Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #272 - ARC System

Episode Date: October 23, 2015

Mark taks about an idea that Wizards tried to expand TCGs to a broader audience.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so often on the show I talk all about our successes, but sometimes I need to talk about our failures. So today I want to talk about an early version of our attempt to teach people magic that failed, and failed miserably. So today I'm going to talk about something called the Arc System. So my guess is most of you listening are going, the Arc System? What in the world is the Arc System? Well, that's what I'm going to talk about today, because it's a long-lost piece of magic's past that I would like to discuss.

Okay, so let's go back to 1998. So the idea was, we were trying, so if you ever look at the back of Magic card, there's a little box that says Deckmaster. And for those that are unfamiliar, when Magic was first created, Wizard of the Coast not only believed that Magic

was going to be a hit, but believed they had stumbled upon trading card games and that trading card games as a whole category was going to be a giant hit. And they wanted to be the leader in trading card games, and that trading card games as a whole category was going to be a giant hit. And they wanted to be the leader in trading card games. So what they did is they branded them and said, okay, we're going to have the Deckmaster brand of trading card games, and that way people will know it's a quality trading card game.

So we actually ended up making, I think, four four games or three games other than Magic that fell under the Deckmaster brand if you will we made Jihad aka Vampire the Eternal Struggle based on Vampire the Eternal Struggle the role playing game then there was Netrunner

and then there was Battletech so it turns out all three of the IPs we're talking about IP stands for intellectual property all three of the IPs we're talking about, IP stands for intellectual property, all three of the IPs we're talking about stem from role-playing. Because what happened was Wizards of the Coast in its early days was a

role-playing company. Peter Atkinson, the co-founder and original CEO, was a role-player. He loved role-playing, and the people he knew in the industry were role-playing people. So when he saw that they were, he believed Magic was going to be a hit and trading card games were going to be a hit, he went out and got licenses from the people he could get them from, he believed magic was going to be a hit and trading card games were going to be a hit, he went out and got licenses from the people he could get them from,

which were role-playing. Now, magic would go on, or I should say, wizards would go on to make lots of role-playing games. We made the Harry Potter role-playing game and the Major League Baseball role-playing game and the Star Wars role-playing game,

not role-playing, sorry, trading card game. We made trading card games for all sorts of different things. We even had like a Simpsons trading card game. We've made a lot of trading card games. None of them have ever quite been at the level of Magic, and the Deckmaster brand slowly fell by the wayside.

But back in 1998, that hasn't happened yet. We're still optimistic. And the idea was they wanted to introduce people to Magic, and not just Magic, but trading card games in general. They were really interested in introducing the world to trading card games, because trading card games are complex. So it was a two-pronged approach. And as I explained the ARC system, the ARC system is a good example of a really good

idea in concept and a flawed idea in execution. So I'm going to talk about sort of the ideal of what we were hoping to do and then some of the problems we had in trying to do it. Okay, so the thing is, they want a two-pronged solution. Number one is, they need it to be simpler. Magic is complex. And they're like, okay, if we want to appeal to a slightly larger group,

we need to make it a little bit simpler, and then people who could learn first, it's a stepping stone to get you to then play magic. This has often been early in our strategy of trying to get people to play magic. We often had this strategy of let's teach magic at the lowest possible level,

most things taken out of it, to make it as simple as possible to help people learn. The thing that follows the art system, which was called Portal, which I'll do on a different podcast one day, had the same sort of thing of let's make it simpler to help people get in. We've since learned, by the way, that thing of let's make it simpler to help people get in.

We've since learned, by the way, that one of our big mistakes in trying to teach people how to play is that we simplify so much that people don't see the coolness of what is magic, meaning the depth is, there's an attractiveness to the depth, and that sometimes we strip away so much, you can't see what's cool about it. You know, we've done things where we've taught people, and they're like, oh, okay, that seems like an okay game, yeah. And, like, they don't see the depth in it, which is a lot of the draw of magic, of, like, wow, there's all these possibilities, all these different things you can do.

