2y ago
  Magic was monetized from the beginning. It was the precursor to loot boxes in modern computer gaming and used the same hooks that get people addicted to gambling to encourage sales of booster packs.
  - paleotrope 2y ago
    I remember getting addicted hard to find those booster packs. It's funny we always look down on the people that would buy single cards from binders though
  - lupire 2y ago
    The article covers how this is not true and how the transition to loot boxes was how it went wrong. The start is meandering but the meat is that the end.
    - alisonatwork 2y ago
      I think the hook is the same with loot boxes, gacha and booster packs. You pay money for the thrill of not knowing what you are going to get. For some people that thrill is addictive, so they keep spending more money for that brief moment of excitement. From my perspective the idea of a game being compelling because of the mystery doesn't work with PvP because the fundamental mechanic pushes people to learn the meta so they can win. If the original goal of Magic was to allow people to feel the wonder of discovery, either it should have been a PvE game with a GM, or the booster packs actually are a core mechanic that provide the thrill of the unknown, in which case the game was structured from the start to make money.

neonate 2y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20240514162813/https://defector.com/the-creator-of-magic-the-gathering-knows-exactly-where-it-all-went-wrong http://web.archive.org/web/20240514162813/https://defector.c... https://archive.ph/lH00w https://archive.ph/lH00w

itsdrewmiller 2y ago

The guy who invented the power 9 complaining about these new designers making rares that are too good… right. Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.

rat87 2y ago
Spells have mostly gotten slightly weaker. But creatures have only grown more and more powerful. As for rares I don't think Richard Garfield ever intended to make it an expensive game. Magic is one of if not the first trading card game they didn't really know what they were getting into. They thought people might buy a handful of random cards (not 4x best card) and everyone might use different cards (whatever they had lying around). Closer to traditional kitchen magic. He never intended the game to be so expensive. And mythic rares weren't a thing for the first decade and a half.
- empath75 2y ago
  Early on my playgroup literally just mixed all their cards together. We didn't really think of it as being "my deck" or whatever when we were playing unlimited. It wasn't really until Legends came out that anybody in my group of game friends started taking collectability or competitiveness seriously.
ipqk 2y ago
Balancing a game is hard. You can hardly blame anyone for getting it wrong on their first attempt. But getting it wrong 30 years later…
- throwup238 2y ago
  I think the ruleset in MTG especially with all the mechanics introduced is way too complicated to balance at this point. It's got the card game equivalent of Turing completeness and the best they can do is ban cards that turn out to be too powerful from competitive games as their utility is discovered.

mxwsn 2y ago

Part of the original magic that Garfield talks about, the player experience of discovering a world of cards you've never seen before, is captured by recent video games like Inscryption (especially) and Slay the Spire. Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outside the game as in Magic the Gathering. Dominion randomly sets 10 cards to be accessible to players, out of ~500 for an extremely huge number of combinations, such that each 10-set is always new. Dominion shines as card value, and the value of card interactions (e.g., in a combo or engine), can vary significantly by the random 10-set context. In a sense this gives a tremendous sense of novelty, significantly more than playing Magic the Gathering.

orlp 2y ago
A very recent game that also captures this in a unique way is Balatro. The cards that you play are ordinary playing cards, but the way you modify how they score and what cards you have in your deck is a cool discovery process.
- mxwsn 2y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation! Balatro is quite fun
awithrow 2y ago
Its probably the nostalgia talking but a lot of the early magic was the art as well. It was professional enough to look good but not so polished that it didn't have its own character. I had favorite artists and it was always fun just admiring the art. The new cards just don't capture me the same way. Something about them is too polished or too homogenized. They don't leave any room for imagination. I feel the same way about D&D artwork as well. No surprise that both D&D and MTG are owned by the same parent company.
- sshine 2y ago
  They have a lot more narrative control over the artwork now. A thing I disliked (as a kid) about the old cards, as they transitioned to these more homogenised styles, was how wildly different the cards looked. It didn’t feel like one game, and there were many artistic styles I simply didn’t like. But looking back now, the old cards artwork is so much more iconic; in part because of the nostalgia, but in part because each card is different from those drawn by other artists, you remember them better apart.

paulpauper 2y ago

She was right. After Magic: The Gathering debuted at Gen Con in 1993, six months of product sold out in six weeks. that was like the original bitcoin. anyone who still held on to those cards , especially the power 9 or dual lands, made a killing

mrbluecoat 2y ago

> We send all the flattened Magic packaging and booster packs to the prison and the inmates do the product fulfillment. Was that a joke or serious? I was enjoying the article until that abrupt end and it just felt dark. A company forcing imprisoned humans to distribute their product?

valbaca 2y ago
Are you unfamiliar with the Prison Industrial Complex? Are you unfamiliar that slavery is illegal in America except for prisoners?
- paleotrope 2y ago
  Again, this was in Belgium.
rodgerd 2y ago
Prison labour underpins a great deal of the machinery of capitalism, even in nominally free countries. Serfdom never really left the building.

edfletcher_t137 2y ago

"This wasn't just nostalgia talking. There seems to be something objectively more magical, more infinite-seeming and treasurable about this smaller, more limited version of Magic." Not that I ever had the chance to play the pre-release version of the game, but the explosion of complexity has made me yearn for exactly this, a "smaller, more limited version"... so much so that I wrote https://twmtg.computerpho.be/ https://twmtg.computerpho.be/ to try and capture it (and also, admittedly, as a bit of a joke/dig)

jdknezek 2y ago
You might look into Mindbug[1]. It uses a few, very streamlined mechanics. It plays quickly - 3 life, 10 cards. But there is a ton of card variety, and wildly powerful cards, because the mindbug mechanic makes each game self-balancing to a degree. I believe Garfield also gave creative input during development. [1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/345584/mindbug-first-contact https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/345584/mindbug-first-con...

fennecbutt 2y ago

When the suits saw dollar signs and got directly involved. Aka where everything goes wrong.