Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #63 - 1993

Episode Date: October 18, 2013

Mark talks about the year 1993.

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so this year at the World Championships in Amsterdam, I did a little segment called 20 Years in 20 Minutes, where I sat down and I basically talked about the magic of 20 years of history, having one minute to talk about each year. And while that was fun and an interesting exercise, I realized that I had a lot more to say about each year. So I've decided to start a new meta-series, and this is truly a mega-series.

This is truly a mega-m mega series, this is truly a mega, mega series, I'm going to do a podcast for each year of Magic's life to talk about what happened that year. Now, I'm just going to do this every once in a while. Being that I have 20 years to do, and as I do this, other years will roll by, this is probably a multi-year podcast project, which means I'm dedicated to keep doing this for many, many more years. So today, I'm going to start with 1993, where it all began for Magic the Gathering. Technically, there's stuff that happened before 1993, but I decided we'll start with the public's interaction with Magic, not necessarily the behind the scenes. public's interaction with Magic, not necessarily the behind-the-scenes.

So, today is all about Magic's first year of life, as a released product, I guess. So, a little bit of preamble, and then I'm going to kind of start with Magic's public life, not its behind-the-scenes life. Okay, so here's what's going on. The real quick story, I've told this story before, is Richard Garfield and his best friend Mike Davis come to Wizards of the Coast to try and pitch a game that they had, that Richard had made, called Robo Rally. It's way too complex a game for a small company like Wizards of the Coast to make. It's got too many pieces and such. But Peter Atkinson says, you know, I have some inns with places

that can do cards. I know a place to get illustrations. I think we can make a game on, you know, that are printed like trading cards. And, um, a card game. He goes, I think we can make a card game. And what he asked for Richard is he wanted a game that was portable,

obviously cards, and that was adaptable, and that, and that was adaptable, and that, something that you could play, a quick play time that you could play in between role playing sessions, I believe is what Peter actually asked for. Richard said he had an idea, I think he had already toyed around with the idea of a trading card game. And so one of the things that Richard was very excited about was sort of exploring the idea of a game bigger than the box, is how Richard describes it. And he loved the idea of a trading card game.

Anyway, the important part of this story is Richard comes back, shows off his game. Peter loves it, thinks it's great. And Richard has spent some time, you know, playtesting it and really had figured out the key of what makes it click. Peter's excited. Richard spends a little more time playtesting it and really had figured out the key of what makes it click. Peter's excited. Richard spends a little more time playtesting. But finally they make it and they're going to release it. And so what Peter does is Peter drives up and down the coast

because he's on the West Coast trying to convince people, game stores, to pick up this game. Because remember at the time, Wizards of the Coast was this tiny little company who made role-playing games. And not super popular role-playing games. It was a very tiny little company. In fact, I think

in earlier 93, might have been 92, like, Peter had to send out a letter to the few employees that existed and said, look, we have no money. Everything's going to be volunteer. We're going to have to scale back. I mean, it looked like for a while Wizards of the Coast might dissolve and never even come to be volunteer. We're going to have to scale back. It looked like for a while the Wizards Coast might dissolve

and never make it to the point where magic would come out. But luckily, they get magic. They're holding themselves together. Peter, to Peter's credit, recognizes right away that magic is a special thing. And he goes all out to try to get people to pick it up. Because once it gets made, he thinks they have a hit on their hands. And so he's driving up and down the West Coast, going to game stores, demoing the game, and getting them to purchase it.

Okay, so the first public appearance, really, of Magic is at Origins Game Fair. So Gamma, which is the Game Manufacturers Association, has a convention it runs called Origins Game Fair. And it was at Origins that magic is first shown publicly. Not for sale yet, I believe. So July 13th through the 16th in Fort Worth, Texas. Origins basically floats around every year.

That year is in Texas. So Peter and the little wizards that there was packed up, went to Fort Worth, Texas, and that was the first time they ever showed off the cards. That's the first time anybody, I believe, had seen the cards, or any public way. He might have gone to game stores before that. But this is the first time where the public is seeing Magic.