The second thing is, besides making it simpler, they wanted to sort of get to other IPs, meaning one of the ways to get somebody to play something, I mean, if you're a gamer, maybe you get something to play because you hear it's a good game. But another way might just be, let's say, for example,

you make a trading card game based on the Terminator or on Star Wars or on Batman or on whatever. Name your license. Well, people who like that thing could go, oh, I like that thing.

I'm interested in trying a game that's the thing I like, the IP I like, that, you know, this is a series of characters and things that I enjoy, oh, maybe I'll try to play a game. And the idea behind the Eric system was that

imagine, for example, somebody, we would go out and get licenses, and then for each license we would make a game that could play unto itself, that you want to play the Terminator game, you play the Terminator game and play with your friends and be John Connor and, you know, you could, or be the Terminator.

You could be whatever you wanted to be. You could make the cards of the IP that you cared about and play the game. But the cool thing was, let's say your friend, he's not into Terminator, he's into Batman.

So he buys the Batman game. But you could take your Terminator deck and play against your friend's Batman deck. That was kind of the idea. You know, we'd have all these different licenses and it would just be, you know, we're a trading card game company,

this would allow us to make lots and lots of licenses, and that we could plug licenses into the system, and then all the different licenses could work together. And that was considered to be very attractive. I mean, it's a cool concept, like I said. Today is really a lesson of the difference between concept and

execution. The concept was a really cool concept. If we could have made it work, it actually would have been really neat. We stumbled along the way. Okay, so the next thing was, okay, so we have to make it simpler, and we need to go out and show how it can be done through many different media. So let's talk about that. So first thing to do is make it simpler. Okay, so what happened was, a bunch of people got together, basically magic people, people with wizards, and it was a lot of the people that had worked on magic early on. What had happened was when I came there in 95 was sort of the old guard shifted to the next guard. I was talking about me being the second wave of R&D. So a lot of the first wave people who had gone on for magic were very interested

in sort of creating the system that, because once again, it wasn't just an intro to Magic, that was part of it, but it was also just doing trading card games and more IPs and more different things. So, like Scaff Elias and Jim Lynn, a lot of the early Magic people that were part of the first wave of R&D were very, very

involved in making the Arc system. I was not horribly involved in it. I got a watch from afar, and I definitely have some stories from being there, but I was not intricately involved in it, because at the time, I was making Magic. So, okay, so first thing they did is they cut down from five colors to three colors. So, no black, no white. It just said red, green, and blue. The next thing they did is they cut down from a whole bunch of card types down to four card types. I think Magic at the time had seven card types.

At the time, there was Interrupts, which went away, and then Magic would later pick up Planeswalker. So Magic, most of his life, has had seven card types. I guess eight if you count Tribal. But I don't count Tribal anymore, so... Anyway, this had four card types. So the card types were Action, Resource, Character, and Combat.

So if you notice, by the way, A, R, and C. So originally, Combat wasn't one of the cards. Originally, it was just three card types, which would be Action, Resource, and Combat. So if you look at that, by the way, A, R, C, the Arc system, which was a capital A, a capital R, a capital C, stood for the three card types that originally were going to be in combat. So if you look at that, by the way, A-R-C, the ARC system, which was a capital A, a capital R, a capital C, stood for the three card types that originally were going to be in it. Now, it's interesting, when I

when I've done this podcast, I went to do some research to figure out, well, the ARC system, it's all capitalized. I'm like, oh, it's got to represent something. It looks like an acronym. And nobody at Wizards, I talked to all the old timers, like, okay, what does ARC system stand for? And nobody could say what it stood for. So I finally had someone help me do some research.

And it turns out it was named after the three card types that are originally in it. Then, while they were creating it, they realized they needed a fourth card type, which was Combat. But that also started with a C. So it's like A-R-C-C. It's the Arc. Anyway, the Arc System. So let's talk about what they did. So action, resource, character, combat. Okay, so resource is land.

Lands work very similarly to the way they work in normal magic. The only difference is you had a number on it. There was no colored mana. It just had a number. And what a number meant is, let's say it said six. It was on a red card. What that said is you have to tap six resources. And the game did have tapping.

