Igniting the Spark: The Story of Magic - The Gathering (2025) Movie Script

1
From CBS News in New York,
this is CBS This Morning.
Only two minutes until the hour,
it is one of the best-selling
games in the world,
even bigger than Monopoly.
But unless there's a teenager
in your house,
you probably
don't know about Magic.
What is Magic: The Gathering?
What is Magic: The Gathering?
Magic: The Gathering is...
Um...
What is Magic: The Gathering?
Uh... This is like
the toughest question.
Magic: The Gathering...
Like, it's... It's a card game.
Genre-defining,
paradigm-altering card game.
Magic: The Gathering
is a card game
where you and your friend
play wizards.
I'm wizard and I'm a badass,
and you're a wizard and
you're a badass, let's do this!
Who are dueling
in a magical battle
and casting spells at each
other, summoning monsters
and sending them out
to fight each other.
And kicking your opponent's ass
with them.
And artifacts, some
enchantments to protect yourself,
and whoever can kill
the other guy first wins.
It's a cinematic battle scene.
You are standing
opposite your opponent
across a vast battlefield.
Now, this is just a metaphor,
if you are literally standing
across a vast battlefield
with your opponent, it's going to
be really hard to read their cards.
Maybe we're playing 60-card decks,
maybe we're playing 100-card decks,
maybe there's four of us playing
if not just two of us.
But at its heart, we're bursting
cards blindly from packs
and trying to cobble together
something that's going to work.
Magic is an expensive
logic puzzle
that is taking up
a lot of my house.
Magic has tens
of thousands of cards,
maybe even 100,000
cards at this point.
So it's strategic and takes
a little bit of thinking.
Like chess or bridge, maybe.
Magic: The Gathering is what
is known as a trading-card game,
like baseball cards
or movie cards,
where you open up a pack and
there's randomized cards in it.
Those random cards
are pieces to a game.
And the cool thing
about Magic is,
you choose what pieces
you wanna play the game with.
They don't come out
with new chess pieces.
Magic is always
a new, evolving challenge.
Magic is more than a game,
it's an intellectual sport, really.
This is the world championship.
It's for all the marbles.
It's pricey paper, fine
luxury cardboard rectangles,
and at the same time,
it does a lot for people,
it's for collectors, it's for
players, it's for newbies.
Magic can be for everyone.
It is exactly what you and
your play group want it to be.
There was this moment in time
when it almost didn't happen.
We should've been a lot
more scared than we were.
I've always loved games,
but in particular,
I really like
role-playing games.
There's something about
the ability to create worlds
and run adventures,
the creativity it allowed.
Peter was a founder of a startup,
before we had those words.
He just believed in the power
of games to bring joy to people
and to be venues for friendships
and story-telling.
Seattle, the city that brought
you grunge music and coffee bars.
In 1990, Peter,
a Boeing computer analyst,
formed the game company
Wizards of the Coast
with a group of friends in the
basement of his rented home in Renton.
The early days
of Wizards of the Coast
was a bunch of, basically,
Peter's gamer friends.
Invested small amounts
of money into the company
and they were all
enthusiastic but had other jobs.
They wanted to make gaming
products, mostly role-playing products.
So it's kind of surprising
that what happened happened.
Before I started
Wizards of the Coast,
I was a systems analyst
at The Boeing Company.
But at some point, I realized
that I'm just a small, little cog
in a really big aerospace
industry machine.
I started dreaming, like, "Wouldn't
it be fun to be an entrepreneur,
start my own company,
do my own thing?"
Got into the game industry and I
started doing sales and marketing,
and editing, things like that.
I met some people that were
starting Wizards of the Coast
and Peter Adkison put
the full cork press on me
and decided to ask me to be
the first employee at Wizards.
So Lisa was, well, very pivotal
for the whole company.
She brought a lot of experience,
she was the only one in the office
that had actually worked
at a gaming company before.
So I first met Peter,
he had this passion.
We had someone
that was that charismatic,
who could really just move people
and get people lined up and doing stuff.
That's a hard thing to find, and
he was really, really good at that.
We had no idea
what we were getting into
when we decided to start
Wizards of the Coast.
We had no background
in business.
I was not raised
in a business family,
I was raised
in a farming community.
We were about as at the sea
of the idea of running
a business as anyone.
But we love games,
we love role-playing.
The passion is
what really drove us,
and then we started
studying the rest of it
and figuring it out
as we went along.
There's a golf course
near where he lived,
and there's this river, the
Green River, running through it.
I'll never forget the night
we just sat at the banks
and we just talked
about our dreams for gaming
and for what we're gonna do.
And he looked at me
very seriously and he said,
"You know, I'd really like to make
all my friends into millionaires."
And I said, "I wanna be
your friend."
We started with Wizards
of the Coast in 1990,
in the basement of a split-level
house that I was renting in Kent.
So we had 17 employees
who were
coming over to my house.
People were always dropping by.
We had one room
with some computers in it
so there might be someone
sitting there doing layout or editing.
We would hang out with
friends or we would do work,
and you really couldn't tell the
difference between the two at times.
We were this small little company,
I mean, we were this... you know...
really dinky little company.
Just like
The Little Engine That Could.
It was a madhouse,
but we were kids,
you know, it was fun!
You come to a company
and you're the first employee.
You're kind of asked
to do everything.
Lisa Stevens was, you know, in
the early, she was an energetic...
I don't even know what she did
back in Wizards back in the days.
I was doing Sales, Marketing,
Warehouse Fulfillment,
Art Direction, Graphic Design,
everything
that you could possibly imagine.
In the beginning days
of Wizards,
I was working part-time
around my day job,
because I wasn't getting paid
money, I was getting paid stock.
I got so much stock for being
the corporate secretary
and so much stock
for being the executive editor
and there was this whole system
were you got
so much stock per quarter
for doing a set
task list of things.
Peter was working
his job, still, at the time.
Yet he's still fun, energy.
And grabbed the torch.
The first product we ever wrote
was called the Primal Order.
It's a book about deities and
gods and role-playing systems,
and then we also got
the license for Talislanta,
we did Talislanta,
a little RPG line,
and it did okay, it's fun.
We were "critically acclaimed,"
which is code for
"didn't sell well,"
but people we knew liked it.
It just... everything just
changed so much all the time.
And there was always
something new
that we were having to
make up or learn or figure out.
It was hard
to get good at something
before it would be
different and new.
It was the best working
experience I've ever had in my life.
Everybody knew what they
were doing in the basement days,
everybody had a shared vision,
everybody was inspired by the same things,
everybody trusted each other,
so it was a very cohesive
culture at that time.
Jesper!
I've always described him
as just a large force of nature.
Especially in those days, I
mean, the long hair, tall and big.
So he's an imposing figure just
standing there, doing nothing.
He was the one that came up
with the original company motto,
"We Help You Pass
the Time Until You Die."
Jesper Myrfors is
an amazing artist.
Here is the thing
with how I paint.
I don't sketch
the paintings beforehand.
I just start painting.
I just pick up the paint,
start moving it around.
And something always
comes out of it.
I think he called Lisa Stevens
when he heard
that we were a Seattle-based
RPG company
and we'd just gotten
the license to Talislanta.
I got a portfolio on the mail.
It was very, very
dark and brooding
and lots of horror stuff.
I had told Lisa, "Look, I know
the property, I know Talislanta,
can you give me
a piece on spec?"
So I said, "Well, you know,
I need this picture of an
alchemist working at a table,
do a piece for me
and we'll see."
So I get two pieces
over the weekend
and had them ready on Monday
because I really
wanted to prove myself.
The next day, this guy
with long hair,
the black trench coat,
black hat,
shows up at my back door.
I was just a guy who was
showing up in the basement
every week
when they had the meetings.
My thought at the time was
that if I did that,
and I proved myself useful,
they would...
they would work with me.
Early Wizards day
was a lot of that,
you just show up and,
all of the sudden,
you were part of the company.
When you're doing an
entrepreneurial project like this,
you need someone that's
willing to step up and work hard.
I also hired him
because he was so young.
He didn't know
he couldn't do it.
Working at Wizards
in the early days,
it was always a fire
needing to be put out,
and not in a bad way,
it was dealing
with outside forces
and everybody trusted the people
who had their positions
because it was
us against the world.
- Pretty much...
- His name is Richard,
a game-maker and Math
professor at Whitman College.
Meeting Richard was certainly
a highlight to my life.
I was posting on the Usenet,
I made some sort of post
about big or small company,
and looking for games to do,
and this guy named Mike Davis
follows up on the post and says,
"Hey, I represent a guy
named Richard Garfield
who's designing a great game, I was wondering
if you'd like to take a look at it."
Richard is a man
that loves games
more than any other human
I've ever met on the Earth.
Richard Garfield is a divine
being who was sent to us
to improve the world
and make our lives better.
Richard Garfield is a demigod.
I had a number of games
I was working on.
One of them was RoboRally.
It's about robots racing!
Peter called me on the phone
and said,
"Hey, I met this really
great game designer
and he's got this cool game,
he explained it to me."
I basically said, "Well,
it's too expensive for us."
They wanted to have
little robot miniatures.
But I wanted to go down
and meet them in person
and say, "Well, really, I don't
think we can make this game.
But hey, would you like
to invest in our company?"
In those days,
I was always raising money.
When I first met Peter, I thought he
was really exuberant and charming
and very swept-up
in what games had to offer.
He said, "Well, what would you
like me to design?
I'll design
any game you want to.
I love games,
I love all types of games."
So he asked for me
to design something simpler,
cheaper, to publish.
To put in perspective,
this is 1991,
and the table-top game industry
in those days
was mostly RPGs, and a few
board games and miniatures.
I was going to a lot of fantasy,
science fiction conventions,
and one thing I noticed was
that there was a lot of fantasy art,
but there was a lot more art
out there in the market
than what the public
gets the chance to see.
And wouldn't it be
interesting to make a game
where we featured fantasy
or science fiction art?
He posited that it should be
fast to play and portable,
because he saw people playing
it in the lines at conventions.
I don't know that I was
expecting him to get back to me,
and so I came back to Seattle
and wasn't sure
if I would ever
hear from him again or not.
I was kind of surprised when
it was like three days later
and he calls me up
on the phone and says,
"I had an idea and I think
I need to come up to Seattle
and explain it to you
in person."
Like "Oh, okay, great."
I remember clearly,
I was at the Multnomah Falls
in the Portland area
when I had this eureka moment.
And that there was
a lot of potential there.
He took the train up, I went,
picked him up in my pickup
and a friend of mine named
Ken McGlothlen was with us.
And we had to stop
by Seattle Center
to pick up Ken's paycheck.
Peter's memory of that meeting
is probably better than mine.
But I do remember being
in a parking garage somewhere.
So Richard and I climb on the pickup
and we're just sitting there, chatting,
waiting for Ken to get back,
and Richard says,
"So, you wanna hear the idea?"
And I'm like, "Well yeah, I'll
hear the idea, tell me the idea."
So he says,
"Okay, imagine this card game
where everybody's got
their own cards,
there's a huge universe of cards,
there's hundreds and hundreds of cards.
But when you play a game,
you have your own cards
and everybody else you're playing
with, they have their own cards,
and you pick which cards,
out of all the ones you own,
are the cards
that you're gonna play with.
You might not
even own all the cards.
And then you and your friend
play you and your deck
against your friend
and his or her deck.
Like a duel of some sort,
like maybe a war or a battle,
or a duel between wizards,
but the key is
that the game's
gonna be always changing
based on what cards
you're gonna put in it,
it's gonna change based
on what cards
your friend
put in his or her deck,
and we can keep
publishing more cards,
and it'll always be
fresh and new."
And holy cow, this is amazing,
like the concept of this game,
never heard anything like it.
And so we just started
hooting and hollering,
we were like, "Oh my God,
this is so amazing!
This is so cool!"
We're like jumping up and down.
And then Ken comes running up,
like, "Ken, you gotta hear this idea.
Richard, explain it again."
So Richard goes
through the whole idea again,
and then all three of us
are hooting and hollering,
and it was a moment,
a moment I'll never forget,
a moment I treasure.
