Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 308: Civilization and Magic: The Gathering

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

Friend of the show Shivam Bhatt features this week as we talk about two gaming topics dear to his heart: Sid Meier's Civilization and (by patron request of segment guest Bill Nielsen) Magic: The Gathering.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, I get schooled. Hooray! Hi, everyone, welcome to another pandemic protocol, protocol, protocol, episode of

Retronauts, I am Jeremy Parrish. And once again, I am recording remotely far away, more than six feet away from everyone else. And as I've been doing during this time of not being able to get together with other people in the studio, I am doing this more or less as a kind of one-on-one conversation, which, you know, that's challenging in its own way. And it doesn't create the usual sort of lively group banter that comes up with a standard recording format. But it does allow me to go into topics that would, that would, you know, kind of be tough for me and for Bob to tackle as full episodes because they're on topics that are either, you know, not familiar to us or else are fairly small

specific topics that maybe couldn't support a full episode of conversation. So this is another two-segment episode. Although honestly, uh, the reason this one's the segment approach, as opposed to a full episode is not because these topics could not support a full episode. Quite the contrary. And in fact, we'll probably revisit these topics in some capacity at some point in the future. But they are shorter episode segments because I don't know anything about these topics. And fortunately, we have someone on the line who happens to understand both. He grocks them. He thoroughly lives them. He breathes them. Introduce yourself, please. And why are you here? What is it about these things that you love so much? Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for that

wonderful and glowing introduction. My name is Shivampat, and my words are backed with nuclear weapons, as we used to say in the olden days. And Jeremy, you've brought me on here today because these are perhaps my two most favorite passions in the history of my entire life. Civilization and Magic the Gathering, which you might think are unrelated, and really they kind of are, but they're both in-depth strategy games that have a wide array of replayability and of just persistence

and also the ability of emergent gameplay, of being able to create your own stories as you go along. And both of these games have this addictive quality about them where you just want to keep playing. You want to keep jamming the next game. You want to keep going until the sunrises

over your window and you realize you've been playing for the last seven, 12, four days. And it's just these are just some of the most brilliantly designed games, I would say ever, really. And there's actually probably more in common than you would think, but I would much rather just treat them individually for the glory that they are. Yeah.

Well, you know, as it happens, Shevim is not just someone who likes these games. You actually host a Magic the Gathering podcast on the same network as Retronauts, the Greenlit Podcast Network. So you're the guy to go to to talk about these things. And it's funny because I've talked about games. you on the show to do something with civilization, or maybe you've talked about getting me getting some on the show. I've been begging you to let me do civilization on retronaut for

15 years. I don't know if it's quite that long, but the show hasn't actually been around that long, so it's very, very prescient of you. But yes, it's something that's been that's been kind of bandied about for quite a while. And with the move to these remote segments, I thought, you know, this is a great opportunity to bring Shevenman, because I don't know if I can find a full roundtable of people who can really talk about SIV, but I can definitely go one to one and just like basically give the floor to shoot them. And then around the same time, we got a patron request to do an episode where someone would come in. I just put one of our new pandemic era tiers and take part in a segment talking about a topic which happened to be Magic the Gathering.

And I'd like to say that I had the genius immediate revelation like, oh, now I can do both at once. But actually, that wasn't the case. I'd been kind of talking with She even when trying to figure out a time. And then in the second segment, Bill, you'll meet him, everyone, once he's on the show. He made his request and I was trying to set up a time slot with him. And they both fell on the same weekend. And I said, oh, well, gee, why don't I get the Magic the Gathering podcast guy on the Magic the Gathering segment? So it just kind of worked out. Like, as most things do in my life, It didn't have anything to do with me being any kind of particular master plan or genius. It's just I kind of stupidly lucked into something.

You know, we take serendipity where it comes, right? Well, there's, it always seems to happen for me. So I guess I just lived a charmed life. But yes, we are here to talk about two very, very meaty, chewy games. And there are things that I've never really spent much time with. And I did a fair amount of reading on both topics before this and, you know, watching YouTube videos. but neither of these are topics that you can just like, you know, when we do an episode on a licensed NES game, you know, like a survey of diehard games or Robocop games or something, it's easy to

like boot up a ROM and play, you know, five minutes of Robocop and say, well, I know what this game is about, but you can't do that with civilization and you can't do that with Master of Magic of the Gathering. So yeah, it's definitely, this is a case where I have some awareness of these things, but it's really going to be, you know, as much an educational experience for me as for everyone else. And that actually was kind of the idea behind retronauts originally, like exploring game history. Find experts who are really good at things and then have them teach you things. Yes, that's how it's supposed to work. And so we're actually getting to primal retronauts with this, like the real, the chewy core of it. But we're going to start with civilization,

specifically Sid Meyers, Civilization, the very first one. We might touch on the sequels, but I really feel like there is enough history here and certainly enough game that this is a good 45-minute conversation in the end of itself. Because I think if you want to talk about the other games, that would be full-on, like, I mean, each of these games could easily cover a 45-minute segment by themselves. But Civ-1, I think, deserves to have its own kind of just isolation for the time being. we can talk about the others if we get the chance. Yeah, I feel the same way.

I feel like a game this influential and this innovative really, you know, deserves at least its own standalone segment, if not more. Because it really did kind of, it didn't invent the 4X genre, strategy genre, but it definitely kind of served as the template for everything that came after. Yeah, but I mean, it was not the first 4X, but it was definitely the absolute most influential one. the biggest one to hit the popular kind of zeitgeist, and it definitely created a template that everything since has followed. And it's funny because in preparation for this podcast,

I found an old ROM of SIV 1, and I fired it up again just to see, okay, I want to, you know, I've been playing SIV 6 a lot lately. I want to make sure I can still go back and talk about Siv 1. And it turns out some muscle memories just don't go away. And I definitely played Siv 1 for a good six to eight hours last weekend just kind of jamming through it and I'm remembering how this game worked and boy it felt good again. It felt like riding a bike that you haven't seen since you were 12 years old

and it's just like whoa this is this is just pure old school civilization but if you're up for it, shall we get started? Yes, let's First of all, we should probably talk about, well, actually, let's talk about how you discovered civilization. Like, where did you first play it? And at what point did you realize, oh, this is part of who I am. Okay, so this is an interesting story.

because, well, I mean, I guess it's interesting to me and if you know who I am, that when I was growing up, I grew up in California and I moved to central Massachusetts. And when I was in Massachusetts, I was kind of a lonely kid in the middle of like, you know, a very rural part of the state. And I made friends of like the one and only other Indian guy who was in my elementary school at the time because our parents were the only Indians in like 40 miles and they wanted to actually get to know each other. And I would go to this house to go and just hang out and play. And he introduced me to a game called Dragon Quest. And then when we ran out of Dragon Quest, he introduced me to these novels called Dragonlance. And when we ran out of Dragon Lance, his dad brought home a game that one of his coworkers had been playing, a bootleg on a 3.5-inch floppy disk that was called Civilization. And I fired this up, and we're sitting in my friend's basement, and we're looking at this game.

And first thing that comes up is this map of the world. And you're like, what? What's going on? And here's the thing about SIV. Siv, when you look at it, is an incredibly complicated game on the surface. Like, if you don't have a manual, if you don't have kind of an understanding

of like economic structures and trade and just like at least basic math, this game is really, really daunting. It doesn't have a very good tutorial and the text was in a weird font and it was hard to read. And my friend's bootleg copy was corrupt. So all the graphics for the parts

that had actual like, you know, which would show you what the cities were or stuff like that. Those were all just boxes of like purple and magenta lines just showing up because whatever the graphics file for the cityscaped were corrupt. So I'm looking at an abstract map of the world, which I'm in like fifth grade or fourth grade. I have no idea what any of this stuff means.

I don't have a manual, so I don't know what any of the icons mean. So I had to brute force my way through one of the most complicated games of all time. And it just completely hooked me. because you start off, you have a settler. This is like, you know, a covered wagon. You're going around. And the first thing I did was I ran my settler into a barbarian.

And the barbarian killed my settler and I lost the game. It was turn three. Right. So you sit there and I'm like, okay, well, hang on. I have to do something with a settler. So I hit B on the keyboard. I built a city. Suddenly I had a city and I was like, I've chosen Indians obviously because why not?

Why wouldn't I? And lo, there is New Delhi staring at me. And I'm like, whoa, I've got a city here. What are these weird icons? And slowly and steadily, as I went, step by step, I figured out, okay, these weird shield-looking things are money. These, like, kind of weird-looking wiggly, like, yellow ones are food. And when they turn black, that means you don't have enough and your people start dying.

