The Creator Of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong
The Creator Of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong
As the number of cards in circulation grew, Garfield went out of his way to keep common or easier-to-find cards powerful, while also keeping the rare cards narrowly attuned and never so powerful that you needed them to win. He would sometimes demonstrate this by bringing a deck full of common cards to games stores and beating players who had decks stuffed with expensive rares.
Today, getting rich kids to buy 10 sets of the game seems to be Hasbro’s primary business model. Wizards has adopted a punishing release schedule, printing so many new cards that the Bank of America recently reprimanded Hasbro for trying to over-monetize their players and downgraded the company’s stock. When I asked Garfield what he thought about this, he pleaded ignorance and told me he’s been completely disconnected from the game since the pandemic. He’s heard rumors that have alarmed him, but he thinks Wizards of the Coast old-timers like Bill Rose and Mark Rosewater still have the game’s best interests at heart.
I thought this was particularly interesting. I love the original vision Garfield had with commons vs. rares, bring that back!
I have an accelerationist mindset for MTG alone. I hope that the game's brand continues to deteriorate as a result of Hasbro's actions to the point where people start en masse printing their own proxy sets in the system and doing cube-style drafts incorporating some new or redesigned cards along with the old system.
He's so correct about the rarity system particularly lands, a basic feature like dual-color lands has evolved into this kind of chase collector item worth hundreds of dollars. Eliminating mana screw and making mono color mechanics more distinctive and powerful would probably be my immediate focus if I could get people offline involved in weird custom cube drafts. Xmage has some pretty creative people, and you can actually play with the custom cards, I wonder what Garfield thinks about it or if he knows about proxying.
So far, fwiw, the best take on solving mana screw imo has been what the game Sorcery Contested Realm has done. You have a 40 card deck and a separate 20 card lands deck. In Magic you would start with 4 spells and 3 lands, one free mulligan in both decks, and then you draw from either deck for the turn. Cards would have to be erratad en masse to make this work in Magic, but I think Arena kinda solves it with "seeking" a land vs. a spell. I don't know how that works in Magic outside of at least smoothing an opening hand. The game would need to refer to the deck separately from the "atlas" of lands.
Regarding his biggest fear and Magic's biggest threats:
“The places I get worried about are Magic’s tournament system, which has historically been important to Magic’s health. And then the philosophy that you should not make rare cards so powerful that you need them. People feel that’s a philosophy that has been broken from time to time, and I think it’s always been a mistake. It might have made money in the short run, but it has hurt the game in the long run, or at least until it was corrected,” he said.
“I think things that are existential threats for a game like Magic is if the community breaks down, and here I'm thinking of the community built around tournaments, but not just that. Or if people see it as being a game where you can buy victory, which is associated with this idea of making rare cards too powerful—or powerful cards too rare would be another way to put it. Those are serious problems which might lead to short-term profit but will lead to long-term problems that could be catastrophic.”
I started to drift away when they introduced super-rates - even though technically there were always rare that were harder to get. Didn’t take long for their power level to creep up beyond regular rares, so you had to have them.