2/22/13 Episode 22: The Trading Card Genre

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means—it’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay, so today—last time I did my unintentional three-parter, but I decided today I was going to do a kind of intentional three-parter although a little bit different. I often talk about something that—when Richard Garfield created the game, I often claim that he had three great inventions. That Magic was the culmination of three different really cool ideas. And I call that the Golden Trifecta. My name for it.

So the Golden Trifecta is made up of three things. First is the concept of a trading card game, second is the idea of the color wheel, and the third was the mana system. All of those are very important. So important that I’ve decided to dedicate a whole podcast to each one of the three. So as a sort of informal three-part thing, I mean each one will stand on its own.

So today I’m going with the beginning. The trading card game. So I want to talk about what exactly Richard Garfield came up with, and sort of walk through a lot of the problems he had to solve. Because I think if you really want to understand design of Magic, or to be honest of any trading card game, you’ve got to explore the trading card games themselves. And understand what makes them tick.

So, let’s start from the very beginning. So, I think—trading cards have existed for a long time. I mean, the most famous trading cards probably are baseball cards, for those that don’t live in America, baseball is a very popular American sport. All the players of baseball get put onto cards, the cards have a picture on the front, usually on the back are statistics about how good they are.

So anyway, baseball cards have been very popular, and then off of baseball cards there were other sports cards that were made, and then eventually there started being trading cards of pop culture. You know, of, you know, pick your favorite of Star Trek or Star Wars or whatever the pop culture thing is where you can collect cards that represent all the characters in a certain show or something.

And so trading cards existed for a while. And I think what Richard is—Richard liked the idea of a game that—his words—that was bigger than the box. And what that means is, that normally you play a game, there is a consistency of expectation.

For example, my go-to is Monopoly. So, when you open a Monopoly board, I will see forty squares on the Monopoly board, the exact same forty squares that somebody else will see when they open a Monopoly board. Assuming traditional Monopoly and not like, you know, fill-in-the-blank Monpoly. So, the difference—what Richard wanted is, he said “Imagine I open a game, and I see what I have, but what I see is not what you see when you open up what you get.”

And Richard was fascinated by the idea that, I mean Richard loves the concept of what’s called a metagame. Now, I don’t mean the metagame—the definition most people use is trying to understand what is being played at a tournament. I think Richard had a slightly different definition that we use in R&D. What that metagame means is, all the things that surround the game.

You know, that the game—I mean, for example, when you play Magic, you talk about playing Magic. How much of the time that you are involved with Magic, are you physically actually playing the game? A tiny portion. You know? A lot of Magic is thinking about Magic and building decks and reading about it and talking to people about it, and a lot of the experience of Magic goes way beyond the actual physical playing of the game. And that’s what Richard was talking about is the metagame.

And part of making a robust metagame is making it such that no one person had all the information. How do you force people to sort of get together in a larger sense is “Oh, we’ll make a game that’s bigger than any one person.” And that’s what Magic was set out to be. And I think Richard went to trading cards because what he needed was—well, a couple things.

One is, so when Richard Garfield first went to Wizards of the Coast, I don’t know if I’ve told this story. So Richard Garfield, and again, a man named Mike Davis, so Jay Michael Davis, JMD Tome… maybe I told this story before. Anyway, they went to sell a game that Richard had made called Robo Rally.

Now if you’ve never played Robo Rally, Wizards later put it out, I think it’s now made by Avalon Hill, which Wizards dose. And the idea of Robo Rally is, you’re a robot, and you get cards that program your movements. And then you have to preprogram your movements. But everybody’s preprogramming their movements, so conflicts can cause things to happen that you don’t expect.

Plus there’s conveyer belts, and all sorts—you’re on a factory floor, so you also yourself can misguess something. Like you have to take into account that this will rotate you and this will move you.  So part of the fun is getting where you’re going to get, and then there’s interactions as other robots interfere with you, and mess you up.