And it wasn't for sale yet, but it definitely started to get a little bit of buzz. And then on August 5th, it officially goes on sale. That is the in-history date that the product first went on sale was August 5th. Now, a little later, a couple weeks later, from August 19th to the 22nd, is Gen Con.

So for those that aren't aware, Gen Con is the largest gaming convention in the United States. Not in the world. I believe Essen is the largest in the world. It was in Germany. But it is the largest gaming convention in the United States. It is very

focused on role-playing. And as Peter is a die-hard role-player, Gen Con was a mecca he went to every year. He had great, I mean, funny thing is Peter would go on to later buy Gen Con. But anyway, Peter definitely wanted

to try to make a splash at Gen Con. And so Gen Con was the first convention where Magic was on sale. And it just blew the doors off the hinges, as you will. It was the talk of the convention. That every year there's some game that just sort of, there's buzz on. And for 1993 at Gen Con, that game was Magic the Gathering. What happened was they thought they had brought a decent amount of product, and they went through it quickly.

I'm not sure whether it sold out day one or maybe day two. Probably it was day one, knowing the stories. So anyway, they got it, they brought it, sold out. And then just everyone's talking about it. And everywhere you look, people are playing it. You know, in early Magic, definitely one of the things about the game early on was this was a small company putting it out, which meant that there wasn't a lot of press on it. There wasn't, like, you kind of heard about it by word of mouth more than anything else.

Also remember that Peter spent all his time working on the West Coast, because that's where he could drive to. And so, you know, the early Magic Buzz that existed was mostly on the West Coast. So nobody, I mean, Milwaukee's, you know, in the middle of the country, nobody there had heard of it. You know, a few people who might have been West Coast-based,

but it was mostly this, you know, oh my God, have you heard of this thing? And Magic, you know, I mean, it's very funny now that it's entrenched. But at the time, it was like, it was this card game, but when you bought it, what you bought wasn't the same as what somebody else bought. You know, that was pretty unheard of, that I would buy a card game and you would buy a card game, but we didn't have the same cards in our card game.

You know, it was pretty revolutionary. And on top of that, you know, it had the fantasy art, and it had a lot of different pieces that all sort of clicked together. I mean, obviously, Gen Con, you know, Dungeons & Dragons had always been a very big thing there. You know, fantasy was very big there. You know, Magic really clicked well with the role-playing crowd, especially the D&D crowd. It, you know, had similar imagery, and, you know, it obviously was playing around with fantasy.

So anyway, big hit. So the one thing they did there is they did run a tournament which they would later go on in the duelist to describe that first tournament and what happens. In the duelist, they described it as if it were a real duel.

But anyway, that was the first Magic tournament ever, was at Gen Con 1993. Okay, so Origins happens, you know, it creates a little bit of buzz. Gen Con happens, cards get into people's hands. Okay, we're out of the gates. So the story I tell, and I've told this many times, because this is the classic Magic Origins story,

is Peter and company decided to print enough magic that they thought they'd have a six-month supply. And they sold out of their six-month supply, I believe, in three weeks. And that, it just, it went off the drive. I mean, one of the things about magic, I mean, is, and it's very easy now looking 20 years back, but they printed as much as they could. They were conservative in their estimates. One of the things about the game is people talk a lot about some unbalanced cards, like Ancestral Recall or Black Lotus.

And one of the things that is important to understand is Richard understood that those cards would be broken in large numbers. He just didn't anticipate people would have that number of cards. You know, when they estimated how much money people would spend on the game, they assumed people would spend what they spend on any game, 30 bucks, 40 bucks, you know, and that with that number of cards, you know, somebody in your play group might have one inch of recall. Well, if one guy has one in your playgroup, you know, and that's, he's one broken card, eh, that's not a big deal. You know, now if somebody's a deck of all the broken cards, that is a big deal.

But Richard knew that, like, he wanted to make sure there was exciting things. The only way it broke is if Magic was a runaway hit. And if Magic was a runaway hit, hey, they'd have bigger, they'd solve that problem later. So, you know, what happened was they printed the cards. You know, they knew they had a good game. Like I said, Peter really felt in his heart that this was something special. And obviously Richard thought it was something special. But it's a big difference between you recognizing something and it selling well.