You know, so it was slowly and steadily, I brute-forced my way into understanding, A, what it meant to have surplus money, what it meant to have a deficit of money, what it meant to have not enough food to feed your sieves, how to get more. food, how to build out your irrigation roads, going forward, building new cities, running into other people, taking over their cities. And it was just this incredibly

emergent, vibrant education I got in what it meant to try to, like, I mean, what it meant to learn, how, what it meant to actually just understand how to take an information you've never seen before and figure it up. And this is the first game I've ever had. I mean, people had these kind of revelations where like,

Oh, yeah, and Mario, I figured out when I ran to the Goomba to die, I should jump over it or I jump on it or something. That was a kind of eye-opening revelation I had with civilization, where every step I took, I learned something new. I learned something I did wrong, how to back it up, how to save my game and reload it if I just flubbed really badly. And in this game, in this process, we're talking, I played for in the, the game came out in 1991. I must have started playing it around 1992 or so. So it's been almost 30 years of civilization I've been playing. And in that time, there's still things to learn and there's still things to just discover. And this game is just like, it was transformative to me.

It was a game that taught me that, first off, I'm not an athletic person. I'm not a very Twitch person. I'm not good at playing platformers very much, although lately I've gotten better. I mean, I was good at reading. I was good at taking time to analyze positions. and I was good at figuring out how to think ahead three or four or five moves. And this was like playing chess, but it was playing chess that changed every time you played. The world changed every time you played.

The civilizations changed every time you played. And it blew my mind. And then I discovered, you know, like SIV 2 and SIV 3. And one of the funny things is when I was working at one up underneath you at the time, SIF 4 had just been previewed. And I got the chance to write the preview for that. And they were like, we're introduced religion into this game, and we're going to have, like, here the symbols we're using. And I was looking like, what is that weird elephant thing? They're like, oh, we couldn't figure out one for Hinduism.

So we put that. And so instead, I sent them like an OM symbol that I had. I'm like, here, use this. This is a Hindu symbol. And that's the exact asset that ended up being used in SIF 4. And so I was like, holy crap, this game that I've played literally tens of thousands of hours of I finally got to, you know, participate in and actually add my mark to. So it kind of became like a joke among people that, oh, like, if they ever find a way to, you know, few streetfighter in civilization, she even was just going to fall off the face of the earth and you're never going to see him again. And this game was just kind of one of those like life-changing eye-opening moments to me.

I remember sitting down one night at like, you know, it's like Friday night. I'm sitting down at 7 o'clock and I'm playing Underworld. I've got the Underworld sound like the Underworld TD. is on the My CD player, and it's playing the song Rez, which is like an eight and a half minute long, just techno meditation. And my CD had a scratch on it, and there was

like a little loop of electronic music that would just kind of like play over and over again for a long stretch of the song. And I'm playing SIF, and that loop was the exact where the scratch of the CD was, and literally listened to that song for four and a half hours before I realized

that something had gone wrong, and that time was like, that this eight and a half minute long time was not just going for eight and a half minutes because in civilization I just got completely absorbed into this world that I had created. So basically

you're saying there's a lot there. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's the thing that really, I actually find civilization intimidating in the process of reading up about the game for this episode, you know, I looked things like the list of advances you can create and there's such a

like a chain of of effects. There's like this real causality based, you know, built around your actions. The things that you choose to do open up new possibilities. And depending on where you put your emphasis, you open up completely different possibilities. And like the direction of your your civilization's evolution goes in completely different directions. And that's like there's just so much to see there. Like there is no, you know, from what I understand, there is no best strategy. There's, there's, there are many valid solutions for playing the game. And just kind of from what I understand, you need to adjust your strategy somewhat, depending on which race you play as first. Like if you play as someone like the Babylonians, you know, you have to take a different approach

than if you play as, is it the Zulus or the Aztecs, who are much more, like, they're more aggressive and they're better at combat and warfare. Whereas the Babylonians, not so much. they're better more from, you know, again, this is secondhand, but they're like, yeah, they're, they're more built around research and discovery and technology. Okay, so, so let me, let me stop you there for a second and kind of build off what you're saying here, which is a very civilization thing to do, right?

So in SIV, there were, there were 14 civilizations. I'm going to be, I'm going to be thinking about the different directions this conversation could have gone for the next hour. So the thing is, a lot of that differentiation in terms of your play sound. stuff, definitely is more for the later games. Like, in SIVs 3 onwards, each of your races has, like, more attributes and more things that lean you in a particular direction. In SIV 1, the main thing that helped you find a direction of how you wanted to do it

was simply, what are the other AI civilizations in your game? So, like, there were seven, there were 14 civilizations, of which seven could be in your game. Because of the way this is a board game, there were like seven colors. So each color was basically taken by. two civilizations and you got one or the other. So, for instance, Babylonians, which you brought up, were green. The other green sieve was the Zulu.

So if you were playing like the Indians, the Indians and the Mongols were both a gray color. So if you're playing a game as the Indians, for instance, you would not have the Mongols show up in your game. But you would see a green city over there, and it could either be a Zulu city or a Babylonian. And if it's a Zulu city, you know that, okay, I'm in for a lot of warfare because the Zulu AI is very aggressive. and very expansionist, and he's going to come knock you on my door. So Civilization I is not really based on real geography in that case. I mean, it would make sense for you to have Mongols and Indians, you know, in pretty close proximity to each other and be able to encounter each other as opposed to like the Zulus.

Right. And it was a limitation of the system that they built it on. They were like, look, we can only have maximum seven sieves running. And like later on, for instance, in later sives, they're like 40, 50, civilizations you can choose from or whatever and so for instance the races you had here they kind of

okay so it's important to say straight up civilization one is definitely a western colonial idea of like civilization so like for instance the races you have are definitely Eurocentric more you've got England, France, Germany Russia America as a

civ right like you've got Babylonians Zulu is the only African Zulu and Egypt were the African Sives. You had China, India, Mongolia, and the Romans. And, yeah, basically, I mean, there was

some more, like the Aztecs were the one like Native Americans from the Americas there. Later, Sivs did a better job of balancing that. But each of these civilizations was like, for instance, you could be like, I'm Abraham Lincoln of the Americans or, you know, I'm

Mao Zedong of the Chinese or Mohandaz Gandhi of the Indians. And they had a mode where you could play on Earth and start in your real world civilizations. But realistically, they just, they chose seven sieves, or 14 sieves, gave them colors kind of arbitrarily just more out of AI gameplay choice than out of real world like implications. Because obviously, like, you can't have the Mongols and the Chinese share the same color because they're next to each other. That would make sense. The Mongols and Indians would have met each other. Obviously, the Mughal Empire exists.

that was a Mongol-oriented Indian Empire. But they were kind of just going for looking at the map and seeing how best they could broaden it out. Now, I probably wouldn't have picked, like, France and Germany and England. Like, come on, what are you trying to say here? But it was still, oh, yeah, they also had ancient Greece. So Greece and England charit color. Did they get the Dutch in there too?

I mean, it might as well get all the European embers. No, the Dutch came in Civ, too. Okay. And they had, they were obviously very good at me, building naval, naval boats and stuff. The thing about it, it starts in 4,000 BC. So when you're Queen Elizabeth, and she's got all of her cavemen surrounding her in 4,000 BC,

it's pretty funny. Because, like, the main character doesn't change their clothing, even though your government's behind you, change their graphics. So you'll see, like, you know, Caesar standing there with a bunch of ancient Egyptians representing that you've got monarchy. And it's just, it's real funny. But you're right that the tech tree was one of the main innovations of civilization.

The idea that as you're going, you can spend money either to do taxes to get money for your treasury, which would help you buy units or buy buildings and stuff, or you could put your money into science research. And in science research, you could get things like pottery or ceremonial burial or spaceflight, nuclear fission, that sort of thing. And as you go through the track, it would kind of lean you in a direction like, oh, I can't have ironworking without bronze working first. And if you have bronze working, you can get phalanxes, which are a good defensive unit. And they would kind of lean you in a direction of like, do I want to be an aggressive player? I should start getting ironworking so I can get swordsmen or getting chivalry so I can get knights and go out and fight people. or do I want to be more of a cultural base and research based

and then you would go for things like, you know, construction or aqueducts or whatever to help kind of build out your civilizations. The thing about Civ I is that there were a couple of world victories you can get. The easiest victory was obviously destroy all the other civilizations. If you take them over, you win. The other way is if you go all the way to the top of the tech tree, you could win by doing a space race,

which is by the time you get to the end, you can do the Apollo program and then research a bunch of things that would let you build a rocket chip and fly off to Alpha Centauri and there you've escaped Earth, you've won. And that is that is where Sid Meyers Alpha Centauri comes into play, right? It's the direct sequel to Civilization. Well, it's not necessarily a direct sequel, but it was kind of like, hey, Civ 1, Civ 2, we get to go to Alpha Centauri. Okay, well, let's make a game about now you're in Alpha Centauri. And Alpha Centauri, obviously, one of the great 4X games of all time. but civilization yeah that's kind of where he definitely got that idea and they're not necessarily straight sequels but they're it's definitely spiritual like six hatch right to the game later sieve games would introduce things like cultural victory religious victory political victory

stuff like that but in simple one it was you can have the science victory or you can have the combat victory so i was going to say it seems like the game really pushes you toward the combat side of things but you can have a viable build and you can survive as a civilization without necessarily going out and being on the war path and trying to conquer everyone else. Absolutely. That seems like a really difficult balance to maintain. Well, I mean, it is.