That, like, "Wow."
The idea of a trading card game.
Even though
I was pretty excited,
I was also talking him down some
because I didn't know whether
it was possible to make a game
which would be fun
with this as a characteristic.
- Behind the scenes.
- Cutting edge. Get ready.
I think the main appeal
to Magic is fun.
And that's the key to any game.
When I first made Magic,
I knew that it was a good game.
I even thought it might change
the game industry.
We identified four problems
that we had to solve in order
to make Magic: The Gathering.
One, which was out of Richard,
was: Would this game be any fun?
Richard Garfield was
a Math PhD student at the time.
Games that are created for the purpose
of being mathematically complicated
tend to not be very fun to people
who are not mathematicians.
We had to find a place that
could print and collate the cards.
We had to find a lot more art
than we originally anticipated.
When this came, it was multiple
pieces, I was very excited.
Maybe no one ever
played this game,
you could just die a thousand
deaths like every other game had.
And raise money to do it.
Every small company
that comes with a game idea
thinks it's gonna be the
best thing since sliced bread,
it was an era
before Kickstarter and GoFundMe,
and none of that stuff
existed then.
We left that meeting energized
but without
any particular direction
as to how that game
would proceed,
but he was expecting something
and I was expecting to make something.
A couple or three months later,
I get a phone call from Richard,
who's like,
"Hey, I designed the game!"
And... it's great.
When Magic was
being designed and playtested,
I was a graduate student at
the University of Pennsylvania.
During those years,
I recruited many folk
to play all sorts of games,
some of which I made.
Richard did not design
this game alone.
He credited a significant
portion of the design work
to the development team that really
helped him put this game together.
A whole bunch of guys out here
at the University of Pennsylvania,
guys that are now legends
in the Magic history community.
Charlie Catino,
Bill Rose, Jim Lin,
Joel Mick, Skaff Elias...
Richard would just wander the
hallways at the University of Pennsylvania
looking for people
to play games,
so right from the beginning,
we knew,
even before he had finished
the first deck,
that it was gonna be a deck game
that had depth of play to it
but that it could be
sold in small packets
and it could be played
very quickly.
The biggest challenge,
from a game design
point of view,
I had no antecedents to look at,
I couldn't look
at any other examples and say,
"It works this way here, we
should change it because of this,
or we should do it
because of that."
It's the model T.
Before it existed, there wasn't a car!
It invented cars.
Making the first set of Magic
was really exciting.
Once I had the framework
done, it was not so hard.
With Magic,
it really is all in the cards.
You build your deck from a
pool of nearly 2,000 different ones,
a colorful menagerie of mystical
creatures and magical spells.
If I go to my friend's house
and we play Scrabble,
play Monopoly,
or play Clue, whatever,
it's the exact same game than when
you come to my house and we play it.
But with Magic, when I go to
play at your house, with your cards,
it's different cards that you might
have that I've never seen before.
The idea that the game is bigger
than the box, as Richard always said.
I knew there were five colors,
I knew
that there were five lands
which would associate
with those colors.
Plains, which produce
white energy, white mana,
islands produce blue mana,
to cast blue spells with,
there's swamps, which produce
black energy, to cast black spells,
mountains produce red mana,
to cast red spells,
and forests produce green mana,
which we cast green spells with.
One of the big challenges
of a trading card game is,
let's say we're gonna play chess
and I'm gonna bring my pieces.
Why wouldn't you bring
15 queens and a king?
Why wouldn't you
just play the best pieces?
Richard had to solve that,
and one of the ways to solve
that was the mana system.
You had your lands or other things
that create what we would call "mana."
Lands are kind of the currency of
Magic: The Gathering in many ways.
And then you can spend those
mana to play spells out of your hand.
By making it so that each card
had a cost,
that gave this balancing idea
that there was a lot of richness
possible in deck-building.
It's a big part of controlling
when and how you can do things,
because if you could do everything
right away, the game would break.
And that variance helps make
sure that everyone always has a shot.
You could be up against
the best player in the world,
and there's still a chance, even if
it's small, of winning against them.
It's different every time,
and if you play it once,
the second time you play it,
the third time you play it,
it's just gonna keep
on changing.
My favorite thing
is the color pie.
One of the ways to make sure that people
played different cards and different decks
was to divide them,
and colors did that.
There's five base colors, there's
white, blue, black, red and green.
Each one is meant to feel
different and play different
and have access to different
mechanics and ability suites.
Each of them have
their own identity.
I call it "the secret
sauce to Magic."
I think that blue is very
cerebral, it's very elemental.
Black is kind of the color
of ambition.
You're willing
to make sacrifices to get ahead.
White is very orderly,
it's holy magic,
so it tries to control others
and put a hold on the board.
Green is very large creatures,
it's the magic of life.
Then there's red, which is meant to
be explosive, aggressive and powerful,
but it also burns out quickly.
So at its core, Magic has
three kinds of cards.
The more lands you have,
the stronger you are.
You can play one every turn, and
these are, basically, your resources.
The game centers
around creatures.
They attack and block,
that's how you're going
to win the game
and protect yourself.
And then a lot of the
surrounding cards are spells
that, in some ways,
support your creatures.
They're like a one-shot effect.
For example, dealing some damage
or drawing some new cards.
Or get rid of your opponent's
creatures, destroy them,
or whatever it might be.
And utilizing all three
of these components in unison
is how you play
a strong game of Magic.
And you alternate doing this
until one of you
has no life left.
The first version
of Magic I made
was 120 cards
just divided randomly.
In playtest, that's
what I called Alpha Magic,
it was little yellow cards,
I remember, about that big.
After that, I made
what I called Beta,
which was over 100
different cards, I'm sure,
and shortly after that,
I remember making Gamma,
and Gamma was where a lot
of the real flavor began to pop.
Yeah, I mean, obviously,
they're very...
You know, very small.
We hadn't really
thought a lot about
how, what size they would be,
how they were gonna be made,
or anything like that,
so just for playtest purposes.
You can imagine trying
to shuffle this deck,
you're doing a lot of,
you know, shuffling like that.
Oh, Channel, Channel
and Fireball, look at that.
When we were first
doing those prototypes,
all the cards were made by hand.
I think I cut up index cards.
It was a very
manual labor-intensive project.
I helped him make all the cards
after the first deck,
I had a big
comic book collection,
so we would photocopy those
and put those on the cards
and make them pop out
a little bit more.
Searching through
magazines and comic books
or things like Dungeons
& Dragons Monster Manual,
these days it's so much easier
to find images.
Some things were hand-drawn,
some things were photocopies
of various parts of my anatomy.
My face was Phantom Monster,
I think.
My foot was Heal.
A photocopy of my foot and
then a little circle around it.
I think those are maybe the only two?
Maybe there were other parts,
but nothing like, bad.
There is one playtest card,
Cloak of Invisibility,
I said, "I know
what we'll do for this one."
And I am proud.
I remember getting cards
from a lot of different places,
including Calvin & Hobbes,
and one of the Calvin & Hobbes
I remember using was
Power Sink,
a toilet as a Power Sink,
and so I had a picture
of Calvin sitting in a toilet.
At the time, I think
I was just making a joke
and having fun
with the prototype,
but later on,
I began to appreciate
that having any image there
was really important
to people's learning
what the cards do
and playing fast
and effectively.
There were so many little quirks
you could put in the cards,
it felt like I could make
an unlimited amount of them.
He's like... "We've been
playing the heck out of this game,
it's fantastic, I'm gonna
send you a copy of the game."
"Oh, wow, great!"
So I got it in the mail,
I think there was a two-page
description of the rules
and about 20 playtest decks.
Peter explained
the concept of Magic to us
before we actually saw anything.
The idea that you had
a card game
where it wasn't
the same cards every time.
All of that was just totally
brand new and really exciting.
And so, we passed them out
and started playing
this game of Magic,
then we start playing and...
Oh, my God.
Productivity just stopped
for like two weeks!
We... We didn't get
anything else done!
Unlike, say, a normal
deck of playing cards,
when you open up
a booster pack of Magic cards,
inside will be a randomized
assortment of cards
of different rarities
and commonalities.
Magic has four basic rarities.
When you open up a booster pack,
ten of them are commons,
three of them are uncommons
and the last card, seven
out of eight times is a rare,
and one out of eight times
is a mythic rare.
The thing that was
probably the most interesting
is how varied each hand was
because of the randomization
on the deck.
Oh, Time Walk, that's a good one.
Take an extra turn.
We started realizing how the
rules really kind of needed...
They had to be really precise.
Part of the playtest process
was playing and seeing
how we could screw things up.
The playtest guide
was something
that Richard handed out
to playtesters,
an early version of what became
the Magic Rulebook.
It was intended to be something
for new playtesters
that they could refer to
when Richard wasn't around.
As we'd play,
we'd come up with questions.
If I play this,
why doesn't it do this?
And you'd need to have more rules
to kind of deal with the edge cases.
Let's just make sure that people can
tell what this card is supposed to do.
And there were certain aspects
that you might see missing.
The core of it was there,
the major difference was
part of the rules of the game,
everybody played for ante.
Ante is where each player
puts up a card
from their own deck,
a random card,
and then you play the game
without the benefit of those cards,
and then, whoever wins the game
wins both cards, like, permanently.
Ante was supposed to make it
so that the cards
would change ownership
without the need of buying
decks or trading cards.
That kept this flow
going back and forth
between the decks
that was really exciting.
We did not really consider
that gambling,
growing up,
playing marbles, for example,
when we would play
for keeps and things like that.
Eventually,
people got to the point
where they didn't really
want to play for ante,
but decks were much more limited
back then than they are now,
you couldn't just go buy
another one, that was your deck.
That's just
how the environment was,
it was playing for keeps
in a very sort of real way.
I really kept
coming back to this idea
that I wanted a game where there
were things that people loved and hated
rather than a world where
everybody was okay with everything.
Magic's success
overwhelms me, I think
it would overwhelm anybody
who wasn't
completely arrogant or...
One characteristic
that Richard has,
I think, that sets him apart
from most other really brilliant
game designers is
he's got plenty of pride
in his product,
but just way less
than you would expect.
He was not
the least bit defensive.
We would be playing a game
and somebody would
make a comment
and Richard was there
and did some sort
of calculus in his head,
change the rules of the card
in the middle of the game,
and we would simply write
on the playtest card
and change the rules text
on the fly.
He would actively
take suggestions
and we could sit
and we could argue with him
and it was sort
of a very logical approach.
Very often
he would listen to the people
that had
the most logical argument
or yelled
for the longest amount of time.
They were passionate
about their answers, like,
the game would be ruined
if I made the wrong decision
with regard to this issue.
Some of the players said,
"When my opponent
makes me discard,
I always feel bad."
The disagreements had to do
with cards like Chaos Orb.
You flip it and then the cards
you touch
get destroyed.
Well, literally,
in a tournament one time,
someone took their Chaos Orb
and tore it up
into little, like, confetti
and threw it
over everybody's cards
and said, "That's Chaos Orb,
it's touching all those cards,
they're all gone.
I win."
My gut was that adds variety,
and variety is terrific.
Originally,
when Magic first came out,
Richard wanted there to be
no limits on anything.
Every card, you can have
as many copies as you want.
And you can see this in some
of these early card designs
like Plague Rats.
One Plague Rat was a one-one,
and the second one meant
that you had two two-twos.
And once you got four,
that was something.
And then, of course,
once you had 16 in play,
then it was really quite good.
We were all gamers,
we were all Magic fans,
and we all played Magic
regularly.
The funny thing is,
none of us knew how to play.
If you asked seven different
people of Wizards of the Coast
how to play Magic, you'd be
taught seven different games.
When somebody
is really motivated,
they will learn how to play
a game that is very complicated.
Easy to learn,
complex to master.
In the mathematical sense
of the term of complexity,
Magic is much harder
than any other board game.
It is insanely complex.
I screw things up
constantly, all the time.
You can summarize
how to play chess
in a page of text,
in a paragraph of text, really.
The Magic Rulebook
is 800 pages for a reason.
