10/18/13 Episode 63: 1993

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 this year, at the World Championships in Amsterdam, I did a little segment called Twenty Years in Twenty Minutes. Where I sat down and I—I basically talked about Magic’s twenty year of history, having one minute to talk about each year. And while that was fun and an interesting exercise, I realized that I have a lot more to say about each year. So I’ve decided to start a new meta-series, and this is truly a—not meta, a mega. A mega-series, this is truly a mega-mega-series. I’m going to do a podcast for each year of Magic’s life to talk about what happened that year.

Now, I’m just going to do this every once in a while. Being that I have twenty years to do, and as I do this other years will roll by, this is probably a multi-year podcast project. Which means I’m dedicated to keep doing this for many, many more years. So...

So today, I’m going to start with 1993. Where it all began for Magic: The Gathering. I’m technically—there’s stuff that happened before 1993, but I decided we’ll start with the public’s interaction with Magic, not necessarily the behind-the-scenes. So, today is all about Magic’s first year of life. As a released product, I guess. So a little bit of preamble, and then I’m gonna—I want to kind of start with Magic’s public—public life. Not its behind-the-scenes life.

Okay. So here’s what’s going on. The—real quick story, I’ve told this story before, is Richard Garfield and his best friend Mike Davis come to Wizards of the Coast, to try and pitch a game that he—they had that Richard had made called Robo Rally.

Way too complex a game for a small company like Wizards of the Coast to make, it’s got too many pieces and such, but Peter Adkison says, “You know, I have some ins with a place that can do cards. I know a place to get illustrations. I think we can make a game on, you know, that are printed like trading cards. And—a card game.” He goes, “I think we can make a card game.”

And what he asked for Richard is he wanted a game that was portable, obviously cards, and that was adaptable, and that something that you could play that—a quick playtime, that you could play in between role-playing sessions. I believe is what Peter actually asked for.

Richard said he had an idea. I think he had already toyed around with the idea of a trading card game. And so one of the things that Richard was very excited about was sort of exploring the idea of a game bigger than the box. That is how Richard describes it. And he loved the idea of a trading card game.

Anyway, the important part of this story is, Richard comes back, shows off his game, Peter loves it. Thinks it’s great. And Richard had spent some time, you know, playtesting it, and—and really had figured out the key of what makes it click. Peter’s excited, Richard spends a little bit more time playtesting, but finally they make—make it and they’re going to release it.

And so what Peter does is Peter drives up and down the coast, because he’s on the west coast, trying to convince people, game stores, to pick up this game. Because remember, at the time Wizards of the Coast was a tiny little company who made role-playing games. And not super-popular role-playing games. It was a very tiny little company.

In fact, I think in earlier ’93, might have been ’92, like, Peter had to send out a letter to the few employees that existed, and said “Look, we have no money,” you know, “anything’s going to be volunteer, we’re going to have to scale back.” I mean, they—it looked like for a while that Wizards of the Coast might dissolve and never even come to be—you know, never make it to the point where Magic would come out.

But luckily, they hit Magic, hold themselves together, Peter—to Peter’s credit, recognizes right away that Magic is a special thing. And he goes all out to try to get people to pick it up. Because once it gets made, like he thinks they have a hit on their hands. And so he’s driving up and down the west coast, going to game stores, demoing the game, and getting them to purchase it.

Okay. So the first public appearance, really, of Magic, is at Origins Game Fair. So GAMA, which is the Game Manufacturer’s Association, has a convention it runs called Origins Game Fair. And that it was at Origins that Magic is first shown publicly. Not for sale yet, I believe, so July 13^th-16^th in Fort Worth Texas. Origins basically floats around every year.  That year was in Texas.

So Peter and, you know, the little Wizards that there was packed up, went to Fort Worth, Texas, and that was the first time they ever showed off the cards. That’s the first time anybody, I believe, had seen the cards. In any public way. He might have gone to game stores before that. But this is the first time where the public is seeing Magic.

And what—it wasn’t for sale yet, but it definitely started to get a little bit of buzz. And then, on August 5^th, it officially goes on sale. That—that is the in history date that the product first went on sale. August 5^th.

