Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1272: How Magic Grew

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

In my podcast on Igniting the Spark (the new Magic documentary), I talked about doing a podcast that covered something the documentary didn't. How did Magic grow from a one hundred million-dollar game to a billion-dollar game?

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today's podcast was inspired by my podcast about igniting the spark. So there was a new documentary all about magic. And I noticed that the documentary really focuses on early magic, sort of magic in the 90s. But there is one little sequence where I talk about magic making 100 million. Then they show the screen and talk about it's magic's first billion dollar year. And I said, there's a really good story about how did it get from $100 million to a billion dollars that the documentary doesn't really cover it covers a little tiny bit so today this is a supplementary podcast for those that have watched the documentary

or even those that haven't watched the documentary where I'm going to talk about look magic started and it magic was a very popular exciting game right out of the gate and $100 million is nothing to sneeze at that's a lot of money but how did not magic 10 times that? How did magic get to where it is today? And so there are a lot of things we did. And so today I'm going to talk about many of those things. I mean, I only have half an hour so even my half hour is probably only, I can only do so much. But okay, so let's go back to the very beginning, back to 1993. So Richard makes the game. what happens?

So I think the very early years of magic, the first couple years, really are about Wizard just catching up to demand. That when magic was first printed, I think they made enough, they made enough magic where they thought it was going to be like a year's worth of magic,

and it got sold in six weeks. Then they made another what they thought was going to be like a year worth of magic, it got sold in three weeks. And that early magic was all about just trying to print enough for demand, meet demand.

And it's not really until fallen empires in 1994, the end of 1994, that they're able to do that. And if you watch the documentary, there's a whole story about that. But that's not today's topic. So in 95, it's when I get hired Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, William Jockish, Henry Sturney year or two later. And it's really sort of, I think the first phase of magic was just trying to keep up with

magic. Just trying to like, this product was exploding. Let's catch up there. I think the next phase of magic was, okay, magic is now a thing. We can print enough cards. The next question was, how do we make magic the best it can be? And so the first thing I've talked a little bit about was just the idea of reshaping the game so that it was a game for the phenomenon it became. And once again, I always talked about this. This is no not to Richard. No one designs a game intending it to be the phenomenon that magic

became. You can't possibly make a game imagining that's what's going to happen because that happens so infrequently. So, there's a lot of decisions that Richard made, correctly. I'm not, like, he made decisions to make the game that he assumed it would be.

A game you play at the game store, one of many many games, you know. So, But there was a lot of reforming and crafting it, and that involved making better rule set, tightening up the color pie, consoled, I mean, just doing a lot of things. Like, for example, early magic didn't have collector numbers, didn't have rarity on the cards. There was a lot of just cleaning up and clarifying and making magic sort of match the scope of what it became. And that was important. Just, like, just consolidating the rules, just making it so you didn't have to learn every rule.

Like, early magic is like, it almost was card by card there's a rule. And there wasn't consistency in the rules. Same with the color pie. Like, there wasn't, one of the things that really magic needed to do was figure out what it was and how it functioned. And then it created some consistency. So that, because one of the things about magic is, it's an ever-growing game. We keep making more and more cards. In that system, you can't go card by card.

You can't make people memorize things card by card. You need to create systems. And so a lot of early magic was about helping create systems and make it more logical so that I could pick up any one card. And if I understand the basic rules, I can understand how a card functions, even if I've never seen the card before.

And so that was very important. The next big thing that we did, And this was something that Richard and the early playtesters did, but Magic hadn't gotten to yet, which is limited play. The idea is, like, one of the big things. Early on, when Magic started, it was like, it's a game, it's one game. It's the game of magic. You can use all the cards. I mean, the earliest version of Magic was 40 cards, no restriction on the number of cards.

And then eventually, they realized pretty early on that, okay. magic's kind of broken you know like richer designed things assuming that people would buy some number of cards and that's what they would own it's a game

you spend 20, 30, 40 dollars on and that's what you own the idea that people would buy the volume of cards they did the access people would have to the cards like none of that was sort of built into the system so there was a like magic clearly sort of broke

if you can just have four I'm sorry infinite number of whatever card you wanted in fact there were there are decks that still exist where, you know, the deck, some high 90% of the time on the first turn will just win.

Like, 99% will just win on the first turn, meaning your point doesn't even get to play. Eh, that's not super fun. So, along comes the DCI and the idea of, okay, we're going to have tournament. So I guess sanctioning probably, before I get into SEAL play,

sanctioning is important, right? The idea that we're going to help run things and we're going to organize things and that people can play in something and have a record and tracking what's going on. This kind of all went together. Maybe I'll just say organized play. Organized play has a bunch of different factors to it. But I think organized became very important.