It's a challenge because you have to build up your defensive strats. You have to make sure. So one of the things is because of the way Civil One was programmed, there are a lot of just weird dice rolling that happened behind the scenes when you get attacks. And you get things like the phalanx, like I just mentioned, which is a defensive unit. if it's fortified, it starts to get multipliers of defensive strength. And if it's been fortified in the city for a very, very long time,

those multipliers are kind of unbound so that in the late game, you can have a tank attacking your city that's being defended by one phalanx, and that poor little spearman from 6,000 years ago can just spike that tank and kill it in the most hilarious and unfair way possible. And this game's math was really weird. But if you have, if you build up a defensive sieve, you can very easily coast to a science victory because once you're outracing people technologically

I mean for years and years the only way I would play the game was non-combat because I would do it combat once in a while if the situation arose but by and large I prefer doing research and building up my cities and building wonders and building a huge advanced civilization nation state

that's got just amazing glories and stuff that people want to come see because that's kind of fun to me I'm a builder more than a breaker. Right. But in Civ 1, what there was was your cities were undefended. And if you create a unit, you hit fortify. Fortify means that they're now defensive and staying in that one spot.

So when you fortify a city, a unit in your city, that unit is now protecting the city. But if you don't have a unit there, I could literally walk in and take over your city with one of my units just for free. So early on in the game, when if you're sending out explorers and combat units, you can go through. If other Sivs spawn near you, you can just destroy them just by walking and taking over the capital city before they finish building their first unit. And boom, you got it. And if you do a couple of those, then you might as well just go combat and try to take out the rest. Because Siv 1 had this neat thing where if you're playing a seven civilization game and you kill a civilization, the other Siv that is that same color, if it's early on in the game, they'll just spawn and start a new one.

So, for instance, if I destroyed the Babylonians on turn two, then the Zulus might just appear. like three turns later and just be like a brand new civilization has appeared just to kind of whoops you killed them too early let's make sure you have a challenge later but one of the other cool things is if you're deep in the heart of the game and like let's say America's got this gigantic

sprawling civilization and you take over their capital city but you don't take over like all of their other cities you can precipitate what they call it a civil war which would mean half of the cities of that nation would split off and become a brand new civilization so like I used to have a thing where like or I had a game

once where I took over Washington, D.C., and suddenly I created a civil war where America split into the Americans and the Indians. And I was like, I don't know how that works. Maybe they mean Native Americans, but I'll take it. It's hilarious. And it just makes for really, really interesting and weird scenarios you don't expect. So you mentioned that you can walk into an unprotected city, an unfortified city, and just take it over. Are there political ramifications to doing that, or is this game not quite that advanced yet. Yes, there are. Okay. Like, for instance,

if you take over a city, there will be unhappy people in there, and you have to make them happy by building temples or, you know, colosseums to give them entertainment. Or, like, happiness is one. So, yes, if you take over a city, A, other nations will get mad

at you. You've just taken over a city. B, the nation whose city you've taken over will try to take it back. They'll either fight you for it. They'll try to ransom it from you by saying, Look, I will give you 200 gold and like some resources or something if you give me my city back. Or three, you will have wiped them off the race and they'll be gone. So it does have a negative impact on you, especially if you become a warmonger and you start just taking over a lot of cities.

Other nations won't want to make deals with you. Look, one of the big things you have had was the ability for you to trade technology with each other or to sell technology for money. And other nations wouldn't trade with you if you're a warmonger who's showing off that you're going to go. go and obliterate them. And it was just really, like, later on, the trade system would become much more complex, and you would be able to do things like, okay, well, I'll give you, like, horses for 30 turns if you give me back the settler that you captured from me, you know, that sort of thing. And it's like, that's one of the core ideas of civilization is just making peace with people,

making alliances of people, and having your allies come and help you fight against their enemies, encouraging them to fight or, like, bribing them. you could send diplomats into cities and do things like destroy their wonders or their buildings that they've got you could sabotage their water supply and poison them so that you would

they would lose population in the city you could do things or if you had enough money and you sent a diplomat in there you could buy a city and bribe them and just have that city come over to your side it was just this whole kind of sub layer of the game that

when Sid Meyer built this he built this with so many like great beginning ideas for how to do us a game. Like when you think about all of the different subsystems that are into one, it is mind-blowing. It's mind-blowing how much stuff is in here. So I guess we should talk about kind of like the basics of what is a game of civilization like. Well, actually, I was going to say before we do that, I think it's good to talk about a little bit of where civilization came from.

Because in reading up on it, it seems like there had been board games. You mentioned board game earlier. You dropped the phrase. There had been board games called civilization for like a decade or so. For Sid Meyer created civilization and people had tried to adapt it and not just like random nobody's like Joe Slob over there who's like I'm going to code this on my tandy and it's going to be amazing. I'm milled out in plastic bags and Ziplocs. But no, it was like legendary designers like Daniel Bunton Barry and Don Dagglu. Like they tried their hands at turning civilization into a video game and for whatever reason they were like, eh,

I'm going to piece out and do something else. And so ultimately it's a very, very complicated game, the original one. It is. And it somehow ended up at microprose with a guy who mostly did flight simulations, which, you know, you've got simulation in the title of the genre there. But flight sims and civilization world building strategy 4X simulations, they're not really that closely connected. So it's interesting that this game ended up, you know,

ultimately coming from someone who was more. on the kind of mechanical side of game design, more about the, you know, kind of the immersive real-time simulation element as opposed to someone who specialized in turn-based strategy like Daniel Bunton Barry. Yeah, Mule was one of the big games of the time, right? Yes. Yeah, for people who don't know who she was, she designed Mule, which was one of the very first multiplayer strategy games. And I believe the first ever to have an online component, it could, you know, you could compete through modems. Yeah, in 1983.

It was insane. So she was way ahead of the curve. Yeah, Danny Buntonberry, one of the greatest designers. Yeah, like if anyone in 19, the early 80s, mid-80s could have turned civilization into a game, it would have been her,

but she ultimately switched over to other projects and never finished up her take-on civilization. Yeah. She went on to make seven cities of gold instead and Heart of Africa, which were kind of like adventure games for the C-64 and stuff like, that back in the day. But so the original SIV by Avalon Hill, a board game from 1980,

which is a game when you listen to the description of it is effectively, you understand where Sid Meyers got his ideas, right? You start with a single population token on an area. You can grow out, explore more areas, get more population, get resources to build, you know, buildings and to build units to go off and fight other people. You've got trade. I mean, when you look at the original SIV board game, it is so deeply, deeply in the heart of the civilization video games that it's almost uncanny. But it was like one of the, and it still holds up. The game is super

fun to play still. But yeah, so the thing is, so Sid Meyer and Bill Staley, who created Microprose, basically wanted to start, like you said, building flight sims. And they built F-19 stealth fighter. They did a bunch of these really cool kind of like old, old, like early PC flight sims. But Sid Meyer had also discovered SimCity and Populis, which had both come out in 1989.

And those games were some of the most seminal games ever, right? SimCity, obviously the city simulation where you can build an economy, build your roads, and kind of develop the city as you go upwards, and Populus, the God game, where you're trying to, you know, help your people and, like, build out this world while also going off and doing platformer things. The thing is, though, Microprocent also taken a bunch of people who were from Avalon Hill, which was a company that put out civilization the board game like Bruce Shelley

who is one of the great board game designers and also video game designers now and they took this idea and they started creating railroad tycoon which was basically based on this board game called 1829 which is this train sim where you're basically a baron who's running a train company you've got to make money you've got to trade resources

get back and forth you're trying to out resource everybody else and get monopolies on trading. Railroad Tycoon games super fun. But in that, between Railroad Tycoon, the Siv board game, and the original old Empire computer

games, which are also just kind of like a war game from 1977, effectively, where you're sitting there trying to just build out your empire. It was one of those old chits and hexas type of games, where you've got your little cardboard pieces and you're moving around doing all these incredibly detailed war

gaming type things. And so Sid took all of these ideas and kind of fusioned them together into this, how do we take Avalon Hill civilization and bring it to computers in a game where you have to have AI running everything else because you don't have the capacity to have multiple people playing a game

as complicated as this with the systems that we had at the time. Because obviously you would show your hand if you're sitting playing couch co-op with civilization and they would be able to see all your units and everything. You couldn't really do that. But they were able to take this idea of a one-player god game and create this civilization idea of making this board game into a reality. And the biggest thing I think they did was take the countries and give each of the nation leaders their

own kind of recognizable and identifiable AI based on what their world history was. So for instance, So kind of like a hero unit in a modern, like, defense of the ancient type clone. Yeah, as in like the type of thing that this character helps determine all of the decisions you're going to make. Right. So, yeah, like a hero character or, for instance, a legendary creature if you're building a commander deck of magic. Oh, they're getting ahead of things. That's next segment. Yeah.