Now, a little later, a couple weeks later, from August 19^th to the 22^nd, is Gen Con. So for those that aren’t aware, Gen Con is the largest gaming convention in the United States. Not in the world, Essen is the largest in the world, which is in Germany, but it is the largest gaming convention in the United States, it is very focused on role-playing. And as Peter is a die-hard role-player, Gen Con was the Mecca he went to every year, he had great—I mean, funny thing is Peter would go on to later buy Gen Con.

But anyway, Peter definitely wanted to try to make a splash at Gen Con. And so Gen Con was the first convention where Magic was on sale. And it just blew the doors off the hinges, as you will. It was the talk of the convention.

Every year there’s some game that just sort of—there’s buzz on, and for 1993, at Gen Con, that game was Magic: The Gathering. What happened was, they thought they had brought a decent amount of product. And they went through it quickly. I’m not sure whether it sold out Day One, or maybe Day Two. Probably was Day One, knowing stories.

So anyway, they got it, they brought it, it sold out. And then just everyone’s talking about it. And everywhere you look, people are playing it. You know. And early Magic definitely—one of the things about the game early on was, this was a small company putting it out. Which meant that there wasn’t a lot of press on it. There wasn’t a—like, you kind of heard about it by word of mouth more than anything else.

Also remember that Peter spent all of his time working on the west coast. Because that where he could drive to. And so, you know, the early Magic buzz that existed was mostly on the west coast. So nobody—I mean, Milwaukee’s—you know, it’s in the middle of the country. Nobody there had heard of it. You know. A few people might have been west coast based. It was mostly this—you know, “Oh my God, have you heard of this thing?”

And Magic, you know, I mean it’s very funny now that it’s entrenched that—but at the time, it’s like—it was this card game, but when you bought it, what you bought wasn’t the same as what somebody else bought, you know, that was pretty unheard of, that I would buy        a card game and you would buy a card game, but we didn’t have the same cards in our card game? You know, that was pretty—it was pretty revolutionary.

And on top of that, you know, it had the fantasy art, and you know, it—it had a lot of different pieces that all sort of clicked together. I mean, obviously Gen Con, you know, Dungeons and Dragons had always been a very big thing there. You know, fantasy was very big there. You know, Magic really clicked well with the role-playing crowd, especially the DnD crowd. It—you know, it had similar imagery, and you know, obviously playing around with fantasy.

So anyway, big hit. So the one thing they did there is they did run *a* tournament. Which they would later go on, in The Duelist, to describe that first tournament and what happened. And they—in The Duelist, they try—they described it like as if it were a real duel. But anyway, that was the first Magic tournament ever, was at Gen Con 1993.

Okay, so—so Origins happens, you know, it creates a little bit of buzz. Gen Con happens, cards get into people’s hands, it—okay. We’re out of the gates. So the story I tell, and I’ve told this many times, because this is the classic Magic origin story is, Peter and company decided to print enough Magic that they thought they would have a six-month supply. And they sold out of their six-month supply I believe in three weeks.

And that it just—it went (???). I mean, one of the things about Magic, I mean, is—and it’s very easy now, you know, looking twenty years back, but they printed as much as they could. They—they—theyw ere conservative in their estimates.

Like, one of the things about the game is people talk a lot about, you know, so there’s some unbalanced cards. Like, you know, Ancestral Recall or Black Lotus. And one of the things that is important to understand is, Richard understood that those cards would be broken in large numbers. He just didn’t anticipate people would have that number of cards. You know. When they estimated how much money people would spend on the game, they assumed people would spend what they spend on any game—thirty bucks. Forty bucks. You know.

And that—with that number of cards, you know, somebody in your playgroup might have one Ancestral Recall. Well, if one guy has one in your playgroup, you know, and that’s—he has one broken card, eh, that’s not a big deal. You know.

Now if somebody has a deck of all the broken cards, it is a big deal. But Richard knew that—like, he wanted to make sure there was exciting things. The only way it broke is if Magic was a runaway hit. And if Magic was a runaway hit, hey, they’d have bigger—they’d solve that problem later.

So, you know, what happened was they printed the cards, you know—they knew they had a good game. Like I said, Peter—Peter really felt in his heart that this was something special, and obviously Richard thought it was something special. But it’s a big difference between you recognizing something and—and it selling well.

