Part of the original magic that Garfield talks about, the player experience of discovering a world of cards you've never seen before, is captured by recent video games like Inscryption (especially) and Slay the Spire.
Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outside the game as in Magic the Gathering. Dominion randomly sets 10 cards to be accessible to players, out of ~500 for an extremely huge number of combinations, such that each 10-set is always new. Dominion shines as card value, and the value of card interactions (e.g., in a combo or engine), can vary significantly by the random 10-set context. In a sense this gives a tremendous sense of novelty, significantly more than playing Magic the Gathering.
Its probably the nostalgia talking but a lot of the early magic was the art as well. It was professional enough to look good but not so polished that it didn't have its own character. I had favorite artists and it was always fun just admiring the art.
The new cards just don't capture me the same way. Something about them is too polished or too homogenized. They don't leave any room for imagination. I feel the same way about D&D artwork as well. No surprise that both D&D and MTG are owned by the same parent company.
A very recent game that also captures this in a unique way is Balatro.
The cards that you play are ordinary playing cards, but the way you modify how they score and what cards you have in your deck is a cool discovery process.
And I will never be unsad about dominion.isotropic.org shutting down with its dead simple and fast dominion implementation, they promised to take it down if the company ever did its own thing and they did and you had to buy every expansion and it generally sucked.
So it seems like it went wrong when greed took iver and now there are so many cards that it doesn't make sense.
I love all the 3 games you mentioned, but not mtg because card packs should be illegal from my perspective (I know it's a me problem).
they can say whatever they want, it is legal gambling
Linked from the article are the pre release testing cards.. According to Garfield - it all went wrong after this! Magic with it's twice a year new sets and pay-to-win is not what he had envisioned.
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.
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.
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
> One day they found a trap door hidden in the woods near the fort, which opened to reveal a rusty ladder leading to a series of underground bunkers filled with broken doors and graffiti.
That's funny: I think it is quite likely that I once found that same trap door and descended that same ladder. It's quite a magical place.
The guy who invented the power 9 complaining about these new designers making rares that are too good… right. Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.
1) In the original game, "balance" was meant to be achieved through the ante system, so if you loaded up your deck with good rares and managed to lose, you were risking more than your opponent was.
2) There was no competitive collectible card game scene so nobody was thinking about balance, it was just about having fun. Chaos orb was everyone's favorite card when the game first came out.
3) They didn't know that people would collect magic cards in any serious way, so they weren't thinking about resale value or getting people to buy a bunch of cards so they could have the rares. Baseball card and comic book dealers early on were completely uninterested in dealing with magic cards for quite a long while.
4) You're looking backwards with decades of experience of playing collectible card games. It was not at all immediately obvious that moxes and black lotus would be good, and people did not understand either "card-advantage" or "tempo" for many months after the game was released. The early meta was all people trying to get out big minions. It took quite a few months before people started figuring out degenerate decks, and even then, there wasn't a lot of communication between players early on unless you were on a few news groups, and not many people were. A lot of it was just word of mouth.
> Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.
The hate against arena isn't due to lack of polish or it not working well, it's about what it's trying to do. It's not about collecting or trading cards anymore it's about opening as many loot boxes (packs) as possible.
MTGA let you purchase specific cards, Arena does not and likely never will. That isn't an oversight, that's a conscious choice to get people to spend money on buying more digital packs. That's a big reason it gets hate.
Spells have mostly gotten slightly weaker. But creatures have only grown more and more powerful.
As for rares I don't think Richard Garfield ever intended to make it an expensive game. Magic is one of if not the first trading card game they didn't really know what they were getting into. They thought people might buy a handful of random cards (not 4x best card) and everyone might use different cards (whatever they had lying around). Closer to traditional kitchen magic. He never intended the game to be so expensive. And mythic rares weren't a thing for the first decade and a half.
The Power 9 are only almighty powerful in 2 player games. If there are 3 or more players, the Power 9 are nowhere near as decisive.
The main thing that went wrong with MTG was reducing it to 1v1 primarily. MTG is a hugely different game when there are multiple simultaneous opponents.
"This wasn't just nostalgia talking. There seems to be something objectively more magical, more infinite-seeming and treasurable about this smaller, more limited version of Magic."
Not that I ever had the chance to play the pre-release version of the game, but the explosion of complexity has made me yearn for exactly this, a "smaller, more limited version"... so much so that I wrote https://twmtg.computerpho.be/ to try and capture it (and also, admittedly, as a bit of a joke/dig)
You might look into Mindbug[1]. It uses a few, very streamlined mechanics. It plays quickly - 3 life, 10 cards. But there is a ton of card variety, and wildly powerful cards, because the mindbug mechanic makes each game self-balancing to a degree.
