Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #307 - Limited Edition, Part 1

Episode Date: February 19, 2016

Mark begins a new six-part series on the design of Limited Edition (Alpha), Limited Edition (Beta), and Unlimited Edition.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, today I'm going to tell a design story, but the design story, the very first design story. I'm going to start talking all about alpha slash beta. So, bits and pieces. I've definitely told elements of the story before, but I'm going to try to get a little more the design element of the story. Okay, so, to recap the classic magic story. So, Richard Garfield and his friend, Mike Davis, came to Wizards of the Coast because they were trying to sell Richard's game RoboRally, which is an awesome game if you've never played it. Coast because they were trying to sell Richard's game Robo Rally, which is an awesome game if you

never played it. Robo Rally was too expensive to make and Peter Atkinson, the CEO then of Wizards of the Coast, said that he's more interested in a game that can be made on cards that can be played quick, something to be played in between role-playing

sessions. Richard said he had an idea and went off to try to make this game. So I think what happened is, so a little history on Richard, Richard Garfield. So Richard was at the time a math

professor. Or actually, was he a professor yet? I think he was actually in school when he was at the University of Pennsylvania is where he met a bunch of the other play tefters. And so he, he, sorry about that. Little traffic stuff, trying not to get into accidents while I drive.

So Richard was in the graduate program, I believe, at UPenn at the time, because he was in Philadelphia. And I don't know, what I understand is Richard had loved the idea, Richard, for those that don't know, I think I've talked about this, loves games, loves, loves, loves, loves games. And he was just the kind of person that would play every game he could get his hand on, and that he just loved the exploration, and he just loves games.

And so, one of the things that he spends a lot of time on is, you know, thinking about games. He loved talking about games and exploring games. And, you know, when Richard was in R&D, we had a whole folder just to discuss concepts of games. You know, it was called Kickshaw was the name of the folder. And this is where I learned all about a lot of Richard's theories and a lot of the terminology that Richard has. You know, the idea of kingmaking, which is a game in which you don't necessarily win the game, but you control who wins.

So you can't win, but you control who else wins. And we had a lot of terminology explaining how different functions and different games work. Very educational. But one of the things that Richard would always been very fascinated with is the idea of what he calls a metagame. And he doesn't mean what we often talk about now as a metagame, which is what's the right deck to play. What he means is all the things that come along with the game beyond the game itself. So, for example, when you think of magic, in any one week, you might be talking with your friends or building decks or trading or reading about magic online or participating in social media.

There's all these things you can be doing that are magic that in your mind, I'm spending time doing magic, but you're not actually playing the game. And Richard was very fascinated by that, and I think that magic came from the concept of, I think the way he phrased it is, a game bigger than the box. That Richard liked the idea of making a game that part of the game was just seeing the game. That part of the game was that the game was bigger than any one person. The game was big enough that it was something in which you didn't experience the game solely by buying it and opening the box. You experienced the game by going out and finding other people also playing the game. So I think Richard

had been very fascinated by that concept. He also loved, I know from games like Cosmic Encounter, the idea that games allow you to break their own rules. That there are a lot of games, so Cosmic Encounter is a famous game where you are controlling alien armies and you're trying to take over the galaxy. And the cool thing about the game is that there are different cards that let you do different things, and there are cards that let you counteract that, and then

each alien has its own sort of superpower that affects the game. That each alien has a certain thing they can do that nobody else can do. And so every time you play, the fact that you always have a different mix of can do that nobody else can do. And so every time you play, the fact that you always have a different mix of aliens, and then the inner mix of the cards, Cosmic Hunter has a lot of rule-breaking in it.