Like a lot, a lot of rules.
That's Richard's genius.
I'm gonna make a game
where every single card
gets to make up its own rules.
A card can say more or less
anything at once.
Whereas in chess or checkers
or any of these other games,
there is a fixed and typically very
small pool of things that can happen.
Each card just creates
hundreds of thousands
of different permutations
of cards that you can combine.
There are 22,000 or so
unique cards in Magic.
And if you're only talking
about looking at every
combination of three cards from that,
that's six times the number of
stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
We had to watch that we didn't
spend all our time playtesting
because it was
kind of addicting,
and we needed to get other
products done so we could pay the bills.
And there's a part of me like,
"Wait, we should be working."
But this is working, in a sense.
Like, if everybody's so excited
about this game that they can't work,
let's follow this.
It was exactly
what he told me it would be
when we were in that parking
garage, hooting and hollering.
I just knew
this was something special,
this was something
that was revolutionary.
There were
so many things about this idea.
We could publish
a lot of art this way
on nice little cards
that would be easy to collect,
they would be able
to store them.
The whole interest
of trading cards
could now be brought to gamers
with this idea that sports cards
are based on the value
of how well the athlete's doing.
But these cards could be...
People would want them
based on what sort of effect
they had in the game,
whether they help their deck.
Having been in the industry,
I instantly started thinking
about logistics, how we
were gonna get this thing done.
Everybody realized,
"This game is very cool,"
I was thinking that too,
but it was a long ways
to go from this
to, you know, this.
And of course, reality started
to sink in for me too,
I'm like, "I thought
RoboRally was hard to make.
This is crazy.
This is way more art
than I was thinking, okay?"
"This is gonna get expensive."
We knew that randomization was
what he wanted in the very beginning.
The initial randomization device
was a giant garbage bag
and we would take all the cards
and throw them
in the appropriate
amounts in the garbage bag
and shake it around a lot,
and then shake it around more,
and then shake it around more, and then
we put our hands in it and mix, mix, mix,
and then make our decks.
I remember Ken McGlothlen
once even thought,
"Well, maybe we get a playing
card come in to make the cards
and then we
sort them ourselves,"
he even sketched out on a napkin
like this conveyor belt
of cards coming out
and a big blower
like you see in the lottery,
like maybe the cards
would come off this thing
and go in and blow like "Whee."
I mean... Yeah, okay.
We realized
that it would be hard,
we didn't have any clue
how difficult it would be
from an industrial
process point of view.
Before this moment,
there'd never been
a trading card game.
There were people
that made playing cards,
and there were
sport card companies
that would sell
collectible cards
that were sometimes
premium with foil
but not high-quality card stuff
that you could shuffle.
But they were experts
at randomizing cards.
We did what I would call
a "bend test"
with any card stock
they'd bring us.
If you take the card and
pinch it together and open it up,
and if there was a crease,
it wasn't good.
We did not want
programmed obsolescence
to be part
of our business model.
We could've used crappy stock
that would've forced people
to rebuy stuff,
but we didn't want
to rebuy the cards,
we were players also.
When I called the guys
at White Wolf,
they were gonna be doing
some other card product.
They had just met... We're getting
Luc Mertens from Cartamundi.
Gen Con is a gaming
convention and it's the big, big one.
If you wanna go to the center of
the gaming world, you go to Gen Con.
It's a weird town for a Belgian
guy, so I agreed to go there.
Gen Con in 1992,
which was Wizards of the Coast's
first year exhibiting,
we had our role-playing
products there,
and so I sat down
with Luc Mertens.
And as I'm explaining,
he's nodding.
"We also need
to sort them, to collate them."
"Like, having them
come out kind of randomly."
Okay, there's just
even more fanfare.
Like, "Really?
You can do everything
I need done, you're sure?"
"Okay, great, awesome."
We went with Cartamundi
because that was the only facility
that could really pull it off.
They didn't sub out
to any other printers,
it was Cartamundi or nothing.
My inspirations are mainly
the environment I set up
around myself.
Salvador Dali is
a huge influence on my work.
Richard Garfield
did an amazing job
designing this game,
coupled with the art, of
course, of all the illustrators.
Jesper was given the job
of being the art director
for Magic: The Gathering
pretty much from the beginning.
Occasionally, they would
have super-secret meetings
that I wasn't allowed in.
I had no idea
what they were discussing,
I mean, were they
hit men on the side?
Were they running stuff
for Colombian cartels?
I had no idea, they wouldn't
even hint at what was going on.
But they were
very, very serious,
and I had the feeling that if I found
out about it and I wasn't supposed to,
my life could be in danger,
so I didn't ask any questions.
We really compartmentalized
information,
kept it
to a smaller group of people,
so that there's less chance
that it would actually get out
and someone would steal it
and beat us to the punch.
Eventually, of course, we
let him into the circle of trust,
"Okay, we gotta do this game and
we need you to go and get all the art."
When I first heard of Magic and
when I first started playing the game,
the only thing
that was in my head was
the magic duel from the
Corman movie "The Raven."
Don't just stand there,
do something!
That is what I thought
a magic duel looked like,
and that sort of just set
the whole tone for me.
You were the wizards casting the spells.
How did they get in the duel?
That's for them to say, let's just give
them the tools to create the backstory.
So that's why I wanted
to start depicting these items
as if they belonged
to this game.
I was not thinking
specifically fantasy
when I set out to make Magic.
Fantasy is a palette
which is very broad
and is very shared.
Everybody knows what a
sword is and what a shield is,
everyone knows
a giant is bigger than a goblin.
Fantasy encompasses
everything, right?
Anything is possible.
So any time you need something
new, you need a new world,
you need a new creature,
you need a new spell,
it's there.
Imagination's your only limit.
Their original idea had been
to buy second and third rights
to popular fantasy artists.
I mean, I love those guys' work,
but how boring,
we've all seen that work before.
And I said, "Look, I bet I
can get original art for this
if you let me try,
and that's gonna involve
giving the artists
a piece of the game."
Some of the first people that
got asked to do cards for Magic
were artists that were already working
on Wizards of the Coast products.
Dan Gelon,
Chris Rush, Brian Snddy,
we were all doing black and
white work on role-playing products
that Wizards
was putting out at the time.
So when the call came to do
work on this unusual
new product idea,
we were some of the first
people that got asked.
So I took enough
at 50 dollars a piece
to pay my rent for a month.
I started to contact
illustrators that I knew.
At the time,
when they approached us,
"There's a gaming studio in a
basement, we're looking to do this game,"
we, of course,
can't afford the big guys,
so we're just looking
for new and upcoming artists.
He says 50 dollars a card.
It was a royalty of 2.5%
divided amongst all the artists,
times the number of pieces
they worked on in a set.
They also got
50 dollars in stock,
so they felt invested
in the product.
50 dollars in stock?
In a company you never heard of? Royalties?
But 50 dollars was cash.
That's why I took 25 cards.
That's a nice chunk of change.
I was looking for artists
with an individual voice.
My idea for art-directing
the game was
we're trying to represent
an entire world
of all different kinds of magic
and different cultures.
And I really didn't want a
homogeneous, boring look for the world.
I would rather have somebody
hate some of the art in the game
and love
some of the art in the game
than look at the game and go,
"Oh, it's okay."
I want to elicit some level
of passion from the viewer.
I think the artwork for Magic
helps the individual to develop
the world of Dominia
in their minds,
and it's a vehicle
for all of their creativity,
to, you know,
enjoy the game more.
The world-building for Magic was
a less directed look.
And the reason was, there was an
entire world that needed to be created.
They always gave you
freedom to be who you were.
He would interject guidelines
or suggest something,
but it was always a suggestion,
it was always positive,
very positive,
very appreciative.
We were doing quite small pieces
which had to fit
on the scan band.
Jesper encouraged
our creativity.
He said, "I want your input, I
want you to be creating the vision."
I didn't want that world
to look like my vision
because my vision is small.
Any single person's vision
is small.
So what we have here is a small
piece of history that no one's seen before
outside of this studio.
That's my original sketch book
that I had when Jesper
called me on the phone
to give me my first assignment
with Wizards of the Coast.
After I wrote them all down,
I went here and checked off
the ones I wanted to do.
Thoughtlace, Stream of Life,
Balance, Crusade, Farmstead,
Howling Mine.
I didn't pick Steal Artifact
or Control Magic.
Wild Growth, two islands.
This was originally called
Ancestral Memory,
it turned into Ancestral Recall.
Further on down was
my original sitting there,
doodling on the phone
with my initial roughs
of, like, Wild Growth,
Illusionary Forces,
even Counterspell still had
the mullet and the fizzy effect.
This was a better Burrowing,
I should have done this one.
Not the janky one.
I would tell them the color of magic so
they knew kind of what palette to play in.
And I would tell them
what the card did
that they had to convey.
Other than that,
I tried to give them
as much freedom as I could.
They actually
specifically requested
that you keep it simple.
So they didn't want
battle scenes,
they didn't want lots
of figures in them.
I think what makes
a Magic card good is...
first, readability,
where the print is like
two inches across
or something like that,
it's really small,
you have to make sure
that it can be read
at such a small scale.
But it also needs to have
something cool in it
that draws the eye to it.
The way the players
play the game,
the first read that they have
of a card that's important
as a player
is upside down
on the other side of the table.
The painting needs to be able
to tell that player
what card it is as soon
as it gets turned over.
The silhouettes of things
are super important.
Don't go to too much detail
and make bright colors that pop.
Wow.
Only things we couldn't do,
couldn't have
any white backgrounds
and no obscene.
Freedom on the cards back then
was just whatever.
No nudity, of course.
And nothing too graphic,
as far as violence went.
No chainmail bikinis was a rule.
I didn't want any TNA art,
basically,
because it had become
a fantasy clich,
and any outsiders
who'd see it and go,
"Oh, God, here it is,
more of this...
barbarian,
adolescent boy fantasy stuff."
And I really didn't want that.
The market was
incredible male-driven.
And I thought the best way
to get more women to play
is not by insulting them with
the game right out of the gate.
As a woman in gaming,
looking at the only
pictures of women
or like these weird
scantily clad women,
somehow trying to get
their butts and their boobs
in the picture at the same time,
it just didn't feel great.
I wanted to see strong women,
I wanted to see bad women,
I wanted to see
different cultures represented,
people of color, like I've
never ever seen that.
And how do you know that there
isn't a bigger market out there
of people who would play this if
they felt like it was about them?
How can you not
use some of that art
to appeal to people who haven't
ever been included before?
I never felt that I worked
for the company alone. Ever.
You need to keep
a good working relationship
with the people
who make your product,
and the second you start trying
to take advantage of them,
you're on the road downward.
And I made that very clear
to them, so I fought hard
for artists' rights
the entire time I was there.
Working for Magic: The
Gathering, they have a lot of benefits
that Jesper made sure,
as artists, we could have.
A lot of times, when you do
a piece for a company,
you don't own the piece, you
don't own the rights to reprint it.
But with Wizards' product,
we could sell prints.
I'm very appreciative of that.
I want people to be able
to read my signature.
I want to be known
for what I do.
Magic reinforced that
by having our names associated
with the picture
that we had painted.
When Jesper
was making such a point
of making sure that the artists'
names are on the card
and the artists were getting
the full recognition
for their contribution
to the game,
I thought, "Wow,
this is somebody that obviously
cares about this a lot
and is wanting to make sure
the artists get their due."
I think it really meant
an awful lot to all the artists.
And what they were
bringing in was just amazing,
some of the artwork
was stunning.
I can remember when Hurlon
Minotaur came in from Anson.
I was just like, "Wow."
Alright, Minotaur,
you are the Magic:
The Gathering mascot.
Who's your favorite
character in the game?
Mm...
This is the Wizards of the Coast
employee jacket
with the minotaur in the back.
Over the last two and a half years,
I've done about 70 Magic cards.
When I first started working
professionally in the fantasy field,
I never, ever imagined
that I'd be doing that many
paintings in such a short period of time.
I had to convey concepts
and work in a tight composition
in a small area
to help bring across
what the meaning of a card is
and what it can do.
