Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1120: The Early Days of Magic

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

In this podcast, I explain what it was like to play Magic in 1993.

I'm pulling away from the curb. We all know what that means. Well, I dropped my son off at college. And it's time for Drive to Work. Okay, so today, so most people who are playing Magic today and listening to this podcast were not playing Magic in 1993 when it came out. So I thought today, I've touched upon this from time to time, but I really wanted to focus on what it was like when the game came out in 1993. Sort of like, what was Magic like? Because Magic has changed in a lot of ways.

So I thought today would be fun to sort of go back and give everybody the experience of learning about Magic in 1993. Okay, so Magic first came out in August of 1993 at Gen Con. Okay, so first off, let's say you want to play the game of Magic. It's 1993 and through the rumor mill you've heard about this amazing

game that has cards and it's about magic and that's how I first learned about the game. I was working at a game store and someone came in and asked me about it. And then somebody else came in and asked me about it. Then somebody else came in and asked me about it. And I was very intrigued to find it. So the first thing I found was it was hard to find. So basically what happens is Wizards of the Coast makes what they think will be enough product for a year, you know, maybe if things go really well, six months.

So early on, when Richard Garfield and Peter Atkinson, when Wizards and Peter, you know, basically the super fast version of the story, I won't get into that, is Richard comes to pitch Robo Rally. It's too many pieces. Peter says they can make a card game. Richard takes an idea he already has and adapts it into the concept of a trading card game. Magic is born.

But when magic first comes out, if this is the summer of 1993 and you want to find magic, the first thing is, if you don't live on the west coast of the United States of America it is near impossible to even find magic because when Peter first was selling the game he drove up and down the coast of the west coast and he sold it to individual stores and to distributors like he sort of demoed it to get people interested in because Because remember, nobody could predict what magic would become. The phenomenon that magic would become was kind of an unpredictable thing. The assumption had been, okay, it's going to be a game like any game.

You spend an amount of money and you buy, you know. The idea, what, so anyway, Peter went up and down. So in the very beginning, in the summer of 1993, I mean, other than they sold it at Gen Con, so probably some product got out. Gen Con at the time was in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. But other than the stuff sold there, most of it was sold on the West Coast.

So if you needed to find it. Now, another thing that happened is, if you went to the, first thing you would do is, you'd hear about Magic. So you'd go to the game store. Now, not every game store even carried Magic at the time. Mine didn't, for example. But even if you found a game store that had ordered Magic,

it was gone. That it was in such high demand that obviously the game players went to game stores. It was gone fast there. And so what you needed to do, and this was true for Alpha and Beta. So Beta basically comes out in September, October.

Like late September, early October, I think. And once again, they print what they think is going to be, you know, a year's supply, maybe six months if things go well. Alpha sold out in three weeks. Beta sells out in a week. And Beta's even more. Beta is even more stuff you know beta is them taking into account that the game has been hot no idea the climb early magic is insane anyway so if you wanted to buy magic um either you had

to be there the day it came out like i was there the day beta came out so i could buy beta or you had to think about where could I go to buy it that it would like for example a lot of finding magic early on was just trying to say well what kind of store might have it you wouldn't think off the top of your head yeah yeah game store would have it but um game stores and sort of um actually magic wasn't really in mass market very early on um that would take a little while to get to mass market. So after game stores, you would try bookstores, sometimes like boutique stores that did gifts.

I found magic. I remember I found magic one time. It was like a candle store. And I don't know why they had magic. I had no idea. I don't even know how I found out. Maybe someone told me? Anyway.

So a lot of early magic, just finding magic, just finding it was a challenge. Okay. Let's say you find some magic. Now, remember back in the day, it came out in two versions. There were boosters like we have today, 15-card boosters, and starter decks. Starter decks were 60 cards. They were a mix of land and spells. There were two rares in a starter, one rare in a booster, sort of. I'll get to that in a second. And the idea of a starter was that you could kind of play out of it in the sense that there was land. There wasn't enough land proportionally. There was all five colors. So it wasn't as if you could really play.