Because one of the big things, real quick, in game design is that quality does win out to a certain extent. That if you have something good, other people will recognize you as something good. But there are so many factors that go into making a game sell that quality is just one. I mean, a big reason of Magic's success, I mean, partly is it's a good game. That helped immensely. You know, it had the art, and it did a lot of things correct. But also, Peter put in the elbow grease. Peter literally went to

every game store on the West Coast and demoed it in person to every game store. The reason it got its foothold originally was because he spent the time and energy to get the people invested, to get the game stores invested, to get the distributors invested. And obviously, the quality of magic helps carry it through,

but having something good does not necessarily, the quality will sell itself. That's not always true. You have to get people to see it. And it's very easy for people to dismiss something and never look at it. You know, I know in Hollywood that the hardest point, I mean, they used to say that, you know, the hardest part is writing a good script.

And the hardest part actually wasn't writing a good script. I was able to write a good script. The hardest part was getting someone to read your good script. You know, getting someone to recognize that you've done something good. And that in gaming, it's the same thing, that, you know, making something awesome is not just enough.

You have to make something awesome and then get people to play it to recognize it's awesome. Luckily, Magic had Peter out in force and it had the game of Magic, so those two things combined, some elbow grease and a truly, truly amazing game, made a hit.

Okay, so August, the game's exploding. So this is about the time, by the way, where I was working in a game store, a gamekeeper in Los Angeles, part-time, because I needed to get out of the house. I was writing, I was doing freelance stuff, and I was doing a lot of pitches, but I was going stir-crazy being alone. So I decided I needed to get out of the house. Ended up a job in a game store. So people started coming into the game store. This was in August.

I was on the West Coast, obviously. I was in Los Angeles. And they're like, have you heard of this game called Magic? Or this game with cards? Sometimes people don't even know the name of it. That's the best part, is they would describe it to me. It's this thing. And, you know, they just heard about it.

And Magic early on had this interesting quality in which everything just sold out. The second Magic came in, it would sell out, you know. And so people would come in. They were looking for it. And Magic early on had this interesting quality in which everything just sold out. The second Magic came in, it would sell out. And so people would come in, they were looking for it. Did we have it? We were a game store. Did we have it? And I had never heard of it. I was very fascinated. And so finally, in late August, I went to a game convention in Los Angeles called, I believe, OrcaCon. L.A. has a couple gaming conventions that happen every year. And there, I saw this game for sale, so I bought some. In fact, I did exactly what Richard predicted. I spent about $30, $40, and I bought, or maybe it's not like $20.

I bought a starter and three boosters. And I figured, okay, whatever, $20, $30, that's about what you spend on a game. And I opened it up, and someone there helped teach me how to play, although the person who taught me did not do a great job of teaching me. I was very confused. He did teach me to spread my cards out, though,

because he had heard of this card that you could flip in the air if it landed on your card and destroy it. So play your cards far apart. That was very funny. So Chaos Orb, even then, had its... So once again, one of the things that Wizards did in the early days

is Wizards said they wanted to create word of mouth, and they didn't publish information about the game. For example, they didn't give card lists. There was no official listing of what the cards were. Now, there was a magazine called Shadis. Shadis was a

role-playing, mostly dedicated role-playing games. Shadis did their best guess and made a card list. They talked to dealers and opened cards and whatever. They made a list. The list was mostly accurate. It was wrong on some of the rarities. They missed on some rarities. Now, remember, the other thing about the early Magic was...

Oh, and something to explain. So, they were trying to create a sense of mystery and they didn't want people knowing where things came from. Now, one of the things I've always claimed is that there's an island on the rare sheet and that the island was there to confuse people so they wouldn't know where their rare was.

And that's not completely true. I found out after I stated that there's a guy named Chris Page who's part of the original East Coast Playtesters that along with Scaffoli, Jim Lynn, and Dave Petty made Antiquities and Ice Age and Alliances and Fallen Empires.