So Richard and Mike had came that day to sell Robo Rally. Because it’s a fun game.  The problem was, they pitched to Peter Atkinson, who was then one of the founders and CEO at the time of Wizards, and mind you at the time Wizards was a very small company. They were putting out role-playing games. (???) maybe was their biggest one.

Anyway, they were a small role-playing game company. But Richard and Mike were just going all over, asking everybody, trying to sell their game, and the problem was that Robo Rally had too many pieces to it. Meaning, when you look at games, what they call cost of goods, how much is actually the cost to produce it? And that it has—it takes more investment to make things that have more pieces to it.

And so you need to be a little bigger company to have the financial sort of outlay to be able to pay for that because you have to be able to pay for it before you sell it. And so, the idea is, you would have to put a lot more money—it’s a small company, you know, and Peter said “Look, we just don’t—we don’t—that’s too much cost of goods. We can’t make that game. We’re not a big enough company right now to make that game.”

And so, he said, “Here’s what I’m looking for: I’m looking for something made out of paper that is fast and portable. Because—“ Peter was very into Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing game, and he goes, “What I would kind of like to find is a fast little fun portable game you can play in between D&D sessions.” That’s what Peter asked for.

And Richard, now—I don’t know if Richard had messed around with trading cards before, but part of the parameters of what Peter was saying was number one, it had to be paper. Why paper? Paper’s cheap. Paper’s easy to print on. And paper, all of it is done in one place. A lot of times if you have a lot of components, for example Robo Rally has either plastic or metal components depending on how you make the robots, and so those usually are in a different place than where the board would be made. You know, or maybe where the cards—the cards and the board are probably made at a paper place.

But like the plastic or metal pieces are made at a different place. So that requires you to, you know, get together items from different things and put them together. The nice thing about an all-paper product is, you could send that to a printing press and they can make all of it. They can make the cards, they can make the wrapping—all of it can be done in one place. And it’s a lot cheaper.

And so early on, a lot of what happened was, Peter was trying to say to Richard, “Well, this is the means of what we can make. And this is the kind of thing we’re interested in.” Now Richard took those parameters and said “I have an idea.”Now I don’t know—it’s interesting. I haven’t really talked to Richard about this. I don’t know if he had—I think he had messed around with ideas before, I think maybe in the back of his head he had the idea of turning trading card games—trading cards into a game.

Now I remember, by the way, when I first heard “trading card game,” I knew nothing than those words, I was like “Oh my goodness.” Because I had bought trading cards, I had bought baseball cards,  I had bought different trading cards in my youth. And I’m like “Oh wow.” Because trading card games are fun, it’s fun to collect things. But like, the idea that—“Oh, imagine those—instead of being a baseball player, those were cards to a game.” Blew my mind. I was like “That is awesome.” You know.

Now. Let’s talk about, so Richard’s idea was he wanted something bigger than the box. Trading cards allowed him to create an experience that was perceived and would be random. You know, you would get some number of cards. And the thing that I guess he understood at the time, and I understand now obviously, is by having different rarities of cards you can control how much certain things show up. You don’t control who sees what, but you control how often something gets seen. And that ends up being a very important tool. Although I think I’m jumping ahead of myself.

Okay. So, in trading card games, the idea is, “Okay, I’m going to make a game. I’m going to chop up the pieces, and then not give all the pieces to all the players. Each player will get some of the pieces.” Okay, now that is a very cool idea. A very cool idea. But there are a couple problems.

So problem number one is what I’ll call “the queen problem.” So let’s say you’re  making the game of chess. And you were gonna break up the pieces and people—different people got different ones. Well let’s just say I open up a rook and a bishop and a knight. And you open up two queens. How do I beat you?! You know, the queen is so much more powerful than anything I opened up.

And so one of the problems Richard had to deal with is, normally in a game, it’s okay to have powerful things because the game is balanced. For example, a queen is more powerful than a rook or a knight or all the pieces, really. But that’s okay, each player has access to one queen. And they start in a mirrored version of the same place. So that’s okay. It’s balanced. The game balances it. Richard’s problem was, a trading card game, well how do you do the balance? Everyone isn’t getting the same thing. So, how do you keep people, when they can pick and choose what they play with, how do you keep them from playing the best cards? And the answer partly is you don’t. But, partly is, okay, there’s some ways to help spread things out in a couple ways.