But the other thing when you first started is you needed to get land. Nowadays, you can go to a store and they'll just give you land. That wasn't the case back then. Land was a very, very valuable resource. And so there was land in the starter decks. And in the boosters, there wasn't a land slot.

The way land worked is Richard put it on the sheets, or Richard, whoever, the people that made magic, including Richard, put it so the common, uncommon, or rare sheets all had land on it. So you would get some amount of land. I mean, you could get zero land. You could get, like, eight land. It varied quite a bit. And Richard at the time was trying to sort of hide the contents.

So when Alpha came out, Wizards did nothing to tell you about anything. There was no information, no card lists. The cards themselves did not have collector numbers. They didn't have rarity symbols.

You know, there was nothing to help you understand. Like Richard really wanted part of the magic experience was playing other people and learning what existed. Like when I really wanted part of the magic experience was playing other people and learning what existed. Like, when I go

to play my friend, I see cards I've never seen before. So Richard really was against early on the idea of telling people what cards were there. Even when we started doing more organized play in the early part of magic, Richard didn't like printing deck lists. So early on, Wizards

was very secretive about what was in Magic. In fact, there was an article, so there was a magazine called Shadis that was like a role-playing magazine. I think it was in Southern California. I don't know how wide Shadis. But anyway, Shadis was the first article I'd ever seen where they opened up boxes and they put what they,

they listed every card and then what they thought the rarities were. I believe even they were missing a few cards and their rarities a lot. Like, people used to trade off Shades because that's all we had. And there were uncommons that they listed as rare that turned out to be uncommon.

So, anyway, the pack opening experience was a bit different. It was a lot more randomization. And because Richard spread the lands across all the sheets, the rare sheet had the islands on it. So it was possible in your rare slot to get an island. So you didn't really get a rare.

And the rare slot island even had a picture that I think showed up on the common sheet. So it wasn't even like a unique picture that only the rare island had. Also, there were no expansion symbols yet. The first expansion symbol would happen in Arabian Nights in early 94. When originally the plan was Arabian Nights was going to have a different back. It looked like the normal magic back was a little pinker.

But I think Scaf Elias convinced Richard that people would want to mix the cards and they shouldn't change the back. So that's when they came up with the idea of an expansion symbol, of the little scimitar for Arabian Nights. The other thing to be aware of in the early days, you know, if you're first starting playing is there was no organized play system. There was no, you just sort of had a fine ways to play. My earliest, a lot of my earliest play was, I bought some cards at a convention. Then I couldn't find any more cards. I couldn't buy stuff until beta came out. So I made

two decks. A mono green deck because I had Crawl Worms, so I had to play mono green. And a mono blue deck because I think I had a clone. I didn't realize at the time that you could play multiple colors. I didn't in the very first packs I opened, I didn't even see a dual land. I didn't, the idea, there was no multicolor stuff in alpha, so the idea you could play more colors. I didn't, in the very first packs I opened, I didn't even see a dual land. I didn't, the idea,

and there was no multicolor stuff in alpha, so the idea you could play more than one color didn't even dawn on me. And I used to play against myself. I would, like, play one side, and then I would act as if I didn't know what was in the other person's hand. That was my early playing, sort of learning magic. Now, how did you learn to play magic?

Well, when I fought my very first pack, there was somebody there that sort of taught me. Not super well. And the other funny thing about early Magic was, like, when he taught me to play, the person who taught me, he taught me to spread my cards apart because he had heard, he hadn't even seen, he had heard of a card that you could flip in the air,

and when you landed on somebody, it killed whatever cards it landed on. And that's a lot of what Richard was going for. Like, there was the whispers of chaos orbs, the card he was talking about. So anyway, most of my learning to play was reading the rulebook. So the other reason you wanted a starter deck was the rulebook came in the starter deck. in the starter deck. In the starter deck,

early magic rules were, I think what happened was, Richard really wanted each card to work sort of in a vacuum as best that it could. And so the rules in the early days were very much about making each card work. But they weren't consistent. And the reason for it, eventually we'd make what we call

six edition rules, which would make the stack and just do a lot to consolidate things so that things were more consistent in how they played. So that the rules didn't work one way for one card but a different way for another card. But early on, a lot of the philosophy