Because one of the big things, real quick, in game design, is that quality does win out to a certain extent. That if you have something good, other people will recognize it’s something good. But there is so many factors that go into making a game sell, that quality is just one.

I mean, a big reason of Magic’s success—I mean, partly is it’s a good game, that helps immensely. You know, it had the art, it did a lot of things correct. But also, Peter put in the elbow grease. Peter literally went to every game store on the west coast. And demoed it in person to every game store. The reason it got its foothold originally was because he spent the time and energy to get the people invested. To get the game stores invested. To get the distributors invested. You know.

And obviously, the—the quality of Magic helped carry it through. But, you know, you—having something good does not necessarily—you know, “the quality will sell itself…” that’s not always true. You have to get people to see it. And it’s very easy for people to dismiss something and never look at it. You know.

I know in Hollywood that the hardest point—I mean, (???) say that, you know, the hardest part is writing a good script. And the hardest part actually wasn’t writing a good script. I was able to write good scripts. The hardest part was getting someone to read your good script. You know. Getting someone to recognize that you’ve done something good.

And that in gaming it’s the same thing. That, you know, making something awesome is not just enough. You have to make something awesome and then get people to play it. To recognize it’s awesome. Luckily, Magic had Peter out in force, and—he had the game of Magic, but those two things combined, some elbow grease and a truly amazing game, made a hit.

Okay, so August, the game’s exploding. So this is about the time, by the way, where I—I was working in a game store, called The Game Keeper, in Los Angeles part-time because I needed to get out of the house, I was writing, I was doing freelance stuff and I was doing a lot of pitches, but I was going stir-crazy being alone. So I decided I needed to get out of the house, and ended up in a job at a game store.

So people started coming into the game store. This is in August. I was in the west coast, obviously, I was in Los Angeles. And they’re like “Have you heard of this game called Magic?” or “…this game with cards?” Sometimes people didn’t even know the name of it. That’s the best part, is they’d describe it to me. “This thing.” And, you know, they’d just heard about it.

And Magic early on had this interesting quality in which everything just sold out. The second Magic came in, it would sell out, you know? And so people would come in, they were looking for it. Did we have it? We were a game store. Didn’t we have it? And I had never heard of it. I was very fascinated.

And so finally, in late August, I went to a game convention in Los Angeles called, I believe, OrcCon—L.A. has a couple game conventions happen every year. And there, I saw this game for sale. So I bought some. In fact, I did exactly what Richard predicted, I—I spent about thirty, forty bucks. And I bought—or maybe I spent like twenty bucks. I bought a starter and three boosters.

And I figured “Okay, that’s…” you know, whatever, twenty, thirty bucks, that’s about what you spend on a game. And I opened it up, and someone there helped me—teach me how to play, although the person who taught me did not do a great job of teaching me, I was very confused.

He did teach me to spread my cards out, though, because he had heard of this card that you could flip in the air, and if it landed on your cards it’d destroy it! So play your cards far apart! That was very funny, so—Chaos Orb even then had it’s…

So once again, one of the things that Wizards did in the early days is Wizards said they wanted to create word of mouth, and they didn’t publish information about the game. For example, they didn’t give card lists. There was no official listing of what the cards were.

Now, there was a magazine called Shadis, Shadis was a role-playing—mostly dedicated to role-playing games. Shadis did their best guess and made—made a card list. You know, they—they talked to dealers and opened cards and whatever. They made a list—the list was mostly accurate. It was wrong on some of the rarities, they missed on some rarities.

Now remember, the other thing about the early Magic was—oh, and something to explain. So they were trying to create a sense of mystery, and they didn’t want people knowing where things came from. Now, one of the things that they’ve always claimed is that there’s an Island on the rare sheet, and that the Island was there to confuse people so they wouldn’t know where their rare was.

And that’s not completely true, I found out after I stated that. There’s a guy named Chris Page, he was one of the East Coast Playtesters, that along with Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, and Dave Pettey made Antiquities and Ice Age and Alliances and Fallen Empires. And he said to me, he goes, “Ah, you were incorrect.” I mean, partly it was the sense of mystery.