Richard really improved, really liked that kind of gameplay, and so I think he was also fascinated with the idea of having a game that would continually break its own rules. of having a game really where you could break, a game that would continually break its own rules. Finally, I don't know whether or not Richard got to the idea of a trading card game before Peter suggested the idea of cards. My memory of this story, and like I said, I've heard this secondhand a bunch of times, is that Richard had already thought of the idea of a trading card game,

but hadn't really pursued it. is that Richard had already thought of the idea of a trading card game, but hadn't really pursued it. I think what happened is that Peter basically was giving them, Peter had a small company, Wizard of the Coast at the time, it was a tiny, tiny company, it was a role-playing company, and it was run out of Richard's, I mean, I'm sorry, it was run out of Peter's basement.

It was a tiny, tiny company. Nobody was really even full-time in the company, I don't think. I mean, everybody was kind of part-time. Or if there were any full-time employees, there were very, very few. And I think if there were a few full-time employees, they were like working for a stock or something. You know, they weren't, it was very low-key. It was a very small company. And what Peter had said to Richard is, look, here's what I'm capable of doing. And Peter knew of an art school. He knew some artists from an art school, I think through Jesper, a place to get some artists. He knew, I'm not sure what he had done with the printer before, but he knew of the printer. Maybe he'd used the printer. Carter Munday was in Belgium. Maybe he'd even used Carter Munday before, but he knew of the printer. Maybe he'd used the printer.

Cardamond Day was in Belgium. Maybe he'd even used Cardamond Day before, but he had a printer he knew. He had artists that he could get in contact with. He realized that he could make cards. The cards were something he could do that could look cool and that he was capable of doing. And I think Richard, I think,

so I mean, Peter said to Richard, okay, here's the constraints of a game that maybe I could make. You know, I'm looking for something. He was a role-playing company, so he was definitely looking for something in the role-playing area. I think that's why fantasy appealed to him. He was definitely looking for something that was quick playtime. Peter's line was, a game you could play in between role-playing sessions. He was looking at cards, something with illustrations.

And I think that Richard... I think what... This is my take on it. I could ask Richard next time I see him. But my take on this was that Richard spent a lot of time thinking about things and he had a lot of ideas for games in his head and that he didn't have a time to actually explore all the different ideas he had and that he would just explore whatever was interesting to him at the time. And so when Peter came

along and said, and gave him the constraints, Richard was like, okay, I have an idea that's within that area. And I think Richard's basic idea was he had toyed around with the idea of a trading card game and what that would mean. So for those that know, I said that Richard had three genius ideas when he created Magic. And one was the trading card game genre. The idea of taking trading cards,

which obviously long existed, and designing a game out of them. Just the idea of, I've opened this up, instead of baseball players or movies or whatever, I'm getting, you know, cards to a game. And the idea that you could pick and choose which cards you wanted to play.

Richard was fascinated by that. And in fact, I think what Richard was fascinated by was the idea that I had a bunch of cards and I could make something from what I owned, but that I would venture out and play other people and they would just have spells I'd never seen before. Now, remember, when he built Alpha, the idea of ante was built into the game, meaning it was part of Richard's thought that not only would I go out and explore, I would, in exploring, get other people's cards that our cards would mix. That was a big part of, I think, Richard's early vision,

is the idea that, and this aspect was really influenced by marbles. Richard had grown up, his dad is an architect, and he, Richard grew up in, I know he lived in, I think, Nepal for a while. You know, he definitely moved around a bit as a kid, and he lived in some foreign countries. And I think it was Nepal where they played marbles. There's some game where marbles were really, really big.

And the idea of marbles is you have a bunch of marbles that you think are really cool, but in the act of playing marbles with other people, you are interchanging your marbles for their marbles. So that it has the quality of, you know, any one marble. Like, kind of, I'm exploring and finding other people's marbles, and then part of playing with other people meant that some of my marbles wouldn't go to them, and some of their marbles wouldn't go to me. There's this constant change of flux of marbles.

I think Richard really liked that. And you can see, I'm trying to name off different influences here, that there are a lot of different pieces that sort of influence Richard. So anyway, Richard gets from Peter this, I want this. So Richard's like, okay, I have a game company willing to make something. And once again, I should stress, Peter's saying, this is what I wanted. Richard still had to make something that excited Peter, that Peter wanted to make.