early on, and this is something that I mean, once again, Richard didn't expect tournaments, he didn't expect, like a lot of stuff that happened, Richard didn't realize what happened because you don't expect a phenomenon. I think Richard felt like part of the fun of the game was people sort of arguing around and figuring out among their playgroup how things worked. And so early Magic really didn't do, there wasn't, I mean, the rule book existed,

but there were just not a lot of resources. The internet was very young. At the time, they had what's called the Usenet. It was like a bulletin board, and interestingly, most of the rules questions were answered not by Wizards employees, but in fact, by a young man named Tom Wiley, who would later get hired by Wizards,

as I think the first rules manager, watching him answer questions online. In fact, Tom would eventually, in The Duelist, which was a magazine, I'll get to it in a sec, he wrote an article that made a little flowchart to show how the rules worked, and he made it look like a rat maze because he was making a commentary about the rules.

So anyway, okay, so you want to play the game of magic. You sort of, you were at mercy of the book. And the rules in early days were very weird. Like protection, for example, was very undefined. I have a black knight. It's got protection from white. Does wrath of God kill it? I guess not. That's white. It's white. But even with, the early rules are very funky. There's the thing called semi-targeting. So let's say I'm playing balance. So the way balance works is it looks at creatures on the battlefield, cards in your hand, and that's a life total.

And then your opponent has to go down to whatever you're at. So if you have creatures, let's say you have a black knight out and your opponent plays balance and they have no creatures. Well, balance can't kill black knight so it doesn't go away.

But let's say they have, you have two creatures and he has one creature. Well, it doesn't go away. But let's say they have, you have two creatures and he has one creature. Well, it can't kill the Black Knight, so you have to sacrifice your other creature, because it has to kill something. Like, it knows the Black Knight exists for counting the number of creatures, but it can't kill the Black Knight. Anyway,

very wonky in the early days. The other thing, by the way, is just magic worked differently in a couple key ways. Let's say you're going to build your deck. For starters, you are building a 40-card deck. That was the deck limit at the time, not 60. I think the reason was that Richard assumed that people were only going to buy so many cards and it just was easier to build a 40-card deck.

Now, what would end up happening is 40-card would become the default for limited, under the same kind of guise that you just have less cards when you're playing limited. But in Constructed, they found that having 60 cards was better, and then there were no limits to cards. In fact, Plague Rats, the card in Alpha, was designed so you could have as many

Plague Rats as possible. In fact, if you wanted to play a Merfolk deck or a Goblin deck, there just weren't that many merfolks or goblins. There was one merfolk in alpha, there were two goblins in alpha, not counting the lords that weren't a merfolk or goblin, respectively. So a lot of your deck was,

if you wanted to play a merfolk deck, you were playing a lot of merfolk or the pearl trident. That was the merfolk. So what would happen in the early 1994, like January, February of 1994, the DCI was formed, the Duelist Convocational International. That's what DCI stands for.

And the DCI was a sanctioning body to start doing sanction play. But before that, before January of 94, like if you wanted to play in something, it was, one of the problems of early Magic was just finding places to play. There was one card store that I know that did do play once a week.

But I also should mention, the idea of game stores as being the center of gameplay, where people showed up to play, was a rarity back in the day. One of the things that... And Wizards had a big hand in that. A lot of Magic creating, Friday Night Magic, stuff things that, and Wizards had a big hand in that a lot of magic creating Friday Night Magic and stuff like that really started cementing this idea of the local game store

as a place to play and so early on there were places that did do it but it was the exception rather than the rule and I was in LA at the time and LA especially, it was very very hard to find

places to play, every once in a while the early tournaments were very like someone would have a special one of tournament the idea of regular play, I did find one store and that wasn't until middle of 94 but eventually there

started to be more regular play and sanction play but that wasn't true so not only were you building middle of 94, but eventually there started to be more regular play and sanction play, but that wasn't true. So not only were you building 40 card decks with however many cards you wanted, things were a bit different. The card types were not the same as they are now. So Planeswalkers weren't, I mean, the idea of you being a Planeswalker existed, but Planeswalkers as a card type would not happen for quite a while.