This is basically
the original drawings
for the mana symbols.
I was working
with Christopher Rush,
he'd been a friend of mine long before
Wizards of the Coast was in our lives,
and I knew he had
really good graphic skills.
So I asked him
to do the mana symbols
and the logo for the game.
He did both,
he did the outline for the logo
and then I did all the texture
work inside it and the color choices.
The artist that appears on more Magic
cards than anybody else is Joe the Ant.
When we were making
the card back for Magic,
and Jesper was filling around,
he goes,
"I need a texture for this."
In the closet right nearby,
I had a bunch of art pieces I had
accumulated during my lifetime.
And one was
this piece of artwork
that is this kind of
blue stormy sea
and there's a castle on a rock.
So I pulled it out and
he's like, "Oh, this is great,"
so he scans it
and uses it for the texture
on the back of the Magic cards.
Working at the University
of Minnesota,
I had this friend of mine there,
he comes in with this
very nice tennis racket,
he goes, "Some guy
just gave it to me."
I'm like, "What do you mean,
he just gave it to you?"
He goes, "Yeah, this guy giving
his possessions away up there."
He's like, "Come on, stand in line,"
and I get up there and there's this guy,
he looks kind of like a Buddhist
or something,
he's got a shaved head,
he's wearing robes,
and he's sitting on the ground.
I said, "Who are you?",
and he goes, "I'm Joe,
Joe the Ant.
I have an ant for a God."
And I say, "Well, what does God
say I'm supposed to get?"
And he kind of closes
his eyes, and he goes,
looks around and finds
this painting nearby,
he looks at it and goes,
"I painted this when I was
in the insane asylum."
And he hands it to me.
So in the back of it
I wrote "Joe the Ant"
and the date in the back of it.
I shoved it in my closet.
All these years later, boom,
it ends up on the back
of a Magic: The Gathering card
which has been on every card
that's ever been made.
Hello, Wizards' land!
What's your favorite game?
- Um, um, Magic, of course.
- Okay.
Look, he's in his guru stance.
I think the biggest miracle
for Magic is that we managed to
come up with the money to print it.
And that was all Peter.
Raising money is a big part
of what you do
when you're running a startup.
I knew nothing
about how to do it,
it was all learning on the fly.
Wizards in those days
was struggling, they had
financial issues,
they were stretched really thin.
There was a time
when Wizards of the Coast
was having difficulty
getting a loan from a bank
to get WOTCgoing.
Lisa called me and asked me if I
could write a letter of recommendation
to the bank that they were
trying to get a loan from,
because I was the most professional
vendor that they were dealing with.
I wrote the bank
a letter that said
that I'd been dealing with Wizards
for a certain amount of time,
and that they'd been very
consistent about their payments.
To this day, I can't believe
that I wrote that letter to a bank
so Wizards could get a loan.
We never had
a big investor come in and say,
"I'll write you a check
for 200,000 dollars."
He figured the art
would be exciting to people.
A bunch of numbers and words
and a business plan...
not exactly exciting.
So he wanted to get art in early
and then have art shows.
We just reached out to all
the people that had invested
or that we were talking
about investing,
anybody within
the extended family.
"Hey, come on over, bring
your friends and show off the art."
We actually used the yard
that was outside.
The yard was laid out.
It was Anson and Mark,
Dan Frazier,
Doug Shuler, Amy Weber,
Sandra Everingham,
Andi Rusu, myself,
those were the key artists.
A friend of mine invested
and a friend
of my father's invested,
and both of them
retired off of that,
so I remember that
more than the actual event.
What small companies do
is you go out
and you pitch
to friends and family,
friends of family,
family of friends of family.
It's like going out to the field
and turning over rocks,
and every once in a while
you find a couple hundred bucks.
While I was working at Boeing,
there was a janitor
who I'd always chat up with
because I'd be working late,
and we just got to know each other, I
was always talking about my company,
and one night she says,
"Can I invest in your company?"
I'm just like,
"I really need money,
that would be great,"
but I'm also struggling
with the guilt of, like,
this person is an elderly lady,
she's working as a janitor,
I just felt
very conflicted about it,
but she asked,
like, "Okay, yeah,"
so she wrote me a check.
And it was
a very specific amount,
it was like 1,258 dollars.
This is like, what, that's exactly how
much money she had for retirement?
A lot of us were working
for not much at that point,
trying to make sure that we
were going to survive long enough
to get Magic out the door.
That was probably the
hardest thing I've ever done.
But it didn't
feel like it at that time
because we were all really stupid
and young and we didn't know,
and everything wasn't as hard.
So as gamers ourselves, we
were very excited for the release.
More so as gamers than we were
as the creators of the game,
because we just
wanted to play it.
The moment that I was confident
that we were gonna
have a product,
was when I actually
got a bunch of cards.
When the first cards came in and
we held them, it was mostly rares.
We didn't get booster packs,
we just got boxes of rare cards.
The game
was real to me at that point,
it felt wonderful to hold
the final product.
It made us all feel that we'd
been working together
for all that time
for a real reason.
This was our game, we knew this
was gonna change gaming forever.
I'm interested in this Magic:
The Gathering thing.
The best thing
is probably this gift set.
It gets two decks,
packets like this,
you supplement the decks
with boosters,
15 cards in each pack.
I'll let you dig around
for good luck.
Building up to the release
of Magic: The Gathering,
the question's how to sell it.
You couldn't call
a distributor up and say,
"I got this game with starter
decks with booster packs," right?
We had a good relationship
with a number of distributors
of table-top games.
Our biggest distributor at the
time was Capital Distributors.
I put out a whole ad
called "The Anatomy of the Card"
and their big, pricey
preorder thing.
They were kind of excited
to see what was gonna happen.
And then there's an order
for six decks and two boosters.
Not six displays or six cases,
six decks and two boosters.
From our biggest distributor.
And I freaked out.
I totally freaked out.
I hid the order.
All our money
and all our effort,
and basically
the company's on the line,
and Peter came and said,
"Oh, we've got the order
from Capitol City."
He's kind of leveraged himself,
he's made promises,
he's co-signed loans and stuff,
his own personal life is
in big jeopardy if this thing
goes down the drain.
No, there's no backup plan.
Backup plan?
It's having a business.
And I'm like "No,
I haven't got it yet."
I totally lied to him
because I knew
if he saw that order,
he would be devastated,
he might just give up.
Magic was a big risk
for Wizards of the Coast.
Think about it, you're trying
to introduce not just like,
"Here our new
role-playing game,"
but "Here's our entirely new
kind of game," period.
I started calling distributors,
trying to explain it to them,
it's a trading card game,
everybody makes their own deck
out of a pool of cards,
and they were just like,
"What are you talking about?"
Wait a minute,
there's a couple hundred cards
but if I buy a deck
I only get some of them?
You're only selling me
some of the game?
What kind of scam is that?
I told Peter, I said,
"Well, you know,
we get it out there, it's gonna
sell itself, practically."
And Lisa went out and aggressively
pimped it the best she could.
And I'm giving you
this guarantee of mine,
if I'm wrong, you can return it,
but I want you guys
to go all-in on this.
And so, they did.
Still, the initial numbers
were pretty modest
because nobody understood
what it was gonna be.
These days, Magic is
this huge Juggernaut.
But when we were
first starting out,
there was
this moment of time when
it almost didn't happen.
As fast as this train
was going on the track,
we were only
a track in front of it.
If we cannot launch at Gen Con,
we're done, we're gonna
be closed.
If the cards don't hit Gen Con,
my whole plan is down the drain.
We would've gone
out of business, for sure.
Our role-playing lines
had not done that well.
We had 0 dollars left.
I still had my day job
at Boeing.
In order for us
to have Magic cards to sell,
Cartamundi had to print them.
For Cartamundi to print them,
they needed to make
printing plates.
We had to send them
pieces of film
that they expose on the plate
to make the plate.
We had to have it
in Belgium on Monday.
Thursday at 4:30,
we finally get all the things
done, the files done,
I pick up the drive,
we head downtown,
and drop it off
at the Imagesetting Bureau.
And I go home
to collapse in bed.
Most companies didn't have
an image setter,
which is basically a giant,
35mm camera,
to print film
which could be sent to printers
and be made into plates.
So Wizards would send the cards
to the service bureau
and we would make film.
Four something or other the
next morning, my phone rings,
and I'm like,
"Who's calling me now?
I want to sleep."
I pick up the phone.
It's Vic, from Wizards, going,
"They're not going
to do our job.
We're screwed, we're done,
we're gonna go bankrupt."
I was like, "What?
Dang it, I'm not gonna quit now,
There's gotta be
something we can do,
There's gotta be another machine
in town, somewhere.
We just have to find it."
So I called the company that
made the image-setting equipment,
Compugraphic, who made
this Laser 9600, and said,
"Who else has bought
one of these machines,
the machine that's big enough
to run our film?"
There was another image setting
company in town that had one.
A company called CMYK.
And they were even
open on weekends!
In the old days,
the files were so large
that they had to bring
1GB hard drives.
Ooh. And we used
to call it "sneaker net."
Instead of bringing disks, they
would actually bring hard drives.
It seemed like they spent
the rest of the weekend
running the job.
The last film came out the
machine Monday morning,
I think around 9 or 10.
And met them there
and packed it all up,
and shipped it off
to Cartamundi.
All the files have gone to
Cartamundi, they're printing the cards,
but I still haven't got
all the money I need.
I was raising money
up until the very last minute.
These people
that invested money into it,
we were not aware that they
were that short on cash.
Nor would that have made
that much of a difference to us.
I just don't think we knew
enough about business to know
what a problem it was.
I get this phone call
from Luc Mertens, he says, "Hey,
we have the first cards
off the press,
if you'd like,
I could send them to you."
So I was like, "Yes!
Yes, send me Magic cards!
We would like to see
the Magic cards!"
Origins was the first show where
we showed Magic cards in public.
We had a small 10x20 booth,
and one of the sales reps
from one of our distributors,
Wargames West, comes up, I go, "Hey,
I gotta show you this new card game."
Wargames West guy's all had
this cowboy theme going,
with a cowboy hat
and stuff like that.
The first demo I did of Magic:
The Gathering with actual cards
was with this guy,
a sales rep for Wargames West.
And I show him the game, he
goes, "Wow, that's pretty interesting."
Huh. "I think I'm gonna
show this to Phil."
So he goes off, he comes back
about half an hour later
with another guy,
a slightly taller guy,
slightly bigger hat,
and I demo the game to Phil.
"Wow, this is really good,
I think we need to show Stan."
Half an hour later,
they come back
with an even taller guy
and an even bigger hat.
And he's like,
"Oh my gosh, this is awesome.
I think we need
to talk to Wayne."
So they all go out.
They come back
with a fourth guy,
even bigger, even taller,
biggest hat yet, ten gallon hat,
comes up, and he's
the owner of the company.
And I demo the game to him.
I go, "Well, Wayne,
I'm a little short on money."
Every conversation I had with
anybody was like, "I need money."
He made the last investment
that we needed
to get the product out the door,
and he basically
paid in advance for an order,
then I gave him
an extra discount.
That's how Magic got funded,
it was lots of moments like that.
One of the things I did
to promote Magic was,
I went on a retail tour
for the two weeks
leading up to Gen Con.
Magic had just shipped,
the first couple stores
we went to,
nobody had any idea what it was.
Just doing cold demos.
The last store I went to
was Wargames West
in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
They had promoted it,
they bought deep into it.
This was the first time I got
to see Magic in all its glory,
like, people
just rabid about it.
How often do you play?
Oh.
It's probably easier to answer
when I don't play, actually.
There was like 70 gamers
there, waiting for me to show up,
they wanted autographs,
they rolled out the red carpet,
they were videotaping
me arriving,
which was weird,
This is not a typical thing
that CEOs do.
It was like being a rock star.
Yes, it was totally,
totally unexpected.
That was the harbinger
of what was to come,
that was the energy that I took
going into Gen Con
for the official launch
a few days later.
Magic: The Gathering.
This man doesn't understand it.
It's got some interesting pictures
of really horrible-looking things.
