Understanding Magic: The Gathering - Part One: History

Magic: The Gathering has been one of the most successful games of all time. Invented in 1993 by Richard Garfield and sold to Wizards of the Coast as the first trading card game, Magic has blazed the path for other collectible games to follow. In order to fully understand Magic, you'll need to understand its background.

Today, it seems inconceivable that it took this long to create a game with a collectible aspect to it, especially when baseball cards popped up around 1887 or so. Throughout the decades since then, we've heard of the various games that kids would create utilizing their baseball cards, ranging from simply placing them between the spokes of their bicycles to create sounds to elaborate setups involving statistics.

But it took a century until somebody invented a card game that utilized collectible aspects in its design. And thus began the games revolution. Magic's success encouraged competitors to release their own collectible games, which were often shoddy, or a blatant ripoff of Magic itself. This led to a glut of collectible games coming onto the market at the same time, all competing for the same niche market that had just initialized.

Quality always wins out over quantity, but during this period of time (1994-1998), several games were released that ultimately failed. We can rattle off a long list of failed collectible card games (CCGs) here, where the year given is the year it began:

Bablyon 5 CCG - Precedence Publishing 1997
Battlelords - New Millennium Enterainment 1995
Battletech - Wizards of the Coast 1996
Doomtown - Five Rings Publishing 1998
Doomtrooper - Target Games 1994
Dune - Last Unicorn Games 1997
Illumanti: New World Order - Steve Jackson Games 1995
Jyhad - Wizards of the Coast / White Wolf Games 1994
Legend of the Burning Sands - Five Rings Publishing 1998
Middle-Earth Collectible Card Game - Iron Crown Enterprises 1995
Mortal Kombat Kard Game - BradyGAMES 1995
Mythos Collectible Card Game - Chaosium, Inc. 1996
Netrunner - Wizards of the Coast 1996
Rage - White Wolf 1995
Redemption - Cactus Game Design 1995
Shadowfist - Daedalus 1995
SimCity - Mayfair Games 1995
Spellfire - TSR 1994
Star Trek Customizable Card Game - Decipher, Inc. 1994
Star Wars Customizable Card Game - Decipher, Inc. 1995
The X-Files Collectible Card Game - US Playing Card Co. 1996
Ultimate Combat! - Ultimate Games 1995
Wyvern - U.S. Game Systems, Inc. 1994

Whereas the number of successful games released during this time period can be narrowed to:
Magic: The Gathering - Wizards of the Coast, 1993
Pokemon - Wizards of the Coast, 1996
Yu-Gi-Oh! - Bandai, 1998
Legend of the Five Rings - Alderac Entertainment Group, 1995

Several of the failed games were actually great games in their own right. They were doomed to failure by external factors including but not limited to: poor product quality, bad marketing, poor decision making, and the market being saturated with so many different games being released at the same time.

In the mid-nineties it was hard enough to acquire the cards required to play the games much less find opponents that played the same games. One person might have liked Shadowfist, but another person liked Battletech. You can't play a game between the two, using Shadowfist cards versus Battletech cards. The games' rules just don't mesh.

One constant was Magic: The Gathering. It became easier to find Magic cards as time progressed, but in the early days, it was very hard to find cards due to limited print runs, scarcity, and demand. Stores would sell out of their entire stock of new expansion sets the same day they received them.

As a direct consequence, the secondary market for Magic cards began growing larger and larger. Prices for certain cards rose as demand rose. Problems with distribution were commonplace in the early days, and even regional preferences factored into pricing.

But Magic wasn't the only game with variations in pricing. When some of the earlier games hit the shelves, they were directly competing with each other, and with Magic. Magic was the undisputed king of CCGs, but gamers were willing to shell out some extra cash for non-Magic games just for variety or other reasons.

Perhaps they got tired of buying so many Magic cards or they just wanted to be able to play another game once in a while. The problem is that for several years, there was no true 'second-tier' game that could take up as big of a shard of the CCG market as Magic could.

After Magic hit the market in 1993, only about five games were truly released in 1994 to compete with Magic. And they all approached the CCG concept with a different method:

First, Wyvern - a limited concept card game that can be directly seen as the precursor for both Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!'s gameplay, was released. There was no real draw to Wyvern, no sexiness to it, and it was very simplistic. Needless to say, most real gamers were turned off by the product, and Wyvern failed.

Second, Doomtrooper attempted to create a science fiction world within its CCG for its main draw, as Magic can be considered "high fantasy" during this time period. It wanted to appeal to the sci-fi lovers that didn't enjoy the fantasy world of Magic. Doomtrooper was able to last through approximately three years and five expansions after the original set was released. It officially ended in 1997, but a small group of gamers have kept the game going with user released expansions for online play. The narrow focus on the created sci-fi CCG world eventually wasn't profitable.

Third, Spellfire was released by TSR based on their wildly popular role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). It was much maligned by Magic players and other casual gamers who had expected gameplay similar to Magic. Spellfire had a much simpler and different design than Magic did. TSR released twelve expansion sets for Spellfire, with the final one coming in 1997. In 1997, TSR was acquired by Wizards of the Coast and Spellfire pretty much died. There are some user created sets floating around on the Internet for printing onto sticker pages, but no official expansions have been produced since TSR's last in 1997.