And so there’s a bunch of tools you use. One is rarity. So the idea of rarity is, just because they’re random doesn’t mean you get them in the same amount. You know. So for example, if I have a very powerful card, the rarer I make it, the less often it shows up. And so that solves some problems. Although it doesn’t solve the biggest problem, which is, you know, well what if I open up super broken card, even if it’s rare, but I do open it up and you don’t.

Although rarity does allow us, especially for Limited players—although to be fair, when Richard started, I think he had some idea of Limited but that wasn’t the driving force when he was making the game originally. Although I know he did have that in the back of his head.  Now, here’s the real thing. The two major solutions beyond rarity, interesting, are the other two parts of the golden trifecta. Surprise, surprise.

So, number one is the color wheel. So what he did—the reason he made a color wheel was he wanted to separate out—he wanted to have things—the idea was, every deck shouldn’t be able to play every card. So actually, let me do the mana—let me do the mana first because actually—I mean, these are intertwined. I mean, I guess they’re part of the same thing.

So the idea of color says, “I’m going to have different cards,” and then the mana system which says, “You just can’t play all the colors easily.” You know. The mana system says, “Hey, you know, you can play one color easily, and every time you add another color, it gets more difficult.” And the reason that’s important is, it allows you to say “Okay, I can make good cards, but I can spread them out through the colors, and that means not every deck can play every good card.”

And so for starters, that just kind of spreads out what the good cards are. And makes more diversity. “Oh, I want to play this broken card? Well, I need to play blue. I want to play this broken card? I also need to play blue. I want to play this broken card? Yeah, blue.” Okay, okay, okay. Maybe—maybe there’s some of the execution in early Magic was not (???) but the concept of the color pie was.

The idea there though is you can break up and separate your good things, so not every deck has access to all the good things. I talk about during Mirrodin, when Mirrodin had a lot of the problems it did, part of that stemmed from the fact that, you know, it didn’t break out the things. That one deck could have every good thing in it. We called it “the blob,” and like how do you stop it? Like, we couldn’t just ban a card to stop the deck because there’s this—it just took every card it needed, because in an artifact environment without any color controls, it sort of off—it showed off the problem of not having any color in the game.

So, part of it was, okay. Things need to be different colors. Another big part of it was the whole idea of the mana resource, which is, you have to build up over time. It’s really important. And when I get to the respective podcasts on these things I’ll go into more depth. But the basic concept to understand here is, cards have different value at different points in the game. That is the important thing of the mana system. Or one of the important things.

And what that says is, early game turn one, a one-drop is really important. A six-drop is useless. Later in the game, a six-drop is really important. A one-drop is useless. And so Richard came up with a means and a way, by which he could ensure that cards had different values at different times, which meant more cards overall had value. And that is a big part of what he was trying to do.

Now, another thing that plays into this is—I’ll call this formats, but it’s the idea that I’m going to—see one of the ideas in Magic, I talk about this a lot but let me explain it a little bit, is Magic isn’t really one game. What Richard did is, he created a resource and an umbrella set of rules and a set of tools, the cards, that said okay, I’m going to explain how to play, and then it’s flexible enough, and modular enough, that you could sort of play the way you want to play. You know.

And Richard understood that, you know, if I give people cards, and I give them a basic rule set, they’re going to extrapolate. You know. This was a game made for gamers. You know, this wasn’t a game—like, this wasn’t a casual game. This was a game where Richard said “I’m going to make the game, there’s components and there’s a metagame, meaning if you’re really into this game, you’re going to have to go out and explore. You’re going to have to talk to other people. You’re going to have to see what other people are doing. You know.  And so when  I go to play somebody, you know, they might have things I don’t know and I’ve got to learn about them. And then once I’ve learned about them I have to adapt to them.