The release of Magic,
the official release of Magic,
was at Gen Con in Milwaukee
in 1993.
If Magic: The Gathering
failed, then we were done.
This was so new, it wasn't just
creating a new game,
it was creating a new category.
You're all in, it's like
playing poker, we were all in,
all our chips are on the table.
We all believed in this so well.
We just believed in our hearts
that this was gonna
be successful.
I knew it was gonna be special
because I wanted it.
And I was the customer.
My idea was basically
to try to infect
as many gamers at Gen Con
as I possibly could.
Figured
that all the alpha gamers
from all over the world
come to Gen Con.
If we could get these cards in
their hands, they'll take them back
to their local communities,
infect people,
get people hooked,
those people buy the game
and then it would spread.
That was kind of my idea
of how to virally market this
back before the word "viral"
was probably even thought about
with marketing.
We shipped
a lot of product to the show.
We were very optimistic.
It's a four-day show.
We set up our booth
on Wednesday,
but our cards haven't arrived.
Show starts on Thursday.
We go down Thursday morning,
product's not there.
The cards were
in Los Angeles Port,
and it needed
to get through Customs.
The whole first day
of the show goes by,
still no cards.
There were people
that had the cards,
they'd come
from their local retail stores,
they'd bought them from Peter
when he went through the West Coast.
There were players who were
anxious to buy Magic: The Gathering.
People had heard about it.
Yeah, it's a very fun game,
you learn a lot,
it makes you think a lot.
Friday, day two of the show.
Morning, no cards.
Noon, no cards.
But there were people
waiting for the cards.
Having this whole mob of people
constantly coming
by the booth saying,
"Is it here yet?",
was kind of my first sign that,
"Oh, this is gonna be
a bigger deal
than I thought it was gonna be."
At about 2 o'clock
in the afternoon on Friday,
we get the word,
"Magic has arrived."
All the people that were
standing around, waiting,
we invited them to come along
and help us carry the cards.
So we all go trace off
back to the loading docks.
You know, it was just
such a great sight to see.
All these gamers following
Lisa, Jesper, Jay and I.
So we were all carrying them on
our shoulders, they were kind of heavy,
and there's a whole line of us
bringing these Magic cards
up to the booth
from the loading dock.
Okay, there was a few minutes
to open these up.
It was a full year from
when I said, "Sure, I'll do 15,"
to when I saw these cards
being delivered at Gen Con
on skids, and they were
coming and going
as fast as they could
get them in the building.
It was just this stampede
of a huge, huge line
going just back forever.
I couldn't even
see the end of it.
The second we got on there,
the people that knew
a lot about the game
came and bought them,
and they all started
just sitting on the ground
and ripping open decks
and booster packs and playing.
And we were not prepared
for that at all.
We didn't have anything,
we had a table,
we had a cash box, a calculator
and a little pad
of carbon-copy receipts.
It was my job
to write the receipts.
I was writing
as fast as I could.
In the middle of the second day,
my finger split open.
I'm sitting there going, "Oh,
I'm bleeding, what do I do?"
Peter's first wife
was sitting next to me,
we're in the cash register and she
said, "Don't bleed on the money."
It was
actually really frustrating.
We were so busy selling them
that I didn't get to actually
open one,
look at it and play with it.
People were like,
"Oh, they're so cool!
I got this, I got that!"
And I'm like, "I want mine."
It was such a relief.
There was something magical
about being out in the market,
seeing people for the first time
being super excited about it.
Boom, it takes off.
They literally could not
print them fast enough.
We blew through all of our
expectations, a lot of projections.
The first print run
lasted six weeks.
We had projected it would last
six months to a year.
We didn't have enough money to
print the ten million cards we wanted to.
We had enough to print like 2.6.
The first 2.5 million cards
of that ten million cards
were sold out within two weeks
and the next 7.5 million cards
were sold out
before we got them.
There was this huge
conspiracy theory
that we had deliberately
shortened the market
to drive up the value
of the cards as a collectible.
When really, we just had no
idea it was gonna sell that well
and didn't have the money
to reprint at the time.
When Magic just came out
and it was
that popular that fast,
"Okay, now I'm scared."
Although this game
has come on like Game Busters,
Richard insists
that it's not a fad.
In the early days of Magic,
the word "fad"
was used in the same breath
all the time.
Everyone was like, "This is a
fun thing, it's gonna come and go."
In fact, some day,
he hopes that his game
will become an integral
part of all of our lives.
And it probably will.
After all,
who doesn't like Magic?
We certainly didn't realize
that this was going to be
hundreds of millions of dollars.
This could make
millions of dollars.
So, like, a year
of being perpetually surprised.
I was bulled over.
There was this feeling like,
"Okay, we're on the right path."
After Gen Con,
basically everything changed.
We were so focused
on getting it out the door,
getting it sold, that we didn't
think about what came next.
The idea, originally, we were to
produce Magic: The Gathering,
it hadn't begun.
That road was successful,
I expected there to be
more versions of Magic.
We would do 300 cards now
in the Ice Age,
300 cards now in the Savannah.
Magic: The Gathering
was gonna go away.
It was actually just a set.
It became clear
that we were onto something,
so we decided, "We need to make
Magic: The Gathering the brand."
What we decided was that
we would come out with sets.
Expansions, if you will.
We thought that we could
release expansions at a certain rate
and it's like no, we're gonna
have to reprint the original set
more than once
in order to make it to the part
where we have an expansion.
There were all these problems
that were so complex to solve.
So there was a big trip
that we planned out
where Lisa and Jesper and myself
went to the University
of Pennsylvania
and met with Richard and
Skaff and Jim and all those guys.
Several major decisions
were made
that decided the fate of a
lot of things going forward.
What we decided was that we
were going to come out with sets.
Several times a year,
new card sets called expansions
are released.
These cards, when added
to a player's arsenal,
increase the game power
for the player.
We really didn't think
that anyone
would actually buy
an entire box of boosters,
how crazy is that?
That's way too many cards!
Many Magic players
around the world
spend over 1,000 dollars
each year
on new Magic decks
and booster packs.
Yeah, okay, yeah, alright,
we learned better.
Very quickly, game stores
wanted more Magic products.
This is
what an Alpha looked like.
Very simple design,
no words here.
This is
what an unlimited looked like,
that beautiful bold "unlimited."
Now these were $7.95,
that's what they
were marketed for.
Today, each of these
would probably be
$100,000 sealed,
I'm not sure if Alpha more.
Here is Revised.
Still obtainable this day,
still in stock
at Dice City Games.
A mere $1,500 for a Revised
starter deck today.
The early release schedule
to follow was very ambitious.
The Alpha and Beta
were almost like a wisp,
there were people who were
there, they got in early,
but really,
Unlimited is, I think,
what made the game
nationally recognized.
And then just a couple
of months later, Arabian Nights.
And then just a couple of months
after that, Antiquities.
And then Legends.
And then The Dark.
And then Fallen Empires.
All within one year.
That all happens December of '93
to November of '94.
Magic,
as it was first published,
considered it its own world.
That was when I came up
with the concept
of Magic being a multiverse.
With Arabian Nights,
I saw it as being
in the Magic world,
but in its own capsule,
so to speak.
In all the Magic sets,
including Alpha,
Arabian is the one
most done by one person
and most done by Richard.
He pretty closed it
from scratch.
A card like Shahrazad,
that's like Richard to the core.
Richard really wanted
the Shahrazad card
to create a game
within the game.
It was the very first
expansion for Magic,
and we didn't yet have
a total protocol
for how the expansions worked.
I got a call
from the typesetting saying,
"Hey, where is the flavor text?"
There wasn't any.
On some cards, on the bottom
of the rules text box,
you will find italicized text
that tells a little bit more
about the story
or the worlds of Magic.
We call this "flavor text."
When I got the card file
from Richard,
it didn't have
any flavor text in it.
And so when the typesetter
gets it,
he notices that on all
of the very basic creatures,
there is nothing
in the text box.
You start looking
at these cards, and you're like,
"That looks kind of bad."
I thought that,
not given any flavor text,
then there must not be
flavor text in expansions.
What it's used for
is to bring additional depth
or even additional clarity,
sometimes on a card level,
or sometimes
on a larger world level.
They paged me.
And I said, "Who's writing?"
and they said, "You should."
I had taken back to the library
all of the reference books
about Arabian Nights.
The only ones
that I had left were
this Junior Classics edition
and one translation that I had,
I found
as many quotes as I could
and made up other ones
and stayed up
all night doing that.
When entire sets
go without flavor text,
I don't think so.
If that happened, the people
responsible for writing it
would probably soon
find themselves in need of jobs.
In doing the flavor text
all in a hurry like that,
there's a card called
Stone-Throwing Devils
that was a big mistake.
The flavor text
I wrote for that one,
"Sometimes who has the most sin
cast the first stone,"
a Palestinian player
contacted us and said, "Hey,
do you know that stone-throwing
devils is a racial slur?"
And I'm like "What?"
The art of it is devils clearly
in a Middle-Eastern setting.
And I just felt
so bad about that.
I went and talked
to Skaff and Peter
and said, "Look, I know we can't
recall the cards,
you can't do that,
they're out there,
but can we apologize to them,
can we promise them
we will never reprint this card?
Some people
got really mad about it."
And Peter took some heat,
and we dealt with it.
I just really wish
I had known about that
in the first place
to have never put it out.
We wanted to bring
more people into gaming
by highlighting their cultures
or things from their cultures
to make it more inclusive.
So after the Arabian Nights
set had come out,
some of them were made
available in later sets,
and Piety, it's got a quote
from the Qur'an on it.
"Whoever obeys God
and His Prophet,
fears God and does his duty
to Him, will surely find success."
In later context, like,
I might not feel necessarily
comfortable with
taking a quote from the Qur'an
and putting it
into the flavor text
for a game that's,
otherwise, entirely fantasy.
But at the time,
it meant a hell of a lot.
In Richard's mind,
there was definitely this idea
that different sets would have
a different card back.
It was brown
for the initial first edition,
but Arabian Nights
was gonna have a purple back.
So what if you could tell
by the card back?
"Oh, the next card up
is an Arabian Nights card."
He didn't immediately
assume that that was bad.
You don't know
which Arabian Nights card it is.
Unless that's the only Arabian
Nights card you put in your deck.
I wanted it to have
a different card back
because I didn't want
people to feel
like they were obliged
to buy into this,
strong-armed into an endless
parade of expansions.
Our customers,
before they'd even played it,
were positive that this
was a terrible idea.
When they found out that the
cards were going to be marked,
that you'd be able
to tell them apart.
Now of course,
we'd been playtesting it,
it worked fine.
I argued very strongly
for the same card back.
It is, I think,
the only argument
that Richard ever lost
that he cared about.
I was getting
lots of pushback on this.
But I felt
very strongly about it.
I thought I won
the argument at that point.
Peter told me I did.
But in the last few years,
he has told me that I did not.
Peter was gonna back me
to the end on it.
He was gonna do
different card backs anyway
because Richard
felt so strongly about it.
Last minute, midnight,
I decided to relent
and say, "Okay,
let's make them
the same card back."
That ability to have
all the cards be interchangeable
is absolutely fundamental
to Magic's success.
I can play with my cards
from 10, 15, 20 years ago
with the cards
I'm opening up right now
and if I stop playing Magic,
I can come back in eight years
and not only
still know what's going on,
but dust off my old cards
and use them together.
Making it so that all the cards
had the same back
kept this magic
of a boundless world alive.
They intended
for this game to continue on
for the indefinite future.
I think it's every single
visual creative's first instinct
when they walk
in the doors of Wizards to go,
"Great, gonna change
the back of the Magic card,"
and one of the first heartbreaks
I have to do to that person
is to say,
"No, you will never
be able to do this thing."
It's good enough.
It's the best I can say looking back on it.
If I were to do it now,
it would be done differently.
To keep the game
fresh and ever-changing,
new cards
are always in the works.
Artists and designers
take a great deal of pride
in the imagination
that goes into their creations.
There was a point in time where
the designers that made Magic
were these six people,
all of Magic R&D went to Tahoe
to have a sort of vacation,
that's when this picture was taken.
