Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1235: Bigger Than the Box

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

When Richard Garfield first made Magic, he liked to say it was "a game bigger than the box." In this episode, I walk through what exactly that phrase means and the challenges of making a game that accomplishes this.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I brought my son off at school. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today's topic, I want to dive in deep. There's a kind of there's a phrase that Richard Garfield used when he talked about magic on that phrase is it's a game bigger than the box. So I want to really dive in deep and what that means. There's a lot of challenges for magic. And I just wanted to sort of, it's an interesting concept that magic obviously is very much built around. But I want to spend a whole podcast we're talking about. It's an interesting idea. And it's really something that has a lot of challenges to it and a lot of the making of magic with Richard trying to solve the problem of how to make a game bigger than the box.

So let's start with what exactly that means. What does bigger than the box mean? So let's say you go buy a normal game. You buy a Monopoly or Scrabble or Clue or pick your game. When you buy Monopoly set, everybody who buys Monopoly Set gets the same pieces. You get a certain board with, you know, now Monopoly as an example can be skinned differently, maybe different properties have different names based on however you skin it, but the reality is

the core essence of the game, the actual game pieces. you have a board with 40 squares, you have cards that represent the property, you have dice and pieces and money and community chance, you know, a community chest and chance, and you have all the same component pieces. Like I said, Monopoly's a game where sometimes they skin it differently, there's different flavors there, but the core mechanics are the same. And if two different people buy Monopoly

in two different places, they get the same game. So the idea is that the game experience for the end user, for the player, is the same no matter where you buy the game. And so the idea is that most games are a complete experience, meaning when you purchase the game, everything that's needed for the game is in the game. And so as a game designer,

when you're designing these type of games, well, you just balance everything. You know, you make the game with all the component pieces and then you have a sense of what the audience is going to experience, because what you're testing is what they are going to experience. Okay, but it is possible for a game to have more pieces than exists within any one copy of the game. That's what Richard means that the game is bigger than the box, that you could buy the game, the box, and open it up and not all the pieces are in the box.

Now, this idea, Magic did not invent bigger than the box, bigger than the box invented before Magic. So the two big ways that it pre-existed actually are, so there's a couple of what we call core hobby industry, core game hobby industries. One is miniatures, one is role playing, and the third one is trading cards. Obviously we'll get to trading cards in a second, but the other two predate magic, and each of those, interestingly, are bigger than the box. And one could argue that maybe one of the core elements of becoming a lifestyle game

is that there is a component element that the game is, you know, bigger than the box means a lot of things. A means that all the component pieces are there are not all the pieces. There's more pieces than exist in any one box, but also it has a lot to do with community. You know, that a lot of understanding a game isn't just sitting by yourself and playing. You can't possibly understand the whole game. You don't have all the pieces. Okay. sitting by yourself and playing, you can't possibly understand the whole game. You don't have all the pieces.

Okay, so let's go back to the very first one, which I believe is Dungeons and Dragons. If I understand the time. Role-playing, not role-playing, miniatures and role-playing both exist. I'm not sure of my quite timeline. I think miniatures, actually, miniatures predates role-playing for sure.

The early miniature games is before the earliest role-playing. Role-playing in Dungeon Dragons began in the 70s. Miniatures predates that. A lot of the miniatures that people know, I guess, happen after that. But miniature, especially like war gaming, goes back actually pretty far. So let's start with miniatures. I guess miniatures, now that I think about it, miniatures were first.

So the idea of a miniatures game, at least a traditional miniatures game, especially Wargaming, is you're having a war. In fact the way Wargaming started was when you're actually planning an actual war, one of the things you need to do is you need to mark where everything is so that you can look at the whole field and understand what's going on. And original war gaming was just the idea of, well, this thing that really happens in real wars, what if you could do that, but there wasn't a real war? What if you could experience the act of having a war without, you know, the killing and dying?