So the idea was, like, for instance, if you're playing, if you run into the Aztecs and they're run by Montezuma. Montezuma is an expansionist race because obviously the Aztecs were a very expansionist people and also a race that hordes a lot of wealth because they were really rich and wealthy country. The Egyptians were a race that would be building a lot of wonders and focusing on building wonders and on trade because that's the type of people that they were, et cetera, et cetera. You got this whole kind of like, like for instance, the Greeks were very science focused. The Indians were a very population focused, trying to build a huge civilization. the Russians, the Mongols, and the Zulus are warlike. And you got this kind of idea, which would, based on who you run into, like I said earlier, would help shape the dimensions of the game that you end up playing.

And that just gave the game so much depth and replayability that when these guys were doing this, Siv had this problem that people would run into. Like, I just keep wanting to play. I keep wanting to hit next turn. And that's a good problem to have when you're a game designer. But a bad problem when you're actually trying to do things. things like school or work or living your life. Like, when a civilization game would come out, I would have to set time aside on purpose

to say that I'm just not coming up for air in a few days. So I'll see you guys later. So it's probably just as well that they only come out once every few years as opposed to on an annual schedule. Yes. The fact that sieve has come out roughly once every six or so years or something is like the greatest gift. But a sieve game being what it is, you're still playing.

I mean, everybody's like, what's your favorite sieve game? I'm like, the one I'm playing now, right? Every sieve game is so good. And Sid Meier operates on this idea of one-third, one-third, one-third, one-third, which is to say, one-third of the last game, one-third of improving on like, or like, you get rid of one-third of what was in the last game, you keep one-third of the last game, and you create one-third brand-new content. So at its core, every sieve game has this daisy-chain heritage going all the way back to

the original. So you can pick up any sieve game. and basically start playing if you've played any other Siv game. So a lot of continuity of concepts involved, even though there's constant growth and constant evolution. Yeah, which is a lot like the game itself. And I'm sorry, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say you had mentioned wanting to talk about, you know, how does the game actually play? and we sidetrack talking about kind of the heritage behind the game.

But I do think that might be a good place to kind of wrap on just to explain what does a game of civilization look like? What are you doing? I mean, yes, you're making choices, but there are, you know, kind of there's kind of a particular process to getting started with your settler and things like that. And then kind of making your choices beyond that and reaching out toward that ultimate goal of taking over the world or leaving the world. altogether. So when you fire up a SIV game, the first thing you see is you've got your covered wagon in the middle of nine squares and everything else is black. So the first part of the game is exploration.

So you say everything is black as in Fog of War? Yes, fog of war. So in Siv 1, it was all just black tiles. Later games would have actual visible fog to kind of give that idea. But basically, as you move, you would see more nine squares around you. Like, that's a visibility range of the settler unit. And really, all the units of the game, I think, until, like, flight had only, like, nine unit, the three squares around you, you get to see. So you've got your settler.

And you start off with your settler, and you're on terrain. You've got hills, swamps, plains, mountains, that sort of thing. There might be some resources out there. But effectively, you're just out there on your own. So the first thing you do is you can either move your unit or you can try to build a new city. Generally speaking, Civ 1 would start you in a place that's roughly good enough to start, but when you're better, you're like, okay, I want to find a plane that's got water access. I want to, you know, I want to be able to have a place so I can make naval ships.

I want to make sure there's good resources around me and good other places to build. So you might take a turn or two, move around. Then you build your city. The first thing you would want to do is you were given a choice, like, okay, do you want to build a combat unit, like a warrior? Do you want to build your warrior to go explore more to fortify to defend your city? or do you want to start building like a barracks to start making veteran warriors which are like twice as strong

than a normal unveteran warrior? And that's like your first thing and then the first thing it'll say is like okay now start your research. Our wise men have come together and said these are the things we can start studying. Pottery, alphabet, the wheel, you know, there's a handful of very basic

low level technologies. You can check the tech tree to see kind of like okay well if I get pottery that'll let me get a granary which lets me store food so that every time my population goes up, I don't have to start from zero, and it also helps save off starvation. Because if you build

a settler unit, which you have to do in order to develop the world and build more cities, it takes two of your population with it. So you have to start thinking like, okay, if I build a granary, then I can start building up my population. Or you can get alphabet, which opens up a whole bunch of new texts if you want to go out and start learning things

like writing, which will let you get libraries, which get more science. Or you can start building a wonder, for instance, a hanging gardens that gives you this, like, you know, bonuses to your food and to your city, like development, the pyramids, which will let you have all the government types available right away. For whatever reason, civilization has never been able to figure out what the pyramids should represent. Each single sieve game has had a different function for, like, in the first game, if you rush to the pyramids, you could get the ability to have, like, democracy or communism in, like, 4,000 BC when, all the other people are still in despotism, and each government type has bonuses and negative abilities. You have to put your civilization into a revolution in order to change the government. If you have communism, for instance, there's equal levels of corruption all the way

across your sieve, which means you can go and expand and build really far and not worry about losing your money and your food and happiness to corruption. If you have democracy, it means you can get a ton of money and food, but it's harder to go to war because your legislator will vote against you starting any preemptive war you had a republic you had monarchy etc and so I guess that's the other thing there's like building types which are like barracks granaries temples

then they're wonders they got a bunch of world wonders famous buildings because they're like wonders represent civilizations so like the great wall you could build and that would say every civilization that you run into has to offer peace to you if you're going to war with them you could get civilizations

The Library of Alexandria, which says that if two other civilizations have a technology, you get that tech for free, which means if you're behind, the Library of Alexandria would help you just skyrocket forward in the technological understanding because you never want to fall too far behind because if you've got chariots and your opponent is over there with Sherman tanks, you're just going to start eating it really, really badly. So you build your city, you build your first guy, fortify them into your city so that no random barbarian walks in, takes over your town. and then you can go and start exploring. You start clearing out space and you run into little Goody Hutts. Goody Hut are like native peoples or something that come and either give you money, give you a free technology,

give you a unit or maybe a settler or a population that goes to your first city. And so it was always amazing when I would be playing a far late game and go to an island that nobody had gone to where there had been a Goody Hut untouched since the beginning of the game and they'd be like, you know,

the poor natives of this small town have taught you the secrets of nuclear fission. And you're like, What the hell are you doing in this tiny hut? But it was so fun. You know, after you become death destroyer of worlds, you're just like, I'm out of here. Peace out. Yeah.

And obviously, we would be amiss if we didn't mention the famous glitch in Siv where Gandhi, who is set to zero, like negative 255 in terms of aggression, like super peace-loving, super, you know, don't ever attack anybody Gandhi. But if you make him mad, he rolls over because the thing is, if you make him, I'm mad by taking a city or something, or by taking over a place that he wanted to build a city or whatever it is. The game has a modifier, which is when a person gets angry, they drop into lower numbers. Well, he's already at the bottom. So it rolls all the way up to hyperaggression until, like, Gandhi comes up and says, my words are backed with nuclear weapons and I'm going to destroy.

I'm going to assault the earth with your, like, you know, after I leave you behind. and it just goes to a hyper-crazy aggression which is they left because it was just funny to see Gandhi. A little naked man with his loincloth just coming up and trying to level you. Oh man. God, they're so good.

This game is just, there's so much to it. You start building out technologies. You get horses and your horsemen can go farther than your warriors, but they're weak so they die really easily. But then you run into another civilization. And when you do, you start having in a conversation. It's like, I am Alexander

the great, I have the Greeks, I've come here in peace. And then he'd be like, we demand that you give us the secrets of ironworking. And I'm like, I'm not going to give you the secret of ironworking. Very well then, prepare your armies for war. I'm like, hang on, buddy, what's going on? And then the Greeks start attacking you. It's suddenly

you have a choice. Okay, do I want to go aggressively against him? Do I want to fortify my cities? Do I want to pacify him by say, here's 50 gold, leave me alone? Or do I want to give him ironworking and say, okay, now we're friends. And from there this whole world just develops and built out. So the choices you make obviously are going to be different every time you play, but are the choices the AI makes typically different? Does it

depend on civilization or like race or will even the same race make different choices in a given circumstance just, you know, kind of based on random elements? In Civ 1, it was based more along the, well, the AI was kind of, it gave them a direction, but it also changed. based on the things you did. Because obviously only one nation can have anyone wonder, for instance. So if you're building and you're building aggressively and you're surrounding their cities, then even Gandhi is going to start going warlike because, look, he needs to have room to expand. So he's going to start trying to take over your cities in order to get off of this, you know, rock that he's stuck on.