And he said to me, he goes, oh, you were incorrect. I mean, partly it was a sense of mystery, but the real reason there was islands on the rare sheet was they were trying to balance all the cards so all the lands showed up at the same rarity, at equal numbers. And in order to make that happen, they ended up having to put one card, one basic land

on the rare sheet for balance. And they didn't really, they were trying to think about trying to create balance, but they weren't thinking about, oh, you know, people would recognize they get a rare and then they'd realize they didn't get a rare. Because at the time, like, well, we're not going to say what the rares are. And so early on, the idea was that they wanted this mystery. And that early magic definitely had the sense of, did you hear

about this game? And so, anyway, oh, actually, I'm missing my start up a little bit. Before I went to Orcon, I went to San Diego Comic Con, which was in August, later August, in San Diego. It was after Gen Con.

Nowadays it's before Gen Con, but back then it was after Gen Con. And it was at San Diego Comic Con that I saw Magic for the first time. Now, there was none for sale, or at least I couldn't find any for sale, but I found someone who owned some cards, and she let me look at her deck of cards, and I was fascinated.

And something about magic, when you're holding your hands, you see the cards, you see the pictures, there's something, I mean, there's much, there's much magic in magic, if you will. But one of the things that, I don't know, is really compelling is the cards themselves, just holding

the cards, looking at the cards, is really, it grabs you, and it's exciting. Anyway, I got to see the cards for the first the cards, looking at the cards is really, it grabs you and it's exciting. Um, anyway, I got to see the cards for the first time at San Diego Comic-Con. Then I bought them at Orcon and then I had so much fun. I'm like, oh, I'm going to get more. So I went to the store and the guy laughs at me like, oh yeah. Uh, I, he goes, I mean, the store I'd went to was a store UCLA, and they had carried Magic, but he's like, look, we get in and it's gone. So he told me when the next shipment was going to happen, what we all know now as Beta.

So what happens is, in Magic, is they printed Alpha, but there were a bunch of mistakes. Now, for those that don't know, Alpha left off two cards. Silk Protection Black and Volcanic Island were accidentally left off the sheets. And so what they decided to do was they wanted to fix that. They wanted to put those two cards on. And by adding one more picture for each basic land, they were able to get the card numbers up over 300.

I think to 303, so they could announce over 300 cards. So Beta fixed some things. Now, also, there's a whole bunch of misprints. See if I can remember some off the top of my head. Elvish Archers was listed as a 1-2 instead of a 2-1. Orcish Oriflame and Orcish Artillery

were both listed as 1-R, 1 and a red, where Orcish Artillery was supposed to be 1-red-red, and Orc Orcish Artillery was supposed to be one red-red, and Orcish Orphan was supposed to be three red. So three colors mana and a red mana. The Red Elemental Blast was mistakenly labeled as an instant rather than an interrupt, although ironically later it would go back to becoming an instant.

So it's an errata that got undone. Later, it would go back to becoming an instant. So it's an errata that got undone. There were a lot of examples where instead of having the mana symbol, it would have the letter that was represented by the mana symbol. So instead of saying, you know, black, black, black, it would say BBB. They did a fine replace at one point. And so the word discarded sometimes, instead of being the word discarded, the word card would be all capital letters, so like discarded.

Because I believe they used card as in card name, and that was capitalized. Anyway, there's some global pasting that... So anyway, as you can tell, Wizards had never done printing like this before. And so Alpha was just riddled with mistakes. I mean, a lot was correct, but there were a lot of mistakes. As I get into 1994 in my next podcast, one of the early things of Magic is how many mistakes were made in printing. But anyway, they decided to make Beta. So Beta put in Volcanic Island and put in Circle of Protection Black.

Which, by the way, I thought Circle of Protection Black missing was, like, black was so evil that white could not stop it. I thought it was, like, done on purpose. I didn't realize that they mistakenly left it out. I mean, Volcanic Island was too rare for me to notice that it was missing. I think I only had one or two dual lands in the early days, early on. What else mistakes were there? There was a, I mean, and there's a lot of

subtle little things like Island Sanctuary in Alpha prevents damage from things that don't have flying or island walk

but includes your things. So you use Arcus Artillery and it wouldn't damage you because of the Island Sanctuary. There's a bunch of little things.