I believe Garfield also gave creative input during development.
> We send all the flattened Magic packaging and booster packs to the prison and the inmates do the product fulfillment.
Was that a joke or serious? I was enjoying the article until that abrupt end and it just felt dark. A company forcing imprisoned humans to distribute their product?
neonate|1 year ago
https://archive.ph/lH00w
mxwsn|1 year ago
Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outside the game as in Magic the Gathering. Dominion randomly sets 10 cards to be accessible to players, out of ~500 for an extremely huge number of combinations, such that each 10-set is always new. Dominion shines as card value, and the value of card interactions (e.g., in a combo or engine), can vary significantly by the random 10-set context. In a sense this gives a tremendous sense of novelty, significantly more than playing Magic the Gathering.
awithrow|1 year ago
orlp|1 year ago
The cards that you play are ordinary playing cards, but the way you modify how they score and what cards you have in your deck is a cool discovery process.
hobs|1 year ago
Fire-Dragon-DoL|1 year ago
I love all the 3 games you mentioned, but not mtg because card packs should be illegal from my perspective (I know it's a me problem). they can say whatever they want, it is legal gambling
dccoolgai|1 year ago
It tends to break down with more than 4 or 5 players - I wish there was a version of it for larger groups to play online.
getwiththeprog|1 year ago
https://www.magiclibrarities.net/955-rarities-alpha-beta-gam...
hibikir|1 year ago
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.
yetihehe|1 year ago
chowells|1 year ago
2024throwaway|1 year ago
Euphorbium|1 year ago
preordained|1 year ago
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
marssaxman|1 year ago
That's funny: I think it is quite likely that I once found that same trap door and descended that same ladder. It's quite a magical place.
itsdrewmiller|1 year ago
empath75|1 year ago
1) In the original game, "balance" was meant to be achieved through the ante system, so if you loaded up your deck with good rares and managed to lose, you were risking more than your opponent was.
2) There was no competitive collectible card game scene so nobody was thinking about balance, it was just about having fun. Chaos orb was everyone's favorite card when the game first came out.
3) They didn't know that people would collect magic cards in any serious way, so they weren't thinking about resale value or getting people to buy a bunch of cards so they could have the rares. Baseball card and comic book dealers early on were completely uninterested in dealing with magic cards for quite a long while.
4) You're looking backwards with decades of experience of playing collectible card games. It was not at all immediately obvious that moxes and black lotus would be good, and people did not understand either "card-advantage" or "tempo" for many months after the game was released. The early meta was all people trying to get out big minions. It took quite a few months before people started figuring out degenerate decks, and even then, there wasn't a lot of communication between players early on unless you were on a few news groups, and not many people were. A lot of it was just word of mouth.
_aavaa_|1 year ago
The hate against arena isn't due to lack of polish or it not working well, it's about what it's trying to do. It's not about collecting or trading cards anymore it's about opening as many loot boxes (packs) as possible.
MTGA let you purchase specific cards, Arena does not and likely never will. That isn't an oversight, that's a conscious choice to get people to spend money on buying more digital packs. That's a big reason it gets hate.
rat87|1 year ago
As for rares I don't think Richard Garfield ever intended to make it an expensive game. Magic is one of if not the first trading card game they didn't really know what they were getting into. They thought people might buy a handful of random cards (not 4x best card) and everyone might use different cards (whatever they had lying around). Closer to traditional kitchen magic. He never intended the game to be so expensive. And mythic rares weren't a thing for the first decade and a half.
ipqk|1 year ago
bsder|1 year ago
The main thing that went wrong with MTG was reducing it to 1v1 primarily. MTG is a hugely different game when there are multiple simultaneous opponents.
paulpauper|1 year ago
edfletcher_t137|1 year ago
Not that I ever had the chance to play the pre-release version of the game, but the explosion of complexity has made me yearn for exactly this, a "smaller, more limited version"... so much so that I wrote https://twmtg.computerpho.be/ to try and capture it (and also, admittedly, as a bit of a joke/dig)
jdknezek|1 year ago
I believe Garfield also gave creative input during development.
[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/345584/mindbug-first-con...
fennecbutt|1 year ago
paulpauper|1 year ago
that was like the original bitcoin. anyone who still held on to those cards , especially the power 9 or dual lands, made a killing
mrbluecoat|1 year ago
Was that a joke or serious? I was enjoying the article until that abrupt end and it just felt dark. A company forcing imprisoned humans to distribute their product?
valbaca|1 year ago
Are you unfamiliar that slavery is illegal in America except for prisoners?
rodgerd|1 year ago
mock-possum|1 year ago
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2024throwaway|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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aridzone|1 year ago
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