I mean, generally speaking, because every time you start a game of Siv, the world is generated from scratch. So where you start, where you are located, what's going on, what sort of resources are around you, those are all different. And so the AI's got like a general idea of the moves they want to make and the sorts of things they want to lean for, but it's different every time. And the difficulty level you play on changes that as well. So if you're playing at max difficulty, the AI starts with like a ton of extra text right off the bat and they're cheating and it's cheaper for them to build stuff. but if you're playing at like lower levels everybody you start off with a head start over them and there's enough that you can sit there and say like uh oh the zulus in the game

I better wipe them out right now before they come and just start you know destroying me because Sif Juan had this thing which was this mode which you could basically the best most optimal way to play if you wanted to just win was to just spam out cities and spam out tutlers and just take over as many as you can and like build as many cities as you can to get a ton of money to go and build up and just start buying, you know, soldiers to go off and destroy the rest of the planet. And for instance, if you'd like launch nuclear weapons and stuff, there would be pollution. If there was pollution too much, then there would be climate change and the coastal cities would get flooded out.

I mean, this game had everything in it. And it's so hard because every time I say something, I think of 40 other things about SIV that are just there, which is kind of the problem of the game. Yeah, exactly. It's just like unlocking advances. Yeah. All right. So to kind of wrap this one up, the segment, where would you like to see civilization go from here? I mean, there are six of them now. I'm sure at some point there will be a seventh. What would you want in that seventh game? So the thing is civilization, every game that's come out has been like groundbreaking and has been, you know, like always lauded as being one of the great games. The thing about Civ is that right now, if you look at Civ 1 and. SIF 6, they're very

different because SIV 6 is now a hexagon based game. There's tiles of six instead of squares, which were in SIV 1 through 4. And like you're building out your cities outside, like in the earlier SIV games, everything you built was within your city.

Right? Like inside the one tile of your city, everything was built out. In SIF 6, when you're building out, you have to build on the tiles next to your core city. So your cities actually start sprawling on the map and become these just immense kind of like visual representations of growing cities. So in a new forthcoming SIV game,

I would want to see them kind of build off on that more in the sense of like, I would almost want them actually to go back a few steps to SIV 5 where they've got more tactical strategy was there. Like in Siv 5 where they first introduced the hexes, you can have things like my catapult is sitting here on this tile and can launch this rock two tiles away, which can start hitting your people. So if I put him, fortify him in this mountain pass,

I can block off this mountain pass and stop you guys from coming and invading my cities from behind me. So I would be able to launch and start attacking your units before they got to me. But what I would like to see more in future sieves is more interactivity, more kind of like, I mean, you've got ways to play multiplayer.

I used to play civilization where we would email each other our turns, like email the save files, and they would get to take a turn, and then email it back to me, and I would take a turn. And we played very, I mean, It was like mailing chess moves to each other. It was super slow. But it was delightful because you still got to play with another human.

I would like to see more kind of, God, how do you say it? It's hard because every sieve is perfect. I don't know where you go from perfect. So it's a problem for Sid Meyer as opposed to you. Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to play whatever a game they want to put out, except for the ones that came out. There was a civilization series.

They made a little dumb-down version that you could play on the 3DS and then later on, like, consoles and stuff, and it's fine. Civ Revolution is what they called it. It was not my favorite, super deformed kind of. It's good if you need a quick fix. But, I mean, look, I played SIV 2 on the N-Gage, and it was still addictive. And they've just recently put Siv-6 out on the Switch, and I can't think of a game worse for my life than putting Siv-6 on the switch,

because then I could sit and play Siv wherever I am. And, frankly, the best part of SIV is being able to know that I have to sit at my PC to play, it, which means I can walk away. So what you want to see from future games is more restrictions. Yeah, I would like see Siv's... Parental lock for Sivom. Make Siv not fun so that I don't have to keep... Okay, that's not true.

They did make an unfun Siv. So they made, in 2014, they put out civilization beyond Earth, which was kind of like a reimagined version of Alpha Centauri took place on a different foreign sci-fi planet. It was kind of running on the SIV-5 engine. It was... So the thing about civilization is that it's easy to understand what pottery is.

It's easy to understand what plastic is, right? It's hard to understand what bionetic cyber mutations are or like why I need to get 14 munisophrangium to make my three-legged horse or something. And I'm like, I didn't understand anything.

And when you take SIV out of the context of the earth of giving people like grounding in our reality to be able to build off of, the game loses a whole lot. Alpha Centauri worked because it had a really good story and each of the factions was like story driven and had a really interesting kind of like balance in the way the gameplay worked. They felt like actual factions in an RTS game as opposed to just like nameless faceless sives. Right. But Siv Beyond Earth, like when you look at my Steam library, you've got Siv 5.

It's got 1,500 hours of playthrough. You've got Siv 6. It's got 2,000 hours of playthrough. In between them, Siv Beyond Earth, four hours of playthrough. so less of that is what you're saying yeah i'm like dude stick to earth don't go to space you're not good at it and just just give us more of what we want and all we want is just another turn to play all right well i think that's a plenty of said about sieve one and maybe i'll be able to actually say something in the next segment but we'll take a quick break here and jump over to

magic the gathering There are a lot of comics, book reviews and interviews with some of the greatest creators in the industry. But only one will tell you. you scientifically what the worst comic book of all time is. And the best. We've been ranking comic book stories for six years. We have a list with over a thousand comics on it and

we're adding more every month. War Rocket Ajax on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Running Diagnostics in three, two. Men like that is a podcast. Good so far? That really sucks. Oh, no. Shut her down. Shut her down. They thought they could make something funny. They can't do anything. They can't do.

Before vision. We can. Listen to men like that. There are a lot of podcasts with comic book reviews and interviews with some of the greatest creators in the industry, but only one will tell you scientifically what the worst comic book of all time is. And the best. We've been ranking comic book stories for six years. We have a list with over a thousand comics on it and we're adding more every month. Or Rocket Ajax on the Greenlit Podcast Network. And we're back from our exciting commercial break. And this time we have a new person on the line. and sheave-em-butt is still shevim-butt.

But there is another person who is the other. Introduce yourself. Hey, everyone. My name is Bill Nielsen, and I can't dance. I can't talk. The only thing about me is the way I planes walk. Wow, you got a Genesis and a video game or Magic the Gathering reference in there. So that's props to you, sir.

But yes, this was your topic request. And again, you know, I knew I couldn't do justice. to the topic of Magic the Gathering myself. So I called in the big guns. That's why Sheevam is here. But we are going to talk about, you know, even though Magic the Othering is not a video game, it is a customizable card game,

it is the customizable card game. It's so, like, it's, it's so woven into video games at this point. It's so influential and so just profoundly important to video games that it does merit a topic on its own. I mean, if we can do an episode on, like, die hard the movie, then by God,

do an episode, or at least half of one, on Magic the Gathering. So, first of all, Bill, when did you discover Magic the Gathering and what was it about the game that made you, you know, enough of a fan that at some point you would be like, I want to make the Retronauts talk about this? Well, I first discovered Magic the Gathering at like local card shops back in like the mid to late 90s. And at the time, I just saw there was so much text on every card and every deck would play a whole batch of different cards that like there's no way you can ever really know everything there is to know about the game.

There are new cards being released every few months and the meta game that exists between players is shifting all the time. So it's really not a topic you can ever be 100% an expert on. That's what drew me in and has kept me coming back to to play in paper tournaments to play at tournaments all across the U.S. and online, and even to this day going into MTG Arena, which is their latest online client. And Shavim, how about yourself? Well, I forgot to mention at the top of the show that beyond just hosting a magic podcast here on the Greenlit Podcast Network, I'm also a member of the Commander Advisory Group,

which is one of the boards that handles the rules and bands and structure of the the most popular way to play magic, which is Commander. So that's, I guess, my bona fides for being here. But as to how I discovered magic, in like 1994, about 1994 in like middle school, I was in my band class and I heard people saying, okay, well, I'm going to fireball the dragon. And anything that involves words fireball and dragon, I needed to know exactly what was happening. And I went back there and I saw these kids playing these cards that had these pictures that looked like they came off the covers of Dragonlance books.

and I needed to know immediately what was going on and I picked up that dragon they had and there was like it's a sheven dragon I'm like they spelled my name wrong what the heck and after that I decided

whatever color is the enemy of this color for messing up my name I'm going to be that and so I became like obsessed with playing this game I started buying cards I mean in the 90s the idea of having a fantasy world

where I can be a wizard summoning my armies to fight against you in these giant melee it was just so evocative and so much like D&D, which I was already a diehard fan of, but I could carry it in my pocket. I could play in school on the sidewalks

and just slam cards down. And we would go down and bike down to card shops and I would play in like, you know, seven or 10 or 12 player games in my like after school in high school. And then, you know, I fell off in college for a bit,

but I still kept up by reading and like watching the websites and seeing people play at my local card stores where I was discovering other card games. And then, in like 2011 there was I was unemployed having left like I think PlayStation magazine or something at the time

and I had nothing else to do and Magic's World Championship was in town and they just put out Dules of the Planeswalkers on the Xbox which was their first like digital exploration of actual magic and not just like Chandler which is an RPG in the 90s by Micropros who made civilization

ooh right there but between those two things I was like oh I used to play this game I should go and find out so I went to World's where the best players of magic in the world are sitting there. And I'm like, I haven't played in 15 years. What's this like? And I got drubbed.

