Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #961: Barry Reich

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

In this podcast, I interview Barry Reich, Magic's very first playtester.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work at home edition. So I'm here with Barry Reich, a longtime Magic player, and he's the answer to one of my favorite Magic trivia questions. So the trivia question is, who are the very first two people to ever play a game of Magic? Now most people can guess Richard Garfield. That's the easy answer. But the other person is Barry. So welcome, Barry. Thank you, Mark. Happy to be here. So I want to go way, way back. So let's talk about your first experience ever with Magic, which was the very first, other than Richard, the very first experience anybody ever had with Magic. So can we tell the story of your very first time playing? Sure. So I met Richard in grad school,

University of Pennsylvania. He was doing math. I was doing computer science. And we met at the Bridge Club and hit it off. We both love games. Richard, from the beginning, he was always into creating games, Magic, chess, chess whatever it was always something interesting and um one day after i knew him for i guess a year year and a half he came up to me he called me bit by the way so he said hey bit i created this little little game here you want to you want to be able to try so i said sure so we went into the astronomy lounge we had no windows and we played the very first games of magic uh it looked it was on card stock it looks you know roughly like it does today with uh mana costs on the upper right and a title and and land and creatures uh it was 120 cards just shuffled it split in half and we just started

playing and from the very first game i was hooked and it was amazing we played and played and played i thought it was three o'clock in the morning i thought it was four o'clock in the morning i said you know maybe maybe we should go home even if it's sunday so we we called it a day and it turned out it was nine in the morning it just, we had played for 12 hours. And yeah, that was the first experience. And it was so much fun. And immediately, like the next few days, we got a bunch of his friends, our friends together and started playtesting. And it was about 10 of us playtesting, then 15, then 20, then closer to 30 across Philadelphia until 1993 when he went out to Wizards of the Coast, and you all know the rest.

Okay, so I want to get in, like, what was it like playtesting? So, like, what exactly, how did you playtest? What were you given? What did you have? So the first deck, again, was 120 cards. So immediately we went to the printer room. He had cardstock. We put printed cards from the computer onto cardstock. We copied it.

I believe the very first playtest sets contained two of each rare, something like 13 of each uncommon, and maybe 40, 45 of each common. And he just basically split it up, you know, randomly among all of the playtesters. So it was a very closed environment. You know, you knew that there were two of, if it was rare, there were only two of them and so it really wanted to go we would trade for trade for them um we would play for ante the first couple of years everything was for antis you'd ante your top card and then play and you know you could lose a land or you could gain a dragon usually i'm the one who gained the dragon but uh

i was just lucky so um and it was very interesting, the whole play test environment, because it was almost like a little stock market. You know, there were cards that were obviously powerful and it took a lot to trade for those. Lands were worth next to nothing, you know, especially planes. They're a little stronger now, but people didn't like playing. Everybody wanted to play a red, blue power deck at the beginning. But there was plenty of other things that you could do. And I just remember that every once in a while, a card, somebody would figure out an interesting use for a card that nobody else had considered like a stock market. And, you know, I remember,

I always went to Richard and said, you know, I'm going to try to build a deck that's all artifacts or a deck that's five colors or a deck that's like this or that. And a lot of these decks are actually in the credits for me in the very first booklets. I don't know if it's still there. Is it? And he would say, no, I don't know if it's still there. Is it? And he would say, no, I don't think you're going to be able to do that. Like, how can you build a deck of all artifacts? So I did. I went and got seven of the ten moxes, a bunch of soul rings,

and just artifact creatures. And I could pretty much play my hand on the first turn and attack and attack and kill you before you could do anything. So he was impressed by that. When I traded for one of the Mox Emerald, I traded with Howard Kallenberg. And he said, well, basically, that's just a forest. So why don't you give me a forest and I'll give you my Mox Emerald. And so that was the first mox trade um they're a little bit more powerful than that now so um yeah and and one time uh this guy oh i forget his name he had he had a jmd tome or something like that that i really wanted so i went i went, I went to him. Oh, Ethan, I think, I think his name was Ethan. I could be wrong. Sorry. But I went up to him and I said,