See in early Magic, I mean this is a hard concept to get now, but in early Magic,  the internet was really in its infancy, I mean it was mostly Usenet at the time, you know, it wasn’t—it wasn’t what we think of today as—especially with social media, it wasn’t what it is today. So communication was still much more personal. It wasn’t as internet –driven as it is now,

And Richard decided—this is what Wizards did for a while—that they didn’t want to help the players figure out what was what. For example, for the first… year, maybe? Maybe year and a half? Wizards didn’t tell you the rarity of the cards. What’s common, what’s uncommon, what’s rare? Not saying. They weren’t marked on the cards, there’s no rarity indication on the cards.

And they even messed with us! They even messed with us. For example, in Alpha, on the rare sheet, there is an Island. Why is there an Island on the rare sheet?  Well, the Island’s the exact same Island on the common sheet that’s on the rare sheet. Why? Because they wanted to mess with people trying to figure out which card in the pack was the rare slot.

They were messing with us because they wanted—Richard’s idea, and I think it was a cool idea, they said, “Hey, a lot of the fun in this will be the interaction. The exploration.” And what they didn’t want to do is just have someone go be able to look it up and then they find the answers. And so Wizards (???), if you look early on, we didn’t give decklists early on.

Like in the original, the World Champions, both the first and second world championships, because I wrote these articles, I would talk about what the deck did, and I gave a play-by-play where I ran through what happened. So you could piece a lot of it together. But I never told you what—I mean, I went back later and told you the decklists. But at the time, I didn’t tell you the decklists. I wasn’t allowed to. You know, they didn’t want people copying other people’s decks.

And so, Wizards did a lot early on to sort of slow that down. Later on, I mean essentially, what happened was, I mean information wants to be free, and so what they eventually came to the conclusion of was “Look. People are going to find the information,” especially when the internet sort of took off, and they sort of said “This is a fight we’re not going to win, so let’s—let’s…” you know, they changed the philosophy, said, “Okay, well we’ll have the information out there, you know, but we’ll create other tools for people to discuss things,” and we changed kind of how we approached things.

But anyway, so a trading card game has color, it has rarity, it has mana costs, you know, at least Magic does, and all those things lend itself to having different cards matter at different times. But here’s the other important thing. Let me get to this. Richard understood that Magic was realy more than one game. And part of that was, he made cards for a lot of different kinds of players.

Now, I would later go on to sort of create the psychographics to define how we were doing it, and Richard did it, Richard made cards for Timmy, Johnny and Spike, it’s not that Richard didn’t get the different audiences, he didn’t label them. I mean part of what I did is label them so R&D could make sure we were designing             for them.

But so a big part of what he did is he said “Okay, I’m going to make lots of different kinds of cards.” And, you know, the idea being, different cards were going to matter to different players. And one of the ways to solve it was also, like, certain cards are super flavorful, and maybe they weren’t as powerful but man they were flavorful. Some people wanted those.

Some cards had linear strategies. I mean, Richard was very good about saying “Okay, I’m going to put some cards in that clearly point you to other cards.” You know. Goblin King, Lord of Atlantis, and Zombie Master were all in the first—in Alpha. And all of them said, “Okay, go find creatures of this type.” You know. And he had a lot of other cards that definitely—like, you know, Gauntlets of Might said “Your mountains tap for one more and your red creatures are bigger.” Look, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to say “Okay, I’m going to make a mono-red deck with this thing.” Same, he had the charms, where you, the lucky charms, where you, you know, Throne of Bone and Wooden Sphere and those cards, where you gained life as you cast certain color of spells.

And, flipwise, he also had cards that were defensive cards meant to play against another player. “Oh, is your—the friend you play beating you down with a red deck? Oh, look! It’s Circle of Protection: Red! That’s really good against a red deck.” And he also put a lot more color hosers in. Alpha has a lot of color hosers. It’s got some very strong color hosers. You know, you’re playing white and your opponent’s playing black? How about Karma? You know. Or you’re playing black and they’re playing white? How about Gloom? Talk about beatings of color hosers.