And in that drubbing, I discovered my love for this card game again to the point that now I'm, you know, in the community, I'm very well known. I run my own podcast. I help make the rules for the format that I love to play. And I'm a degenerate card buyer who's got a whole, like, room full of these pieces of cardboard that I just can't find myself to part with, despite them just being. stacks and stacks and stacks. That's interesting because all the things you just cited are all the reasons that I've never gotten into magic. I remember my first encounter with magic was back in, back when it was very first released, it was 93, 94. And someone in kind of my, like, not in my social

circle in college, but very kind of on the periphery, like a friend of a friend was really into it. And he was someone I did not like that much. So it kind of was a turn. off right there. But I did, you know, check it out. And, you know, it's difficult to have been a nerd in the early to mid-90s following video game magazines and comics magazines and publications like, what was it called, Wizard and that sort of thing. That was just, it was, it was, you know, ubiquitous. It was everywhere. And so I definitely saw a lot of it, but it just seemed like such a huge investment of time, of energy, and definitely money. And also, I don't like playing with other people. That's, that's my problem.

I'm, I'm a, when I play video games, like, I just want to spend some time by myself, do my own thing. I've talked about this before on the show. Like, when I, when I get into multiplayer situations, I just kind of go off and do my own thing and I'm terrible in a team. So, yeah, as someone who's not a competitive player, there's not a lot here that is necessarily for me. But I do, I am kind of fascinated by the depth and the, just the constant evolution that the series has gone through and you know the fact that you know it's something that was again kind of I was peripherally aware of for a long time and just kind of assumed had gone away but then it would resurface and I'd find out that no there are actually tens of millions of people still

playing this 20 years later 30 years later it's 25 years later it's it's really it has amazing longevity and you know so you don't have that kind of longevity without having something more than just like a quick time-waster. Like, there's got to be something more to it. So I can definitely respect magic, even if I also have to admit that it's not a thing for me. But I would like to talk about the history of the card game and about, you know, how it works

and also how it's been influential on video games. And there's a really huge list that Bill put together of Magic the Gathering official games. I didn't realize there were so, so many of them. but I don't think we're going to have time to talk about all of those in this space and also give a good overview of magic. But, you know, looking at kind of how

magic is manifested in other video games and how other people have picked up its cues, because were there customizable card games before magic? I feel like I had never seen anything. Yeah, I'd never seen anything like this. Like cardboard trading cards, baseball cards

with wizards and serpents and stuff on them that explain like, hey, you're basically performing D and D maneuvers, you know, play this card to cast magic missile into the darkness. Effectively, yeah. Yeah, like it was just not a thing. And now there are so many CCGs, both in terms, you know, of like actual physical CCGs, including, you know, huge franchises like Pokemon, but also video games that have

integrated those concepts into them. Ironically, those are all called TCGs because, a trading card game, because CCG is a copyrighted wizard's term. So Magic is the only CCG. Well, I did not realize that. I apologize for my misuse of trademark term. They were very forward thinking, but also

locked down a whole bunch of terms that would become like universal, but can't be used because of their copyright nature. That's interesting because people still refer to other trading card games as CCGs all the time. It's like, you know, we're going to Xerox a Xerox whether Xerox

likes it or not. Exactly. They just can't use it in their trade. Like, they can't put it on the box. You can't, just like you can't say you're having a Super Bowl party in print. Exactly. The big game, right? That's what all the ads say. It's time for the big game.

It's time for the big card game with monopoles. All right, so, Bill, I think you said you were interested in talking about the history behind magic. So at this point, I think I'm going to give the floor to you and just let you kind of walk us through. Like, where did this come from and who created it? It seems like it was kind of a singular vision in the beginning. Yeah, there's a guy who's largely credited for creating and designing the original Magic Gathering set. alongside a bunch of others but the main person is Richard

Garfield who is a mathematician and a college professor but also designs a lot of games and if you look at like his Wikipedia page you'll see he's created many games before and after magic like he'll keep like dabbling

here and there with the ongoing evolution of magic but he's kept very busy outside of it and originally he was trying to pitch a different game actually to this guy, Peter Atkinson, who ran a little company called The Wizards of the Coast. And he wanted to print this game Robo Raleigh, which eventually did make it to market. It's a game where you kind of program in a set of actions for your robot to follow in this arena using little tiles.

And then they'll like move left, move two spaces forward, fire their laser, etc. But they didn't, sorry, wizards didn't want to make that. They're like, eh, but, you know, Richard, if you wanted to make something that, and I'm paraphrasing, like an actual, like, a quote here is, if you want to make something that people could, like, say, just play as a pickup game at conventions and stuff, because it felt like, I guess at the time there's lots of little idle moments and there still are at conventions and big gatherings, they, we would be interested in that. So Richard went away and he started working on some cards and he pulled in a bunch of other people that were very early involved with the game like Scaf Elias and Bill Rose are some of the names that come to mind and they originally envisioned that this would be a thing where you would own some of the cards but that there were other cards you would not even know existed like you would have your blue deck and then you might know there are other like black. decks out there, but you wouldn't know all the cards that you'd be up against. So you'd see a card like by the name of pestilence. And it's like, wow, this card can like deal damage to all of my creatures at once. I don't know how I'm going to deal with that. And it would be the first time you're interacting with that. So the idea was one, the internet wasn't going to be a thing. And two, this

wasn't like a baseball card set where you get, you know, the card that has like a complete checklist of all the baseball players for the year on it. Exactly. It was meant to be, much more mysterious and much more a sense of discovery. So it kind of reminds me in a sense of, you know, the design of something like NetHack, where there are all these features built into it and so many things you can do, but there's this element of discovery and you have to kind of figure it out on your own. And a lot of that, I guess, is sort of spoiled by the fact that the Internet exists and information can be shared freely.

So that's a really good point. And basically the idea was that Richard wanted to create a game that was bigger than the box it came in, which is to say like, you know, a board game, you're sitting there, you play Monopoly, you know what's in Monopoly, you get it. Eventually, after enough play-throughs, you've seen everything in there. The idea with the CCG was like,

okay, you've got these handful of cards and your playgroup might each get like starter decks or some amount of cards somehow and you guys are building your decks, and the original in the game had Ante, where at the beginning of the game, you take your top card and you put it aside and the winner gets both of those cards that were taken out.

And they're like, okay, with Ante, we can sure ensure that there's card flow. There's trading, there's ante, so that people's decks keep changing. The idea was that nobody's going to spend more than 20, 40, maybe a hundred or bucks tops on this. Right. So it was like it was a trading card game as basically a game of jacks, like winner takes the best jack. Exactly that. And the idea, they never realized that we were all going to just become inordinate degenerates and need to have the best possible card all the time. And that's why like, for instance, the original cards that had rarities, there might be, they expected, okay, this super broken card, there might only be one in your play

group floating around. So that's fine. It's not going to be that big of a deal. We can make it completely busted because it'll be just the one cool card that they have, you know? Yeah, and it is worth mentioning. This game launched in 1993 and the same year was when the W3C

kind of signed off on the World Wide Web. And the internet went from being kind of this closed very finite structure where you either used a dial-up service like AOL or CompuServe, or you went into a university and used their VAC system, or you use something like Gopher or Ways that was very esoteric and not very well connected. And I don't think they could have really, you know, even if they were in academia, really predicted just how much the internet would

explode and how, I guess, you know, porous information would become, how, how easily it would flow from one place to another. Yeah. So kind of reality sort of exceeded the scope of what they kind of anticipated. Yeah, because again, nobody had a checklist card. We didn't know how many cards were in the sets. The only way you could tell was to go to one of those magazines like Inquest or Wizard or Scry that would have like theoretical, you know, guides of like, here's all the cards and here's what we think their rarity is and here's what we think their prices are.

It wasn't until many, many sets later that they would even include things like collector's numbers to tell you how many cards are in the set or like, you know, rarity symbol so that when you open a pack, you know what rarity of the car. card is. Before, in the first few sets, you would crack open a pack, and it's your best guess as to what the rare card in there was. That's actually very exciting to me, but I'm sure a lot of collectors were like, no. It was hell of cool, because you'd be, because for me, half of the fun is that gotch upon mechanic of, oh, God, is this pack going to have the thing in it? It's going to be, yeah, I hate it. It's awesome. And now I can go and put it in my deck and win the game.