Deck Master, tapping was part of Deck Master, not just part of Magic. So it did have tapping. You would have to tap six lands, or sorry, six resources, but one of them had to be red. That's what six on a red card meant. Five on a green card meant you had to tap five resources, one of which must be green. So there's no double mana.

All it said is, I have red or I don't have red. Not, I have so much red. Okay, C was for character. Character were the creatures. The creatures were similar, a little bit simpler in the sense that there was a less going on. There wasn't static abilities as much.

Creatures tended to either do something when you played them, or they did something when you attacked with them. So basically they had a triggered effect. Either they could have an ability, there were some creature abilities, I'll get to that in a second, but they

tended to either have a creature ability, or they had an enter the battlefield effect, or they had a win attack effect. So they were either triggered or they had a basic ability, and sometimes more than one. And then they didn't have power and toughness. They had a combined power toughness. It's called power, but there was just one number. So essentially everything had square stats.

Either you were a 1-1 or a 2-2 or a 3-3. I mean, we didn't write out 1-1, it was just a 1 or 2 or 3. And they didn't use the term toughness, it was just power. As far as creature abilities goes, one of the things they tried to do was, one of the ideas is,

different games would use different mechanics. If you kind of think of how Magic has a few evergreen mechanics and then has, you know, every block would have its own mechanics. The idea was every game would have a few, there'd be a few, there are a few evergreen mechanics

that went between all the games, but only a few. And then most of them, you know, Death Touch might be in one game, but not in another game. And so they divided all the different abilities that Magic had and decided who would go where. Like maybe Vigilance was just in one game, you know. I don't remember exactly which ones were in all the games.

I know there was a Flying. It wasn't called Flying, though. It had a much worse name than Flying. I forget what it was. But anyway, so the idea was different games would have different mechanics. Okay, now we get to action and combat cards. So the game had two phases. It had an action phase and a combat phase.

So the action phase, you could cast any spells out of your hand. The combat phase, you could cast any action or character card out of your hand. So actions were sorcerers, essentially. And then characters were creatures. So during the action phase, you can cast any actions or any characters you want. Then during the combat phase, you would attack.

And then you could cast combat spells during the combat phase. But you could cast them during Indies' combat phase. So the idea was, there were instants in the game, but they were reduced to only being during combat. So giant growths existed, but you could cast it during any combat phase. So the idea was there were instants in the game, but they were reduced to only being during combat. So giant growth existed, but counter spells didn't exist. There was no defensive kind of magic. You couldn't cast any spells in response to sorceries or anything.

You could just do them in combat. And the idea was, okay, we have our one phase where we can cast things, we have our combat phase where you can do the instants, if you will, but it's only combat-related. There was no second phase after combat, meaning everything had to be done before you attack. So people knew what spells you had done before you attack. The surprise would be in the combat spells.

So, the, um, so one of the things that you can see here is at every level, they just try to simplify things. They simplified the mana resource. They simplified the creatures. They simplified the casting spells. They simplified the combat, how combat worked.

And there was nothing else. There was no global things. There were no enchantments. There were no artifacts. There were no interrupt sort of things in the sense of, like, I don't remember how the combat, like, there was an instant thing, but

however magic worked at the time is how it worked. I'm not sure if the stack did exist by 9-8, so this probably used the stack. The stack did exist by 9-8, so my guess is, yes, it just used the stack. Okay, so, oh, another just used the stack. Okay. So, oh, another big difference is the victory condition. So in Magic, you have 20 life.

And when you hit your opponent from 20 down to zero, you win. In the Arc system, there was no life total. What happened was, whenever you did damage to the opponent, you milled cards, meaning you took cards from the top of the library and put it into the graveyard. It was called deck and discard pile. I will fall into magic terminology if I'm talking to a magic audience. So essentially, whenever you would do damage, for every point of damage you did, you milled them. And so what happened was, there was no...