But the real reason there was islands on the rare sheet was they were trying to balance all the cards so all the lands showed up at the same rarity, the same equality—in equal number. And in order to make that happen, they ended up having to put one card, one basic land on the rare sheet for balance.

And they didn’t really think—they were trying to think about trying to create balance, but they weren’t thinking about “Oh,” you know, “people would recognize the rare, and they’d realize they didn’t get a rare.” Because at the time, like, “Oh, we’re not going to say what the rares are.”

And so early on the idea was that they wanted this mystery. And that early Magic definitely had this sense of “Did you hear about this game?” You know. And so, anyway—oh, actually, I’m mixing my story up a little bit. Before I—I went to OrcCon, I went to San Diego Comic Con. Which was in August. Later August, in San Diego. After Gen Con. Nowadays, it’s before Gen Con, but back then it was after Gen Con.

And it was at San Diego Comic Con that I saw Magic for the first time. Now, there was none for sale, or at least I couldn’t find any for sale. But I found someone who owned some cards, and she let me look at her deck of cards. And I was fascinated.

And something about Magic, just when you hold in your hands, and you see the cards, and you see the pictures, there’s something—I mean, there’s much—there’s much magic in Magic, if you will. But one of the things that—I don’t know, is really compelling, is the cards themselves, just holding the cards, looking at the cards is really—it grabs you and is exciting.

Anyway, I got to see the cards for the first time at San Diego Comic Con. Then I bought them at OrcCon. And then, I had so much fun I’m like “Oh, I’m going to go get more.” So I went to the store, and the guy laughs at me. He’s like, “Oh, yeah.” He goes—I mean, the store I had went to was a store in—by UCLA, and they had carried Magic. But he’s like, “Look, we—we get it in and it’s gone.” So he told me when the next shipment was going to happen. What we all know now is Beta.

So what happens is, in Magic, is they printed Alpha. But there are a bunch of mistakes. Now for those that don’t know, Alpha left off two cards, Circle of Protection: Black and Volcanic Island were accidentally left off the sheets. And so what they decided to do was they wanted to fix that, they wanted to put those two cards on, and by adding one more land for each basic—one more picture for each basic land, they were able to get the card numbers up over 300. I think to 303. So they could announce “over 300 cards.”

So Beta fixed some things. Now also, there’s a whole bunch of misprints. See if I can remember some off the top of my head. Elvish Archers was listed as a 1/2 instead of a 2/1. Orcish Oriflamme and Orcish Artillery were both listed as 1R. One and a red, where Orcish Artillery’s supposed to be one red red, and Orcish Oriflamme was supposed to be three red. So three colorless mana and a red mana.

The Red Elemental Blast was mistakenly labeled as an instant rather than an interrupt, although ironically, later, it would be—it would go back to becoming an instant. So it’s an errata that got undone. There were a lot of examples where instead of having the mana symbol would have the letter that was represented by the mana symbol. So instead of saying, you know, black black black, it would say BBB.

They did a find-replace at one point, and so the word “CARD ed” is sometimes, instead of being the word  “discarded.” The word CARD would be all capital letters, so like disCARDed. Because I believe they used “CARD” as in card name, and that was capitalized. Anyway, there was—there was some global pasting that…

So anyways, as you—as you can tell, Wizards had never done printing like this before. And so Alpha was just riddled with mistakes. I mean, a lot of it was correct, but there were a lot of mistakes. As I get into 1994, my next podcast, one of the early things of Magic is how many mistakes were made in printing.

But anyway, they decided to make Beta. So Beta put in Volcanic Island and put in Circle of Protection: Black. Which by the way, I thought Circle of Protection: Black missing was, like, black was so evil that white could not stop it. I thought it was like done on purpose.  I didn’t realize that they’d mistakenly left it out. I mean, Volcanic Island was too rare for me to notice that it was missing. I think I only had one or two dual lands in the early days. Early on.