So Richard had this neat idea, so he said, okay, I'm going to go work on this. So I think, I don't know for sure. Once again, I'm not sure whether or not, I think the idea of fighting with magic is something that Richard already had in his head. I'm not sure.

I mean, the idea of tying a trading card game specifically to a magical duel, I don't know. I mean, that goes back to the earliest incarnations of the game, so I assume it must have been there from the get-go. I don't know whether Richard had...

I don't know whether or not the fact that he was pitching to Peter, and Peter was a big role-playing fan, and especially Dungeons & Dragons, Peter was very into fantasy. So I don't know whether or not Richard steered toward fantasy because he knew he was pitching to Peter, or whether his idea inherently was a fantasy idea. I don't know.

I'm not sure. What I do know is he went back to Philadelphia and there was a bunch of different people he played games with. So the two major ones is he went to a bridge club that he used to go to. And at the bridge club, he met Bill Rose, Charlie Coutinho, Joel Mick, Lily Wu, most of the people that ended up doing the design for Mirage and Visions, that group. Don Siegel, Howard, Howard Elliott, I don't know the last names. I think it's Howard Kallenberg, Elliot Siegel, Don Felice, sorry. Don Felice, Elliot Siegel's Howard Collenberg,

Elliot Siegel, Don Felice, sorry. Don Felice, Elliot Siegel, Howard Collenberg, Charlotte Cattino, Joel Mick, Bill Rhodes were the six that did Mirage. So that was one group. Another group was people that he knew from University of Pennsylvania. That's the group that we now sort of call the East Coast Plate After. So that would be Scafali, Jim Lynn, Chris Page, Dave Petty, that group.

He also knew a guy named Barry Wright. Barry Wright is, if you know, the Barry's Mechanic, Barry's Land. He's the one that made a set called Spectral Chaos. I've talked about that in my Invasion podcast. And there probably were a few other. The ones I remember are the ones that ended up making magic sets. So he probably had some other playtafters that I'm not naming, although those were the major playtafters. Okay, so what Richard did is he knew he needed, that part of what he was trying to capture was not just the gameplay, but also the larger sense of a metagame of people opening cards and different people owning different things, that he wanted to create that sense to it. And then he knew if he was going to play TAS, it couldn't just be, it wasn't just playing

the mechanics, but trying to play out the entire sort of metagame unto itself. So I know that the earliest, the very first Magic games he ever played was with Barry.

I know that. And I think he was just trying to figure out the mechanics. So for those who don't know early Alpha, so real quickly, when I talk about Alpha, I really mean Alpha and Beta, what we call limited edition.

What happened was Richard had made a set and they printed enough for what they thought was six months, sold in weeks. But there were some printing errors. They went back on press to fix the printing errors. That is Beta. It's still limited edition, still Black Border. Alpha and Beta differ from each other in a couple ways. There were two cards plus five basic land. They had forgotten Circle Protection Black

and Volcanic Island from the alpha sheet. They fixed that in beta. And in order to say over, I think they wanted to say over 300 cards, they added five more land, basic land arts. So they could say over 300 cards, I believe, is why they added the land. So I'm talking about his design of Limited A.

The fact that there was printing errors in it doesn't negate sort of the basic set. Alpha beta is the basic set. I use alpha shorthand a lot of times just to be the first, but I really mean limited edition. When I say alpha, I mean alpha and beta and limited edition is what I'm talking about. Okay, so Richard playtested with Barry.