And there was a card type that existed in Alpha that went away. So in Alpha, there were lands, there were creatures. Although the creatures didn't even say creature on them. They say summon whatever the creature type was. So let's say you had a goblin. It would just say summon goblin. And so when the card would say destroy target creature, you had to sort of intuit, well, that's a creature. It didn't actually say creature anywhere

on the card. You had enchantments, but enchantments didn't say enchantment. What enchantment said was enchant whatever it enchanted. So, for example, let's say, it might say enchant creature, it might say enchant artifact, enchant enchantment, and it had fun stuff like enchant dead creature. Then there were artifacts, and artifacts, there were different kinds of artifacts. There were mono artifacts, which meant you had to, basically you had to

tap the card to use it, although it didn't have a, the tap symbol wasn't a thing yet. There were cards that told you to tap, that tapping existed in alpha, but the tap symbol was a little ways away. I mean, a year or two away. Or I guess the early tap symbol came in 94, and then the tap symbol, as you know, it maybe came in 95 or 96. We went through a couple of iterations of what the tap symbol looked like. And then there was a poly artifact.

You could activate that as many times as you wanted. There was a continuous artifact that just had an effect that was always happening. There were artifact creatures. I think that's it. I might be missing one. But anyway, the artifacts. And then there were instance, sorceries, and interrupts. were Instants, Sorceries, and Interrupts.

So the idea of an Interrupt was that you couldn't... Well, actually, I guess there wasn't a stack in the time, but normally when I cast a spell, you could respond to the spell, and you couldn't respond to an Interrupt. So Interrupts were usually counterspells or things that made mana. Counterspell, Dark Ritual, Blue Elemental Blast, Red Elemental Blast. And the idea

was that if I counter your spells, you can't do other things, but you can interact with my counterspells. And you could make mana so you could do things like catch your counterspells. Interrupts would go away with 6th edition rules. They would just become instants, basically. The rule system was created such that they could handle,

the system could handle having counter spells be instant. Although 6th edition did make mana a mana source for a little while. But anyway, so interrupts... Oh, one of my favorite things. So another thing about early magic was wizards was really sort of finding their feet on printing cards. Wizards of the Coast had printed rule books before, but they hadn't printed cards.

And so there were a lot of collation issues. Like Arabian Nights had some cards that were printed too, that were too light. Antiquities, repeated commons in the pack. Legends, the uncommon sheets. In any one box, you only got one of the two uncommon sheets. So there were definitely some, there were some growing pains. And there were a lot of mistakes, like just mistakes made on the, for example, there were

cards that just had the wrong cost. For example, Orcish Artillery was supposed to cost one red red, and it cost one and a red. And Elvish Elvish Elvish Archers

were supposed to be a 2-1 creature with first strike, and they were listed as a 1-2 creature. So there was a combination. There was a bunch of mistakes where literally just wrote the wrong thing. There was a... The way the database worked at the time was

you would write card name in, and it would replace card name with the name of the card. But some things, it was broken, and so literally on the card would say C name in, and it would replace card name with the name of the card. But some things, it was broken, and so literally on the card, it would say card in capital letters. It said a card name because it was card. Anyway, there were a lot of misprints. But one of the things, and they even left off two cards. So Circle Protection Black and Volcanic Island,

which was the blue-red dual land, both weren't in alpha. They were supposed to be. The rest of their cycles were. They got included in beta, and then they added one of each basic land, a new art for each basic land, so they then can say over 300 cards. Once again, they didn't say how many cards. The other weird thing about early Magic is, even though they wouldn't tell

you, like, what cards were on the set, they would get information, like, how much they printed, which we don't do anymore. So it's weird what they shared and what they didn't tell you like what cards were in the set. They would get information like how much they printed, which we don't do anymore. So it's, it's weird what they shared and what they didn't share. Um, okay. So you would have to learn the game. Uh, you had interrupts since the, oh, another important thing. Okay. This was the rules of the game. Like this wasn't an add-on. This wasn't something you could opt into. This was, as created, the rules of the game. You would draw seven cards. Then your eighth card would

go aside. I don't know technically whether it was faced up or faced on. Whenever I played ante, it was always faced up. You knew what you were playing for. So, the rules could have said faced on. Everyone would play the faced up. But the idea was you played for an ante is you would play the game. Whoever won the game got that card.