you know, I'd like to trade for that. And Richard was around and he saw what I was doing. I said, you know, I'll give you a serpent for it because, you know, I had a lot of serpents. I was the serpent king. And Richard said, oh, don't do that. That's terrible. I'll give you a serpent. He said, well, you're not offering any more. No, Richard said, I'll give you a serpent just to talk to me and make a trade with me instead. So I basically took Richard aside outside of the room. I said, what do you want for me to leave? So he said, you know, give me this or that. So I gave him a card. He walked away.

And then I went and traded for the tome. But, you know, Richard tried to keep me honest, I guess. Yeah, one of the things that's really interesting about the early playtesting was, A, it was all constructed. Like, limited came later, right? Did you guys test any limited in the early days? Limited? Like drafting. Like drafting or any sort of thing. Did you guys test any limited in the early days? Limited?

Like drafting. Like drafting or any sort of thing. Mostly you were just constructed where you just had cards and you built on the cards you had, right? Yeah, yeah. So whatever cards you had, you'd build a deck, you'd trade for other cards, or you'd win them in ante. And at the time, it was a 40-card deck. So you'd build your 40-card deck and play and keep changing it.

At first, that's all we did. I don't remember exactly when, but it could have been several months, maybe a year after we started playtesting. I actually came up with the draft where everybody opens a booster, picks one, and then passes it to the left, and picks one and passes it to the left, and so on. And then you have 15 cards.

You do it again, passes to the right. You do it again, passes to the left. And I forgot what that's called now. It's called Booster Draft. So you're the creator of Booster Draft. Yes, I am the creator of Booster Draft. That's very cool. We played some team games. And then somebody, not me, came up with the idea of a league.

So we took a bunch of playtest cards, stamped some unicorn or something on the back, so we would know that these cards are for the league, draft league. And honestly, I don't remember how that works. But there were there were there were these other versions uh we played something called a melee i think it was called a melee uh where there were like 16 of us or 17 or 18 everybody sat in a circle and every second or third person i forget which had a little token so it was their turn and you could only attack the person on your left or right i think yeah. Yeah, it's called Grand Melee.

The format's called Grand Melee. Okay, so yeah, yeah, yeah. That was something that happened probably at the very end, like right before everything was published. That was fun. So one of the things that's very interesting, one of the things that Richard was very interested in and had you guys do was,

like trading was a big part of early Magic, of playtesting, right? Like, a lot of it was, you'd figure out a deck you wanted, then you had to go figure out how to get the cards that you needed to build that. Exactly. And, okay, so you built an artifact deck. You said you built... Did you build your five-color deck? Did that work? Yeah, I built a five-color deck. I think I used dual lands and moxes.

You know, once I traded for the moxes, I kept them. I knew how powerful they were. And I just basically threw in three spells from each color and three powerful creatures from each color. And on my second turn, I'm getting a dragon in play, and then my third turn I'm getting a vampire and an angel. I mean, it was a powerful deck. Of course, I was using some of the Power Nine cards since I recognized them very early. Not all of them, but many of them and traded for them. Did you have a Lotus?

Did you have either of the two Black Lotuses? I don't remember. Yeah, I really don't remember if I had a Black Lotus in there. Seven of the ten Moxes is quite impressive, so... Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was seven Moxes and eight Sol Rings. Wow, that's very impressive. So, I mean, that's basically all I needed, right? Every hand I got, I could pretty much play almost my whole hand in the first turn or two.

So obviously we talked a little bit about sort of the nature of how you guys played, but like what... So you started with 15 people and it grew over time. Yeah. When did this happen? Like when you're talking about playing the first game of Magic, what year was that?

Do you have a rough idea? I believe it was 1991. Okay, about two years before the game came out. Yeah. I'm about 90% sure of that. And, yeah, so at first it was a small group, mostly of people that Richard knew in the math and physics departments. that Richard knew in the math and physics departments.