So the earliest version of Magic, he had five colors super, super early. I don't know I think inherently Richard understood the idea that you wanted I've talked about this in my Color Pie podcast that he knew he needed to divvy up what was going on that he needed one of the ways to make a trading card game work was you couldn't let everybody play everything and cause problems

so he used colors as a means to separate what people can do. And then he wanted flavors to colors. My gut is he picked five. My guess is this was a little more subconsciously than consciously, but I'm not sure. Is he liked the idea of a relationship between colors

and an odd number gives you a much more interesting relationship than an even number. Because an odd number, five especially, five did this neat thing where every color got two allies and two enemies. So it made it very dynamic. If you had made four colors, then it's like there's just two enemy pairs. And it would be much less dynamic. By adding one more color, you go from two enemy pairs to five enemy pairs,

which is just much more dynamic. Richard really really if you look at the early limited edition Richard really was trying to communicate the idea of the color pie and the idea that these colors get along and these colors don't get along

there's a lot more hate early on there's a lot more there's a lot of my enemy is this color, so I will fight against this color. And that was throughout. He also did a lot of mirrors things, so the things in which

he's really contrasting. Most of the mirrors were in enemy colors. White Knight, Black Knight, Blue Elemental Blast, Red Elemental Blast, those kind of things. Okay, so what he did was he figured out,

I think a lot of the early mechanics were just, like he wasn't, he might have keyworded stuff early on, but that was more of a shorthand just to say, oh, here's a mechanic, I'm going to do this a bunch of times. It's got some flavor to it, so I'm going to use the flavor word.

In fact, alpha playtest cards, so if you've never seen Alpha playtest cards, they're pretty cool. So what he did was, he wanted to make something that definitely conveyed the information and gave a little bit of the sense of a playing card. The actual cards he made were maybe two inches, two and a half inches by two inches. They were longer than they were wide, so maybe they were like three inches by two inches, maybe.

And they were cardboard. He printed on cardboard. And what he did was he got whatever pictures he could find. They mostly were from magazines and comics and stuff. Um, uh, in fact, there's a lot of fun. If you've seen early alpha cards, there are a lot of, you know, um, there's a lot of very jokey cards.

Like one of them, um, the card that would go on, I think we call it to be healing salve was called heel. And it had a photocopied of Scaffolias' heel, his foot. And then there were Calvin Hobbes, and there were Superman. There's just a lot of pictures from different things in this prototype. And so what he did was, he actually made booster packs, and then he divvied them up to people. And each person in the playtest got so many.

I don't know exactly how many, but got some number of packs. And the idea was, this is all you get, but you can trade with people and go make decks. That was the very first playtest. And I don't think there were tons of restrictions in the first playtest. And what happened was, I mean, the essence of what magic is, I mean, Richard discovered really quickly that he had hit upon something because his playtesters just went to town.

Um, now once again, like I said, these are little tiny pieces of cardboard that were, you know, black and white photocopies. Um, but it didn't matter that, you know, just the, the excitement of building the deck and finding more cards and making trades. Just the excitement of building the deck and finding more cards and making trades. And what happened was, early on, there were no rules. You can have as many cards in your deck as you want. You can trade as many people as you want.

Hey, whatever you want. And what started happening is, as they started playing, people started realizing that there existed some degenerate strategies. And so the game then took on this interesting aspect where there was a limited number of things. And so as people started realizing... So I think, for example, Scaf... What was it? There was some card

that Scaf figured out. Was it Plague Rat, maybe? There was some card in Volume or something out was a plague rat maybe. There's some card that in volume or something that was really, that was much, much more powerful in volume than had been isolated. And so Scaf started trading for this thing. And people weren't really aware of it early on.

And Scaf got quite a number of them before people realized what Scaf was doing. And then they're like, oh no, Scaf's trying to get whatever it was. Let's say it's plague rats. Scaf's trying to get plague rats. No trading with Scaf. Do not give Scaf plague rats. You know, but Scaf would go around and he would make these, you know,

he figured out what other people wanted and he would make these exciting trades and people were like, well, I really, really want this card and Scaf has it. It can't hurt to give him one more plague rat or whatever it was. And so, there was this little, sort of the little substructure began

of people definitely building decks and hoarding cards and people careful who they traded with and all this dynamics. And one of the things that was definitely happening was you were seeing different,

