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.
I agree, I find so much of the art of modern magic cards completely uninspiring. They all look the same. Old magic cards had an element of the strange and the quirky. Sometimes the designs bordered on naive. Hand painted illustrations had a distinctly human touch. And the illustrations were punchy and had contrast. You knew exactly what a card was from a distance. A lot of the modern art is just polished, air brushed fantasy cliche. Muddy. Too much detail. A distinct lack of the surreal or abstract. Too thematically consistent.
My favorite thing about the cards is they were little windows into a deep and mysterious world, hinted at further by the mechanics of the cards.
I thought it was just nostalgia, but looking at the sets you linked the 1995 one (I'd never seen) excites me while the 2024 does nothing... it could almost be AI. It's not just the same faces, but the same framing, same expressions, same "grand fantasy architecture", same MMO-esque magical swirls and sparkles, etc.
The abstract pieces weren't just whimsy, they felt like they could be based on vastly different local traditions or culture, history, or come from different time periods.
Note also that all those old cards were done on physical media, whereas today almost all the cards are done digitally. So the modern cards are much more _detailed_. Check out the Jesper Ewing cards like Frantic Scapegoat. He's notable for creating real paintings. To me they capture a bit of the old feel.
They have a lot more narrative control over the artwork now.
A thing I disliked (as a kid) about the old cards, as they transitioned to these more homogenised styles, was how wildly different the cards looked. It didn’t feel like one game, and there were many artistic styles I simply didn’t like.
But looking back now, the old cards artwork is so much more iconic; in part because of the nostalgia, but in part because each card is different from those drawn by other artists, you remember them better apart.
I was going to write something similar: if I had been in creative control back in 1993, I definitely would have fallen for the trap of thinking that I was making things better by forcing the artwork to have a homogeneous, consistent feel to it. In retrospect, the idiosyncratic uniqueness of each card made it like a little piece of art that you could own. As a young kid, that made it so cool! I think a lot of young kids only bought a relatively small batch of cards and never even played the game much. I remember owning a scant few cards but that made me treasure my favorites that much more.
Nostalgia or not, I let myself get sucked back into MtG in 2021, after discovering the unofficial format Premodern [0], and a major component of that is the artwork on the cards in those sets with the black border. I'm sure it really is just nostalgia but I truly enjoy playing games in that format and looking at the artwork, especially cards which I've never really seen before because they weren't meta back in the day or cards that are just infrequent or that I'd forgotten.
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.
There's two Dominion Online games now, one from Temple Gates Games where you buy expansions, and the other one from ShuffleIt which is subscription-based.
At least the Temple Gates version honors past purchases made on Making Fun dominion, even if they came from a Humble Bundle.
I begrudge no one their money, I would have paid 100 dollars for the good version of dominion, but I wont pay for a clearly inferior product that pushes out the good one, ever.
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
I quite like magic the gathering online for this purpose. You can’t trade cards, so the gambling and trading aspect go away. And you get wild cards in packs so it’s easier to craft the specific decks you want. Also the rapid cycle of releases just feels more fitting here. I’la be away for some months now and again and come back to an entirely new challenge of cards and decks.
I also paying is optional, you get enough resources just playing regularly that you join events and play drafts regularly. But you can also just pay to have enough to only play events if you feel like regular games become boring.
Just a point here, you're talking about MTG Arena, which is the new online game. There's a much older game still called MTG Online which preserves the gambling aspect, where you buy packs and event entries for real money as well as trade cards with other users (and through a number of legitimate third parties, even buy and sell singles for real money). They even go one step further: if you can collect all the digital cards of a set while they have physical product available, you can exchange the digital set for a factory-sealed physical print run of the set (https://www.mtgo.com/en/mtgo/redemption).
I kinda waffle between the two. Arena's my first love for the reasons you mention, but sometimes it's nice to simply buy some singles and throw together a (Pauper) deck for some fun on MTGO Online (especially since their set selection goes much farther back). I never play that one competitively, though. Feels like playing online poker against a community that's been refined down to 100% professional grinders or wannabes.
yeah, I have a subscription there - you can jerry-rig it so 5 or more people can play on that (by creating the table with slots and not having players wait to join) but the game itself gets a little unwieldy with more people
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.
I'd put the end of the golden age a few years past that, but I fully agree with the notion that the point where the game was at its best was long after he was in charge. He created a fun game, but not a game that people would continue to play for decades, and Magic R&D turned it into a game that I had far more fun with than anything he ever envisioned.
He also designed the Netrunner rules that Android: Netrunner was based on, and that had such a committed community that when Wizards pulled the license from FFG, the fans just kept developing the game.
Was it harder to play? If you didn't understand the rules amongst friends you made them up. But the game also tended towards more battles like "my flying bear defends against your dragon, oh no a lightning bolt". I tried getting back into it a few years ago because I still love the idea of MTG and every card had a book of text and all the best combos were sorted out the second a set released.
Which -- I understand why people like that. I'd still like my flying bears back.
Magic was monetized from the beginning. It was the precursor to loot boxes in modern computer gaming and used the same hooks that get people addicted to gambling to encourage sales of booster packs.
The article covers how this is not true and how the transition to loot boxes was how it went wrong. The start is meandering but the meat is that the end.
I think the hook is the same with loot boxes, gacha and booster packs. You pay money for the thrill of not knowing what you are going to get. For some people that thrill is addictive, so they keep spending more money for that brief moment of excitement.