Fourth, Jyhad was the second CCG released by Wizard of the Coast. It was a very dark CCG based on the vampire world found in the Vampire: The Masquerade role-playing game. Players take onto the role of a 'Metuselah', which is an ancient and manipulative vampire. I don't think that I've ever been scared by anything else within the world of CCGs. Jyhad is the first and only time that I've ever thrown away a game before even playing it once. Jyhad failed in its original incarnation. It was republished as Vampire: The Eternal Struggle in 1995, which stopped publication in 1996 after three expansions. White Wolf, the owners of the Vampire role-playing game, took over the CCG in 2000 and has continued to produce expansion sets for it with the latest release being Sword of Caine, released in March of 2007.

The fifth and final CCG released in 1994 made a huge splash within the CCG world. It brought an element that nothing else could match. Whereas Spellfire and Jyhad were based on games in other forms, they didn't directly match the worlds that created them.

Decipher brought to us the Star Trek Customizable Card Game. This game had a built-in audience, with such ardent fans that there's even a common word for them, 'Trekkie'. Official licensing allowed Decipher to use the content produced in the Star Trek: The Next Generation universe for the game. And Decipher used the licensing wisely. The CCG was wildly successful, with prices on the secondary market for cards of important characters such as Jean-Luc Picard reaching absurd heights. Unfortunately, design flaws and lack of balancing within the CCG during the years led to its downfall. Incompatible ideas and massively complex rules scared off many players. Eventually, Decipher acquired the licenses for the rest of the Star Trek Universe and a few years later released a new version of the game in 2002. Even today, the prices for Star Trek CCG cards remain somewhat stable, mostly due to the collectible aspect of the source material. But the original game has been thrown by the wayside.

Each of the other games brought something fresh to the CCG world but eventually, each failed due to various errors, factors, or just plain bad luck. From this set of games, we can infer that part of Magic's success has been luck, but luck only carries you so far. Magic's success involves far more than just luck.

In the early days and even today (although it was much well publicized earlier), the mainstream media and a lot of people associated Magic: The Gathering with Satanic worship and the occult. Now, Magic is just a game, it doesn't require any sort of religious conviction to play it. However, that won't stop the naysayers from denouncing Magic as being evil.

The reason why some people call Magic evil is because of how the game's designed and its flavor. The players in a Magic game assume the roles of powerful wizards that summon creatures and cast spells, trying to win the game. There are a variety of ways to win a game of Magic, but the main method is to reduce the other wizard's life points to zero (each player begins with twenty). I don't view this as a particularly evil aspect, but it's a main concern of some of the critics.

Suppose there was a game like football, only instead of starting a game at 0-0, each team began with the score being 20-20. A touchdown would reduce the other team's point total by 6, with an extra point reducing it by 1. Doesn't seem so satanic now does it? The life totals and wizard aspect are just a part of the game's flavor.

The second most often used argument against Magic would be the use of occult characters and symbols on the cards. In the early days, there were a limited amount of cards and some of them included demons as creatures one could summon. In response to this criticism, Wizard of the Coast voluntarily removed all the artwork and banned new demon cards from being created for a number of years.

Eventually, this ban has been lifted, but as an example of the original demon "occult" cards, we can take a look at the card called 'Unholy Strength'. The original version in print during the time period 1993-1994 was replaced with an edited version with Fourth Edition's release in May 1995. The outcry from players caused Wizards of the Coast to promise never to alter artwork again, but the ban on demon-related cards continued.

In 2002, Wizards decided to start reprinting demon and demon-related cards again, believing that it wasn't as controversial now as it was then. They've been proven correct. People will always react badly most of the time when presented with something new and different from their experiences, that combines with something they view as evil / bad.

The original rules for Magic had rules in place for gambling (or ante as it was called). Ante cards were printed in the early sets and were supposed to be removed from your deck before the game started if you weren't playing for ante. Basically, each player would shuffle and cut the other player's deck. The top cards of each deck would be flipped over and set aside as the ante, with the winner of the ensuing game claiming ownership of both cards.
Ante is rarely seen today but a small group of players play it, or a variant of ante. If a card is flipped over and lost that the player doesn't want to lose, the winner usually offers to sell it back in exchange for another card(s). Tournament Magic prohibits gambling and ante in all games played. The last card printed in a set to refer to ante was printed way back in 1995, just two years after Magic began.

So there've been two main concerns with Magic, the occult and gambling. Gambling has been removed, so that leaves the occult, and Magic has more than proven that it isn't a tool of the Devil or of the occult. There are angels and demons but the Bible has both of those also. It's the matter of context they object to. However, Magic is just a game, and a wildly successful one at that.

Magic has become a brand, with a matching series of novels. Major characters in the latest novels have their own special cards in the latest Magic expansion sets. There's a million dollar Pro Tour, a very active and enthusiastic group of developers, and Magic hasn't slowed down at all. There are sets being developed for the future constantly.

Magic also doesn't take itself too seriously. There are two special irreverent expansion sets with silver borders that are illegal for tournament play that poke fun at Magic, things associated with Magic, and people associated with Magic.

Those two expansion sets are Unglued and Unhinged. A third "Un" set is probably forthcoming in a few more years. An example of how the "Un" sets riff on Magic, would be the land card called 'City of Brass'. In Unhinged, there's a card called 'City of Ass' and the artwork for the new 'City of Ass' has been produced to resemble the original's artwork but with a twist.

Magic can be played with two or more players. Multiplayer has its own set of rules, as does a special multiplayer format called Two Headed Giant, which has recently surfaced as an official tournament format. The majority of Magic games are played one-on-one though, with various formats defining the cards that one can use to build one's deck with.

But before we progress any further with our discussion on understanding Magic, we'll have to understand how the game's played. So, this article will end on this note: Magic is a rich and vibrant game with a myriad of possibilities. Learning just part of its history along with how to play Magic will fulfill you.