My Kid Lost a Game of 'Magic' to Its Creator But Scored a Piece of Its Art (opens in new tab)

MtG is just a fantastic game. Somehow I think the detailed rules really appeals to those of us who simulate automata in our head. ;)

> I had begun the interview with what I figured was an obvious, softball icebreaker: “Yes,” Garfield responded when asked if he was related to President James Garfield (1831-1881), “he was my great-great-grandfather.”

Wow!

> I think make-believe is a very important component of games; the art really drives that.

The art and flavor text are a big part of the game, IMO. At least its original draw, anyways.

Magic may be the best game ever devised.

Unlike chess, it’s stochastic and unlike backgammon, it has hidden information and bluffing. But it’s more than that - the cards change the rules of the game itself.

On top of those layers, the fact that each player builds their own deck makes the game asymmetric and ultimately the meta-game of building the deck to beat the Keynsian beauty contest of optimal deck selection becomes the most important part.

It is this meta game that makes me think it will be a long long time before we have a machine learning model that can play the full game (and the meta-game) consistently better than an expert human player. At least while new cards are being added to the game.

The game is turing complete. It can have infinite loops and crazy, ridiculous complexity and is gloriously fun to play. I’d love to hear about any AI projects that have taken a serious stab at playing a complete game.

Growing up in the suburbs south of Seattle, I got to visit the Wizards of the Coast headquarters once or twice. As a 14 year old, I approached Richard Garfield one day and asked him if he wanted to play. We played two or three games, I recall I won two. He signed one of my cards and continued playing other folks.

For a 14 year old me this was a pretty big deal. Thank you Richard for doing that!

What a great read! Stasis is one of my all time favourite pieces of MtG art, although there are definitely people who feel the opposite. To me it perfectly encapsulates what the card does, and as someone who at age 12 lost his first game at a 'real' Magic tournament to a Stasis deck the card is a special memory for me. Although the game has moved towards being very cohesive with its art, I actually liked it when there were many cards whose artwork didn't really fit into the canon of the game, in some way it made the game's world feel even bigger.

The art in the old sets were so much more iconic and imaginative. They were so varied in styles and had so much personality. The newer ones have a much more consistent style, but ends up looking really generic and forgettable.

I first played Magic when I was around seven years old, when the Portal set came out. I've played on-and-off, never seriously/competitively. Before Arena came out, I had spent more time playing on Apprentice and then Cockatrice than I had with physical cards.

Arena now takes up a LOT of my spare time. I'm happy with the microtransaction system. $5 can take you pretty far when it comes to building a competitive deck if you are willing to play drafts. I've spent around $40 total across three accounts. The $5 one-time purchase is quite generous.

BO1 constructed allows you to deviate from the meta and/or counter it. The matchmaking is good, and you can tell a lot of effort has gone into cosmetic and sound effects.

I've played lots of Hearthstone and Shadowverse since both came out. I haven't touched Hearthstone in years, even though I spent close to a thousand dollars on it. I'm done with HS for good. I'll still play Shadowverse for new sets since you can always make a competitive deck for free if you create a new account and spend a few hours grinding.

I hope Wizards doesn't get greedy with Arena as it (and MTG) continue to grow in popularity. When Hearthstone got big, I expected Magic to die out completely, but it's nice to see that didn't happen.

There's no mention in the article, but as a kid I really liked the flavor text at the bottom of some cards: witty, small fragments of an unknown fantasy lore.

It's nice to learn about the backstory of Stasis in particular. The card art in Magic was gorgeous all around back then, but Stasis in particular has always been one of my favorites. Totally iconic, highly unique stylistically but still a great fit for what the card is and does. It's a real classic of the genre.

If there's one thing that has made me fall in love with Magic all over again, it's my boy trying to get into Yu-Gi-Oh, which is one of the most absurdly complicated games I've ever tried to learn. In Magic, no matter how big the rulebook is now, the core interactions and vast majority of cards are incredibly simple (and still flavourful!), and all the complexity is more or less optional, in terms of playing with more rares or different sets. It's astonishing how much stuff Garfield got right 25+ years ago, whether by accident or not, but I hope to be playing the game for the next 25 years as well.

>> So, in Magic, the rare cards are often the more interesting cards, but the most powerful cards are meant to be common so that everybody can have a chance.

It's funny but just today I was playing a match in M:tG Arena and I noticed that I used a card's rarity to make a decision. The card was Worthy Knight, a 2/2 creature and I was trying to decide whether to attack into it with my own creature, a Pelt Collector (at the time also a 2/2, with a +1/+1 counter). Normally, in that situation, I wouldn't attack with Pelt Collector - I'd wait for it to grow a bit and then attack so it wouldn't just trade.

However, I wasn't sure what Worthy Knight was doing in the opponent's deck, but I noticed it was a rare (I didn't know the card, it's from the new set, Sword of Eldraine).

Now, normally that would make no difference, but there is no trading in M:tG Arena, as there is in the physical game, so rare cards are harder to come by in Arena than they are in the physical game. Given that Arena booster packs only have eight cards, when physical booster packs have 15 cards, a full set of four of any rare represents a more significant investment (of money, or time) on the part of its owner.

Based on this I figured that, if the opponent was running Worthy Knight (and likely a set of four given I'd seen it in the first turn), then it must be somehow important to their strategy. So I attacked with Pelt Collector and we traded (i.e. the two creatures killed each other in combat).

>> “One of the underlying premises of the game,” he said, “is that there’s supposed to be a very simple set of rules and all the cards are exceptions. Every card allows you to break the rules at some point. That’s how I think of it.”