Bill, you were going to say, sorry, yeah, I was just going to throw in there that not just with the collectors aspects, but the gradual proliferation of internet access caused the germination of deck ideas to accelerate really quickly, because early on, I mean, still even now, there are people who mis-evaluate cards when they're first printed, but back at the start of the game, people really didn't understand how certain cards could be used. Like, very early on, I believe it was InQuest magazine, there was this card called Dreamhalls that was printed in a very, very early set

and InQuest called it the worst card in the set. And without going full much... Yeah, it's a card that lets you take one card out of your hand and then play another card from your hand for free. And one of the early top players, Zvi Mosiewicz, was like, well, you know, I'm going to prove that this card is really, really good. And he did. He designed a whole deck around the Dream Halls card,

and Dreamhalls was banned from tournament play just a few months later. Like, those early magazines were just kind of going off on whatever they could, they had no idea either. I mean, there are things like card advantage, concepts that are just like fundamental to gameplay. Like, if I play a card, it need to put me up on the table,

either give me something to do, draw me an extra card, or take away a resource from you such that I'm advantaged. And these ideas and things like playing on a curve so that you have something to do every turn, were not concepts that were developed until like the internet and people started actually understanding magic theory right it's such a and it's like when you look at some of these early ideas they like bleed into all these kinds of like tower defense games and stuff your plans versus zombies your RTSs things that came afterwards that would build off of these concepts of playing uh you know building units cheaper early and then building more expensive units later such that you always have things to do but you're never like at a loss they feel like elementary concepts now but these are all like brand new and magic was being developed that's right yeah with like play testing and understanding what your cards did like those were

gradually evolved over time and like even something as abstractly different as a fighting game where you know players will talk about going into the lab where they'll like go into training mode and they'll singularly focus on the one fighter and like figure out all their moves and how all the different animations work, that's something that's mapped into magic as well, where you build your deck, you play it against other people, you change one card out for another, and you see how it performs differently and stuff like that. Well, it kind of sounds a lot like the meta game around Pokemon now, competitive Pokemon, where, you know, a new generation comes out with new creatures and even, you know, old creatures getting new moves or old creatures getting different, you know,

stats and that sort of thing, and trying to figure out, like, what works here. Like, what are the ideal strategies, what seems ineffectual but can actually be game breaking in the right hands? Exactly. Exactly that. And, like, the original Pokemon game came out in 1996. They knew what magic was when it came out. And when you look at that original Pokemon set and you've got all these, like, you know, the grass Pokemon are better than your fire Pokemon. You're better than your water Pokemon.

You know, whatever. Like, those kind of balances were all, like, there in those original card games as well. I mean, obviously, rock paper, scissors have been around for a long time, so it's not like magic created that. But magic had this kind of, when you look at like Pokemon itself, collecting units, building up your team, building up your deck, if it were, of your six Pokemon to fight up against other things, that was all taken straight out of Magic the Gathering. I mean, has Satoshi Tajiri actually said, I really loved me some Magic the Gathering, or are you speculating here? I'm speculating, but it's also the fact that Wizard of the Coast was the ones that they went to to make the Pokemon CCG originally. And that says to me that they knew, like, they had a relationship or they had an understanding of the game because definitely it was out in Japan at that time. Okay.

I mean, I would have to do more research into the Pokemon. I'm more magic person than a Pokemon person. But definitely the Pokemon TCG was highly, highly influenced. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely the TCG part of it, for sure, was clear. like so many TCGs where, you know, it was just like straight up inspired by magic. Yeah. And so

the idea was that in magic, the original thing is once they put them out, they put out an alpha set in 93, released it at GenCon sold out basically immediately. And the Genesis, as Bill mentioned, was we want to have something that you can play between turns of D&D or when you're

waiting in line at a con or something like that. And eventually it became to the point that it was the whole point of the con. It was the whole point of the con. was the whole reason for like going. You're just sitting there and you're playing magic more and more. And these games were meant to go fast. But nowadays, the game of magic can go upwards of an hour even sometimes if you're playing like I do with the commander where it just takes forever to play.

But I don't remember going to the first world championships in San Jose in 1990, like five or six or something. And just playing there. And it was incredible to see a whole roomful of people who've flown in from all over the country with their decks. And we're all sitting there with unsleeved cards and we're just trying to, like, figure out how, like, again, the internet was there, but you had to be old to use it. So, like, most of us were sitting there. This is the first time we'd ever seen, like, a regional player from, like, New York or something coming out and, like, playing their decks.

And it was just completely baffling to me. Like, whoa, these guys are doing things I've never thought about with these cards because I was a young kid. I was a straightforward player. I'm like, these two go together because they're goblins. And they're like, no, if I take these three cards and sacrifice them. and I can make this loop that will force you to discard all the cards in your hand and then take a whole bunch of damage. Oh, no.

And it was just amazing. Seeing that the same card pool of like 200-some-odd cards could be used in such of infinite variety of ways, like blew my mind. So we've been using a lot of terms. Well, you've been using a lot of terms that... I'm sorry. No, that's fine. You're using the lingo, the jargon of the game.

But we should actually explain, like, how do you play Magic the Gathering? What is involved? We haven't really... Kind of like in your civilization conversation, we haven't really gotten to the nuts and bolts of what it means. And that's fine. We've been talking about the history behind it. But... Sure.

Yeah, I think this would be the point where you guys step in and explain to poor stupid me. Like, what the hell are you doing when you have all these cards? And, like, they're neat cards and people pay a lot of money for them. But am I, like, picking my teeth with them? What am I doing? Like, what is? Okay. Jeremy, I mean, the basic way that every game starts is each player, you and your opponent have 20 life points.

And you choose who will go first at random. and then you each draw a hand of seven cards. Now, every deck you build is composed of two major groups of cards, land cards and non-land cards. And non-land cards are like, there are 800 flavors of those, but let's just stick with land and non-land for now. Lands are your currency. You put them in play, and every turn you can use them to pay the cost of your non-land cards,

which would be spells. They can summon creatures, they can fire bolts of lightning at your opponent, they can let you draw extra cards. They have so many effects that we could spend another 45 minutes just going through all of them. But you want to, with your initial opening hand, find a mix of lands and non-land cards. And if you don't, you can mulligan to look for a new hand with a different mix of cards that is more pleasing. Then every turn you go back and forth, you can play up to one land. You can play any number of spells, actually, as long as you have the appropriate manna to pay for them all, and you can also have one round of attacks with all your creatures that are in play.

Likewise, when you attack, I'm sorry, Shiva, go on ahead. Oh, actually, I was about to ask a question. So if I'm understanding right, land is basically like you're possessing space, like territory ground, and that fuels your spells and your capabilities. So it's almost like claiming territory and, you know, tapping into the laylines or something, like the mystic power of that space. So if someone diminishes your lands, that means that decreases the power

that you can draw on per turn? Yes. In essence, the lands are, if you were playing the legend of five rings, the lands there would represent the actual space you're controlling. Here in magic, they represent links you have to mystic places that you've visited or whatever.

That mythology was kind of abandoned early on, but the idea is that if you have lands, each land generates resource. The resource is obviously called mono. one of five colors, or colorless, depending. And if you have a spell, for instance, like the goblin that I mentioned earlier, let's say it costs one colorless and one red mana to cast. So you would tap, which is to say turn two of your lands sideways

to indicate that they've been used to draw the mana from those lands to cast this spell. Right. So if you have, like, let's say, five lands of which one of them is an island, then you can cast a spell that costs up to five. but if it's a blue spell that has more than one island requirement, you can't because you don't have enough blue mono to do it. Now, if I had a spell that destroyed one of your lands and I destroyed your blue mana generating land, suddenly your hand is stuck because you've got no way to play these cards

that would require that mana. So that's like a thing in the game that used to be a bigger part, but they realize people don't like not being able to play the game. So they've sort of taken a step back away from land destruction cards, even though it's something that in Commander, I hear a lot about people really desperately wanting to have their land's direction back. No, you cannot have it back.

But the idea is that you're drawing mana from these lands and using them to fuel your spells. So the thing is, the game has rules, but each card can supersede the overall rules depending on what it's doing. So you might have a card that says you get to have two attacks this turn, or you might have a card that says you can play more than one land this turn,

or, you know, what have you. And there are things like, sorceries. You can only play them on your turn and instance. You can play them anytime you've got priority in order to play a spell. The game is incredibly complicated, such to the point that I saw yesterday, somebody had found a way to take a game of magic and force everybody to play a game of Uno. As in, they use a whole like about 40 card combination to create this setup, which would literally replace everybody's deck with your deck, which has multiple colors and numbers, forcing everybody to play a game of Uno.