And then later on, it grew to my other gaming friends from the Bridge Club, Bill Rose and Charlie Coutinho, whose name they never spelled right, and Don and- And Joe Beck. Yeah, yeah. So then, and then, and then later on, I added about half a dozen people from the computer science department. So like Scaf and Jim,

were they earlier or were they later? They were early. They were early, okay. So just to the audience, real quick for the audience, Scaf and Jim and Dave and Chris were the people, the East Coast playsetters that would make Ice Age.f and Jim and Dave and Chris were the East Coast playsetters

that would make Ice Age. Bill and Joel and Charlie and Howard and Don, they were the group that made Mirage, for example. Right. So here's a good segue. So the game hasn't yet come out, but Richard's like, well, one day, you know,

at some point in the future, we might need more sets. And so he had different people work on different sets. So, you know, Scaf and Jim and company made Ice Age. Bill and Joel and company made Mirage and Visions. So let's

talk about what you did because you made your own set. So let's talk about Spectral Chaos. Right. So when I saw other people were making their own sets, I thought, well, that'll be fun. You know, I had a lot of ideas.

For example, I talked to Richard about the fact that there was no multicolor in the game. I think there was exactly one multicolor card in the initial release. I forget which one it is, but... There's a card that had an activation in another color, but there was no multicolor cards in the first set. Right. Central had a red card with a black activation had an activation in another color, but there were no multicolor cards in the first set. Right.

Said Troll had a red card with a black activation. That was an alpha. Okay. So my thought was that I wanted to make multicolor work. So I wanted to come up with all kinds of ideas that would make it, you know, make your deck better if you had more colors, punish you if you didn't have enough colors with certain cards. And then also, I like the idea of breaking the rules wherever possible.

And so that's the chaos part. And in the end, Magic is made on three sheets of 11x11. So that's, what, 363 cards, minus a few because a lot of them are lands. And this is early Magic did that. Our card sets are a little different now, but yeah, way back in the beginning, that's how they were made.

So I had so many ideas at the time that I added a fourth set, so I added 121 more cards. So there was very rares. And Magic would go on later to have mythic rare so yeah yeah so uh and and you know i i went through the rule book i just tried to think of crazy interesting things um cards that end the game in a tie uh five color cards spectral chaos in fact was two of each of the five colors so it cost ten to cast

and when you cast it you put everything down, get up switch seats with your opponent and now you're playing his deck and you're still trying to win so you know it was just a lot of fun you know everything I ever wanted

to see they put in, I put in. A lot of the ideas for Multicolor have been published. They did buy the set for me. Not for very much, but we won't talk about that. Over the years, there's still, on occasion, I see now that they're printing some idea that I had come up with at the time. I mean, I'm not trying to boast here or anything, but I had a lot of help. We came up with so many different ideas. Let me pick up the story real quickly from the wizard side because i i was involved on the other side of this so it's uh so what happened was uh bill rose and mike elliott and i were doing a set called

invasion and where invasion started was we knew we wanted to do a multi-color set we wanted to actually a multi-color block is what we were interested in is you know the whole block all three sets were going to be multi-colored. And Bill was well aware that Spectral Chaos existed. So the very first thing we did on the very first day was we looked at Spectral Chaos. And our favorite thing from Spectral Chaos was what we called the Barry Mechanic. So now the audience will know it's Domain.

It's now known in the game. So let's talk a little bit about how Domain came to be. How did that come about? Is that the one where... You count how many different basic line types you have. Right. So again, I tried to come up with as many ways as I could to encourage multicolor use. So one thing that was sort of... I don't know how it

popped into my head, but it seems obvious now looking back. I thought, okay, well, let's create X spells where X is the number of different types of land you control. So, you know, like it might be like a lightning bolt type of thing where instead of it doing three damage, it does X damage for the same cost where X is the number of basic land types you have in play. So if you have one of each in play, you're doing a five-point lightning bolt that costs one, and so on. Yeah, that was our...