From my perspective the idea of a game being compelling because of the mystery doesn't work with PvP because the fundamental mechanic pushes people to learn the meta so they can win. If the original goal of Magic was to allow people to feel the wonder of discovery, either it should have been a PvE game with a GM, or the booster packs actually are a core mechanic that provide the thrill of the unknown, in which case the game was structured from the start to make money.
Boosters were in from the start, and that means the gambling and "skinnerisation" were already there, perhaps less optimised than today but fundamentally the same thing. Whales buying every booster they could get their hands on until they got the cards they wanted was something that happened as soon as it went on sale.
I remember getting addicted hard to find those booster packs. It's funny we always look down on the people that would buy single cards from binders though
Twice a year? I think there were 7 new releases in a single year recently. Twice would be relaxing. (I quit a long time ago, so I just watch from the sidelines, baffled.)
You definitely don't have to pay to win. I play entirely on MTG: Arena, and you can pay $0 and still build a competitive deck. For paper magic, just find people who don't have sticks in their posteriors and use homemade or printed versions of the cards you want.
It can be difficult to find people to play with outside of events sanctioned by WotC, in which proxies are not allowed. I have some proxy decks but my opportunity to use them is limited.
And in that environment, it's not pay to win exactly, it's pay for a shot at winning.
I remember my fancy black deck I was so proud of and all the nights playing against tooth and nail, a deck full of cards many of which was worth as much as my whole deck. It sucked. I won 1/3 games at my best because I wasn’t willing to sink hundreds of dollars into my decks
Playing with printed cards though is janky. It’s not how the game is meant to be played and contradicts the aesthetic experience. Better to switch to dominion where the intended experience doesn’t revolve around pay to win
I have no objections to proxies, but I do dislike printed cards. Proxies should be indistinguishable from real MTG cards when face down or in your deck, and printouts generally aren't. The right way to make proxies if you can't make decent counterfeit cards is with basic lands and a felt tip pen.
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
That floor is pretty dang high though. It both has one of the highest costs of entry for pretty much any game (to be fair, it does change with format, but it's basically a choice between paying a lot upfront or effectively a subscription), and the advantage you have scales quite substantially with the amount that you spend (though not quite as much as some mobile games). 'pay-to-win' is a valid criticism, even if skill still matters to some extent.
> 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.
> 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.
Yeah, to echo this point exactly: as a kid I remember that it was distinctly disappointing to open a pack and get a boring mana-related card, such as a mox or dual land, in the rare slot. We all wanted cool big creatures instead!
Pretty soon, the usefulness of those mana cards became clearer. But I still recall finding it ridiculous that moxes were selling for a steep $15 at a gaming convention.
I stopped playing a few years later and sold all my good cards. I cringe seeing how much even a lowly Arabian Nights mountain sells for these days...
i found some of my cards and just tossed them in the trash a few years ago because they were all revised and fallen empires and i was still thinking they weren't worth anything, including a full set of revised dual lands.
> 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.
but physical card packs have had this "issue" since inception of magic the gathering. Understandably, the digital cards don't have the same physical manifestation and thus feel like it could be taken away at any time, but the loot box mechanic is no different to the random booster packs you'd buy.
The physical game absolutely does not have this issue.
1. First of all, you could print proxies when playing with friends to try out card.
2. You could buy individual cards from other players or your local game shop.
3. You could sell your cards.
The previous iteration (MTGA) had both 2 and 3 as part of the game. What's more, they would let you "cash out" your digital cards for physical cards.
You were not required to get cards by opening packs (which I agree is the ancestor of digital loot boxes). But Arena got rid of any way of getting cards outside of "lootboxes" because they want to get as much money out of your as possible, not because it's better for the game.
You could still buy individual cards from people who opened physical packs which meant that the price of a booster box didn't hurt so bad. You could sell a bunch of cards in it and the whole system worked because everyone had 10-100x more cards than they could ever use, creating a great secondary economy.
That's true - i've not thought about the secondary market. This doesn't exist with digital goods - something i think is missing in the laws governing consumer rights today imho. It's not just trading cards, but everything.
And you can buy individual cards in arena. You can buy wildcards in the store and redeem them for any card of the corresponding rarity. They’re stupid overpriced in many cases but you can’t say it’s not possible.
I was not aware that they introduce that. I gave up on it a while ago.
But wow, those prices! So they kinda addressed the purchasing individual cards, though the trading aspect of the trading card game is still conspicuously missing.
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.
Early on my playgroup literally just mixed all their cards together. We didn't really think of it as being "my deck" or whatever when we were playing unlimited. It wasn't really until Legends came out that anybody in my group of game friends started taking collectability or competitiveness seriously.
He didn't get it "wrong" though - he purposefully made much more powerful rares in the very first set. Maybe he now believes that was a mistake, but as a limited player I don't think it was! I like having some powerful cards show up from time to time but not to have the draft format dominated by them. Their latest change makes rares show up more frequently in packs and it is really bad for the sealed deck format IMHO.
I think the ruleset in MTG especially with all the mechanics introduced is way too complicated to balance at this point. It's got the card game equivalent of Turing completeness and the best they can do is ban cards that turn out to be too powerful from competitive games as their utility is discovered.
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?
Which, btw, is currently on a nationwide prison strike since early April.[0] At least Belgium prison strikes get some press. Unlike the US ones. In 2016 we had the largest prison strike in this nation's history[1] and I didn't see a peep about it in any major newspaper
https://archive.ph/lH00w