Just, you know, that, that was the initial idea of, of miniatures came from war gaming, meaning literally matching wars. And one of the ideas of war gaming was, Hey, there can be different component pieces. There's different kinds of infantry. There's different kinds of armed units, you know, that that part of having a war is, Oh, well, the different groups can come. And so the way that wargaming Was made early on which the idea of you create some general rules

And then you get different pieces that get brought in Eventually Wargaming like there's a couple that so the idea essentially is there are more pieces that exist than you play in any one wargame The idea essentially is there are more pieces that exist than you play in any one war game That you the person playing the war game can you have some ability to pick what pieces you play? Now eventually as that gets extrapolated And this is where Dungeon Dragons were role-playing and then miniatures go back and forth

Role-playing came along and really, really, not that fantasy didn't predate it, but it really sort of brought fantasy into gaming in a large way and that you started seeing fantasy coming into miniature gaming and so the idea is I'm not just getting an normal army. Like early war games like oh I'm getting different troops from different places and then you start getting, I'm getting orcs, I'm getting elves, you different places. And then you start getting, I'm getting orcs. I'm getting elves. You know, you're starting to do fantasy elements of them. And then eventually also you will see wargaming and miniature gaming tipping into like science fiction and other genres.

Um, but anyway, the important thing for miniatures is there's a rule set, but each person, there's more pieces than need to be that then need exist to play when you play a war game or miniatures game there's more miniatures than are needed to play the game and Normally the way the miniatures are sold is they sell you two pieces that you can play with These are two balanced armies. You can go play You don't ever have to leave that environment if you just enjoy it But they sell other armies and other component pieces and other you know So you can go buy other things and you can start to customize

And that's a big thing about the game bigger than the box is the idea of customization that you the player Get to pick and choose what you're playing with. Now mostly today I'm talking about tabletops. Obviously as you start getting into video games, a lot of these component pieces of customizability become a very core essence of video games. But both miniature games and role-playing games really predate video games. And so they have a big influence in how video games work. Also, trading card games would end up having a big influence

in how video games work. But anyway, I'm mostly talking about tabletop games today. Okay, so the idea in miniatures is that there are more pieces than needed to play the game. And the way that miniatures usually work is what we call a point system. And what that means is each piece has a certain number of points and the way you balance them is you sort of figure out how strong pieces are and then you can give them a point value.

And so the idea is, okay, we're going to have a fight and then we're going to make sure that each side has the same number of points. if you if you're trying to handicap maybe one has more points than the other but the idea is the point value allows a balancing system so okay I want to play you and we each get 40 points 50 points I'm not a big miniature player but you get so many points and you can build your armies and stuff based on that another way that you can do it is you can have what I'll call a color system. The idea there is that the game says, oh, well, you get so many red things, so many yellow things, so many blue things. In that kind of game, the point system, everything's balanced

against each other. The color system says, well, we want certain component pieces and we give you some variety on what those are, but we kind of balance everything that's red against each other. So we say you can have one red thing or two red things. Well, the red things are equal. And maybe the blue things are more powerful than the red things, but it's fine. The blue things are balanced against the other blue things. So those are the two major systems you can use. The thing I'll say about miniatures in general is you kind of build the game with a larger system and then the component pieces give you different flexibility but they are balanced

against the whole system. And they have a pretty similar function. Like a lot of the flexibility is, oh, I can have different armies, but the armies have the same basic goal of what they do. The functionality of the armies is, I mean, maybe some have certain abilities, others don't, but the basic functionality is pretty similar. Okay. Then we get to role playing.