They went through and cleaned up some of the text on some of the cards. So there's a bunch of things. Oh, Cyclopean Tomb was missing a mana cost. It just didn't have a mana cost. Anyway, so Beta came, they fixed a bunch of the mistakes, and they put it out. So this time, okay, this time they made even more than they made last time. So this time they were sure they had enough for six months. Gone in a week.

In fact, what happened was, for me personally, is I showed up the day that it was coming in, before the store opened, sat in a line, because other people also knew it was coming in. Now, luckily, I was able to buy a whole bunch. I actually bought two boxes of starters and two boxes of boosters. Oh, real quick, for those that might not know, when Magic first came out, it came out, starters were a box of 60 cards that came with a rulebook, and then boosters were just 15 cards, but there was no rulebook. So you were supposed to start with the starter, it had the rulebook in it. Now, also, by the way, the original starter, for people that don't know, the back of the Magic thing is the front of a spell book. And the box it originally came in, the sides were pages.

Like, the box sort of sold that it was a spell book. And that it showed you the back of the card was the front of the box, which was the little color circle. And that's supposed to be the cover of a tome. And the box did a better job because on the side there were pages and there was a bookmark, and it did a better job of selling that to you. Also, you'll notice in the back of the card is the word Deckmaster. The idea originally was they were so excited by Magic

that Peter believed that they were going to make a line of trading card games. Now, Peter was correct. Magic was going to be a big success, and they would go on to make some other trading card games in the Deckmaster line. Jihad, which would later become Vampire the Eternal Struggle. It first got put out as Jihad, and then the name got changed. Also, Netrunner, I think, was put out as a Deckmaster game. I'm not sure of Battletech when it came out.

Was or was not a Deckmaster game. Anyway, that was put on the back. Early on, by the way, also, by the way, there's a pin mark on the back. I don't know if we've ever talked about that before. That someone actually had a pin mark on the card and nobody noticed and got printed and just, it sort of

stayed. So, beta goes up. They think they have a six-month supply. Gone in a week. So they have to go back, and then they're going to scramble. Now, the idea had always been that they wanted to do a limited run, which originally was called Magic the Gathering Limited Edition. Now it's called Alpha and Beta because there are two different runs

and that there's enough differences between them. Also, Alpha had the rounded corners. Beta went to the modern card that we have today. And since there's enough difference between them, we ended up calling them Alpha and Beta. But technically, the whole thing was supposed to be Magic the Gather Limited Edition. And then the plan was to do an Unlimited Edition, which came out later that year. In fact, it came out in December. So August was when the game came out, Alpha came out. October is when they put out Beta, which disappeared right away. And then December, they put out Unlimited.

And the idea of Unlimited was, ironically, the plan was, well, we're just going to be putting this game out. Unlimited ended up being a bad name since it was not Unlimited. But Unlimited meant that it was sold in larger numbers than Unlimited was going to be sold in. The idea was to sort of make the first ones collectible. So the idea in the early days was the first one would always be in black border, and any repeating would be in white border. So Unlimited, which came out in December, was beta again, but in white border.

There was one change in Unlimited which was one of the arts got corrupted, and so they had a change on Plateau, and they had to change the art because they lost the original art through some data corruption. Anyway, but other than, I think, Plateau, I think that, oh, there were a few artist mistakes. The wrong artist got credited for things,

and I think Unlimited corrected that as well. So Unlimited has a few tiny changes, but all the cards are the same. There's no card differences. And I think all the mistakes in card text have gotten fixed, meaning the mistakes that were in Unlimited were outside of that. So Unlimited came out. Now, they were

willing to... The idea on Alpha and Beta was they had one print run, they were done. Unlimited was, oh, we were going to have multiple print runs. And so they printed what they thought, as much, they were done. Unlimited was, oh, we were going to have multiple print runs. And so they printed what they thought, as much as they could basically. In fact, early Magic is them printing as much as they could, making a bunch of money, taking that money,

printing as much as they could, and just keep going. And it took almost two years before they printed too much. They made more than there was demand. It took a while to even get to the point where they were able to make that many cards. Early Magic was just gobbling up. People were discovering it. It was growing at such, you know, it was like a

forest fire. It was just growing at such a fast rate. It started on the West Coast, but then Gen Con happened, and slowly East Coast started getting it, and people, game suppliers who had been at Gen Con, then they wanted it, and it just started spreading across the U.S., and then eventually, not until 94, but it would be printed in foreign languages.