So I know Invasion, that was the one mechanic that we used from Spectral Chaos. And there were a lot of individual cards we used, a lot of concepts we use. So, if you, for the audience, if they enjoy Invasion, you know, a lot of the inspiration for a lot of stuff in it came from Spectral Chaos. That's kind of where

Spectral Chaos, some of it, you know, saw the light of day. So here's the, oh, go ahead. If you, if you want to see what Spectral Chaos looks like, a couple of fans have put up websites. So if anybody wants to do a search,

they'll find Spectral Chaos. Okay, so if you search for Spectral Chaos, there's fans that have... So do you have a couple of cards in front of you? Can you read me a card? Sure. So while you're looking, real quickly, let me just finish the story and then you can

give you a little chance to look. So one of the things that's really interesting is when we first used domain, we referred to it as the Barry mechanic, and it inspired something we called Barry's Land. I don't know whether you had Barry's Land or we just named it after you because it worked with

the domain mechanic. But the idea of a six basic land type that would make your domain spells go from five to six. And we've never quite made the card. We've made things that are similar, but not exactly the six land type. If people ever know about Barry's Land or Barry's Mechanic, this is the Barry for the people like, where does that name come from? Why did we call it that? This is the Barry behind Barry's like where does that name come from why did we call it that this is the berry behind berries land or uh the berry mechanic okay so did you find a card or two oh yeah here's one of my favorites uh screaming mimi's one black green at the beginning of your upkeep screaming mimi's deals one damage to each creature and each player. A lot of times I thought of a concept, a name, like for a card,

and then I came up with what I thought the card should be. And that's what Screaming Mimis is. There's also a Screeching Mimis, which is rare, and it costs like five or six to put into play, and it does three damage to everything. So that's just one of my favorites yeah the other thing real quickly historically just for the audience to understand um like one of the things that's really interesting like i went to film school and

you'll watch a movie from way back when and it seems very mundane in the sense that oh it just seems like a boring movie you know it just seems like but the movie did things for the first time you've never done before i remember watching watching The Great Train Robbery, and we're like, what's so special about this? And the teacher was like, well, this is the first time they bounced back and forth between two locations, and it was the same place. They invented that.

And the thing that's really important to understand here is multicolored cards weren't a thing. When you made this, there was no such thing as a multicolored card. Legends would come along later, but Legends was designed later. You designed this before Legends got designed. Yeah, and Legends did not really stay true to the

colors. They just, as far as I can tell, randomly picked three colors for different things. When I designed this, I was very, very careful to stay true to the colors. So black would do what black does. If it's black and red,

it would somehow combine those two things. And then a big part of the set though, was the chaos part. Any, anytime you had two or more opposite colors in a, in the casting cost of a spell, like if it was a red, blue card,

it would necessarily be chaotic. And it would say on it, chaotic enchantment or something. And then there was a whole group of cards that would affect chaotic cards, like destroy target chaotic card, or something along those lines. And it was,

it crossed over lots of different card types, I assume. Yeah, yeah. Every combination was in there. Every combination of one, two,. Every combination was in there. Every combination of one, two, or three colors was in there, and there were a few fives. Okay, so you had all the twos, all the threes, and five. Yes, yes.

That is chaotic. Yeah. Yeah, I just happened to find some other cards here that are kind of fun. Okay, let's hear them. I mean, they're not all multicolored. So, for example, Black Widow is 4, black, black, black.

It's an 8, 8 creature, but any damage done to it, you put a minus 1, minus 1 counter on it. So it starts out as an 8, 8 creature for 7, but it gets smaller as it's damaged. So if you block it with a 5, 5, then now it's only

a three-three creature. And it's quite possible when you made that card, there wasn't such a thing as a minus-one, minus-one counter, right? I don't know. Alpha, for example, had minus-one, minus-one. They had plus-one, plus-one counters. Oh, Fallen Empires. Oh, Fallen Empires were the first one to minus-one, minus-one.