So that means A, it's organized. They're sanctioned play. You can go. You can get a, you know, the DCI gave you a number. You can get a DCI number. Like there's some organization. There's some organization what's going on. And there started to be some rules.

Okay, well, you can't have any number of cards. You can have four of any one card. And there are certain cards that we think are problematic. So you can only have either one of them or none of them. You know, the idea of starting to have some structural means by which tournaments can be run. And that includes guidelines for how to run. And as we'll get into, it's the beginning of what I will call sort of the creation of formats. That's another thing that happened early on.

Like when magic started, there was one way to play magic, and that is you play magic. You've accessed all the cards and such. So along comes a sanctioning thing that first starts saying, okay, well, there's different ways to play. And then early on, this happened actually before we started pushing Limited, was we splintered magic into type 1 and type 2. Rotation.

We introduced the idea of rotation. There is a format. cards go away that cards that there's a format where the cards don't go away what we originally called type one and type two type one what we now call vintage type two what we now call standard so just the idea there of uh of sort of proliferation of formats the first thing we did is you know what we're going to have a format that only holds so many cards that we're going to make a format that's just not everything because every you know as as the game gets more and more cards that gets more and more unruly. Now there's a format for that. You want to play

with all the magic cards? Fine. There's a format for that. But if you don't want to play with all the cards, if that's just too much, okay, we'll make a format with less cards. So you don't have to know all the cards. And just the idea of formats. So formats and sanctioning, that was very important. The idea that, okay, we're going to tell you how to play. We're going to give you different ways to play. And then we'll sanction them. Meaning we will We'll let places, stores, very importantly, but other places, but we'll let places. And the way sanctioned it worked at anybody can sanction. You didn't have to be a store, you could be a library, you could be a school.

You know, people could sanction, and then you could have play that was tracked. And then you, the player, we created a system where we tracked how you were doing. It was based on chess has a system that shows how you're like a score, a ranking. So you started getting a ranking. We did that early on. And the other thing that was really important is, well, we introduced the idea that Limited was something you play. So I guess there's a bunch of things happening all at once. All this is organized play.

Technically, I guess, before even we started pushing Limited, was the Pro Tour. We created the Pro Tour. That is in, we're talking early 96, February of 96. And we say, okay, you know what? If you play magic and you're good enough, there is something to aspire to. you can come and you can play magic for money you know you can there's a pro tour and along with the pro tour

we're starting to establish a system by which people could play which included starting to play in stores and that was super important the idea that I want to play magic but I don't know where I could play we start like this organized play said we're going to tell you how you can play

we're going to tell you where you can play we're going to tell you what you can play with We can tell you who you can, like, all the stuff starts coming together. I like magic, but I don't have people to play with. Well, guess what? You can go to your local store and play with people. We'll start making formats, so you can customize what you want. And we have a pro tour which says, hey, there's something for you to aspire to be.

The second pro tour in Los Angeles is when we do the very first limited. And that's the first time ever we said, hey, limited is a format. You can sanction this format. You can play this format. And early on, we actually made a couple different limited formats. For the pro tour, we actually made three limited formats. One was sealed, which is just you open up what you open up and play, make a deck and play. And then there was two different types of draft.

One was booster draft, which is the draft everybody knows now. The other we made a thing called Rochester draft, which is you lay the cards out and people take turns picking them and you snake. So one picks, two picks, three picks, four picks, five picks, six picks, six picks, six picks, and picks eight picks a second card, then seven, then six, then five, then four, then three, then one, then six, then five, then four, then three, then one, one picks two cards, like, you snake back and forth.

Limited, by the way, was really important. Limited says, there's a way to play with magic that doesn't require any preparation. That you can go to the store and have done nothing. You don't have to bring anything. You don't have to done any work ahead of time. You don't have to build a deck. You just come, and there's a way you can play.

And one of the things we learned long-term, we didn't know this in the beginning, was as you grow older as a magic player, as you sort of advance, limited becomes a more and more attractive thing for you. Why? A couple things. One is you're getting, as you get older,

you get more responsibilities. You probably start getting in a relationship. Maybe you get married. You have kids. You know, you get a full-time job. Like, as you get older, you get more and more responsibilities. and time becomes a larger issue for you.

Now, we will solve this with another thing I'll get to. But the idea, essentially, is limited allows you to play magic. I just need a couple hours and I can play limited. I don't have to do any prep work. I don't have to have the cards. It just becomes something that's easier to do. Plus, as you play magic more, limited has a higher variance between play.