The eighth card. They literally permanently would take the card. They now owned the card. And the reason for this is Richard understood, well, Richard believed at the time that, look, this was going to be a game like any game. You'd spend, you know, any amount of money and then you'd have

the game. And that's what you would have. Maybe every once in a while you'd go buy an extra booster to get some new cards, but the idea is your play group would really have a static amount of cards, and he thought people would buy, you know, like 100 to 200 cards. So he was worried there wasn't enough robustness that he wanted to make sure there's variety of play. So Richard growing up had played a lot of marbles, and when you play marbles, you win each other's marbles. So Richard was like, okay, well, what if you won other people's cards, and there was a flow, so that way, just the decks would keep changing,

because, well, I'd lose something, now I've got to adapt my deck, because I lost something. Or I gained something, so I would adapt, you know. Maybe I win a card off my friend, and now, ooh, that helps me make a deck that I couldn't make before. And so, ante was built in. Now, ante was never popular. Like, in the early days,

literally when you would ask someone to play, the first thing you would say is, no ante? Hey, you want to play a game of magic? No ante? And so ante, there were people that played ante, but ante was really the exception.

Yeah, I remember I had a friend named Les who owned a store, and we would play in the store, and then once a month, they'd have ante night, and you had to play ante. So I made a deck specifically, it was like a mono black deck, that was like dark rituals and knights, and some of the best ante cards were in black. So I had, well, Contract from Below was the broken, the totally broken one,

and then Demonic Attorney and Dark Pact. Anyway, I just had a deck where no matter what I lost, I wasn't that sad. And then I remember I played less and I won a Chaos Orb off him. So back to the Chaos Orb. What else in the early days? So as I said before, the idea of rarity,

expansion symbols were started with Arabian Nights. There was no rarity. There was no collector number. Premium foils weren't a thing yet. Oh, the other thing that I guess is important to understand in the early days of Magic, and this is one of the biggest things, is there was very little written about Magic.

That when Magic first came out most people couldn't get their hands on it and it was mostly on the West Coast. So it took about, like I said, that first Shadis article that listed all the cards in Magic I don't think that came out until probably I mean the game was out for at least three four months before that happened um so the duelist would come out in january of 94 and the reason it was so

exciting was there just wasn't content on magic there's so little um wizards put out a thing called the pocket players guide although that came out i think also in 94 um so in the early days of magic there was just very, very little information about Magic. You'd go on the Usenets and people might be talking a little bit, but the idea of people writing strategy articles or, you know, none of that had happened yet. In fact, one of the interesting things is metagames tended to be local. Like, I remember there was a trip where I went from Los Angeles up to San Diego, and I had learned that they were really eager for moats up there.

Moats came out in Legends, which is in the summer, so this is the summer of 94. And down in LA, no one cared about moats, so I took moats up to trade because everyone wanted moats, supposedly. And the reason for that is my friend Brian Weissman, who's been on this podcast, he made a thing called The Deck and it used motes and everybody wanted but the the idea was that meta games were very local that there wasn't sort of you would sort of learn a deck from your friend not from the internet um and the other thing was because because uh everybody was kind of a beginner or everybody was a beginner, nowadays if you learn to play, there's all these resources to teach you lots of basic strategies. Brian and I did a whole podcast on card advantage, but that idea took a while to form,

especially in a way where people could read about it. So in the early days, on some level, everybody, you know, was learning. And there were a lot early magic. So one of the stories I always tell, which if you're a regular listener, you've heard this story, but it just gives some context to this, is there were certain cards that were hard to trade for because everybody wanted them. Were they the best cards? They were not. You know, back in the day, people didn't like Moxes, for example. So Mox

zero cost tap for one of the five colors. A lot of people just didn't even understand Moxes. They're like, why? I mean, I remember I opened up a Mox Emerald and I'm like, why is this better than a Forest? Why would I just play a Forest? And then later, oh look, you only play one land

per turn, but you're not restricted on the... But the idea um, but the idea in the early days was, people weren't excited to get moxes, but, um, you know, you would open up, like, the hive, uh, that was a hot card, or, um, a clockwork beast, things that now are nothing, I mean, hive is, if we reprinted hive today, like, no one would play it, um, but in alpha, it was the only card that made tokens. It was the one card, like little 1-1 Wasp tokens. And that was mind-blowing, you know. I mean, the thing that happened,