So role playing says you're going to, you're going to play a game, but the game is kind of a storytelling game. You're going to have somebody who functions in Dungeon Master and D&D as the storyteller. And then you get to build a character, and there's a lot of criteria you get to build on, but you have a lot of flexibility. I mean, you roll some number of dice to figure out abilities, but then you can choose what species you are, or what job you have, what kind of class you have, what are your strengths, what kind of equipment you have, what kind of tools,

do you know magical spells? Like, there's a lot of different component pieces you can get, and you get to customize. Once again, that's the big thing here. You get to customize. You get to choose who your character is. Now the one thing I was able to role-playing game it's not I mean you in theory can win or lose but it's not really about winner and losing because it's a story. Like maybe you accomplish your task maybe that's winning but there's a lot more a role

playing game is more about having fun telling the story no matter what happens whether you achieve the task or don't achieve the task, the act of playing is the fun part. And there's not really, there's not winners or losers like there is in a strategic game. In miniatures, there's a winner, they're giving a battle, somebody wins. In role playing, yeah, maybe your group accomplishes its task

and maybe that's winning for you. But really that's not the point of role playing. And so the fact that role-playing is customization you don't have to balance anything and on top of that you have somebody you know the the game master the dual master dungeon master you have somebody who is helping balance things. They are creating a system they know what you're capable of. They determine what's there. And on the fly, they have some flexibility just to make it a fun game. Okay, so the reason I now we get to magic. Okay, so in 19 early 1990s, I'm

not quite sure 91 maybe Richard Garfield and his friend Mike Davis are trying to sell the game Robo rally. Basically, the story is Richard was an inventor. He made a lot of games. Richard thought it was like a hobby but Mike Davis, his friend, said I think these are good we should sell them and Richard's like I don't have any energy to sell them but if you want to sell them you know I'll split some profit with you like if you want to help me sell them, great. So Mike Davis sets up an interview with a bunch of different places, but one of the important to our story, one of the places is at a very tiny role playing game company

named Wizards of the Coast. Started by five people, one of them which was Peter Ackerson. They love role playing. They love Dungeon Dragons and they just wanted to make their own role-playing expansions and stuff When they're originally Peter was working at Boeing at the time the company started in his basement But anyway They come I mean they're really trying to sell the game and so they're trying, you know, Mike Davis is trying everybody I mean, they're really trying to sell the game. And so they're trying, you know,

Mike Davis is trying everybody. He's talking to every game company. And Peter said, okay, I'm willing to see the game. So they traveled to, you know, I think they were in Pennsylvania at the time. But anyway, they traveled to Seattle. Richard's parents lived in Portland. So maybe they drove from Portland.

But anyway, they come to visit with Peter Ackerson. They show him the game. Peter's like, that is an amazing game. I can't make it. Why? The component pieces are just too much. I'm a tiny game company. I don't have the ability to make something with that high a cost of goods, basically

is what he says. So Richard says, well, what can you make? And Peter says, well, we have access to a printer. They're working with Cartamundi in Belgium, which is where Magic was originally printed. We have a printer that we work with. And we have access to art. We know artists.

There's a local art school that we know people who are there. So we can make a card game that has art on it. That's what we can make. And then Richard went off to sort of brainstorm and I guess they were touring places, I think here in Seattle, and he was at a waterfall when this happened. And the idea of combining trading cards

and making a game out of them. Richard had always collected trading cards, he liked trading cards. There was something really fun about the randomness, he didn't know what you were gonna get. And the idea just sort of hit him like a thunderball. What if you could turn a trading card game into a game? He ended up adapting, what he did is he took games

he'd already made and he adapted them. I think he tried another game, but eventually he adapted a game he called Five Colors. And that was the earliest prototype of Magic. But, and now we get back to the bigger than the box. The thing that Richard loved about the idea of a trading card game was that you wouldn't be in control of what pieces you got.

That the pieces would be randomly distributed. And that was a really intriguing idea. Imagine a game in which you don't even know what pieces you're gonna get. That the act of the trading card means that every time you open a booster pack, you get to see new pieces. And that he wanted to make a game out of trading cards.

Now, there's a lot of challenges. It's, well, it's a very cool idea. There's a lot of core issues with it. And this is what Richard had to solve. So the biggest one was the bigger than the box problem. That's why that's why today's topic. So the idea with the bigger the box is normally if I make a game I can balance the game because I know what people are playing with

and but Richard thought it goes. Okay, let's say I make a game, the game is really successful. For example, Richard liked, there's a game called Cosmic Encounter. Well, Cosmic Encounter was so successful that they made expansions. So this is a very popular means in board games. We make a game, it's popular. I now make added content for the board game. And so different people put out Cosmic Encounter the years, but there have been different expansions.