these were all gamers. All his playtesters were real hardcore gamers, and so they really were exploiting the system. They were trying to figure out what can I do? And remember, this is back where nobody knew all the cards. This wasn't even something where people didn't know all good cards

existed. So part of playing with somebody, and this is very true for early magic. Remember, a lot of how early magic functioned was based on a lot of Richard's desires to create a certain experience. And one of the things that Richard wanted was

he loved the idea of this exploration of space, of part of learning about the game, part of playing the game was learning about the game, that you would play an opponent, and hey, we didn't use a spell you've never seen before. Oh my goodness, and maybe now I want that spell and we'll want to trade it from him, you know. And so in order to get that, Richard was really big on sort of secrecy of not letting people know what the card pool was. So if you look at early Magic, Wizards in the early days was really, really

shy about giving out card information. For example, early magic did not give out card lists. You know, there were secondary sources that sort of figured out the list, but magic didn't give them. They didn't give rarity. And early magic didn't even have rarity on the cards. And if you know early magic, Richard even did some things, like he put some basic lands, islands, I believe, I know, on the rare sheet because he was trying to fool people so they wouldn't quite know even what the rare is.

He wanted to make it difficult for people to know what cards were of what rarity. And Richard was really, really trying to sort of make the exploration something cool. The one misstep that Richard made in this area is he just didn't understand where the world was going. And that the Internet as we know it, I mean, I guess the Internet goes back to, I don't know, the 60s or something. But it really was the early 90s where Usenet started taking off. And, I mean, shortly after Magic came off,

really the web took off. So, I mean, the idea of keeping information at bay right on the cusp of, like, the beginning of the information age is something Richard just really couldn't foresee. He really was trying to sort of keep the information, but it was just an impossible thing to do. And eventually Wizards came around and realized that

that Wizards' vision of sort of people exploring the game only through the game and not sharing what the cards were was just something that wasn't going to be viable. And Wizards really changed up its strategy of sort of how to deal with that. Because, like, for example, I covered the very first World Championships. I had the decks of the World Champions. And I wasn't allowed to list the decks. They didn't want people to deal with that. Because, like, for example, I covered the very first World Championships. I had the decks of the World Champions. And I wasn't allowed

to list the decks. They didn't want people to copy the decks. And so I did a play-by-play. One of the ways people figured out the decks somewhat is I did a detailed play-by-play for the finals.

And so I showed every card in their hand and what they drew. And so by reading my transcripts of the three games, you were able to figure out a good chunk of their deck. what they drew. And so by reading my transcripts of the three games, you were able to figure out a good chunk of their deck, not every card, but you had a pretty good sense of generally what was in their deck

and how their decks worked. And people definitely, from the data I'd given them, sort of backward-built it somewhat to a certain extent. So the, anyway, so Richard started doing this playtesting, and he learned a lot of very important things. So first off, he learned a lot of his metagame stuff, the idea of the deck building and people trading, and a lot of stuff he was excited about. He saw all that happen. Another thing he started to learn about was the importance of templating. So the classic story of this is one of the playtester

comes up to talk to him. I actually don't know which playtester. And the playtester said, wow, I got the most amazing card. And he goes, I played this card and then my opponent, I just win on the next turn. And Richard, like, I mean, Richard knew all the cards. Richard was like,

there's a card. What card can you automatically win on the next turn? So he shows him Time Walk. So the original text for Time Walk was, opponent loses next turn. Which, what Richard meant was, oh, I'm going to take a turn away from you. I'm going to get an extra turn. And the way I'm going to get an extra turn is I'm going to take the turn away from somebody else. But, obviously, get an extra turn. The way I'm going to get an extra turn is I'm going to take the turn away from somebody else. But obviously, opponent loses next turn. You can read that as the opponent loses next turn. That's what happens. Next turn, you're going to lose.

