Richard Garfield, who designed Magic: The Gathering, signing at Spiel 2014. Photo Sonja Pieper, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Magic: The Gathering
What it took directly
- statedMagic: The Gathering took from Peter Adkison's request for a quick fantasy card game to play at conventions (Portland, Oregon, 1991)"So I said to Richard, "How about a card game? It should have a fantasy or science fiction theme so we can use this great art. It should be quick to play, and only use cards to make it relatively inexpensive to publish."" Peter Adkison, founder of Wizards of the Coast, "In The Beginning" (Wizards of the Coast, 2009)
- statedMagic: The Gathering took from Five Magics, the card game Garfield made in 1982"My experiences with Cosmic Encounter and other games inspired me to create a card game in 1982 called Five Magics. Five Magics was an attempt to distill the modularity of Cosmic Encounter down to just a card game." Richard Garfield, "The Creation of Magic: The Gathering" (Magic Pocket Players' Guide, 1994; republished by Wizards of the Coast, 2013)
- documentedFire Breathing (a card in Magic's first set, 1993) took from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam""On a card called Fire Breathing, a dragon spits out a stream of golden flames. Underneath the beast is a line from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam":" Lily Eng, The Seattle Times (November 18, 1993)
- documentedUniverses Beyond (Magic's crossover line, announced February 2021) took from The Lord of the Rings, Warhammer 40,000 and Dungeons & Dragons"Wizards Of The Coast had already revealed that this'd include Dungeons & Dragons (an obvious fit), but now says it will also include The Lord Of The Rings and Warhammer 40K cards." Natalie Clayton, PC Gamer (February 25, 2021)
What it learned to do
- statedMagic: The Gathering learned from Strat-o-matic Baseball (players draft and field their own teams)"I was also curious about Strat-o-matic Baseball, in which participants draft, field, and compete their own teams of baseball players, whose abilities are based on real players' previous year statistics." Richard Garfield, "The Creation of Magic: The Gathering" (1994). The Seattle Times reported the same in 1993: "The idea for Magic came from fantasy-baseball games, said Garfield."
- statedMagic's playtest cards (University of Pennsylvania, 1991–92) learned from Skaff Elias, the playtest art director, who pulled pictures from old magazines, comics and game books"Skaff Elias was my art director: he and others spent days poring over old graphic magazines, comic books, and game books searching for art for the cards." Richard Garfield, "The Creation of Magic: The Gathering" (1994)
- documentedMagic's first card art (1993) learned from Jesper Myrfors, its first art director, and the fellow Cornish art students he brought in"He became the game’s first art director, bringing on a horde of other Cornish artists (none of whom knew fantasy art, but were happy for the gig) to start creating the visual world of Magic." Darren Davis, Seattle Met (December 2017)
- documentedMagic's flavor text and rules wording (first sets) learned from Beverly Marshall Saling, Wizards of the Coast's executive editor"One of her jobs in Magic’s first sets was to edit the rules for clarity and to choose the quotations that lent the cards a fantasy “flavor.”" Neima Jahromi, The New Yorker (August 2018), citing Peter Adkison's Usenet history of Wizards
The tradition it sits in
- statedMagic: The Gathering comes from Cosmic Encounter (Eon Products; later Mayfair Games)"the game's most influential ancestor is a game for which I have no end of respect: Cosmic Encounter, originally published by Eon Products and re-released by Mayfair Games." Richard Garfield, "The Creation of Magic: The Gathering" (1994)
- statedMagic: The Gathering comes from Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing games"“Games are finite. They end,” he says. “But role playing broke all those rules. There is no winner in a role playing session." Richard Garfield, to Darren Davis, Seattle Met (2017)
- documentedWizards of the Coast (the company's name) took from a Dungeons & Dragons session in the early 1980s"Only at this meeting he would announce the creation of a game publishing company called Wizards of the Coast, the name pulled from a Dungeons and Dragons session back in the early ’80s." Darren Davis, Seattle Met (2017)
- inferredUniverses Beyond (the crossover line behind the Lord of the Rings and Marvel Super Heroes sets) comes from Garfield's 1994 idea of Dominia, a multiverse where sets with different flavors could mingle"expansion sets with very different flavors could be used in the same game, for they could be seen as a creative mingling of elements from different universes." inferred — Garfield's 1994 essay explains the multiverse as a way to fit expansions of very different flavor into one game; he does not mention licensed crossovers, which came decades later
Where the whole form comes from
- statedMagic: The Gathering comes from playing marbles in elementary school: a collection of your own to trade and compete with"I remembered playing marbles in elementary school, where each player had his own collection from which he would trade and compete." Richard Garfield, "The Creation of Magic: The Gathering" (1994)
- documentedRichard Garfield learned from making friends with cards and marbles as a boy in Bangladesh and Nepal"Garfield didn’t speak Bengali or Nepali, so, to make friends, he would unpack a deck of cards or spill out a bag of marbles." Neima Jahromi, The New Yorker (2018)
- inferredRichard Garfield (his interest in how systems are built) comes from his father, an architect who worked with Louis Kahn on the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban in Bangladesh"This fascination with design and function may have, in part, come from his architect father, who helped the renowned Louis Kahn build the famous Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban government building in Bangladesh." inferred — Seattle Met offers this only as a possibility ("may have, in part"); Garfield is not quoted saying it
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