The attractiveness of it was, you didn't have to track anything. It was just all in the deck. And so as you would hit them, you would mill them. And when you ran out of cards, that's when you lost. And so the game had 40 card decks. You could only have two of every card, and I believe you could only have one of what they called unique cards. Unique cards, I think, was only on characters,

and they represented actual characters. I mean called unique cards. Unique cards, I think, was only on characters, and they represented actual characters. I mean, unique characters. They weren't just guard. They were Bob Jones or whatever. They were an actual character, and you could only have one of them. They functioned a lot like legendary characters did at the time, which I believe was

you could only have one in your deck, and when you played it, it destroyed the other. So the way to get rid of the opponent's character was to play your own character, a unique character. The way you would get rid of their unique character is to play your own unique character, and then it would destroy both of them. That's how legendary creatures worked in magic back in the day.

Okay, so is that... I think they teach you all the... Yes, I think I... So that is the mechanics. Okay, so now let me talk about the presentation. Okay, so the presentation was they wanted to demonstrate that there was a lot of different games and I can make games in one...

I can make... There's a game for this IP and that IP. So they decided that for some reason it was decided that first off we wanted this IP and that IP. So they decided that for some reason, it was decided that first off, we wanted to have an original IP. Magic had its own IP, so that we're going to start this by having our own IP and starting the game off with something that we own.

So what we did is we went to a man named Jim Lee, who is a very famous comic book person. He's more known as an artist, but he's also a writer. So we hired him to make our... He made a comic that we would own, that we would make a game out of, that was unique to us. And it was called C-23.

I think the C and the 23 stood for chromosomes. I don't remember the story really well. It was a science fiction story. It had something to do with soldiers and I think aliens, but maybe they were clones. Maybe they're clones and aliens because C-23. Here's the one thing I do remember. The main character was named Corbin, I realized,

and he had a friend. First episode, he had a friend named Nemesis. And then, oh my goodness, he's betrayed by his best friend, who becomes his enemy, Nemesis. And I just go, why would you befriend a guy named Nemesis? Like, hey, how you doing? Hi. You seem like a nice guy. What's your name? Nemesis. Yeah, I think we're going to move on here.

Maybe, like, don't befriend a guy named Nemesis. Really. I mean, I think Corbin had to come into him, because comics tend to put names a little on the nose. But I just thought it funny that if you're going to, if the character's going to start as the friend of the main character, perhaps, maybe he could change his name to Nemesis. Maybe his name is Bob, and then after he feels betrayed and becomes his enemy, he goes, I'm no longer Bob, I'm now Nemesis. But anyway, just being Nemesis, I feel like Corbin really,

Corbin kind of deserves it, that when you befriend Nemesis and he betrays you, you're like, come on. I mean, he was being as open and honest as he could about what was going to happen. Okay, so we had C-23. Then we said, okay, now we need to have some other IPs that are real IPs that aren't our IP. So someone at the time was a... So, the way television works, a little background television, is most television is done through networks. So, it could be a normal network like NBC or CBS.

I'm talking American networks. So, anybody who's not from America, I apologize real quickly. Or it could be on a cable network like MTV or the Comedy Network or TNT or Lifetime, that there's different networks, and the networks tend to produce their own shows normally. So most of the time it's like, oh, if I'm watching this network at this time on this day, this show goes on.

But there's something that's called first-run syndication. Well, in fact, there's something called syndication. What syndication means is I sell shows individual market to market. It means in Seattle, maybe the CBS affiliate is the one who's running this. Maybe in Minneapolis, it's the NBC affiliate. And in New York, it's an independent affiliate. So the idea is you sell them shows.

Now, normally syndication are old shows. They're shows that are reruns. It's Seinfeld. It's Roseanne. It's Taxi. It's whatever old show. Or, you know, usually sitcoms syndicate better, but also could be, you know, Magnum P.I. or whatever. Old shows that people like to watch, they get syndicated.

Now, a first-run syndication show means you've made a show originally, it had been showed nowhere, and for the first time you sell it through syndication. Back in the day, with the proliferation of networks in the last ten years, the first-person syndication has changed quite a bit. You don't see it quite as much as you used to. It still exists, but it's not quite as prevalent as it once was. Anyway, there was two shows. There was a show called Hercules, the Legendary Journey,

which was about Hercules of Greek and Roman mythological fame. And he was out, I don't know, doing his labors. I'm not sure what he, I don't remember exactly. But he was wandering Greece slash Rome. I think the show was set in Greece. He was wandering Greece and doing things and interfering with gods and, I don't know, doing the things that you do in Greek mythology. And the show was very popular.