What else mistakes were there? There was a—I mean, and there’s a lot of subtle little things, like Island Sanctuary in Alpha—“Prevent damage from things that don’t have flying or islandwalk” but that includes your things. So you used Orcish Artillery and then it wouldn’t damage you because of Island Sanctuary. There’s a bunch of little things. They went through and cleaned up some of the text on some of the cards. So there’s a bunch of things. Oh, Cyclopean Tomb was missing a mana cost, and just didn’t have a mana cost. Anyway, so Beta came, they fixed a bunch of mistakes. And they put it out.

Okay, so this time, so this time they made even more than they made last time, so this time they were sure they had enough for six months. Gone in a week. In fact, what happened was—for me personally is, I showed up the day that it was coming in, before the store opened, sat in a line, because other people also knew it was coming in.

Now, luckily, I was able to buy a whole bunch. I actually bought two boxes of starters and two boxes of boosters. Oh, real quick, for those that might not know, when Magic first came out, it came out—starters were a box of sixty cards that came with a rulebook, and then boosters were just fifteen cards. But there was no rulebook.  So you were supposed to start with the starter that had the rulebook in it.

Now, also by the way, the original starter, for people who don’t know, the back of the Magic thing is the front of a spellbook. And the box it originally came in, the sides were pages. Like, the box sort of sold that it was a spellbook. And that it showed you—the back of the card was the front of the box. Which was the little color circle.

And that’s supposed to be the cover of a tome. And the box did a better job, because on the side there were pages and there’s a bookmark, and it did a better job of selling that to you. Also you’ll notice on the back of the card is the word Deckmaster, the idea originally was they were so excited by Magic that Peter believed they were going to make a line of trading card games.

Now Peter was correct, trading card games—Magic was going to be a big success, and they would go on to make some other trading card games in the—in the Deckmaster line. Jyhad, which would later become Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, it first got put out as Jyhad, and then it got changed—the name got changed. Also, Netrunner I think was put out as a Deckmaster game. I’m not sure if Battletech, when it came out, was or was not a Deckmaster game.

Anyway, that was put on the back. Early on, by the way—also, by the way, there’s a pen mark on the back, I’m not sure I’ve ever talked about that before. That someone actually had a pen mark on the card, and nobody noticed and it got printed. It sort of stayed.

So Beta goes up. They think that—they think they have a six month supply. Gone in a week. So they have to go back, and there’s another scramble.

Now, the idea had always been that they wanted to do a limited run, which originally was going to be called Magic: The Gathering, Limited Edition. Now it’s called Alpha and Beta because there were two different runs, and that there’s enough differences between them. Also, Alpha had the rounded corners, Beta went to the modern card that we have today. And since there’s enough difference between them, we ended up calling them Alpha and Beta. But technically the whole thing was supposed to be Magic: The Gathering Limited Edition.

And then the plan was to do an Unlimited Edition, which came out later that year. In fact, it came out in December. So August was when the game came out, Alpha came out. October is when they put out Beta, which disappeared right away. And then December, they put out Unlimited.

And the idea of Unlimited was, ironically, the plan was “Well, we’re just going to be putting this game out.” Unlimited ended up being a bad name since it was not unlimited. But Unlimited meant that it was sold in more—in larger numbers than Limited was going to be sold in. The idea was to sort of make the first ones collectible.

So the idea in the early days was, the first one would always be black border, and any repeating would be in white border. So Unlimited, which came out in December, was Beta again, but in white border. There was one change in Unlimited, which was one of the arts got corrupted and so they had to change—on Plateau, and they had to change the art. Because they lost the original art through some data corruption.

Anyway, but other than I think Plateau, I think that—oh, there were a few artists’ mistakes, the wrong artists got credited for things. And I think Unlimited corrected that as well. So Unlimited has a few tiny changes, but all the cards are the same. There’s no card differences. And I think all the mistakes in card text had gotten fixed, meaning the mistakes that were in Unlimited were outside of that.

So Unlimited came out—now, they were willing to—the idea on—on Alpha and Beta was, they had one print run and they were done. Unlimited was “Oh, we were going to have multiple print runs.” And so they printed what they thought—as much as they could, basically.

In fact, early Magic is them printing as much as they could, making a bunch of money, taking that money and printing as much as they could, and just keep going, and it took—it took almost two years before like they printed too much. You know, they made more than there was demand. It took a while to even get to the point where they were able to make that many cards.