And the idea for those who have never played Cosmic Counter, you're playing alien races, and you're having kind of a big war. A lot of the fighting is done with cards, but there are also cards that let you break the rules. And then each alien has a special power, basically, so that it shakes things up. Now, so Cosmic Encounter did something interesting. I should point this out as well. Cosmic Encounter, when you play a game of Cosmic Encounter, there's a randomization that happens in that you each choose, each player chooses an alien, but there's more aliens than there are players usually because there's, I don't know how many, 12, 15,

there's a whole bunch of aliens. And so the idea is every time you play, the game's a little bit different, because it depends on what aliens you're playing. And so if I'm playing one alien one game, even if I play the same alien the next game, the people I'm playing with might pick a different alien. So the mix is always different.

And Richard really enjoyed that. Now, that is a good example of a game that's other stuff like Dominion would follow in this where there's more to the game than you play in any one version of the game and Richard I mean I think of all the games that inspired Magic Cosmic Encounter might have had the biggest influence. It both in the sense that there's some customizability that you have some, and in that there's a lot of cards that broke the rules, that there's things you could do, but a card could say that you could do something

that the former rules said you couldn't do, and Richard was fascinated by that. But the idea of a trading card game is a little more daunting. So in a game like Cosmic Encounter, well, you know all the things that exist and you can balance against those things and you can play test those things and the number of variables, you know, I don't know how many aliens are in the original Cosmic Encounter 15, whatever,

you know, and I mean, so yeah, there's a lot of commentorics there, meaning you're not testing every single combination you could test because there's a lot, but you can test each individual element and get a general system, you know Balancing against the general game if you will a very similar model to how Miniatures are done, right? It's not that all the pieces are played at one time, but you can balance it against the basic system and the thing about miniature wargaming games like Cosmic Encounter is the designer knows the component pieces that the players have access to.

And with miniatures, you choose whether you get the pieces or not. You have total control. You want to play elves? Well, go get the elves. You want to play zombies? Go get the zombies. So those games games There is flexibility

And the game is bigger than the box well, I would argue the cosmic hunter is not bigger than the box everything comes in the box, but The idea that the game has different executions is similar in the way to miniatures work But the problem here is that in order for a trading card game to work you do not have control Of what people have. That you have to make a game that no matter what they own, they can play again, assuming they have enough component pieces, but that they can play the game.

And so the big question was, how do I do that? How do I make sure that I give you random pieces, but you have enough pieces to play the game? And so there's a lot of things that went into that. Part of is making a game where the component pieces, like a lot of what Richard did is he said, okay, I need to make different things because I want you to like,

in order for a training card game to work at bare minimum, I need 300 different pieces. And that's assumed Magic, you know, never had any expansions or anything, just the base game. It was roughly just slightly under 300. So in order to do that, Richard did a bunch of things. He made different types of cards. He made different rarities.

That's another big one. I mean, the different types of cards meant there's different functionality. Most games have different pieces. Nothing strange there. He made different rarities. That's a lot in tying into what a trading card game is. And rarities ended up being very important. I talk a lot about AsFans, but basically you know that your audience is going to see way more of your commons than of your uncommons and more uncommons than your rares. Mythic rares didn't exist when Magic started, so we won't talk about mythic rares. But the idea is your game can't live in your rares.