It started with a guy named Kevin Sorbo. And then there was a character on the show who I think was an evil princess who, on her third episode, was supposed to die. But the audience loved her so much that they ended up spinning her off into a show called Xena, Princess Warrior, played by Lucy Lawless. So Hercules and Zeno were two... Here's the interesting thing. Because they were first on syndication, they had some popularity. They were never super popular.

They were definitely cult shows that had a strong following. But without being on the network and the consistency of knowing when and where to find them, it's hard to have the numbers of a sort of major, major hit. But anyway, it had a following. By the time we got to them, it was a little later into their run.

There definitely was a peak where they were very popular shows. And we kind of got to them, and they had been a little bit past their peak. Although there were people in Windsor who were huge fans of the show and so they were very excited. And so what happened was in May of 1998 we came out with our first game, which was C23, our first Arc System game. In June of 1998 we

came out with our second game, which was Xena, Princess Warrior. Xena at the time had become Xena had come out and become more popular than Hercules. So we had Xena be our first one. And then third was Hercules, The Legendary Journey. It came out in July of 1998. I believe at some point we... So, C-23 originally had 163 cards,

and Xena and Hercules each had 180 cards. We would later, I forget when it happened, but maybe later that year, came out with a... Xena's the only one we came out with an expansion for. It was 75 cards. It's called Xena Battlecry. I think the reason we came out with this, we had already made it.

We had planned to have expansions. And I think we... So, okay, let me talk a little bit about history. Why the Arc System failed. The Arc System failed, I think, for a couple reasons, and we're going to walk through those. Okay, so number one is,

let me talk a little bit about distribution. So in 1998, I'm talking about May, June, July. In the fall of 1998, we were purchased by Hasbro. So at this point, we were our own company. We weren't owned by anybody.

And we had gotten really good. The channel that we were very close with was the Hobby Game Channel, which means game stores and card shops. But the people who, they were individual stores that either sold games or sold trading cards or sold something that made sense that they were selling magic. And so we had distributors and we were very close to that audience. At the time, we were much less, we had much less of a channel to what we call mass market. We had some, but not nearly what we have today, for example.

So what happened was, when I say mass market, I mean the targets and Walmarts. And you're not selling to one store, you're selling to a giant chain of stores. And the first problem was, the kind of game we were trying to be was, we were trying to appeal to a much more casual style of player. And so not having the expertise and mass market that we needed really made it hard for us to get the game where it needed to be. So the first big mistake was

we really had a hard time getting the game to where it needed to go. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two was we, in simplifying the game, I think we sort of lost some of the charm of what made a trading card game fun. For example, we took the color wheel and we combined, we took it from five colors down to three colors.

We simplified it. But the problem was one of the big advantages of the color pie in Magic is it means something. That the problem was one of the big advantages of the color pie and magic is it means something. That the colors have meaning and that they have a relationship with each other and there's allies and enemies and Richard had worked really hard and we've worked

really hard to build on that. Blue made sense and it had things that all came together. But when you condensed it from five cards to three, well you had to take things that were in the two colors that you condensed it from five cards to three, well, you had to take things that were in the two colors that didn't exist and find places to put them.

And so it just wasn't quite as organic. It was, like I said, when I talked about the magic cards, I explained what blue represented. Well, in the arc system, blue had to do with

resource manipulation, and it definitely was the color that was the sneakiest of the three. Basically, the idea was red was more direct damage-y, more destroyed things, and green was a little more creature-y, had the better creature curve, and blue had a little more management of resources.