What I mean is each limited experience is just more different than other things. Constructed, it's designed so you're going to. games play are a lot more similar. You're playing against different people, your deck is shuffled. It's not identical, but the games are more similar. We're limited, you know, if I don't have as much time to play and I can play limited, not only do I have less preparation, but I just get more variety. Every time I play is very different, especially if I'm playing different sets. Okay. And I can't stress enough playing in stores. I mean, there's a lot of structural things we did. We set up regionals into nationals and the pro tour. There's a lot of larger structural

stuff we set up. But probably the most important thing we did is we started trying to educate game stores. You need to not just sell magic. You need to be a place where people can play magic. And that really trying to educate stores that one of the roles of game stores is as much a play space as a play seller, or as a game seller. And we started saying, hey, if you meet certain criteria, you can become a preferred store. And there's advantages to that. And so we did a lot to encourage people. And then, for example, we started Friday night magic. So the idea is, every Friday night, you know, we are going to, as many places as possible, as many game stores as we can, we're going to play magic there. And it just became a thing that people learned.

That, you know, hey, if I'm, if it's Friday night, I can go to my local game store and I can play magic. And that happens every Friday night. Now, what your local game store does, what they play, that can vary. Different stores to figure out what they want to play. You want to do a limited format. You want to do commander. Do you want to do standard, modern? You know, the stores individually can figure out what they want to do. But just the idea that Friday night is when magic happens, you know, that is pretty fundamental to, I mean, I think as far as growth goes, that's one of the most important things we did. Of really, and there's a lot of synergy there, right? There's a lot of advantages for the local game store to run the things because it gets people to become familiar, to purchase

stuff from them because they become their local game store. So there's a lot of synergy there. And so creating those, creating that structure, creating those motivations was key. So that, that is organized play. In organized play, I can't, organized play is, was super, super important to growth. Okay. Next, let's talk a bit about breadth of format. We talked a little bit. So we introduced standard, or type two at the time, that said, oh, there's formats that rotate. Okay, we introduce limited. There's ways to play that, you know, like, we started to find different formats. And even within constructed, what we learned is you want, like, like, there's a gap between everything and standard and vintage. There gets to be a gap.

more time goes along, the gap gets bigger. And so we start filling in the gap. Early on, we did Extended, which was kind of like a big standard. Then we did, I mean, eventually we got to modern and pioneer. There were a lot of things in between. But the idea is there's a lot of people that want to play. There's people at different levels that, you know, want different amount of things. And so we want to create different constructed formats for that.

And a lot of it is trying to figure out, you know, you want different things. things. And, well, I'll get into play to formats in a second. So we did a lot of thing of structure and we're trying to make sure that whatever you want to do, however you want to play, we're giving you a choice and an option. And I think that was super important. That magic in some level is not a singular game. Magic is a game system. And then there are lots of ways to play it that involve, they use the same rules and car, you know, components, but are fundamentally different games. If you want to play vintage and you want to play booster draft, those are both magic, but those are very, very different experiences.

And so we did a lot to lean into that. Another big thing we did is every format we made was not made by us. Wizards definitely made some formats, but there were a lot of formats we didn't make. And so one of the things that I also think was really important is really paying attention to the audience. I mean, Commander came about, for example. Shelton Menary was stationed up in Alaska. started playing with some players that had a format that he thought was interesting.

He sort of adapted it, and that would become commander. So he started playing it with fellow judges at the Pro Tour. And little by little, it started gaining a little bit of momentum. And it started gaining enough momentum that Wizard said, you know what, let's make a product with it. So we made a commander product. It was wildly successful. So the next year we made another one, and then another one.

And it just became a staple of things we did, and that a combination between, just the inherent fun of the format and the support the Wizards gave it helped it help it grow and you know commander obviously is now the most played tabletop format

there are other formats like Pioneer and a Pioneer like a pauper which is just commons you know there is Canadian Highlander there's different formats that became popular in different places and

a lot of what Wizards try to do is do what support we can for different formats in different ways. Different formats have different ways that we can support it. Not all formats are quite as big as commander, so not all formats necessarily had a product for it.