I'll get to that when I get to the 1994 podcast. But anyway, so now we're in December. Unlimited came out. Once again, it sells out almost instantaneously. It was also at this time, I'm pretty sure, I did not, I think this is 1993, I did not look this one up. They put out something called the Collector's Edition, which was all the Magic cards,

but with gold borders on them, on front and back, gold borders. Or actually, just on back. It was a Magic back, but with gold borders. And it was one of every card, and it was called the Collector's Edition. I actually managed to buy two of them way back when. And it was fun, because it gave you access

to play with all the cards, I didn't have all the cards and so it was kind of a neat way my dad and I used to take it, shuffle it up because it came with land it literally was all the sheets cut together and then we would shuffle it up and we would play with it it was great fun, it was fun to play it just gave you access to all the cards

which is so easy to do anymore actually it wasn't easy then because it was printed in very very short supply It gave you access to all the cards, which is so easy to do anymore. Actually, it wasn't easy then, because it was printed in very, very short supply. I just happened to be in the know. I was working at the game store. And so, actually, maybe it came out in 1994. Anyway, the last item of 1993, because I know this came out in 1993, was Arabian Nights. So here's what happened is Magic is a smash runaway hit.

They had not anticipated that. They had not anticipated. So Peter went to Richard and said, oh my goodness, okay, we've got to make another set. We've got to make a set. So Richard quickly put together a set. And now Richard had been thinking,

I mean, Magic had been made many years earlier. So Richard had been stewing for a while and thinking about ideas. So even though he had to quickly make a set, he had a lot of ideas. Um, and so Richard was inspired by a comic, uh, Sandman 50, I believe. Um, which was about the, the Arabian nights that, you know, a thousand and one Arabian nights. So there's a classic book. Um, it basically started, um, I believe, uh, the original book was Persian, but then slowly with time, it started taking in, you know, myths from all over the Arab world. And it became sort of just like a lot of the grim stuff borrowed like fairy tales from Europe. This did the same thing in which it took a lot of the Middle Eastern sort of fables and things, if you will,

and sort of put them all together in a book. And Richard was inspired by this book to make a set. So nowadays we do sets inspired by, you know, so Theros takes Greek mythology as a jumping off point, but we make our own world inspired by Greek mythology. No, Arabian Nights was exactly that world. Aladdin, Sinbad, Ali Baba, Sherazade, all the characters were exactly those characters.

Now note that legendary creatures didn't exist yet. They wouldn't exist until 1994 in Legends. So Richard made cards that had the flavor of being unique. It was Aladdin, it was Alibaba, it was Sinbad, but there was no legendary creatures yet, so they didn't have that distinction. Now Richard in Arabian Nights messed around with a bunch of things. He messed around with lands that did different things, because in Alpha, all lands just made mana, but all of a sudden, lands were doing other

things. There were lands that didn't produce mana. He messed around a lot more with mana costs and with drawbacks. It was really, I mean, Alpha had a lot of top-down stuff because he took individual cards and tried to find top-downness of them.

But Arabian Nights, you know, sort of did that even more so. Like, here are characters directly from stories. What would Aladdin do? What would Sinbad do, you know? And then he also went and, you know, those djinns and efreetz, and he tried very hard to sort of capture

the kind of creatures that would exist in this world. And at the same time, Richard really started experimenting on kind of where you could go with magic. And so what happened is Arabian Nights actually came out, I believe, in two... There were two printings of Arabian Nights.