So they kind of followed what they did in Magic, but it didn't have the same output. It wasn't quite like, here's a color wheel that has an emotional resonance to it and there's a relationship. So in cutting down that, it sort of lost something. And the same things, like, for example, in the decision to, instead of having a life-total mill,

the problem there was they made it simpler and it was a little more elegant from a design standpoint. There's no need for extra things or for a pencil. It kind of consolidated everything. But the problem was, and we already know this about milling, is psychologically, beginning players like milling, but there is a downside to milling, which is when I mill my opponent and they lose their Shivan Dragon,

they lose some card they care about, it is very hard, because wow, you killed their Shivan Dragon. Now, if you understand the more advanced game theory, look, the Shivan Dragon could have been on the bottom of your library, I just wasn't going to get access to it. But the problem

psychologically is, no, no, no, it was there, I was going to draw it. You kept me from drawing it. I've lost it. I don't have it now. And having that built into the game, having a little bit of magic is fun. Having every once in a while that happens is okay.

Having that be a part of every single game, psychologically, is a little daunting. Because every time you lose something, it's not just like, oh, I lost two points. Oh, what did I lose? And so it really kind of didn't, it had a little more of a strong psychological impact than we meant. So, for example, that was a little change where we simplified things that didn't quite, it added some baggage that we didn't mean for an ad.

Chopping down the number of cards just meant there's a little bit less flavor. You know, artifacts, enchantments, sorceries, a little bit more flavor. Even theacts, enchantments, sorceries, are a little bit more flavor. Even the land is a little more flavor. Resource. We had to name them because we wanted to make sure that whatever IP we had, we could work with. So we went a little more generic. So a resource means a little bit less than a land.

And action and combat meant a little less than sorcery. There were more grandiose words we got to use in magic, and there was a little more flavor. The fact that there was a deck in the discard pile instead of a library in the graveyard, there was some flavor loss. And just, there was depth loss. One of the things that we've learned about magic

is one of the attractiveness things to it is that you see, like, I think early on we had this belief that we would scare people away. If we had this belief that we would scare people away. If we weren't simple, we would scare people away. But what we realized is that you want, when players are learning something, that a little bit of danger is actually a good thing. That you want people to sort of, you want people to feel that they understand what they're doing, but you want a little sense of there's more there.

That they're not doing everything. That being a little, being a little bit beyond you is not as scary, like if you look into the learning about how kids learn, which, I mean, it's how humans learn, and that one of the things that's important, and like I've talked about this, that part of fun is overcoming obstacles, and that when you have a game, you want the game to be a little bit scary because you want the person early on to go, oh, that scared me, but I figured out how to deal with it. And that a little bit of

intimidation is actually good when you're learning a game because you want the player to see that they can have some control and overcome things. Also, I mean, it's just an example of everything we did to make things simpler,

we kind of chopped down some of what made magic magic. Like, the lack of power and toughness as being distinct things just made a lot less variety. Everything's a 1-1 or a 2-2 or a 3-3. It's just, it's harder to have any subtlety there. Like, for example, there's no bouncing in the game. Like, if I attack and you block, either one of three things happen. Either I'm bigger than you and I kill you outright,

you're bigger than me and you kill me, or we're the same size and we kill each other. There's never we don't kill each other. And magic, I'm not saying you want tons of that in magic, but some of that is good. And just some of the variety, just the

chopping down to just a single number just meant it was a lot more narrow what we could do. Now that said, I actually think, by the way, the gameplay of the game, there's a lot of good gameplay. I'm picking on some stuff right now to talk about some of the failures. It wasn't, I don't want to make it sound like, oh, the game just was

horrible to play. It was fun. It is amazing, by the way, how much when you boiled on magic to really, really simple things, how it is still fun. That magic at its core is a fun game. But I think stripping it out did not help. Okay, the next big mistake is, well, what were the licenses? Like, part of what we needed to do was we needed to get people, we needed to build up a base and get people excited and get people playing so much so that other ips came to us and said hey i want to be part of your system or we could go to other ips and they go oh that looks that's a robust thing we want to be part of that because what would make the arc system amazing is

you know imagine once there's a point where there's just like 20, 30 IPs and, you know, oh, wow, you know, I could play My Little Pony or I could play, and just name your IP. And that you could go from kids' IPs to adult IPs all across the board. And that you could have silly goofies. You could have The Simpsons or you could go to something really serious, very niche-y. Maybe some, you know, Dawn of the Dead or some zombie thing. You could go, you could, the idea was a brilliant idea, which is whatever I care about, whatever genre I care about, whatever property I care about, I get into trading card game with that. That idea was wonderful.