And I remember
we were joking on the plane
that if that plane went down,
that Magic was in real,
real trouble.
First is Bill Rose,
Bill Rose was one
of the original playtesters
of Magic,
and he's still at Wizards.
He's the vice president
of Tabletop Magic.
This is Henry Stern, he was a
pro-player that came to work for us.
Mike Elliott,
very prolific designer.
That's me, a young me.
William Jockusch
was kind of our first
play designer, if you will.
And that's Joel Mick.
I initially started working
for Wizards as lead designer
in December of 1994.
Richard was looking for a way
to transition away from his
responsibilities for Magic.
I became somebody
they would come to,
but I wanted
the designers to become
empowered to make the
changes that needed to be made.
I think Richard's
probably just as proud
of creating a game
for game designers
as he is as creating
a game for gamers.
Magic is catnip
to game designers.
There's almost no bottom,
we made so many different sets.
Why is this set we made different
from the other sets we made?
What makes someone go,
"I wanna play that set"?
Day one of design,
when you sit down
and it's a total blank slate
except for maybe
the concept of the world,
you get to do
kind of whatever you want.
People have a creative lead
and a game design lead
working really hand in hand.
While I'm doing portrait design,
they're doing
exploratory world building.
What kind of worlds
do we wanna return to?
They need a refresh
or do they just need
a loving glimpse backwards?
Creatives are like, "I wanna make this
into a rogue where there is no fighting,"
and the design person would say, "That
doesn't make any sense, you can't do that."
Novelty is really important.
There's not just one answer for the card.
I like designing Magic cards where
a player can look at and be like,
"Wow, what can I do with this?"
My job is basically
to come up with the stats
and abilities
and the cost of the card.
It's like, "Okay,
we're doing Victorian horror."
We're gonna want to make sure
we've got all these
creature types,
cornerstones of the genre, your vampires,
your werewolves, your zombies, etcetera.
We want to make sure that your
mechanics match what's going on there.
For example, Innistrad has a lot
of cards which use the number 13.
It's got cards
that come back from the dead,
because that's
what a lot of monsters do.
And of course, there's humans
working together.
It plays a lot
with the graveyard, a location
that normally, in Magic,
that's where the dead things go,
we kind of put that
aside, we don't touch it.
Well, in Innistrad, things
come out of the graveyard
over and over and over again.
So you're really
creating a vibe.
Normally, when we're done with
playtest cards, we get rid of them.
Yeah, this is all Mirage.
Could be the only ones
in existence, I have no idea.
I just want to keep the history
of Magic design alive,
and they hold
a warm place in my heart.
Magic sets come out on an
extraordinarily long timeline.
You work on sets three,
four, five years sometimes
before they even come out.
I think the hardest
part of my job is
I have to do something
that I'm so invested in
and so excited by and I know
the audience is going to love,
and then, for two years,
I do not talk about it.
And I have to take abuse for years
about, "Why haven't you done this?",
when I know we've done it.
So people, it's coming!
We're making the product!
It's coming, I swear!
Wizards keeps
releasing new stuff
on a pretty regular basis.
There is so much variety,
that once you get engaged with
it, you wanna see all the variety.
At some point,
we're going to run out of ideas.
We're gonna say, "Yeah, we're done,
we've made everything we can make."
I have full confidence
we'll have endless ideas.
To me, as a designer,
that is part of the excitement
and mystery of Magic.
- Exhilarating.
- Confusing.
Magic: The Gathering
one rule would be a thrill.
This game is a blast.
In my opinion, it was Magic
that was leading the growth
of gaming at that time.
Hobby gaming
really started to grow,
but also games and card games
pushed out
much deeper in the mainstream.
Experiencing meteoric growth,
the company has seen
its revenue increase
from less than one million
dollars in 1993
to more than 150 million
dollars in 1998.
Card roleplaying lies
a year before Magic came out,
the revenue's
like 100,000 dollars.
And in the year Magic came out,
the revenue was two million,
and then went to like 57 million
and then after
to like 127 million
in 19... 95?
The growth curve on Magic revenues
was just crazy. It was just insane.
In two years, we'd gotten to four buildings
and then had to move out to a new complex.
The company currently employs
more than 600 people worldwide
and has international offices
in Antwerp, Paris, London,
Beijing and Milan.
It was big business.
We were making like...
300 to 500 million
dollars a year
in sales, globally.
Woohoo, yay!
Very exciting.
But actually, oddly,
the first two years
after Magic was released,
I was really down,
I was very depressed,
and it wasn't long
before I realized
that I was in way over my head.
Psychologically, emotionally,
one of the lowest points of my life,
because even though
Magic is so successful,
I was really discouraged about
my own ability to run a company.
I felt like I was
screwing up a lot.
In 1995, I went back to school,
went to the University
of Washington,
where they had an MBA program
for executives.
Part of surviving was growing,
as an individual,
and getting new skills.
It really turned my life around.
He came to me and said, "Lisa,
you should go do that,"
so I went and did it too.
Because of my inexperience,
we certainly made some mistakes.
Hired a lot of people who
probably shouldn't have been hired,
because they couldn't
be trusted to do a good job.
There was this guy Ralph, he
was coming in and helping us a lot
with doing photography.
At some point, we decided
to put in a payroll system.
And my mom was
doing all the books.
So my mom worked around
through everybody's name.
Ralph hadn't been
in the building that day.
One day, Jesper comes into
my office and he's really upset.
"You gotta fire this guy Ralph,
he's just in the way,
he doesn't do anything useful."
I'm like, "Well,
he works for you, right?
Why don't you take care
of it? You fire him."
And he's like, "No,
he doesn't work for me."
"Well, maybe he works for Lisa."
So we run over to Lisa's office.
"Lisa, does Ralph work for you?"
"I never hired him,
I thought you hired him."
Who the heck does he work for?
So this guy had worked there
for six months
to hold a paycheck and
everything and didn't have a boss.
Just how big is Magic?
It's a game that came out
on August of 1993,
we've sold over 2 billion cards.
Wizards changed in those years
in a lot of ways.
I would say mostly for the better,
certainly some people would disagree.
My first stretch
of Wizards of the Coast was
from '92 to '94.
I don't think I can express how
much work we were doing at the time.
At one point, I was working
22-hour days.
So I quit the company,
then I came back...
two years later.
And at that point,
it was a corporate machine.
It wasn't the friendly,
innovative game company.
We were all growing up, right?
We were a bunch of young kids
who made a very
successful game company.
None of us had ever
run a big company.
The onus on all of us
original founders
was to up our game.
Do we want to pull back,
be a smaller company?
Make games and have fun?
Or do we wanna...
really get serious
about the money part?
And we put on our grown-up hats
and bring in outsiders?
We all kind of looked
at each other like...
When else are we going to get
an opportunity like Magic gave us
to make a personal fortune?
We all kind of agreed,
so Peter said, "Alright.
Starting tomorrow,
it's gonna be serious.
We're gonna run this
like a business."
There comes a time
in a corporation
where you go
from making the product
for your customers
to making the product
for your shareholders.
Wizards did not know
how much it wanted to grow,
how fast it wanted to grow.
We were bringing
people in from outside,
they had different perspectives
about what should be done,
and sometimes...
Those weren't perspectives that
really worked in the hobby industry.
Many times,
they didn't play the games.
I didn't like
having to answer questions
from people who had never
gamed in their lives
and who were telling me
what I should do
to make products to sell to me,
who is the target market.
Sometimes, those people
wanted to take the game
in a way
maybe you didn't agree with.
It led to some internal
squabbles and fights and stuff.
Power plays.
I don't wanna talk
about which ones.
People who didn't understand what
we were doing who were in charge
had a lot to lose, and they
didn't want to trust anybody.
So they started micromanaging
to the point
where it just became a job.
Like the kind of job
where the alarm goes off
and you roll your eyes thinking,
"What am I doing here?"
It was
us learning the corporate game,
because it's a game too, right?
Just like the growth
of Magic was affecting Wizards,
the growth of Wizards was
affecting Magic: The Gathering.
Collecting them is half the fun!
They can also be profitable.
There you go.
We'd lost control of what it
meant to be Magic: The Gathering.
It had turned into something that
was about speculators and collectors.
The brand was about scarcity.
These were not what we
would consider desirable traits.
One great way to make money was to
go out and buy a bunch of Magic cards
and turn around and sell them to
somebody else and inflate the price.
This driving up
of the prices was really scary,
really dangerous,
really bad for the game.
We quickly had to figure out
how do we reposition this brand.
From the beginning,
we talked about Magic
as being both
a collectible and a game.
And we assumed that there
would be some people
who were only collectors and
some people who were only players.
I store my cards
in an old card catalogue.
I am a public librarian.
I do have them organized
not only by color,
then alphabetically,
if in rarity.
And it's been perfect.
Come with me.
This is what over one million
Magic cards looks like.
If I'm spending a lot of money
on Magic cards as a gamer,
I'm gonna get to the point where
I just what these specific cards.
We probably have some, like 12, 15
million cards stored away here and there.
I was a super hardcore collector,
I had full sets of everything.
And we were so far in that we were
buying boxes and boxes of product,
like every single set.
My only income
is selling Magic cards.
These go, depending on the
condition, from around 200 to a grand.
I brought in Magic cards.
My husband
played Magic in the '90s.
He wanted to have
a complete set.
All these cards were printed
in 1993 as part of the Beta set.
I anticipated
the secondary market, certainly,
but I did not anticipate
how quickly it was established.
Every time
a new set comes out, we decide
how many boxes we're just
gonna split apart for individual sales.
Magic had a lot of people who
were very, very interested in playing.
But they go to the store and they're
gonna buy 15 cards for 20 dollars.
Come on. It is different, the idea
that there is expensive cards out there
versus "I can't buy the product
for prices that are gauging me."
It's a living, breathing thing,
the secondary market.
It's like an unregulated
stock market.
And the market
fluctuates frequently.
The ultimate card we've made
so far is probably the Black Lotus.
Can I pull Black Lotus out?
This is a Black Lotus.
The most famous
Magic: The Gathering card.
The Black Lotus became this kind
of pop culture icon for Magic,
because it let you have
these incredibly explosive turns
no other card in the game
allowed you to do.
Cards like Black Lotus,
it allows you to accelerate
turns and turns
beyond your opponent.
When you have it in your hand
on turn one,
you're gonna do something
really degenerate, really powerful.
This deck currently has
nine Mox Sapphires,
six Juggernauts
four Ancestral Recalls,
six Time Walks,
three Timetwisters
and eight Black Lotuses
you can cast them all
in one turn.
The other player doesn't even
have a chance to play.
I've only failed to win
with this deck once.
Oh well.
Absolutely for sale.
I'm not authorized
to make that transaction.
I remember being in San Diego
Comic Con and seeing a Black Lotus
for five dollars in 1994.
"I'm not gonna pay
five dollars for a Black Lotus."
Oi, oi.
You might be willing to pay
300 to 500 dollars
to get a very good quality
Black Lotus in your collection.
You mean you.
The Black Lotus,
the crme de la crme,
that's the card everybody wants,
is 15 to 20,000
in its current condition.
Oh my gosh.
The highest we've sold was,
I think, about 80,000 dollars.
Most expensive Magic card
to ever pass through my doors,
the Black Lotus, from the original
printing, sold for five figures.
What is the highest amount
of money you've ever paid
for a Magic:
The Gathering card?
800,000, it was an artist print,
Chris Rush-signed Black Lotus.
We are given almost complete
freedom with what we wanna do.
We're given the card title...
Chris Rush, he became and is
one of the biggest names,
as an artist, in Magic.
And all because
of his Black Lotus.
The painting, if it ever
changed hands,
would've been
unbelievably valuable.
I would guess,
if that went up for auction,
it would be several
hundred thousand dollars.
There are few constants
in this chaotic life:
death, taxes and Magic: The
Gathering's Black Lotus card.
An Alpha Black Lotus card
fetched three million dollars
at an auction last week.
Black Lotus? What do you think?