Early Magic just was gobbling up—people were discovering it, it was—the growing was such—you know, it was like a forest fire. It was just growing at such a fast rate. That you know, it started on the west coast, but then Gen Con happened, slowly East Coast started getting it, you know, people—game suppliers would be at Gen Con, and they wanted it, and it just started spreading across the U.S. And then eventually—not until ’94, but it started being printed in foreign languages. I’ll get to that when I get to the 1994 podcast.

But anyway, so now we’re in December, Unlimited came out, once again, sells out almost instantaneously. It was also at this time I’m pretty sure—I’m not—I think this is 1993. I did not look this one up. They put out something called the Collector’s Edition, which was all the Magic cards but with gold borders on them, front and back, gold borders, or actually just on back. The—it was Magic back but with gold borders. And it was one of every card, and it was called the Collector’s Edition.  I actually managed to buy two of them. Way back when.

And it was fun because it gave you access to play with all the cards. I didn’t have all the cards. And so it was kind of a neat way—my dad and I used to take it, shuffle it up—because it came with land, because—it literally was all the sheets cut together. And then we would shuffle it up and we would play with it. It was great fun. It was fun to play.

It just gave you access to all the cards, which—not is so easy to do anymore. Actually, it wasn’t easy then, because it was printed in very, very short supply. I just happened to be in the know—I was working at the game store, and so actually… maybe it came out in 1994. Anyway.

The last item of 1993, because I know this came out in 1993, was Arabian Nights. So here’s what happened is, Magic is a smash runaway hit. They had not anticipated that. They did not anticipate it. So they—Peter went to Richard and said “(???)—okay, we gotta make another set. We gotta make a set.” So Richard quickly put together a set.

And now, Richard, I think—Magic had been made many years earlier. So Richard had been stewing for a while and thinking about ideas, so even though he had to quickly make a set, he had a lot of ideas. And so Richard was inspired by a comic—Sandman #50, I believe, which was about the—the Arabian Nights, you know, 1001 Arabian Nights.

So there’s a classic book—it basically started, I believe the original book was Persian, but then slowly with time it started taking in, you know, myths from all over the Arab world, and—and it because sort of—just like a lot of the Grimm stuff borrowed the fairy tales from Europe, this did the same thing in which it took a lot of the Middle Eastern sort of fables and things, if you will, and sort of put them all together in a book. And Richard was inspired by this book to make a set.

So nowadays we do sets inspired by, you know, so Theros takes Greek mythology as a jumping off point and we make our own world inspired by Greek mythology. No. Arabian Nights was exactly that world. Aladdin. Sindbad. Ali Baba. Shahrazad. All the characters were exactly those characters. 

Now, note that legendary creatures didn’t exist yet, they wouldn’t exist until—until 1994 in Legends. So Richard made cards that had the flavor of being unique, you know, it was Aladdin, it was Ali Baba, it was Sindbad. But they—there was no legendary creatures yet, so they didn’t have that distinction.

Now, Richard in Arabian Nights messed around with a bunch of things. He messed around with lands that did different things, because in Alpha all lands just made mana, but all of a sudden lands are doing other things. There were lands that didn’t produce mana. He messed around a lot more with mana costs and with drawbacks.

It was really—I mean, Alpha had a lot of top-down stuff, because he took individual cards and tried to find top—you know, (???) of them, but Arabian Nights, you know, sort of did that even more so. Like “Here are characters directly from stories. Well, what would Aladdin do? What would Sindbad do?” You know. And he also went and—you know, there were djinns and efreets and—he tried very hard to sort of capture the kind of creatures that would exist in this world.

And at the same time, Richard really started experimenting on kind of where you could go with Magic. And so what happened is Arabian Nights actually came out I believe in two… there were two prints of Arabian Nights. The first one came out in December of 1993, and the second one came out in January of 200—sorry, first one came out in December of ’93, the second one came in January of 1994. So—and the 1993 one, there was a mistake in the printing, and that certain cards came out too dark or the mana—the mana bubbles ended—and the amount of mana that went in them didn’t overlap.