The other thing we did is we started making products that could push in different directions. The unsets are this unsanctioned, wacky thing you can play. You can play arch-enemy, you can play plane shift. We started pushing things like two-ed-a-d-giant-giant. Battlebond is all about two-ed-a-d-d-d-giant.

you know there are different ways to play there's different formats and the formats could talk about how competitive you wanted to be what the deck constructions are like how much variance you had how much preparation it took and so really what started to happen is magic sort of aged

it started saying hey what is this game system capable of and we really match that in a lot of different ways Okay, another really important thing we did. Digital expression. So I said earlier that as you get older and time becomes an issue, it becomes harder to play. Well, one of the biggest things as you get older

is finding people to play with. Now, one of the answers to that is stores, but, you know, I have to travel to a store. And I have to travel the time the store has an event. What if the time I have to play doesn't match up? What if I have time to play? late at night from my home, but I can't go to a store, but no one's coming to my house. How do I play? And that's where digital became important. At first, we did magic online,

and then years later, we do Magic the Gathering Arena. But the idea is, hey, magic is fun. You know, digital games are quite popular. What if we turn Magic into a digital game? And by a digital game, you're still playing Magic. It is still the game of Magic. I mean, we've done we have done video, magic-related things that are sort of other games with magic themes or flavor, but I'm talking playing magic. It is a digital equivalent of playing the card game. Now, as time went on, you know, we would do stuff like alchemy where they're making some cards unique to some formats online. Like, digital started making some of its own formats and things. That's fine. Like, the very nature of a breadth of formats is different formats can do different

things. And different formats have access to different cards. Not every format has access to the same cards. That's kind of the nature of formatting. But digital came along and digital really did a bunch of things. One of the big questions at the time, which was pretty controversial

at the time, was how are we going to do it? And they were talking like a lot of digital games is more of a subscription service. Like either I pay once to play the game or every month I play to pay the game. And we said, no, we're going to do digital objects. Which at the time, time, it's interesting, was not a very frequent thing.

In fact, I think Magic Online did a lot to popularize the idea of digital objects. I'm not saying Magic Online was the only one to ever do digital objects, obviously. But it was one of the early games that really demonstrated the value of digital objects.

And I think had an influence. I'm not saying a sole influence, but had an influence. But anyway, and Magic Online was trying to as much as possible to be exactly magic in every possible way. Magic Arena sort of said, you know what? We want to lean into being a video game a little

more. It's still magic. You're still playing magic, but it definitely made some choices to make it a little easier, like a little more, I'm not sure that I'd turn, but lean into the strength of a video, of digital. But anyway, those both became ways to play. They continued to be ways to play.

And I think digital just really opened up and said, hey, if your problem is time and location okay you can play on your time in your location and digital was really good for doing that another thing that we did

is we started extrapolating our product line like I talked about how we made Commander Decks like magic early on in the early days made normal magic sets right like every and maybe we made a course every once in a while but eventually we said oh we could start making supplemental sets. Actually, the first supplemental set was unglued. Here's a set that's not a normal set, you know, and we started doing more supplemental things. We started making

pre-constructed decks. You don't want to build a deck? Well, we'll sell you a deck. We'll sell you a deck we've already made. We started making products that you could play, you know, dual decks, where you can play the decks against each other. Just the idea of, okay, one of my barriers is it's hard to make a deck. Well, we'll make a deck for you. Obviously, we eventually start some commander next, you know. And so really the, the broadening of the product line of trying to just give you more things that, you know, here are fun things you might want. We will give you access to those things and really giving a lot more option just in, you know, part of the breadth of the formats is the breadth of the products. And in some level, products support formats. Us supporting

commander, meaning we make products for commander, really did a lot to push commander. Because all of a sudden, more people are aware of it, more people have access to it. And obviously, commander being successful has a lot to do with how much fun commander is, but it also had a lot to do with Wizards getting behind it, between us making product

for it, supporting it and sanctioning, doing a lot of things that enabled people to play it, to learn about it and to play it. Okay, another big push that we had was collectability. Probably the earliest thing we did, A, it's like adding stuff like collector numbers, which

didn't exist, and rarity symbols, just making people aware of how rare things are and how many things are on the set and stuff like that. Probably the earliest thing we did is we made premiums or foils so that there is a parallel version of cards. So now you can play the normal version or there's a special version that's a little harder to get. And just introduced, like, we are a trading card game.

Part of a trading card game is we're a collectible. And so we've done a lot of things. And as time has gone on, we've leaned more and more into that collectibility aspect. For example, we started doing collector boosters. We started doing booster fun.

We started doing secret layers. Let me get into those real quick. So the idea of booster fun is what if magic cards could look a little bit different. We can make a normal card and make a foil card, but we can do better than that.