Yeah, I had plus-one, minus-ones, I had plus one, minus ones, minus one, plus ones, whatever combination I could come up with. Early Magic had, I mean, when you got into the Dark and Fallen Empire stuff, there started being a lot more combination of different counters. But that's one of the fun things of

looking back is the idea that you made this, like, Magic came out in 1993 and you probably made this in 92 when did you start making spectral chaos yeah like so i started in 92 i i was still putting the final finishing touches on it um like the fourth version when magic came out so there were you went through four different versions how many versions did you go through with Spectral Chaos? Yeah, four different versions. And the finished product was how many cards?

484 cards, minus a little bit because of the number of lands on the common sheet. Sure. So, I don't know, probably about 450 cards. Wow. Okay, so I'm going to talk a little bit about, as somebody who was

behind the scenes, who obviously played Magic for two years, I just want to talk a little bit about seeing it actually come out. What was your vantage point of seeing Magic become what it became? Did you go to Gen Con? Yeah, I went to the first couple of conferences. My name tag said Richard Garfield's personal bodyguard. And I tell you, I had the opportunity to invest in it. And being a graduate student, I didn't have any money, so I didn't. And if I did, I would have been a millionaire. And it just really took off. I mean, I'm sure you were part of the taking off period. And all their predictions at the beginning, like when they thought they were going to print and sell their billionth card, they were actually selling their billionth card.

It just skyrocketed as it should. You know, it's an amazing game. And it's very well-deserved. You know, you see people make a lot of money because they're lucky. Richard didn't get lucky. He created an amazing, amazing game. And, you know, I'm so happy that it did what it did. Is there a moment, I mean, obviously, when you first started playing it,

you recognized how great the game was. But can you remember a moment where you're like, oh, this is going to be a giant success? Where, like, you realize that the world was going to recognize what you recognized as how good a game it was? I knew it was a fantastic game as we were playtesting it. I had no idea it was going to take off the way it did until after it came out.

Because again, if I did, I would have found the $1,000 to invest, you know? So, yeah, it just... But what I'm saying is, I'm looking for the story. Maybe it's a gen... Can you remember where you first realized how big it was going to be? I mean, do you have some idea of that?

Or no, you never really got the scope of it until it happened. Yeah, I didn't. I mean, where I saw that people were actually going to be making money on this was when Legends came out. And as an original shareholder, I didn't buy any stock, but Richard gave the play testers a little bit. And so since we were shareholders, we got five boxes of product for the first, I don't know, eight, nine, ten sets that came out. They stopped doing that eventually, but I remember Legends came out and everybody wanted the Legends boxes because they could turn around and sell them for $700, $800, $900. And I think that was the first time I saw, okay, this is going to make a lot of money.

You know, this is going to be just so big. But unfortunately, I didn't see it before then. You know, even when I went into one of the local game stores, you know even when I went into the game one of the local game stores and I saw you know they had one box of it and I and I bought like five or six decks you know I I even even at that point I had no idea I just didn't I don't think anybody did yeah yeah I the it's funny the um we there's a documentary that's being shot and um the the clip of me that they put in a little trailer uh for the documentary uh i was very excited because the very first time i played it it just i i called my dad and i'm like dad this is it this is the next big thing this is

the next dungeon dragons is what i said to him and And I was just really, really, really excited. And I got the scope of it really early. And it was... It's almost hard, though. I've talked with Richard a lot about sort of, like, no one makes a game that ends up being magic in the sense of, like, no one understands that scope. You know? Like, I know

one of the issues is... For example, when you were playtesting, do you remember Ancestral Recall being common? Do you remember that? Oh, it was common? Yeah, originally the boons were all common. And then very, very quickly, Richard figured out it shouldn't be common, and I think he moved it up

to rare. But I believe there was a point in time very, very early where they were all common, and then he just moved it, because obviously, like, everything else is common. All the other ones are common. Although he did not like, he didn't like the idea of taking a card