That's Garfield of course and it's his game, but I think it's more accurate to describe the game as an abstract machine and the text on the cards (the "ability text") as its inputs that change the machine's state. Seen another way, the ability text language is the scripting language of the game's rules engine.

The language itself is fascinating. Formally, it's a Controlled Natural Language, but I doubt there is any other CNL that has been in constant use by so many people, while undergoing so many changes to its syntax and vocabulary.

Consider for instance the ability text of the card, Stasis, discussed in the article:

  Players do not get an untap step.
  Pay {U} during upkeep or Stasis 
  is destroyed.

That was what was printed on the card in its original, Limited Edition Alpha printing. The same text is now listed as follows on The Gatherer, Wizards' of the Coast M:tG online card database:

  Players skip their untap steps.
  At the beginning of your upkeep
  sacrifice Stasis unless you pay 
  {U}.

Note how the original card uses "destroyed" while the new text uses "sacrificed" to describe what happens if "you" (the player "controling" Stasis) does not pay {U} (one blue mana) during your upkeep step. In short, "destroy" and "sacrifice" now have different meanings. In particular, while both abilities ultimately move a permanent from its controller's Battlefield to its owner's Graveyard zone, "sacrificing" a permanent doesn't "destroy" it, so effects that replace destruction (like regeneration) cannot prevent a permanent from being moved to its owner's graveyard. Neither can "Indestructible", an ability that precludes destruction, prevent sacrifice.

So the ability text language started very loose and informal, a language aimed to help players understand how a card is meant to be played, but over time it has morphed into something else entirely, a precise formal language that leaves no room for ambiguity, given of course a good knowledge of the rules.

A very long time ago (16-18 years ago) I saw that one of the artists (Dameon Willich) was also in the SCA and did equestrian stuff, I found an email address on some website for the period equestrian stuff for him and shot him an email saying I think it's really cool that he's doing the sorta stuff I like doing and to keep having fun.

Replied to me pretty quick, asked for my address and sent me a signed artist proofs of all the cards he had designed which was really cool because they have the card on the front but the backs were blank, just white. It made my month, any time we went to play at a store I'd get them out and set them out and if anyone asked "oh these are my artist proof good luck charms" just for an excuse to show them off.

Sadly all of my MtG cards went up in flames at a friend's apartment 3 or 4 years ago when he lost everything (including one of his two dogs) in a New Year's day fire.

I just looked him up again, he's still doing the period stuff, and dropped him a line thanking him, brought a smile to my face and I'd probably not thought about that in the better part of decade, good times.

I really enjoyed mtg as a kid but played a few games recently and discovered I don’t really like it. I feel the use of mana makes the game slow and clunky. Moreover, a deck of 60 cards is a lot. My favorite card game nowadays is Gwent. With the small deck size and single card mulligans you can mitigate almost all bad luck and chance and design a really tight and cohesive deck. Also I love the 3 round format, makes the game very interesting.

Mtg at this point just feels dated and I think there’s better ccgs around. Net runner is also great and imo, deeper than mtg. The asymmetrical nature of it also makes things very interesting and deep.

I've seen MTG played, and I've had a few friends try to get me into it, but the idea of collecting a big shoe box full of cards never appealed. In a way I see it much like WH:40k, super interesting looking game, but with such a high barrier to entry as to make it functionally unattainable. Also unless I'm mistaken don't most MTG cards come in "packs" where you don't know what you're actually getting? I have zero interest in loot boxes, virtual or physical, so thats a big negative for me.

To each there own of course, but I think I'll avoid this particular time/money sink.

I would love to hear the original audio from that game between a precoscious 6 year old and Garfield. It sounds like it would be totally adorable and also informative. I got the Magic bug in junior high school in the early 90s and it was a blast that definitely enhanced my life and expanded my friend circle throughout high school. I vividly remember going to a small local tournament, meeting a ton of people and very much having a feeling of 'these are my people'. It was amazing.

That was back in 4th edition days I think (I know it was during release of The Dark expansion, I bought a box of boosters for that... was a bit disappointed). It seems the rules have changed a bit since then and the game itself is quite a bit more complicated. Lots of counters and tokens and such that weren't so much of a thing back then.

Magic is an awesome game.

Taught me how strategy and tactic work together.

How you make weaknesses my strengths.

But most importantly, it taught me not to play the games of others, but to play my own game.

the part about rare cards not being stronger than common cards is really not true anymore sadly, with competitively payable planeswalkers like Oko, for example, often being 50$+ each, and pretty much every card in competitive decks except basic lands being rare or mythic rare

I've recently gotten back into MTG, and Commander in particular. If you think you know magic, check out the Commander format -- it feels so political, so dynamic, so buck wild.

D&D is still my favorite game, but man is magic up there for me.

Like many others reading this, I wish i had kept my old cards or invested in the alpha,beta editions when they were merely just expensive compared to the price they are now. The oldest MTG cards are like the original bitcoin equivalent.

I almost got into Magic just because the cards looked so cool, but my aunt (who showed me my cousin's cards) said I was too young for that somehow. Anyway, that's how I became a Yu-Gi-Oh! player instead...

Growing up I enjoyed playing Magic: The Gathering with my friends - simpler times. I remember having a pretty killer "Goblin Deck". Alas, that was 20+ years ago and are nothing more than feint memories.

Is there a good link that concisely describes the rules of the game?

Does anyone know if/where one could download all the art from Magic the Gathering? If not all, any subsets? Not necessarily generic wallpapers, but the actual card art.

love MtG, started at the end of general availability (locally anyhow) of the beta release around 6th grade. still have cards, still play with my spouse once or twice a year.

i even still buy the occasional booster pack.

Is there an easy way to learn MtG online, without buying cards?

"How Not To Type a Title."