But, okay, first we start with C23, which is a product that nobody knew. Nobody knew. The cards looked nice. We're going to get to the problem with Z and Hercules in a second. The cards looked nice in that get to the problem with Z and Hercules in a second the cards looked nice in that we had illustrations and original illustrations and we could go to Jim Lynn

not Jim Lynn, sorry Jim Lynn worked on that Jim Lee, the guy who was creating it and say to him okay, can you make sure certain things exist so that we can get characters you know, that

the nice thing about C23 is we at least can get good visual images the downside was it didn't resonate because it didn't mean anything to anybody. Yes, Magic has started with its own IP. Oh, that was another problem, by the way, is the fact that we were working to existing IPs really made it a lot harder. One of the things we've learned is design is nowhere near as flexible as creative.

That Magic has this flexibility of saying, okay, we need to do this thing mechanically. Okay, creative team, let's explain why this is so. And that Magic's been able to sort of make its IP match what it needs for the game. And that's been very helpful. Okay, so C23,

nobody knew. Xena and Hercules, couple problems. First off, they were never really big IPs. I think the people who acquired them from Wizards were fans and said, wow, I'm so excited. This thing I love we're doing. But nobody really stood back and said, okay, how big

an audience does Xena have, Xena and Hercules? And, you know, how much is this audience different from our core audience? You know, because we have a very geeky audience in the core of Magic, especially back in 1998. How much overlap was there? Were we picking IP that would get people that would never come to a trading card game, or

were we doing a lot of overlap? The second thing is, we picked two shows that were, one was a spin-off of the other. They were the same genre. They were both fantasy. Like, at least C23 was science fiction,off of the other. They were the same genre. They were both fantasy. Like, at least C-23 was science fiction, but nobody knew it. So the two ones we did that you knew, they were, A, related,

meaning not that there weren't people that might like one that didn't like the other, but pretty much, if you liked one of the shows, same genre, same tone, a lot, you know, overlapping characters, you know, Greek mythology, and they were very, very similar. And so we kind of picked two IPs.

We kind of, we didn't really pick two IPs. We picked one IP and split it into two, which is, you know, what the show had done. So, like, we weren't really appealing to a larger audience. Either you liked one show or you liked, you know, not a lot of people are going to like one and not the other. I mean, one, people might prefer one to the other, but it wasn't like, oh, well, I wasn't attracted to one show, but

I really was attracted to the other. There wasn't that division. So we picked an IP that was kind of old, or I mean, not at its peak. And we picked two shows that essentially were the same audience, you know, same genres, same audience. And so, and the last other one, the one that wasn't that genre, nobody knew. And so we really didn't come out of the gate. We just didn't come out of the gate with something that's going to say, hey, look at the wealth of things we could do. On top of that, one of the other problems,

and maybe this is inherent in doing licensed things, was we were really limited on our visuals for both Xena and Hercules. So it was all screen grabs. And because we were so limited in things, we were trying limited on our visuals for both Xena and Hercules. So it was all screen grabs. And because we were so limited in things, we were trying to make mechanics work, there was a lot of like, okay, what could this be? Okay, I guess it's this guy in the back of that picture. So like we take a screen grab,

we're like the front was, you know, Xena and Gabriella doing something, and the background was some guy. And like that guy was the picture, but it was grainy, so we had to zoom in. So the visuals were never particularly grabbing either, like, one thing about Magic is, wow, you look at Magic already, you're just pulled in, we didn't have that either, so, we weren't, we just, and like I said, we just weren't firing at all cylinders, the game depth wasn't nearly what Magic had, the resident wasn't what Magic had, the visuals

wasn't what Magic had, like, you't what Magic had. Like, you take all of Magic's strengths, and you take so many of them away, and then combine that, like I said, with the idea that really the audiences needed to go to, we weren't even putting in front of them, that most of this got sold in the hobby stores,

the audience that we knew, the stores that we worked with, and they did something with it. I mean, they understood the value of magic, and so they definitely were trying to find people that maybe wouldn't play magic and use it as a tool to help them, but it just never quite got to the audience it wanted. And so, I mean, for all these different reasons,