I think I had the only one
in our little group of employees
who were playtesting them.
This is
what you call a holy grail.
I kept hearing these Magic cards
were worth a lot of money,
and so I wasn't really against
the speculation part of it.
There were many people at
Wizards who were just delighted by it.
That's amazing! Everybody loves our game!
They're willing to pay this much for it!
Speculators come in,
they drive the prices way up,
and then there's a crash.
For people in the game design,
this was like the eventual
death of the game.
What you really don't want
is speculators to come in
so that your average player
can't play.
The game is for the players,
not for the speculators.
The biggest crisis
that we went through
with Magic: The Gathering
after launch was with the fifth
expansion for Magic: The Gathering,
the card expansion
called Fallen Empires.
So Fallen Empires
was a very interesting set.
My favorite set, I love its art
direction, I love the feel of it.
I love Fallen Empires.
Fallen Empires is largely viewed
as the worst Magic set
of all time.
The game was growing so fast.
Arabian Nights
was five million cards.
Antiquities, 15 million cards.
Legends, 35 million cards.
We're soliciting
orders from distributors
and, not on purpose, by the
time we ship a given expansion,
it's far less product than what
the demand for the product was.
The hard thing, we never seemed
to catch up to demand.
People were really
upset about this.
You can imagine.
Magic in particular
has always been
a matter of, "I would like X",
"Well, you might get half X."
The retailers were not getting
all the product
they were ordering,
and so they were inflating
how much product they wanted.
Oh, well, if I'm ordering X
and only getting half X,
then I'm gonna order four X.
The gamers are doing
the same thing.
For set after set after set,
they're going to multiple
retailers and ordering product.
Fallen Empires was
the first time we said,
"We're gonna take orders
and we're gonna print exactly
what you guys say you need."
We promised to distributors,
"We will ship you
as much as you order."
They all
didn't trust us to do that.
"Well, I'm only gonna get
a tenth of what I order.
If I really want 100,
I want 1,000!"
I remember Wargames West,
he called to get a restock.
As he talked to me,
he kept doubling his order
and doubling his order.
He's like, "How many do you have in
the warehouse? I need to buy them all."
And he did,
he bought every single last one.
Wizards turned on the faucet
and just let it go,
and you went from having a few hundred
thousand boxes of this set or that set
to millions of boxes.
It was intentionally
printed so high
we knew it could not
possibly sell out.
I don't know, something like 300
million cards we ended up printing.
There was far more printed
than anybody wanted.
And everybody went, "Oh-oh."
All the distributors were like,
"Oh, no!"
We didn't mean it!
They all got stuck with a bunch of
product and they couldn't resell it.
Here's two pallets
of Fallen Empires!
People were saying
the fad's over,
those cards
were available for cheap.
I mean, they were very upset,
even though they're really
a part of the problem.
Magic's a collectible product,
there needs to be a bit of scarcity,
not so much
that it feels artificial
or it feels like they're
manipulating the market, if you will.
It was when the bubble burst.
Almost immediately,
the players were turned.
They weren't trying to get it because
they wanted the price to go up,
they weren't trying to get it
because they wanted to play it.
Wizards of the Coast now faces
a common business challenge:
how do you keep the magic alive?
In the wake of Fallen Empires,
we put together a strategy
to change the culture of Magic
to being about competition.
There's only so much you can do
within your own little pot
of people playing Magic,
and if you're being asked to
spend all this money on cards,
you really want there to be
some utility to those cards.
Magic in '95
had been out for two years
and it hit its peak, numbers
were starting to trend down,
that's the first time, really,
that that had happened.
If you're a casual player,
you might just buy a deck
and a couple boosters and
play forever with that deck, right?
We needed to drive the sales,
and organized play
was a way to do that.
Organized play, in my mind,
became the primary way
that we used
for promoting the product
and that was also
part of the product.
Making it a lifestyle,
making it into a hobby,
making it something
that people did every week,
every night.
You were gonna get these cards
and you were gonna get access
into a scene where you can
compete with those cards.
It wasn't this concept of your
local friendly game store back then.
Like, that idea
just didn't exist.
In a recent survey,
when young men were asked
who they'd most like
to square off against,
Bill Gates and Bill Clinton
were near the bottom of the list.
At the top,
actress Jenny McCarthy
and comedians Jim Carrey
and Jerry Seinfeld.
In the early, early days, you were always
looking for someone new to play with.
For anyone that played Magic, it
was a master stroke of marketing.
No matter where you are,
you know that if you
can find a store
on a Friday night,
they're probably playing Magic.
I'm Elaine.
- And where are you from?
- Right outside here.
My husband and I,
we would get right off of work
and be like, "Okay,
let's go to Friday Magic!"
When we came
and worked for Wizards,
we're like, "You know
what we should be doing?
We should be trying to get
that experience
that we loved so much
and get that out to everyone."
Friday Night Magic
is Wizards' brand.
It is an official
yet casual experience
where people can often get
the first taste
of true competitive play.
Once we fired up the whole
organized play program,
we attracted
a whole new customer base
that loved the game
for its competition.
400 avid players
from around the world
competing for big bucks.
I liked seeing
the same faces again and again,
sort of seeing
that community build.
It was also sort of seeing
the stars,
seeing the people
who are the favorites.
In 1996, Wizards
launched the Pro Tour,
a series
of competitive tournaments
where we put
a lot of prize money
on winning Magic games.
And we were unsure how positive
the effect would be on the market.
I know Skaff Elias
was the first person
who ever said the words
"intellectual sport" in my presence.
It seemed kind of,
"Yeah, maybe."
It was easy
for me to convince Richard.
He was onboard immediately.
I take games very seriously.
The reason I take them seriously
is because I consider them
the intellectual counterpart
to sports.
It was not my concept,
but I became convinced
that it was a really good way
to give Magic a long life.
Richard and I went to Peter
and I think it was one of the
harder decisions, probably,
that he had to make.
It was very controversial,
much more controversial
than people
can even possibly imagine today.
The idea of repositioning Magic
as an actual sport
and creating a whole
organized play program
was a tough sell
within the company,
not everybody liked this idea.
People really felt
like it was sullying the game.
It wasn't meant to be competitive,
it was meant to be a hobby.
They were worried that it
would make Magic too serious.
And I convinced a lot of them
that that wasn't the case
in the same way
that the NBA doesn't make it
so people don't play
basketball casually.
But because of the NBA,
they're there
playing basketball casually.
We did a lot of research.
We hired a ton
of sports consultants
from all around, from golf,
tennis, Major League Baseball.
And the other person
that was really helpful there
in the early stages
was a guy called Rick Arons.
And he came from a professional
sports background.
In conversations he had with
Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias,
emerged this strategy,
to market Magic
in the way that a sport
would be marketed
and to structure
the sport of Magic.
We knew it was a big swing,
and we were also nervous as to
whether it would be
worth it in the long run.
The board game called
Magic: The Gathering.
The hottest of these new
non-electronic diversions
has now spawned
a professional play-off tour.
128 players,
all males in their 20s,
from 25 countries,
are in the run to compete
for 200,000 dollars.
We're gonna have a professional
tournament league,
five tournaments in a year,
and we're gonna give out
a million dollars in prize money
to people that place well
in these tournaments.
We created a sport.
The place: New York City!
The time: February 17th
and 18th of 1996.
The event:
The very first tournament
of the Magic: The Gathering
professional tour.
Pro Tours and Gran Prix
and World Championships,
and really codifying
the way we play Magic
and the rules with which
we play Magic.
To be qualified to play at
a professional tournament,
you have to win
in a Pro Tour qualifier.
I didn't know what that meant, it
sounded like fantasy and professional.
That's when I learnt, "Oh, there's
actually a Pro Tour for all of this."
And I was like,
"I gotta try this."
If it's a one-day tournament,
you probably play
eight to ten rounds,
each round
is 30 minutes to an hour.
By the time you get
to the end of that day,
your brain is mush.
You make it to the top eight,
you're doing it a third time.
This is a true story.
I remember the last round
of this tournament,
I sat down
against my round eight opponent,
I think his name
was Keith or something,
he was like this gigantic,
muscular guy, right?
And super intimidating.
And I was like,
"Hey, if we both draw,
we get to make top eight,
do you wanna draw?"
And he looks at me and is like,
"No, why would I want
to draw with you?
You're just a little girl."
So we play and the match-up
just happened to be
really good for me
and I crushed him.
This guy was so angry
that I remember
he threw his deck across
the room, he took the deck
in the deck box and just
chucked it at the wall.
I was really in shock, like,
"What just happened?"
I ended up going into
the top eight as first seed,
and this opponent ended up
not even making top eight.
If you were good enough,
you could rise
to a level of stardom,
effectively.
That's the Hammer,
ex-arm wrestler.
Number one wild man on the
circuit and East Coast Magic expert.
Maybe I can get Hammer
to show me around.
- Hey.
- Hi.
We got Magic:
The Gathering on ESPN too.
We invested in figuring out
how to do camera angles,
card games, and the whole tournament
scene became a really big deal.
Richard and I were
travelling all around the world,
giving out big checks.
Shawn "Hammer" Regnier was
handed a check for 17,000 dollars.
I practiced hard.
Magic is my life.
Once you give away money,
it seems like the whole world
says, "Oh, this must not
just be a little game kids play."
Devoting your life to becoming
a professional player,
everything that that entails,
that really should be rewarded.
The hours, the years
he's poured in,
this is a journey that started
when Reid Duke was
five years old.
He has dedicated his life
to Magic: The Gathering.
For much of the time
that I was playing,
a Grand Prize would be
around 10,000 dollars.
And then the Pro Tours,
they're very prestigious,
they would be in the ball park of
40 or 50,000-dollar Grand Prize.
300,000 dollars
was the biggest prize pool
that I know of
for a Magic tournament,
that was the World
Championship in 2020.
Winning 40,000 dollars,
from the United States,
Brian Kibler.
I believe my lifetime
Magic prize winnings
was somewhere on the realm
of 300,000 dollars.
Which is a lot of money, but it's
not necessarily that much money
when you consider that
spread out over ten years.
And it doesn't take into account
flights and hotels and things like that.
For the big guys, the Pro Tour
with 125 of the world's
best Magic players,
this is serious competition.
Lisa Stevens, on Play by Play.
This one is crazy, it could
turn the whole game around.
Some of the top guys had
put together 100,000 dollars,
but that was probably maybe 10
or 15 of those people in the world
was people, if they got a couple thousand
dollars during the course of the year,
it was enough to maybe
buy some more Magic cards.
It's pretty exciting, it's a lot
of fun talking to the players,
seeing what strategies
they're evolving.
Taking Magic seriously, which
is what they're starting to do.
I didn't sleep last night,
playtested with my friends.
I maybe spend six hours
a day, at least.
I do play competitive events,
and I do at least
40 hours of practice a week.
But for me,
they're not competitive.
I win, great, if I lose, okay.
I just get to play more Magic
and maybe I'll
get something out of it.
My mom and my aunt
took all of these T-shirts
and turned them into
this giant blanket.
Each of these patches represents
a different Pro Tour
that I played in.
Pro Tour Mainz,
which was in Germany,
it was at the same time
as one of my university finals,
and I travelled across the world
and I came in 11th place,
and that was really awesome.
However, I did not do nearly
as well in the university final.
But... It all worked out.
Magic: The Gathering
was accepted last fall
by China's Sports For All
Administration Center
to be named an official non-Olympic
mind sport for the masses.
It was the nerd
answer to sports, in a way.
There was nothing like that
for me when I grew up.
There was, at the time,
a very strong,
negative social feedback.
"Oh, you're nerds and you're playing
this and you're wasting your time."
There were kids in school
who were, like,
making fun of me
for playing Magic,
I'm like, "Yeah,
I'm the top ranked player
literally in the world."
At the time, right?
That was hard to make fun of
or at least make me care
that they were making fun of it.
And now we have E-Sports
that's grown out of that.
I think it's just fantastic.
I can't describe completely
how exciting
this is for me personally
as the founder
of Wizards of the Coast.
It's been like a dream
come true to add
this dimension to gaming
and this dimension
to Magic: The Gathering.