And so Richard ended up changing it to instead of somebody else losing a turn, you gained a turn to avoid that confusion. But it's a really good example of sort of realizing the value of words and something if you look at early alpha that Richard definitely struggled a bit with and it wasn't really cleaned up Richard was driven by a lot of the feel that he wanted that he wanted you to feel like a wizard

and feel like a magical duel and he wanted all these colors wanted you to feel like a wizard and feel like a magical duel. And he wanted all these colors to have conflicts with each other and have philosophies and represent things. And he had this whole mana system and it was a trading card game. And Richard did all these amazing, amazing things. I mean, Magic is an awesome game.

But one of the areas that Richard was a little... He wasn't as precise as the game would end up needing to be. That he sort of worded things in like, you know, sort of wording. And as Time Walk showed him, he needed to be more precise.

That the rules needed to be a little bit more structured. And Richard tried to structure the rules, but if you ever read the Elfo rulebook, there's an attempt to try to codify things and make things work similarly. But there is definitely one of the problems with early Magic.

And like I said, Magic has so many awesome, positive things going for it. I'm just looking back with a critical eye, areas where there was room for improvement. you know, looking back with a critical eye, areas where there was room for improvement. And one of them was that the game was not internally consistent through all the cards. That certain cards would do something and be worded one way, and another card would do the same thing, essentially,

but be worded differently. And a lot of early Magic rules... Like, one of the things I think Richard liked was the idea that, you know what? There's going to be confusion in the rules, and you and your friends, you figure out what you think is right. And in a game in which it was just a casual game that you and your friends kind of had fun sitting around playing,

you know what? That could work. House rules. Richard's always been a big fan of house rules. Like, look, the cards are giving you the structure for a game. Look, if we make you talk and make you guys, as a group, figure out what you want to happen, hey, great. You know, Richard is really big on gaming as a bonding experience. But what Richard hadn't seen, and in some level, it is hard to imagine what magic became when you were making the game.

I mean, you don't see things being a phenomenon. It's just hard to see that. And what happened was magic became so big that there needed to be, like, people wanted to play with strangers because, you know, tournaments happen and it's one thing when you're at your own house

and you can have your house rules and, like, it's my house, in my house, here's the rules. But when you start getting places where you're meeting people and you're meeting strangers, there has to be rules for how the cards work that everybody can just like, these are the set rules. And early magic had a lot of band-aids and a lot of like, well...

Like one of the things I talked about is early magic had a lot of fixing. This is my favorite. I talked about this, but had a lot of fixing. This is my favorite. I talked about this, but I'll bring it up because it's my favorite. Protection existed, and so they came up with something at the time. This is post-alpha. This is, I don't know, this is sometime around between beta and unlimited maybe. Semi-targeting.

So they had things that targeted. So they're trying to figure out the interaction between balance and black knight. So black knight had protection from white. And originally the way protection worked is it just said, hey, you can't be affected by things of that color. So protection from a black knight

had protection from white. Well, balance is white. Well, balance can't hurt black knight. He's white. But the question was, well, balance not only did it destroy things, it also counted things. Well, did black knight count? We were figuring out, like, did balance just ignore black knight? But the thought was, well, we want black knight to hose white as much as it can.

So, yeah, we want balance to count it, because we want you to have to sacrifice I guess they, well, I guess they figured they wanted to count it. That Balance should know it's there. I guess that's not actually in Black's benefit. But anyway, they decided they wanted, Balance should know that Black Knight

is there, but it can't kill it. So what does that mean? It says, like, well, it's there for purposes of accounting, but it's not kill it. So what does that mean? It says, like, well, it's there for purposes of accounting, but it's not there for purposes of being able to destroy it. So it's semi-targeted, which means that, like, it's there for part of it, not for another part, which is a weird concept.

And so, early on, Richard realized, now, Richard started doing a lot of work of trying to clean up the text. Like I said, it's not like he learned the mistake of Time's Walk and just clean up the text, like I said. It's not like he learned the mistake of Time's Walk and just ignored it. No, no, no. Richard did a lot of things to try to line things up.