I guess, in the early game is a lot of like, there's things that beginners like, that we know, having made this game forever. And that was just like, everybody was like that. Everybody was a beginner. And so, it was a very interesting place in that there was a lot of struggles in early Magic that would just like, everybody was like, everybody was a beginner. And so it was a very interesting place in that there was a lot of struggles in early magic that would like, eventually wizards would clean up the rules. We'd print a lot more magic content.

We made constructed, we made formats and had sanctioning and, you know, a lot of things would get formulated and a lot of things would start to take shape. But it was the Wild West. It was very chaotic back then. And even just knowing how a card worked, there was no rules you could look up. You just had to kind of figure it out and then fight with your friends. You know, it was... And I was part of the early judging.

And a lot of that was just trying to understand and figure out rules, and eventually, like, they did hire Tom, and he became the rules manager, and there officially became official rules for things, but none of that was true in, in 93, and even early 94, a lot of that was just very hard to, you know, A lot of that was just very hard to, you know... Any final thoughts? It was a special time. I enjoyed that beginning time, and one of the cool things about it was

I think most people don't get to experience kind of Richard's vision. Although, ironically, we make so much cards now that we kind of do. Like, one of the things about us making as much product as we do is most people just don't know everything that exists. So it is possible for you to sit down and your opponent plays a card that you truly have never seen, you have no idea is there.

In early Magic, when you would sit down to play, every time I played someone, I'd see new cards I'd never seen before. It was, like, I think early Magic was the most of Richard's vision, where, like, you know, just, I would go in tournaments, or not even tournaments, just go find people to play with and play with them, and see them, and then when they're done, I wanted to look through their cards and see what their cards, I'd never seen their cards before. And that was, that was cool.

That was a neat experience. I'm not, I'm not saying the improvement to the system wasn't better. I'm glad we have rules. I'm glad there's a database you can look cards up in. All the stuff that exists now as resources is really wonderful. I think it makes it a lot easier to play. When I learned how to play,

I was dedicated. I wanted to learn. Trying to teach myself from the Alpha rulebook was a challenge. Especially because the person who taught of taught me, taught me a bunch of wrong things. And so I had to unlearn some. Anyway, it was, but it was fun. My last story I'll tell you is, so when Beta came out I bought two boxes. Two boxes of Beta starters and two boxes of boosters. Because I knew that it would sell

out immediately and that if I had, if I wanted to find people to play with, I, I had to be able to provide magic cards for them. Um, but anyway, so the rule I made for myself was I can open up one booster a day. Um, I was just trying to, you know, savor it and make it last for a while. And at the time I had no one to play. So like, it was a lot of, a lot of the excitement, like this is back when I'm playing myself, you know, when I'm, you know. So, every day I would open it up, and I, there's something about, I get one Magic Booster a day where I really, like,

I soaked in those cards, and there's no database, there's no list, so I would see cards for the first time. And so, every day I would open up and just learn the things that existed. And it was a magical time. I remember my one favorite memory is I opened up and I saw Thicket Basilisk,

which is like an early version of Death Touch. Sort of like, it kills anything that blocks it. But it kills, other than walls. But it kills anything that blocks it. I'm like, it can kill anything. Like, I was, it just blew my mind. Like, I didn't know you could do that, you know. And that was super exciting.

But anyway, a lot of my goal today is to give you a side of like what magic was in the early days. And there's a lot of things that were really different. So I'm hoping since most of you were not there in 93, I'm hoping this gives you a little insight of just the early days of magic. Anyway, guys, I'm now at work. So we all know that means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to making magic. I'll see you guys next time.

Bye-bye.