The first one came out in December of 1993, and the second one came out in January of 2000. Sorry. First one came out in December of 1993, the second one came out in January of 1994. So, and the 1993 one, there was a mistake in the printing, and that certain cards came out too dark,

or the mana bubbles and the amount of mana that went in them didn't overlap. Another funny thing, by the way, was there was a card called Aladdin's Lamp, and at the time, they couldn't get the 10 inside the circle, because it cost 10. And rather than make it cost 9, they ended up making two circles that were 5, saying it cost 5, and then it cost 5. That was the solution at the time. Oh, another important story is,

so Arabian Nights... Sorry. Arabian Nights went out so fast that... So Beverly Marshall Sailing was the editor. She was the first editor, one of the earliest employees, and for a long time

was the lead editor at Wizards. She realized at the last minute that they hadn't done any flavor text. And so the night before it went to press, she had two books of Arabian Nights that she went through, and all the quotes were Beverly in one night picking out all the flavor texts. Oh, and then, and also importantly, is originally Arabian Nights was going to have a different color back.

Richard's original vision for the game was that each version of the game would be its own thing. So, for example, the first game that came out was Magic the Gathering. The second game that they were going to put out was going to be called Magic Arabian Nights. Not Magic the Gathering Arabian Nights, Magic Arabian Nights. It would have its own back and be its own game

and Richard understood that people could mix and match them he wasn't really concentrated on the idea that oh you'll be able to tell what set it came from and Scaf Elias, one of these cosplay testers who at the time was one of the earliest people to go work in R&D said to him, this is crazy, people are going to want to mix

their stuff together, why are we if he makes the back different it's kind of implying you're not supposed to mix them together. And we want people to mix them together. And so Scaf managed to convince everybody that it was a mistake. In fact, Scaf once told me that he thought the most important... This is the guy who created the Pro Tour, by the way.

Scaf told me that what he considers his most important contribution to magic was keeping the back the same. So I find that interesting. But anyway, Arabian Knights came out, sold out instantaneously, but then it came out again, the second one came out

in 94, sold out instantaneously. Remember, for a while, like, if you wanted Magic, you know, you just had to be there. You had to be there when it came out. I mean, the reason I ended up getting Arabian Nights was in my game store, I convinced my game store to start ordering it.

And when Arabian Nights came in, the store got four boxes of Arabian Nights. And I said to my boss, I said, how much can I have? I would like some of this. And he said to me, you can have as much as you want. So I was like, okay. It only existed in the store because I bugged them to get it in the store. So I ended up saying, okay, I will

buy two boxes and I will sell two boxes. And my thought process was, you know, it wouldn't be there if I hadn't got it. And so that way I would, I will take half from me and I'll give half to the store, which sold out very fast. It's funny because I later found out like the state of Montana, I got a box. So like I purchased twice the state of Montana. It's funny, by the way, I opened one box, and I saved the other box, which I would later sell many years later. I thought I was going to open both boxes, but once I opened up the first box,

and I realized how special it was, I decided I was going to hold on to it, because I didn't know quite... I knew magic was kind of becoming this exciting thing, and so in retrospect, I wish I'd opened that second box. I don't know. Anyway. Financially, it was not a bad call. But anyway.

I always felt guilty that I didn't sell more Ruby Knights. But I was very excited. I felt I had willpower. I didn't buy all four boxes. But anyway, that, my friends, is 1993. So to recap, Magic gets shown off at Origins in July, it comes out on August 5th in

Celts for the first time, it premieres at Gen Con as it's sort of big debut, where it makes a big splash, October Beta comes out December Unlimited comes out and December Raving Nights comes out and that my friends, was the very first year of Magic's life.

So, not next week, but I will continue this series, and next time, obviously, I'll pick it up with 1994. Anyway, thanks for joining me today. I hope you guys enjoyed this little dip into Magic history. People really like the 20 minutes in,

sorry, 20 years in 20 minutes, so I hope 20 years and 20 podcasts goes equally as well. By the way, I'm not going to stop at, I will keep going. How many years it takes me to get this thing done.

As, you know, I will keep going until I get up to the modern year. And then probably I will continue once those years are done. So this will be an ongoing,

this is not a series that's going to end necessarily. It'll end when the podcast ends, which hopefully won't be for a while. So anyway, thank you guys for joining me, but I have to go right now

because it is 2013 and it's time to be making magic.