So, another part of it is Richard made sure that the game had a lot of different kinds of components. And that would help—that would help players sort of branch out to want different things. Now, like I said, the queen problem—your best card problem is more of a tournament problem. More of a competitive problem. And like I said, he solved part of that with mana cost and part with rarity, part with color.

Now, it wasn’t complete. Like, one of—now, here’s one of the things people don’t understand, is, a lot of people say, you know, “Ancestral Recall? Black Lotus? What were they thinking?” And the reality is, Richard—Richard’s thought process was this. He said, “Okay, I understand if the game gets big enough…”

Like, he thought the average person was going to spend forty dollars, maybe? They were going to spend the amount of money that they spend on a normal game. You know, how much money do you spend on a game? Well, you know, forty dollars is the top end of like, “Okay, this is, you know, a fancy German board game, I’ll spend…” I mean, now it’s maybe sixty. But at the time it was about forty. (???)

And he said, well, “Okay, well, what do I expect people to see if… if everybody spends forty dollars, what’s the environment like?” And the idea was, you know, in a playgroup, in a play environment, which is I don’t know, twelve people, let’s say? You know? He said, “Oh, there will be one Ancestrall Recall. One guy will have one Ancestrall Recall. And he’s not going to have all the other broken cards necessarily, those are also pretty rare.” So what happened is Richard’s like “Okay, well yeah there’s some broken stuff, but they're going to be in such small number, that it shouldn’t impact things.

Now the question—I’ve asked Richard this, I go, “Well, Richard, didn’t you take into account—what happened if the game got bigger?” And Richard was like “Well, if the game got big enough that we had the problem of people having too many of these things because of the amount of money that they were spending was so large,” he goes, “That’s a pretty good problem to have.” You know, he’s like “We’ll deal with it. If our problem is people are spending thousands of dollars on cards, well, that means we have a runaway hit. And we’ll deal with that problem.” You know.

It wasn’t that Richard didn’t understand that Ancestrall Recall and Black Lotus were good, he just was like “It doesn’t matter.” In the scale that he was working with, it didn’t matter, and his whole attitude was “Look, if we’re wrong on scale, in order for us to be wrong, this has to be a runaway hit. And then, hey, we have a runaway hit. We can deal with it.” You know.

And the funny thing. People have also asked me, by the way. So I’ve—I have a time machine. If I could go back, assuming I change anything, because I’ve learned from science fiction movies, never change anything. But assuming I wanted to change anything, would I take out the Power 9? You know, heavens, heavens no. I believe the Power 9 were a big part of what made Magic popular early on. I believe sort of the—just the whispers about crazy things in early Magic was a big part of the mystique and really helped the game. You know. And that—I don’t think Magic now wants stuff that broken, but I believe it was important early on. You know.

And back then people didn’t know as much, like it’s very funny how we talk about Moxes, and like I remember people—because I remember when I first saw Moxes—I gave my dad some cards, he opened up a Mox Emerald. I had never seen it before. And I offered to trade it from him, not because I thought it was any good, because I honest to God, I’m like “This is just a Forest? It seems like a Forest.” I just didn’t own it yet, and I was collecting the cards, so I gave my dad a Fungusaur. I had two Fungusaurs. I gave him a Fungusaur for it.

And I thought I was being like super nice to my dad. I thought like I was giving him a gift because Fungusaur’s awesome. And I’m like “Okay, well here’s an awesome card for you. And like I don’t have that card. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of him. I know it sounds like maybe I was, but I was not. Because early days, I didn’t get it. I didn’t get a Mox was good. I just—some weird card. Like I didn’t, I had to kind of play with it for a while before I’m like “Oh, oh, I see. It’s like a land, except you don’t get restricted by how many land you can play. That’s pretty good.