This was a moment
where we faced a crisis
of Magic: The Gathering having
bad brand image on the market
and bad behavior patterns
and having a crash,
and us having to fix it.
Peter got feedback
from the distributors
and the retailers
that this was the thing
that saved Magic.
I think it was a point
where we were
smart as a business.
As opposed to lucky
because we met Richard Garfield
and he designed
the next hit game.
Wizards of the Coast's
expensive line
of popular games and novels,
world-wide organized
play program
and enormously successful
game conventions,
positioned the company
for continued growth
and profitability.
As Magic survived
its early tests
of, like,
the Fallen Empires problem,
it was clear this was
gonna be a perennial product
that had really high revenue
and really high margins.
Wizards of the Coast, as a company,
started to become really valuable.
Starting around 1997,
there started to be
this discussion at a board level
about how we would
find value for shareholders.
And the pressure to do that
ratcheted it up each year.
It was very difficult
for a company like Wizards,
privately held,
how do the shareholders get their
money back out of the company.
We had shareholders.
And we were all
said shareholders,
but it was a small company,
it didn't matter, right?
It was kind of the idea
that your stock is worthless
when part of a game company.
There were a lot of people that
had stock, a lot of employees.
All said now,
that stock's worth money.
Stock was like 25 cents a share,
it was this sort of fake value
that they just put on it
to have a value.
They really needed
a printer desk.
And we happened to have one
that we didn't need
and so I think I got 30 shares
of stock for this printer desk.
So people started getting out
their paper and pencil,
figuring out their net worth
based on how much is this company
worth and how much they have.
Stock buybacks were a problem.
Since nobody really knew
what the value was,
those were going
to be very contentious.
The variance of what people
thought the stock might be worth
was at least a factor of ten.
It did not seem like a path
we could go in.
So there became
a lot of pressure
on me and the board of directors
for there to be
some sort of liquidity event.
An event where people
who had stock in the company
could convert it into cash.
You might say, "I'm worth
500,000 dollars on paper,"
but you can't take that down
and buy a house.
People really understood that
the way to get the money out
was either they had to go public
or they had to buy a public company
or they had to be bought
by a public company.
There were a number of people
that made offers to us over the years,
were offering too little money,
so we all just passed on it.
Well, I had met a guy at Hasbro
named Tom Dusenberry
who was in charge
of Hasbro Electronics.
He said, "Hey, Peter, if you
want to sell this company,
be sure to give me a call, because
Hasbro would be interested."
They give Tom a call
after that one board meeting
and I say "Well, I think my
board's ready to sell this company."
I had an idea
something was going down,
I was coming in
from a lunch basketball game,
and I was walking in,
with my sweaty clothes
as I was going up to the shower,
and as I walked upstairs,
and here comes Peter in a suit
with a couple
other people in suits.
I recognize one of them as Alan
Hassenfeld, the CEO of Hasbro.
And at that point,
I knew something was up.
We pursued other options,
but as we went through the year,
the more we talked with Hasbro,
we invested
in that relationship,
by summer, it looked
like the best option.
He knew I
was kind of against it,
because I thought we still
had more room to grow.
When they finally
negotiated the deal,
Peter came into my office.
Peter put a number
on a piece of paper.
What my shares would be worth
if we sold to Hasbro.
And he put it on the table
and he gave me
a set of craps dice
and he said,
"Are you going to cash that in
or are you gonna roll the dice
and see what happens?"
I looked at that number and it was bigger
than anything I've ever thought about.
And I was like, "I'm out."
And that's how he convinced me
to sell to Hasbro.
It was a pretty fair deal.
Everyone more or less agreed.
Some, begrudgingly.
The price was a combination
of an asset purchase upfront,
with what is called
a balance sheet adjustment,
and an earnout.
In September of 1999,
Hasbro bought Wizards
for 325 million dollars.
The number
that generally gets reported
is much lower
than it actually was
because
of the earnout that followed.
The total price all came up
to just shy
of half a million dollars.
The investor story
about the janitor,
I think their stock ended up being
worth about three billion bucks.
So...
Worked out pretty good.
So I was there the day they
handed out the buyout checks.
And they were like physical checks
that they handed to everybody.
I was walking between buildings
and I saw Richard
walking across the Mana Pool,
just what we called the little courtyard
that was in the interior of the building,
and his wife at the time
was walking the other way,
and I saw the moment
when Richard held up his check
and she went...
Buyout day was
so incredibly energetic,
party time, like people
were really, really happy,
we're talking major life-changing
amounts of money that people got.
I ended up
with multi-millions of dollars.
I had never conceived
of having that much money so...
Wow.
I was able to buy this house,
I was able to buy
a house for my parents,
I could loan my brother
the money to buy a house,
I could loan my best friends
the money to buy a house.
People I could take care of,
who were always
supportive of me.
And that was just
the best feeling ever.
I think Wizards of the Coast
broke that mold,
Magic broke that mold.
Holy cow,
there's big money in this.
And Magic was regularly
bringing in 400, 500 million.
But Peter liked
to put it more succinctly.
Make games as big as movies.
And then we were sitting there,
looking at our 500 million
dollars, going,
"Jeez, there's not many movies
that gross 500 million dollars."
To take what was
special about Magic
but then leverage Hasbro's reach
to get it
in front of more people
and on a global basis, that
was just such a huge opportunity.
When Hasbro came and bought us,
there was this sort
of validation that our industry
was worth someone buying.
It brought a level
of professionalism
and oversight that I think
probably we needed.
Though it's interesting,
because I don't think Hasbro,
at least while I was there, never
really understood what we did,
it was just kind of this
voodoo magic that we did.
And it wasn't Easy-Bake Oven
and it wasn't Monopoly.
I left Wizards within a year
of it being sold to Hasbro.
I can imagine
somebody on the outside saying,
"Oh, yeah, he didn't want to
work for Hasbro" or something.
It wasn't anything like that.
Shortly after Hasbro bought us,
they sold
all their digital rights
to another company,
and it wasn't tenable for me,
that's what I wanted to do,
so I left to do that.
The best part of Magic,
by far, is the gathering.
It's so important they put
it in the name of the game.
It's always been the gathering
that's the important part.
That is the magic.
Magic: The Gathering
is a community,
a shared culture, in many ways.
There are around 10
million active Magic players.
If I bring up Magic: The Gathering,
almost anywhere to anyone,
a lot of times they play it, a
lot of times they're a fan of it,
but they don't think
anyone else is.
Even with that
massive of a community.
It is who you are,
it is something that you do
to express something
about yourself.
I'm saying most Magic players
spend substantially
more time thinking
about the game
than they do
actually playing it.
It's literally a blank canvas
where all
of the paint colors are
the thousands of cards
that you have at your disposal.
You really get
to express yourself.
There's so many different ways
to evolve yourself with Magic
that have nothing to do
with even just playing the game.
If you wanna be a cosplayer,
you can do that.
If you wanna get into the story
and the creative, you can do that.
If you want to, like,
competitively, you can do that.
If you wanna play socially,
casually only, you can do that.
You can go on and on and on.
Magic innovated
in all kinds of ways,
there's Standard format,
there's Legacy...
Pioneer, Modern, Vintage...
Circle Magic,
Grand Mele, 5 Star,
there is Commander...
- Commander.
- Commander.
Commander is one
of the most wonderful
success stories
in Magic's history.
Commander has become the
most popular way of playing Magic.
And that's amazing.
It was a whole play format
that was created by fans.
What's different about
Commander is its philosophy.
In fact, Commander is the only
format that actually has a philosophy.
It's a social format first
and a mechanical one second.
Fun is the primary goal
in Commander, winning is not.
Most of the mentality
surrounding Commander
is that everyone is just there
to have a good time.
As opposed to competitive
Magic where I'm there to kill you.
It's about having a great story,
it's about watching this
ridiculous interaction pop off
that has no business
being on the table.
That's fun, that's cool,
that's creative,
that's neat, that's engaging.
Commander began as a format
called Elder Dragon Highlander.
And the idea was
Highlander, like the movie.
"There can be only one!"
There can be only one.
There can only be one
of any card in your deck.
Commander is a multiplayer
casual format
where each player
builds their deck
around a particular
legendary creature.
You have a 100-card deck
and it's all based around your
Commander, which is one card,
and then 99 other cards.
Commander is a format
unlike any other,
and not just because
of the play style of it,
but because
of how it was created.
I am a retired level five
Magic judge.
I also happen to be
the creator of EDH,
which turned into Commander.
It was created
external to Wizards
and it started
within a small group.
I envisioned it as something
Pro Tour judges were playing
as they were
winding down from a day.
It seemed to me there was room
for low stakes
or no stakes Magic.
The idea is these are cool Magic
cards that never had a home,
let's put them in a deck
and see what they do.
The social aspect is
hard baked into Commander's DNA.
Now that I'm kind
of removed from that lifestyle
of I have to win every single
game that I play, I love Commander.
In 2002, I was stationed
at Elmendorf Air Force Base
in Anchorage, Alaska,
and I had a pretty good
gaming group
our friend Adam Stanley
had come up with.
Sort of proto EDH.
And then I made some tweaks
to make it viable.
And they start talking about it.
And they start showing it
to judges at tournaments.
August of 2004,
I wrote a Star City article
about the format.
That article was
the birth of EDH.
And Wizards watched
from the sidelines,
and initially, we were
actually kind of scared.
Maybe this is bad
for our business?
One day, we woke up
and it was like, "Wow,
everyone's playing Commander."
And that's when we knew we needed
to start making Commander sets.
Wizards of the Coast
approached our manager,
he came to me and said,
"They're talking very seriously
about making EDH product."
The only thing is, we're gonna
have to change the name.
Turns out Highlander
is very litigious, so...
There can be only one.
Over time, once Wizards
adapted the format,
we changed the official name
to Commander.
The Commander series
comes in five separate packs.
Each pack contains
one unique deck.
In each deck, there are three legendary
commanders you can choose from.
I think I have over 70
Commander decks at this point?
I loved trying
the different mechanics
and seeing what they do.
I like to think about ways
to build decks
that are not typical
and to think about combinations
and interactions that can be done
in unique and interesting ways.
It's like a box of Legos
or something like that,
do what you want with this,
and some people will build
according to the instructions,
and some people will rally with some
masterpiece you never saw coming.
What people were looking for
that they found in Commander,
I was playing
similar sorts of things.
Big team games where you play
with over 100 different people.
So it was great to see
players doing that themselves.
It's that there is a community,
it's that there is something
you can come together with,
an acknowledgement
of a deeper connection
than just what the rules say
the cards do.
The picture of four, five people
sitting around a table,
smiling, laughing,
cracking jokes, that is the
quintessential Magic experience.
When I see the endurance
that Magic has had
and the influence it's had
on so many different games
and sorts of games,
it feels great.
It's almost like it's not real.
That it got as big as it did
and that it's still going.
Some person that I randomly
meet in a completely different context
finds out I worked on Magic: The
Gathering, they're like, "Really?
That's so cool!"
The idea that people
would take games seriously
has been probably
the single thing that I'm
the most proud of,
looking back at all.
I feel so lucky
that I happened to be
in the same hallway Richard was
when he invented this thing.
I'm very proud and honored
to have been part of it.
And I'm thankful I was allowed
the opportunity to be part of it.
I like to view games in the same
way that I viewed academics.
In Mathematics,
it felt like everybody
was working together,
providing each other
theorems and concepts,
and when somebody came along
with something that worked,
it would be used by everybody.
I feel like I managed
to do that with Magic
and that it's influenced
a lot of things
in sort of a similar way.
It's terrific to look back
over its influence.
Looking back
at what we created in Magic
is just pride.
I was a cog in this machine
that did some
pretty dang cool things,
and we changed the world.
Everything changed!
Good Lord, the wake
we left, who knew?
I just feel... I mean, blessed.
Lucky, fortunate,
that Richard Garfield
had this amazing invention
and I happened to be in the
right place at the right time.
I really love Richard,
My life is good in so many ways
because of what he did,
and I'm just thankful
I had the opportunity.