Another thing that Richard did is the mana system worked slightly differently. The colors, the five colors were all there. I should say mana cost worked. The mana system worked the same. Mana cost worked differently. So the way mana cost worked originally is he would give you a number

followed by mana symbols. And what that meant is for Savannah Lions, which costs a single white mana, would be written as one and then a white mana. And what that meant was this creature costs one,

one of which must be spent using white mana. So, for example, Hill Giant, which is a 3-3 creature that costs three generic and one red, would be four red mana. So, let's see, like, Craw Worm, which is six mana, four generic, two green, would be six green green. And Richard originally tried that, and from playtesting what he found was people were getting confused because the numbers were getting counted twice. And so what he ended up doing

is moving to the current system where he just told you how much generic mana. Which, by the way, just called... For those that recently with Oath of the Gatewatch, there's a confusion about generic and Culleth mana.

Culleth mana used to mean, generic mana used to not be a term, and the term Culleth was applied to both the kind of mana

you need to pay mana costs and to the kind of mana produced. And eventually, we decided we had to change the name of one of those because it was a word meaning two things that were similar but not identical. That if you made colorless mana,

yes, you could use it to pay the generic cost, but that wasn't the same thing. But anyway, back in the day, it was called colorless. So Richard had played tests of that and he realized that the mana cost wouldn't quite work I think Richard also played around for a while with just having a singular power toughness that you know, a creature

like a 2-2 creature was just 2 Grizzly Bear was 2 the reason he ended up moving to power and toughness was there just wasn't enough variety. That when you only have one number and you want smaller things, like for example, in early magic,

there wasn't much in common other than a few green creatures, I think. I think Crawl Worm. Most things were 3-3 or smaller. And so if at Common you can only have 1, 2, and 3, there's not enough variety. So Richard went to Power Toughness. And I do know what Richard did is he did a lot of iterations of the playtests.

That he would make up cards, he would playtest with them, he'd get feedback from, you know... Another thing that would happen, by the way, is people would start figuring out strategies and Richard could see degenerate strategies from what people were doing. But one of the things that Richard decided was he liked having the cards exist. He wasn't trying to cut off degenerate strategies. He had a different answer, which was rarity. So what Richard said is, look, if I put these things at rare in a normal gameplay environment,

you know, he said, okay, let's imagine what I'm doing here is a normal environment. I'm playing with, you know, I have access to 20 people. Okay, in a field in which, and 20 people isn't who you normally play with. It's like the field of people I might play with. And he said, okay, normal play groups are going to be anywhere from three or four up to maybe 20 if you start combining some play groups. And the idea was, okay, in that number of cards, if you figure out how much an average person will spend

and how many cards they'll get, Richard realized that, okay, I can make Ancestral Recall. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's powerful, but in an environment, there's only one or two of them in an environment. And so, okay, one guy can get both of them, but you can't make a deck full of Ancestral Recalls. There's just not the card pool to do that.

And so Richard used rarity as a means to allow degenerate stuff. And I think Richard knew that part of the fun, like, one of the stories that Richard tells is Charlie decides he's going to do something. So Charlie makes this recursive white deck. I know that the deck made use of stuff like Swords to Plowshares to permanently remove creatures from the game. And then he did something...

I don't know what it was. Maybe it was Time Twister? Maybe it was Time Twister. I think Time Twister, originally, you would shuffle your graveyard and library and draw it in your hand. Maybe it was a white-blue deck. But the idea is, he would...

All his deck did was remove the opponent's creatures from the game, and then restarted the game. Actually, maybe he used Scheherazade. Maybe he... Actually, that's what I think he did. I think he went into sub-game. Oh, no, no, no, he couldn't use Scheherazade.

That was in Arabian Nights, so maybe he used Time Cluster. Anyway, the idea is Charlie would just play endless games with you and just remove all your creatures, and he would defeat you, not because he had a lot of kill spells, but at some point, you had no defense.