that was too powerful or very powerful and just making it rare. Because when the game came out, you know, then basically if you were rich enough to go out and buy enough boxes,

you would get all of these cards. But the people who could only afford to buy a little bit weren't going to do as well so he tried to avoid that and he trusts and he tried he really we all did like we we tried to balance the cards rather than say okay well this is super powerful let's just make it rare yeah i think the essential recalls problem was it was locked into a cost, because the whole cycle were one mana,

and they did three things. Like, there wasn't a lot of flexibility. It's not the kind of card you can easily recast, because it's sort of tied to its cost. I think that's uniquely in its case for that. Yeah, and he also went by the philosophy of life isn't fair. So if somebody gets a really powerful card they get a really powerful card um and as it turns out that probably helped

to have magic take off the way it did because people would get these really cool cards and they'd be so excited and they'd go out and buy more decks because so i could find other really cool cards you know uh so even though we tried to balance things, if it wasn't perfectly balanced, that was okay. And another thing for the audience to remember, Richard made the game assuming it was a normal game, so people would

go buy a couple decks in a couple packs. They would buy a normal thing that you would buy for a normal game, and hey, in that mix, if everybody playing has three starters and three boosters, just your little metagame, hey, maybe there's one Ancestral Recall in the metagame. Maybe one person

has one of them. Having powerful cards is much less problematic when within the system there's not a lot of them. It was hard to anticipate how big the game would become. It's funny, you talk about how you went out and collected all the moxes to build your very first deck. The idea that someone could make a deck full of moxes is very hard to do in the scope of what Richard would originally imagine.

Right. And I was just going to say, the whole stock market thing that I mentioned at the beginning. Also, you know, even after the game came out, there were still cards that people figured out some clever way to play. Yeah. Like Channel Fireball, right? Nobody in playtest, I don't even think anybody used Channel much. Or if they did, it would be to cast something small but i mean that's that's brilliant and it's simple uh and then you know combinations of two and three cards very quickly started to take off and and you

know and richard richard liked that you know he he didn't want to design a game so that this is the way you play it you get all the red cards and the blue cards, and that's how you're going to win. He liked the idea, and I think we all did, that let's just create interesting cards and let the audience figure out what to do with them. And that's exactly what happened. Yeah, and I think that's one of Magic's, I mean, there's a lot of cool things about the game. Yeah, and I think that's one of Magic's, I mean, there's a lot of cool things about the game. But one of the things that really drove the game, I think, early on especially, was, yeah, you the audience, you figure out how to play this. You have a lot of freedom to play the way you want to play.

And it's neat to hear about, even in the early playtesting, how many different formats you guys invented before the game even came out. You know, that's cool to hear. That even at the playtest level, you guys were like, what else can we do? How else can we play that? So that is really, really cool to me. So I'm at my desk here, so I'm almost to work. So any final thoughts? When you look back, it's sort

of the early days of Magic. What is your memory you haven't shared yet that's just sort of a fond memory of the early days of magic sort of like what what what is your any memory you haven't shared yet that just sort of a a fond memory of of the early days of magic the early early days of magic i mean um almost all of my memories are fond you know uh it was just it was just a such a fun time, you know? I mean, that's all I can say. I enjoyed almost every minute of playtesting

and then for years after it came out, collecting cards and playing. And then eventually teaching my son, who's 13, and he beats me all the time. So, you know, it's just so much fun.

Go ahead.. So it's just so much fun. Go ahead. Finish your story. Yeah, it's a fantastic game. And it's well-deserved. Richard just hit the jackpot and created something that's just incredibly good. You know, it's a worldwide phenomenon. I can't say enough about it. Well, I want to thank you so much

for being with us today. It's really, really fun to me hearing a lot of the early... I mean, I've been involved in magic for a long time, but you're talking about a time that I was not involved, so it's really cool hearing the super early story. So thank you so much for being with us today. Oh, my pleasure. And to everybody else, I'm at work.

So we know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you for being with us today, Barry. And I'll see all of you next week. Bye-bye.