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The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
When they were still in arts school in Seattle in the early 1990s, Jesper Myrfors and Sandra Everingham would sometimes look for inspiration by exploring Fort Worden, an abandoned 19th-century military base at the entrance of the Puget Sound. To them, it felt like a dwarven ruin. One day they found a trap door hidden […]
Desperate to prevent the game from turning into something only rich old people could play, Garfield and Elias decided that the November 1994 expansion, Fallen Empires, would flood the market with hundreds of millions of cards. (Garrige Ho/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)Convinced that Magic couldn’t survive by relying on its collectibility alone, Garfield thought the metagame of sports, which made it socially acceptable to spend tens of thousands of hours on a game, might save it from becoming a fad. Each card features enough rules text to fill an AP wire story, more weird keywords and mechanics to keep track of than ever, and the artwork looks like it belongs on a movie poster, not a 2.3” x 1.8” art box.
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