The game Garfield envisioned was played with Ante, which is something the community ran away from real quick. His game also had no serious text templating, so it was a far harder game to play. He might not have envisioned play to win, but he designed some of the craziest cards printed in the history of the game, and basically every single one of them had the highest rarity: He knew that Ancestral Recall was much better than Healing Salve.

It's difficult for me to go back and think that the best times for Magic were the moments when he was in charge: Magic's R&D team has done more work on the game that basically anything else in the boardgame industry, or the videogame industry. The need to keep printing new sets at ever speeding cadences (far more than 2 sets a year), causes failing sets, but from a design perspective, I'd argue that the golden age of the game is way past Garfield's intervention. I'd say the golden age of the game was from Invasion in 2000 to Return to Ravnica in 2012. Garfield left the game in better hands in 1995 or so.

I'd put the end of the golden age a few years past that, but I fully agree with the notion that the point where the game was at its best was long after he was in charge. He created a fun game, but not a game that people would continue to play for decades, and Magic R&D turned it into a game that I had far more fun with than anything he ever envisioned.

It's immediately obvious when you realize that despite all of the games he has invented, Magic, Robo Rally and King of Tokyo are his only real hits...

...and I think King of Tokyo/New York is absolute rubbish.

Some of his other games have their niche of players but very small by comparison. KeyForge was very flash-in-the-pan in terms of popularity.

He also designed the Netrunner rules that Android: Netrunner was based on, and that had such a committed community that when Wizards pulled the license from FFG, the fans just kept developing the game.

Niche - not a huge hit. Great games though.

Was it harder to play? If you didn't understand the rules amongst friends you made them up. But the game also tended towards more battles like "my flying bear defends against your dragon, oh no a lightning bolt". I tried getting back into it a few years ago because I still love the idea of MTG and every card had a book of text and all the best combos were sorted out the second a set released. Which -- I understand why people like that. I'd still like my flying bears back.

one word: banding.

Don't forget the even-more-specific "bands with other" ability from Legends!

I still have a hundred of those Legends rules insert cards somewhere in my basement. Sadly they aren't in demand by collectors.

Everything always goes wrong when it leaves it's small niche and starts being monetised. The thing that mattered no longer matters, only money.

Magic was monetized from the beginning. It was the precursor to loot boxes in modern computer gaming and used the same hooks that get people addicted to gambling to encourage sales of booster packs.

The article covers how this is not true and how the transition to loot boxes was how it went wrong. The start is meandering but the meat is that the end.

I think the hook is the same with loot boxes, gacha and booster packs. You pay money for the thrill of not knowing what you are going to get. For some people that thrill is addictive, so they keep spending more money for that brief moment of excitement.

From my perspective the idea of a game being compelling because of the mystery doesn't work with PvP because the fundamental mechanic pushes people to learn the meta so they can win. If the original goal of Magic was to allow people to feel the wonder of discovery, either it should have been a PvE game with a GM, or the booster packs actually are a core mechanic that provide the thrill of the unknown, in which case the game was structured from the start to make money.

Boosters were in from the start, and that means the gambling and "skinnerisation" were already there, perhaps less optimised than today but fundamentally the same thing. Whales buying every booster they could get their hands on until they got the cards they wanted was something that happened as soon as it went on sale.

I remember getting addicted hard to find those booster packs. It's funny we always look down on the people that would buy single cards from binders though

Twice a year? I think there were 7 new releases in a single year recently. Twice would be relaxing. (I quit a long time ago, so I just watch from the sidelines, baffled.)

You definitely don't have to pay to win. I play entirely on MTG: Arena, and you can pay $0 and still build a competitive deck. For paper magic, just find people who don't have sticks in their posteriors and use homemade or printed versions of the cards you want.

It can be difficult to find people to play with outside of events sanctioned by WotC, in which proxies are not allowed. I have some proxy decks but my opportunity to use them is limited.

And in that environment, it's not pay to win exactly, it's pay for a shot at winning.

I remember my fancy black deck I was so proud of and all the nights playing against tooth and nail, a deck full of cards many of which was worth as much as my whole deck. It sucked. I won 1/3 games at my best because I wasn’t willing to sink hundreds of dollars into my decks

Playing with printed cards though is janky. It’s not how the game is meant to be played and contradicts the aesthetic experience. Better to switch to dominion where the intended experience doesn’t revolve around pay to win

> Playing with printed cards though is janky. It’s not how the game is meant to be played and contradicts the aesthetic experience.

My original comment was telling them specifically to find people to play with who aren’t like you.

I have no objections to proxies, but I do dislike printed cards. Proxies should be indistinguishable from real MTG cards when face down or in your deck, and printouts generally aren't. The right way to make proxies if you can't make decent counterfeit cards is with basic lands and a felt tip pen.

You are making my point for me.

Twice a year sets are a thing of a past. Now they pump sets every 2 months.

"pay-to-win"

Yah, good luck with that. Anyone who has played competitively knows you will absolutely get stomped by a higher skill opponent even if your deck is more powerful on paper unless the discrepancy is ludicrous. Garfield made his game too well to fall to such trite criticisms...he outdid himself, its immune to his own potshots, lol

Yeah, there's basically a floor of how much you have to spend to get a competitive deck, but beyond that spending more doesn't help.

That floor is pretty dang high though. It both has one of the highest costs of entry for pretty much any game (to be fair, it does change with format, but it's basically a choice between paying a lot upfront or effectively a subscription), and the advantage you have scales quite substantially with the amount that you spend (though not quite as much as some mobile games). 'pay-to-win' is a valid criticism, even if skill still matters to some extent.