Early on, it was sort of like, okay, like unglued. to the unsets. The unsets definitely played around the idea of what kind of magic card look like. Could frames be different? Could art break out of the box? That's something we did for the first time

and included. So really, Booster Fun took that idea and, you know, turn it to 11. It's like, okay, we can get more offbeat artists. We can do cool things. We can make magic cards look like movie posters or books. We really

can have fun. And the idea is that we can do special things and special frames, and so not only is the collectible because there's foils, but there's collectibles because there's all different treatments of cards. There's the basic treatment, and you can just play with the basic treatment, but there's rare,

more exciting things that you can go after if you want to make your deck a little cooler. And we learned over time that one of the fun things, once you have a deck, it's fun to kind of upgrade your deck and giving you more options of how to do that. We learned this early on with lands. We started making sort of special lands, and we did like the guru

lands, and we did the unlands, and Artlands and we really realized how excited people were that the customization of how the cards looked, not just what the cards did, but how they looked, was really popular. And over time, we just leaned and leaned more into that. I mean, collectibility went through many phases before it got to collector boosters and booster fun. You know, we tried alternate, you know, inserts, we had bonus sheets. Like, we tried a lot of different things to do that. You know, in time spiral, we had different frames. We had the frame from the past, from the alternate present, from the future,

you know, and really lean into the, there's different ways that cards can look. And then booster fund just took that and, again, just ramped it up. Collector boosters say, hey, we have things that are a little harder to get. What if we made those, made a place to get those easier to get those things? And so we started making the collector booster and saying, hey, for people who want this, it's available for you. It's, you know, it costs a little bit more, but it's, has things in it that are harder to get, and collector boosters have been wildly successful.

We also started doing Secret Layer. A Secret Layer set is, you know what, there's things we think people will like, but not a lot of people, a smaller group of people will like. And so, hey, maybe there's this artist that is cool, but really, you know, something that not a lot of people necessarily will like. Well, we will sell it directly to you. Secret Layer allowed us to print things in much smaller quantities. And so the secret layer really set up this whole system

where we say, okay, do you like this cool thing? Well, we can make this cool thing that it'd be hard to sell it in stores, you know, in nature. There's a lot of complications that go and try to sell something in store. So we can make things that are smaller and tighter and more. We can try experiments and do things

that we couldn't do in a normal system. And then the next big thing, I'm at work. I'm almost out of time. The last big thing that really has, been wildly successful is universes beyond. This was Aaron Forsyce's brainchild. The idea is magic is a game system that is really, really good, it's flexible, and we make worlds all the time where we start showing the world. And we did a lot of, like, worlds that were influenced by things. Here's our take on this and our take on that.

But there's a lot, you know, and we learned over time the importance of resonance. That was a big deal that we learned that when you can make things that match things that people already know it's super endearing and super exciting um and so uh what if we did other properties you know what we magic is very good and and you know for example like on my on my blog i got people for for many many years saying oh what colors is this character you know and that just the idea of can we express that uh and so I think we first dipped our toe in with Dungeons and Dragons

which is our sister brand here at Wizards of the Coast and then we started realizing that there was a lot of other opportunities originally we did like skins with a guy Godzilla and we anyway Universe is beyond just kind of snowballed

and what we found is there is in fact an audience that is very very excited to take a property that they enjoy and see it transformed into magic cards and Universes Beyond has been I mean

our top selling sets right now, number one, top songs of all time is Final Fantasy number two is the Lord of the Rings. It's the only two Universes Beyond sets we have made at large sets. The top selling

commander decks is Fallout and Warhammer you know like the top selling secret layers like there is an audience that really, really, really enjoys Universes Beyond and that has been

in other things. So, kind of the point of today of, you know, my point from the documentary is magic is an amazing game. Richard made a really awesome game. But how we went from that game being its original thing to being today, it went through a lot of changes. That there was, you know, a lot of organized play, helping figure out how to play, where to play, making a pro tour to aspire to, creating more formats and creating breadth of formats. creating sealed play, allowing lots of different ways to play in competitive, ways to play casually, taking fan forms like Commander and helping make it into a larger thing, leaning into digital expressants, letting people play when and where they want,

leaning into collectibility, doing foils and booster fun and collector boosters and secret layer. And finally, just universes beyond, allowing magic to expand beyond just sort of the magic universe, as you will, into other things. All those things have helped magic grow from being an amazing game and once again never knock $100 million

but to go from $100 million to a billion dollars and that is the story that igniting the spark didn't have a chance to get to because there's so much story about magic they really told the early origin story of magic so today my little supplement for you

here is how magic grew. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast but I'm work. So we all know what that means means it's 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.