You don't know if people will get any of your rares. But you have some commons, so you'll get a certain amount of your commons. And if you do your Asfand right, like for example, Richard's like, well you really kind of want creatures to play this game. Okay, if creatures are about half the cards, well, you're going to get a lot of creatures. And so he said, okay, I can use rarity, I can use a core structure of a trading card game to balance a little bit. I can't control exactly what they'll get, but I can control percentages to a certain extent. Okay, but then became the bigger problem is

he loved the idea that you choose what to play with, right? You build your own deck, you customize your deck. And that is interesting, like, yes, you can customize your army in role playing or customize your character, sorry, customize your army in miniatures, customize your character in role playing. But normally in each of those,

this is sort of like, it's a game in which you bring everything to the table. Like even in the miniatures, like the board is kind of a given, like everybody's playing on the same board. Now given, I know there's miniatures, you got different boards and stuff, but at least the base game has a base board.

Whereas magic, it's like what you are playing with, what you're experiencing, there's so much diversity. Like you and I can make I can both make a magic deck and they can be radically different. We may not use the same card type, we may not use the same color, we may not use, like, our strategy to win might be completely different.

Maybe I'm attacking with creatures and trying to beat you quickly, and you're a control deck, there's no creature that's gonna mill me out. Those are very different experiences, but the game has to handle both of those. So, the big problem that Richard tackles is what he calls the Queen Problem. And I've tried for this before.

So if you think of chess, and he liked to think of chess, imagine you had chess, but instead of the six pieces that come with chess, there were more than six pieces. And if you get into sort of, into chess, one of the things that people who are really into chess do is it's fun to experiment the idea of other pieces. It's not how chess is played. But I mean, there's definitely people who goof around chess variants or what if these pieces exist and how would it how would it change things or even just taking the existing pieces and randomizing where they start that, you know, a lot of sort of experimental chess will do stuff like that. Um, so Richard was like, okay, if I can choose any pieces that I want, how do I, how do I make sure you're not playing with, you know, just say, let's say you have to have 16 pieces. We need a king. That's the win condition.

Well, why wouldn't I play 15 queens? Like, why would I bother to play a bishop or a rook or, or a pawn? Um, and he thought, okay, there's like point systems, that's how miniatures work. But a point system is complex. Really he wanted something where just, hey, you can play whatever you wanna play, I'm not gonna tell you what you can or can't play. But he needed some way to sort of restrict things

so that every deck isn't just the most powerful cards. And there's a bunch of ways he did it. Rarity I already talked about. Obviously, you can put the things that are most warping high at rarity, so every player doesn't have access to all of them. This also is soon when he first made the game. Magic became so popular that a lot of things shifted.

If it was a normal game where you just went to the store and you bought stuff and it's random and the only way to get cards specifically is to go trade with your friends, that's a different dynamic than where magic ended up. But it's hard to plan for a phenomenon, so. So he said, okay, how do I make sure that there are things that go, want to go in different decks?

And so the two big, so if you ever heard me talk about the Golden Trifecta, the concept of trading card game, the three genius ideas Richard created, the idea of a trading card game, the color pie and the mana system. Well, the color pie and the mana system were the two answers to his problem. One was the color pie says, okay, what if I divvy up the strengths of the game? I don't let any one deck of access to everything. What if I put them in different colors? And I guess we have to check on the mana system first. The mana system says, look, I evolve over time. I am going to make it on turn one. You have a little bit of your

resource on turn 10. You have a lot of your resource. If we make a mana system, a system by which spells have to be cast and there's a resource and you gain resource over the game that means some cards are valuable early because they're cheap and easy to cast some are valuable because they're powerful you do later but then you make a curve of cards and the idea is because the system changes over time and you want to always be efficient you want a variety of cards a curve of cards you want some cheap cards some medium cards and expensive cards want at every moment of the game to have access to make sure that you can do things. And the other thing the mana system did is it said, okay we can diversify the mana system, meaning there's different colors, but make the

mana system punish you for going too broad. If you're only playing one color you'll always have the color you need. If you're playing two colors, sometimes you won't draw the second color. And the more colors you add, the more likely you don't have the color you need. So the system pushes you toward playing less colors. And the color pie says, well, I'm going to diversify what's going on. Certain colors have certain strengths and certain weaknesses. The nice thing also about that is if I'm playing a certain color and my opponent knows I'm playing that color, I have inherent weaknesses so my opponent can then shift their deck to adapt.