Another funny thing, by the way, was there was a card called Aladdin’s Lamp. And at the time, they couldn’t get the ten inside the circle because it cost ten. Rather than make it cost nine, they ended up making two circles that were five, saying it cost five, and then it cost five. That was the solution at the time.

Oh, another important story is—so Arabian Nights—sorry. Arabian Nights went out so fast that—so Beverly Marshall Saling was the editor. She was the first editor, one of the earliest employees, and for a long time was the lead editor at Wizards.

She realized at the last minute that they hadn’t done any flavor text. And so the night before it went to press, she—she had two books of Arabian Nights that she went through, and all the quotes were Beverly in one night picking out all the flavor text.

Oh, and then—and also importantly is, originally Arabian Nights was going to have a different color back. Richard’s original vision for the game was that each version of the game would be its own thing. So for example, the first game that came out was Magic: The Gathering. The second game that they were going to put out was going to be called Magic: Arabian Nights. Not Magic: The Gathering, Arabian Nights, Magic: Arabian Nights. It would have its own back and be its own game.

And Richard understood that people could mix and match them. He wasn’t very (???) of the idea that “Oh, we can tell what set it came from.” And Skaff Elias, one of the East Coast Playtesters at the time, was one of the earliest people to work in R&D, said to him, goes, “This is crazy.” Like, “People are going to want to mix their stuff together. Why are we—you know, if we make the back different, it’s kind of implying that you’re not supposed to mix them together. And we want people to mix them together.”

And so Skaff managed to convince everybody that it was a mistake. In fact, Skaff once told me that he thought the most important—this was the guy who created the Pro Tour, by the way. Skaff told me that what he considers his most important contribution to Magic was keeping the backs the same. So I find that interesting.

But anyway, Arabian Nights came out, sold out instantaneously. But then it came out again, the second one came out in ’94, sold out instantaneously. Remember, for a while, like if you wanted Magic, you know, you just had to be there. You had to be there when it came out. I mean, the reason I ended up getting Arabian Nights was, I—in my game store I convinced my game store to start ordering it. And when Arabian Nights came in, the store got four boxes of Arabian Nights.

And I said to my boss, I said, “How much—how much can I have?” You know. “I would like some of this.” And he said to me, “You can have as much as you want.” So I was like “Okay.” It only existed in the store because I bugged him to get it in the store. So I ended up saying, “Okay, I will buy two boxes, and I will sell two boxes.” And my thought process was, you know, “It wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t got it. And so that way I would—I will take half for me and I’ll give half to the store.” Which sold out very fast.

It’s funny because I later found out like the state of Montana like, got a box. So like I purchased twice the state of Montana. It’s funny, by the way, I opened one box, I saved the other box, which I would later sell, many years later. I thought I was going to open both boxes, but once I opened up the first box and I realized how—how special it was, I decided I was going to hold onto it because I didn’t know quite—I knew Magic was kind of becoming this exciting thing, and—so in retrospect I wish I had opened that second box. I don’t know. Anyway. I mean, not—financially it was not a bad call, but anyway. I always felt guilty that I—I didn’t sell more Arabian Nights. But I was very excited. I (???) willpower, I didn’t buy all four boxes. So.

But anyway. That, my friends, is 1993. So to recap, Magic gets shown off at Origins in July, it comes out August 5^th and sells for the first time. It premiered at Gen Con as its sort of big debut, where it makes a big splash. October, Beta comes out. December, Unlimited comes out, and December, Arabian Nights comes out. And that, my friends, was the very first year of Magic’s life.

So not next week, but I will continue this series and next time obviously I will pick it up with 1994. Anyway, thanks for joining me today, I hope you guys enjoyed this little dip into Magic history. People really liked the Twenty Minutes in—sorry, Twenty Years in Twenty Minutes. So  I hope Twenty Years in Twenty Podcasts goes equally as well.

By the way, I’m not going to stop at—I will keep going. However many years it takes me to get this thing done. As, you know, I will keep going until I get up to the modern year. And then probably I will continue once those years are done. So this will be an ongoing—this is not a series that’s going to end it, necessarily, it will end when the podcast ends. Which hopefully won’t be for a while.

So anyway, thank you guys for joining me, but I have to go right now, because it is 2013 and it’s time to be making Magic.