So, but that’s a lot had to do with early Magic. And how it was what it was. I mean, the thing that Richard figured out, which I think was kind of the coolest thing was, that people like things. You know, if you look at role-playing games, for example, a lot of role-playing games are—I’m sorry, computer games are about you acquiring things. You know.

For example, my son plays video games at home. And every video game I can name, like, you acquire things. They’re virtual, but you acquire things. You get them, you know. And that—that’s just, you know, that’s just a big part of what makes video games video games is it’s fun to acquire things. And what Richard figured out, which is it’s like—this is kind of like that, except it’s real things. They are actual, physical, tangible things. You know.

And one of the reasons that Peter had wanted to do trading cards is, Peter had a connection with artists. Because they had used artists for the role-playing games, and so they had worked with a local art school to find artists. And so Richard knew he had access to artists. In fact, early Magic, a good chunk of early Magic, of those artists, all went  to the same school. It’s here in Seattle. Most of them are local to Seattle.

And so it’s like, it was—the idea that you could have something and it has beautiful art on it, and it just—it visually represents something, and it thematically represents something—I mean the other thing by the way to talk about that Richard had very early on is, the concept of dueling with magic was super, super early. In fact, it might have even started with the idea of magic and with that went to trading cards. I don’t know which came first.

But I know Richard was enamored with the idea of casting spells. And that the cards represented magic. You know. I firmly believe that a big part of Magic’s success is the fact that the cards themselves represent magic spells. I know a lot of people have said, “Oh, couldn’t Magic have been a science fiction game?” Because we actually did a “what if?” week on the website, and Kelly Digges and I made a game called Space: The Exploration, I think? Space something. Oh, Space: The Convergence.

Anyway, and the premise was, what if Magic existed with five colors, and all the—basically, all the mechanics stayed the same, but we warped it such that it was a science fiction IP instead of a fantasy IP. And a lot of people were gung ho, “It’s awesome, “ “You should make this,” and like I honestly think if Magic had been Space, I don’t know if it would have been successful.

And the funny thing is, for those that know history of games, in movies, science fictions have been way more successful than fantasy in movies. I mean, recently there’s been some successes, but you know up until really, you know, five ten years ago, there were zero successes. I mean, go back ten years, you know, the most popular fantasy movie of all time was, I mean, you know, not in the top hundred films. Or even anywhere close. (???) science fiction were all over the top ten.

But the interesting thing is, if you look at popular games, you know, like Dungeons and Dragons is the defining role-playing game. That’s a fantasy game. A lot of, you know, the key miniature games are fantasy games. You know, Magic—I think something about fantasy that—and I’m not sure what it is. We’ve talked about this internally. I don’t know what it is  but there’s something about fantasy that just kind of lends itself well to gaming?

I think—I’ve talked about this before, that I believe there’s inherent difference between the ethos of fantasy and the ethos of science fiction. Although this podcast (???) time. I believe that Magic has a science fiction ethos wrapped in a fantasy trapping, but anyway. That’s another podcast.

But I do think that the thing that people like about fantasy is, it has a very moral center. There’s good and there’s evil and there’s a lot of absolutes, and that—I don’t know, I think it does a very good job of sort of representing things. Like I think science fiction kind of shows us where we’re going, but fantasy is kind of where we’ve been or what we are at our core. Anyway, I believe Richard did a pretty good job choosing fantasy. That’s another big part of what made the trading—I mean Magic as the first trading card game work.

Anyway, I see the Wizards building. Which means I am here at work. So that is our wrap-up for the trading card game portion of our Golden Trifecta. So join me next week when I will talk about the color pie, which is one of my personal favorite—maybe even my most favorite thing on Magic.

But anyway, I hope you guys had a good time hearing all about the—I’m trying to find my parking spot, or a parking spot, I hope you had a good time hearing about the trading card game. I think it’s very fascinating, I always love trying to figure out how things came to be. So it is neat to me to sort of look at the core of what makes a trading card game a trading card game, and you know what makes Magic Magic. But anyway, I am now parked, and it’s time to go make the Magic.