And one of Richard's ideas was that he didn't think like you build a deck and you're done. Part of this is you're going to play and play against other people, probably play against your friends and maybe they're doing certain things and you adapt to what they're doing. And the idea, and he had this from the very beginning, is you could keep adapting your deck. Plus, as you buy new cards, you have more things that you can add. And so that was the idea, is that the game is flexible and you have the option to sort of pick and choose

your pieces, but then we just laid in, he laid in a lot of things. Things like color, like mana, like rarity. Things that sort of say, hey, there's reasons why I might not put everything or the most powerful thing in every deck. And the thing that's really interesting about it, I mean the thing that is fascinating to me is, like it's really compelling that the three big sort of what I'll call hobby lifestyle game game types are all these bigger than the box customizable things.

Because if you're going to make a game and really really get into the game, you know, you want something over and above. Here's the experience that everybody experiences. You want something where you just have a lot of say in things. And that one of like I did a whole podcast on why Magic is, you know, what makes Magic so special. And a lot of that is that you, the game player, have so much agency of what the game is. I often joke like, you know, with Magic, you know, you're the game designer. And that is really true, that you get to shape, I mean, and not only that magic has a lot of different formats.

You can choose how exactly you play. You know, there's no one way to play magic. It's a game system, you know, as shared rules shared pieces, but you have a lot of flexibility. And if I want to draft and you want to play commander, I mean, yeah, they're the same game. But wow, those are really different in what's going on and that was that was sort of Richard's dream that the dream of bigger than the box is that the game has this essence that people get to experience the game in different ways and people have the ability to adapt the game in different ways that you get to shift the game to where you want to be

and in normal games like there's house rules and things where like, okay, when we land on free parking, you get the money that people pay taxes to or whatever, whatever rule you make up that you add in, people can adapt game. So it's not like there's not a little bit of that, but it's not quite the same thing as the adaptation being built into the game. And that that is something I think when you first built into the game. And that is something, I think when you first get into Magic, the thing that's really exciting about Magic is it really makes you rethink what a game is. I remember when I first started playing Magic,

like the idea that, you know, after living and growing up in a world where every board game had the component pieces and the rules told You what pieces you you know normally when you play a game the rules will say okay Go get five cards and one little piece to represent you and this much paper money or whatever is telling you and And you always start in the same place with the same thing and all of a sudden you're playing a game or is like okay You need 60 cards or whatever the format is telling you. But like, okay, well, you know, maybe it comes from this certain subset of cards, but that subset of cards is usually thousands of cards, maybe tens of thousands of cards. And it's like, okay, you have it. Like I said,

it is so liberating. It's a very exciting thing. It's very cool. And, um, and you know, like, once again, video games really dove deep on this. Video games really, a lot of the bigger-than-the-box things that started in tabletop obviously became giant in video games. But it is an amazing concept. And it's something that's really cool. It's very easy when you get into magic

and just everything becomes the norm to you to forget about how different it is You know the idea that like imagine just imagine like the way you played Monopoly is you opened up a Monopoly Booster or whatever. Oh, I opened up Park Place. I opened up Kentucky Avenue. Oh, I got a Community Chance card Oh, I got the dog, like you know I'm saying? And the idea that like how you play the game only existed by the things you had is really cool. It's a really really neat concept and

it is it was very like the thing about magic that a lot of people forget is there were so many different component pieces of it that were just so out there. A lot of guys when I talk about the Golden Trifecta, like it was magic really was paving the path in a very different place and it it borrowed you can see the Richard was influenced by miniatures, influenced by Cosmic Counter, influenced by role-playing, like all those things obviously had it but he shaped something new and as somebody who's been continuing to shape this thing for a long time. It is a really neat system So that's why I wanted to talk about it today bigger than the box is a very cool concept. And so anyway

I hope you guys appreciate it. This is a little more of a Game design sort of dive today, but I I love doing that sort of stuff So anyway guys, I am at work though So we all know that means it means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.