I mean, the ARC system, like I said, in concept, it really is a neat idea. Like, I remember when I first heard about it, it sounded great. But the problem was that you just need to get there. It kind of needed to prove itself and then get to a certain saturation point, and that it couldn't just be three IPs. It needed to be 15, 20, 25 IPs. I don't know. We didn't...

So, anyway, the ARK system came out with a... I mean, with a splat. It didn't... It never, ever took off. I mean, I think the reason we made expansion for one thing was

we'd already made it and we're like, okay, maybe we can... You know, there's not interest. Maybe we can drum up interest, but... And there's... I mean, I'm not saying

there's zero interest. There's a little bit of interest. And there was more people who either already were playing trading card games or people who were adjacent to those people or people who played but couldn't get their friends to play. So try to introduce what they thought was simpler. But it just never really took off for many, many reasons. Now, the one thing that I do want to point about when I talk about failures is one of the reasons that Magic is so successful, I believe,

is we've tried a lot of things. I mean, as I, as I, this podcast, Magic's 22 years old. We've tried a lot of things. We've succeeded in some. We've failed in others. But we've learned from it. And so, one day I'll do a podcast on Portal, which was the next attempt we did

at trying to teach people how to play. Now, Portal would make its own mistakes, but it learned a lot from the mistakes made from the ARC system. And so, looking back, I mean, I think it was, it learned a lot from the mistakes made from the ARC system. And so, looking back, I mean, I think it was a noble experiment. I'm not in any way unhappy we tried it.

I think we made mistakes with it, but it made a lot of sense to do. It's not like I wouldn't have tried it had I gone back. I guess I would do things differently. But anyway, it was definitely it was really neat. Oh, by the way, just a little bit of trivia for those who want to know.

It was sold in booster packs of 12 cards and starter decks of 40 cards. I think the starter decks were kind of like pre-constructed decks, if I remember correctly. Meaning, we sort of steered, like they were made so you could play them out of the box. In fact, it's an interesting thing.

That pre-existed constructed deck, or not constructed, pre-constructed decks in Magic. So I think that there are definitely, like, there's things that we try to learn in even this product, even a failure of a product that we would later sort of try again in Magic to more success. I'm trying to think of that almost to work.

I'm just trying to think of any big lessons here as a wrap up of this I think like, well we learned a lot about doing trading card games in general I mean magic, wizards would go on and make a lot of other trading card games we learned a lot about trading card games and some of it got applied to magic

a lot of it really didn't affect magic because it was simplified versions a lot of the problems were the affect Magic because it was simplified versions. A lot of the problems were the simplified versions. But I do think we played around with stuff and learned some things. I think we learned a lot about teaching people. We had a lot of data from people learning with the ARC system and the successes and failures of it. So that helped us.

That really did inform the next product we made, which was Portal. It made us understand the need. I think that this product, more than any other product, kicked us in the butt and made us say, look, we have to get a better relationship with mass marketing. I think it's one of the things that really got us to pursue mass marketing more. We also, later in the year, we revived Hasbro, which would help immensely as far as distribution stuff and mass marketing and things like that. Just having a giant company helps a lot.

But anyway, it was an important little history. The reason I want to talk about stuff like this, about things that literally, I'll bet you when I started this podcast that a good, good chunk of my audience, the majority of it at least, had never ever heard of this just because it's from so long ago.

It's from 98, right? We're talking 17 years ago. But it is an important lesson of a lot of Magic's history as us trying things. And some were successes, and I'll talk about those, but some were failures, and those were important. A big part of our history and how we grew

and how Magic became what it became, and how Wizards became what it became. So, anyway, that's why I wanted to share with you the Arc System. But, I'm in my parking space. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic and the ARC system,

it's time for me to be making magic. Talk to you guys next time.