All your creatures were gone, and then he could kill you. And this would take forever. This was, you know, we're going to play a game, I'm going to remove all your creatures with my spells as much as I can, and then we're going to shuffle everything up

and start all over again. And I want to keep doing that until I extract every creature from your library. And I think Richard was really tickled by the kinds of things he was seeing. That you were seeing people making

control decks, you were seeing aggro decks, like all the things you know of magic now, you were seeing all the different things. There were land destruction decks, there were discard decks, you know. But one of the things that also kept it in check is because there was a small pool of cards and

there were people trading, like I think, for example, you know, I think actually, now that I think about it, the Scaf story might have been he was building a land destruction deck, not a play rat deck, which makes a lot more sense. And people realizing that he needed to get a certain amount a land destruction deck, not a play to write deck, which makes a lot more sense. And people realizing that he needed to get a certain

amount of land destruction to make his deck unbeatable, and they were stopping people from trading him more land destruction. I guess that is what Scaf must have been doing. But Richard was enamored by the idea of... So Richard did a playtest, and he then would take the cards back, make new cards,

and he would change cards. He essentially did what we do now, which is he did iterative playtesting. He would make cards, he would have people play with them, and then he would stop. And I think the way it worked was the playtest lasted a certain amount of time. Here's your cards, and it'll last for three weeks. And then at the end of it, he needed to get the cards back, and people were very possessive. No, no, no, no, I had had this deck I don't want to get this back you know

and that as Richard was iterating and trying new versions of cards and stuff he could just he was watching people get attached to their decks so what happens is he iterates he's off to Philadelphia I think he stayed in touch with Peter I know that Peter

came out at one point to Philadelphia so I think he stayed in touch with Peter. I know that Peter came out at one point to Philadelphia. So I'm assuming that Richard must have been keeping Peter up to date on what was going on. Peter was very excited. And that when Richard finally sort of showed Peter what he was doing, Peter was in love with it. Peter loved it. And Peter was the one that then said, okay, now we're going to go get the artist and we're going to make cards out of these. And Peter was really the one, I mean, Richard made the framework of the game.

And then Peter, working with Jesper, Jesper was the first art director, really sort of figured out all the visuals and got the art into it and printed it. And there are a lot of stories early on. One of the interesting things about magic is there was a lot of growing pains. There are a lot of stories early on. One of the interesting things about Magic is there was a lot of growing pains. There were a lot of mistakes made.

I mean, Richard made an awesome, awesome, awesome game. But there were a lot of things that could be improved upon. I think a lot of early Magic and early R&D, one could argue 22 years so far of R&D, or almost 23, was finding ways to fine-tune what Richard had done. And same with what I think Peter and Jesper had done of really finding ways to get the graphics and the visuals.

I'm not even sure who did the names. I think Richard was very involved in the names. Flavor Text might have also been Richard. I'm not sure who didavortex for Alpha. Richard did a lot of it. And once again, he had his playtesters helping him. That was another big part of it. I think if you look at original Alpha,

it's funny. It really parallels how we make sets now, you know, 20 odd years later, in that it was all about sort of getting ideas and figuring out what we wanted to focus on and playtesting and weeding out things that weren't working or changing things that weren't working. But anyway, so Richard finally came in,

had his first prototype that he was happy with, showed it to Peter. Peter was real excited. There were a bunch more iterations. I know Peter came out to Philadelphia for some playtesting and stuff. And eventually it's like, okay, we're going to make this game. And that is how Alpha got designed.

So next time what I'm going to do is I'm going to start walking through the cards and I'm going to tell every story I know about the origin of a Magic card where I know the origin or I know something fun about it. I'm not going to talk about every card. A, it's a lot of cards.

And B, I don't have stories in every card. But I will talk about a bunch of cards. So anyway, a little extra traffic today so you guys got a little bonus but Alpha's fun to talk about so you guys got that. So anyway,

thank you very much for listening to me talk about the very first magic set and how it got designed and I'm in my space now so we know what that means. It means the end

of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll talk to you guys next time.