There's another person who was able to take magic cards and create a logic-generating computer that can do math problems. You know, I was just going to say that that kind of reminds me of the crazy things you can do in Minecraft and, like, create computers, but apparently you can do that in magic also. Magic is the first and only board game that is

touring complete, which is completely nuts. It's like, you can create a logic, Kate. And, I mean, yes, it is, it does nothing. And it sure it'll make your calculator with your math cards go up and down. but the point is more look you want to get that person from 20 to

zero or you want to make them play all the cards in their deck because if you run out cards in your deck you also lose and there's a handful of other women conditions but those are the two big ones like A you're out of cards B you're out of life so you want to basically find ways to remove their creatures

attack with your creatures or hit them in the face directly with fireball and direct damage spells or you know force them to forget spells by discarding cards out of their hand or stealing them from their spellbook which is what their library is and then you win the game and what's you do yay you can go to game two which is uh magic is played in multiple formats right there's constructed magic which is you take 60 cards of which you can use up to four of any one card

not counting basic land and you have a 15 card sideboard which is to say cards that are specifically designed to take on a given archetype that you might be facing against that don't have utility enough to put in your main deck. So a card's like, this is a really good card against artifacts, but the other player I'm playing is not playing artifacts, so I'm just going to leave it in my sideboard. Or I'm playing against an all artifact deck. Okay, I'm bringing these anti-artifact

cards in and taking other cards out of my deck to tune it, to be better balanced to fight this one guy. Then there's limited magic, which is 40 cards, and in that, you open three packs of booster packs, and you get to draw one card and pass it to your next player in what's called

a draft, which is just like, you know, When you're doing a baseball fantasy draft or football fantasy draft, that's kind of what the idea came from of. I'm going to take the best card out of this pack and pass it to the next person. And they're going to take the best card and so on for three packs worth until we've got 40-ish cards, 45 cards that we can build a deck out of. And then they're sealed, which is you've given six packs, you open up and you solve the puzzle of these six packs and build a deck out of them.

Then there's Commander, which is 100 singleton cards, et cetera, et cetera, so on and so forth. And these various ways to play magic all are just, incredibly deep, have their own completely separate, like, fan bases and logic associated with them and, like, different math that goes into it, different ideas of how to design and develop and build these, like, kind of decks

and the kind of experience you're going for changes. And it's just, it's this fundamentally deep and always changing game. So every three months, like Bill said, a new set comes out, and that just completely shakes the ground. But if you're one of those people who's like, you know what, I want to keep playing with my favorite cards,

there's a billion format to let you play with cards forever. Like my personal format of Commander, which is like, okay, I can play with a hundred cards of which from basically the entire history of magic,

whatever my favorite cards are, I can play them. And I have a special character who is a general that directs the colors and shape of my deck and the theme. So I can build like,

like I have a deck which I call my chair tribal deck. Every card in the deck has a person in the artwork who is sitting in a chair or a throne of some kind. There's someone who's got like ladies looking left.

So all of the artwork features people facing left in it. You know, it's like you can do this kind of, magic allows this kind of bizarre creativity that is just so deep and valuable that it means that you don't just have to be a tournament grinder. You can just be sitting there playing fun time, silly magic. And that's kind of where my personal wheelhouse is. I can see why this game has been so influential on video games because there's so much complexity to it that it seems really even more so than like D&D,

like keeping all the rules in your head and all the different permutations and things, that seems really, really challenging. So I can see, you know, having a computer to sort of figure these things out for you, there's a real benefit there. But it took them a long time to create just a Magic the Gathering video game, right? Yeah. As opposed to some sort of adaptation, like kind of a weird adaptation like, hey, you're using magic cards, but in an action RPG.

I love that game. Channel art. Yeah, I mean, there's sort of like a monkey's paw, wish to having video games of magic where, as Shibam was mentioning, there's just a game called Magic the Gathering, which is shorthandly known as Shandler, I think among a lot of players,

where you maneuver around a map and you interact with other plains walkers or wizards on this map, and then when you would have a fight, instead of like in a traditional RPG where it's, you know, like menu-based and like attack, item, run, you just play a game of magic. And it's amazing, like the rules do work as intended.

the the only drawback is sometimes the AI of the game is not ideal because there are so many because you mean you just heard all the different things that can happen all the different complexities so uh the AI sometimes will just attack its smaller creature into your bigger creature sometimes it will just cast a buff on your creature sometimes it will tap all its lands and do nothing with them because it's just trying to to sort through all the different possible outcomes. And after a certain amount of time, it's just like, pick this one. I give up, whatever. You can have it. Yeah. Oh, man.

The thing is, though, like, for instance, Magic put out its own version of an actual online way to play Magic called Magic Online in, like, 1998, 1997, 98. And it is an incredibly atrocious-looking game. It's got no user, it's at the worst user interface and, like, no tutorial. and even for people who play magic like their whole lives like I do,

it's still incredibly impenetrable to figure out how to play magic online. But it was the fact that magic itself was such a fundamentally good and addictive game. People were willing to put up with things that in 2020 still look like 1996. And they're still willing to play it because the game fundamentals are so strong

that you'll just deal with the fact that the software is like just tape and dreams putting it together. And the thing is not to think about it. There's like 24,000 individual cards and magic. Try to figure out the interactions

of every single one of them and all the weird corner cases and places where things can go backwards and wrong and upside down

and the fact that magic is always putting on new cards that are going to interact with them. So online,

trying to make a digital version of these game is almost like a tilting at the windmills

type of just impossible quest. Right? Like it's just so absurdly huge and logarith exponentially difficult to like

add things that when they did arena they were like okay, we're just going to take the Heartstone model of making it look really good and we're going to just put a hard cut off. Any set that exists before this time,

we're just not going to think about or code or pretend even is our problem. And that way they can make sure that all the sets going forward are developed with digital in mind and also with the idea of being able to be easy to program. So there was a card that was put out like, let's say 10 years ago, that broke Magic Online fundamentally

because what it did was it basically said you can take all of the permanence you have and play all the cards you have and play and then shuffle them and put them into three piles the piles can be empty and you can also just like you force somebody to pick a pile and they'd like sacrifice all the cards in there or like some weird chaotic like just something

that makes sense when you're playing in person that when you're trying to do digitally and trying to say okay computer these can be split into three or five or 50 different ways but they can also be an empty piles and you also have to make the empty pile of vial. It basically was just like spaghetti's chasing and just like the code choked and died because it couldn't figure out something that we at humans

can just sit there, look at the table, and intuitively grasp because it needs to be just coded so hard. So specifically, and magic is such a weird game that's such a big game in their formats that you play so many cards that it's almost an impossibility to make a game that can capture something that we humans can intuitively,

grabs because we don't have to try to make every card work with every other possible card at every given time. I think my favorite online bug was for this card called Fate Spinner. And Fate Spinner is a three-manna-one-two, which is a small creature stats-wise. And it has the ability that your opponent has to skip one part of their turn. Except when you played it on Magic Online, when it prompted the opponent to skip a part of their turn, it wouldn't allow the opponent to choose. So it actually became, if you could play this three-manel-one-two, you basically won the game.

Your opponent couldn't choose, and they would lose because their clock would run out. And people immediately went and exploited this bug, and the price of the card fate spinner on the online economy went from like a fraction of a dollar to like $6 immediately. People were playing four fate spinners in their deck. people were playing a bunch of damaged spells to try and stop feet spinners from entering play or staying in play and stuff like that. And, I mean, there's things like infinite loops, for instance, like there's a card called Oblivion Ring, which says, like, cast this card onto a creature or onto a permanent spell. That permanent is removed from the game until this oblivion ring spell leaves the play. So, like, if I put it onto your creature, your creature is removed from the game.

If you kill my oblivion ring, you get your creature back. That makes sense. That's fair. Now, if I cast an oblivion ring on an oblivion ring, suddenly we can get into this weird loop where it's like, okay, my oblivion ring has left play, which means the thing it was hiding is come back into play. And if you do it on three oblivion rings, you can get into an infinite loop, which would basically lock out the program, that in play, in real life, you would just be like, okay, don't do that. We're just going to scoop and start over. And the computer is just going to be like programming to bring these cards back from exile infinitely in this internal loop that would just cause the system to die. and magic is full of those

and as one of the people who like has to deal with the rules now as part of the commander group it's just like oh my god trying to figure out how to make thousands and thousands of cards work together is just the most Sisyphus

task I've ever seen in my life like push that rock up that hill because magic's going to throw another rock down in three months good luck and that's why Pokemon sword and shield trim the Pokedex love it or hate it it's for sanity's sake

oh yeah it's so I mean when you look at it you're like oh but I can't play with my favorite Pokemon's yeah okay but also the game needs to be able to run and you can't do that when there's like 800 Pokemon going running around trying to make things happen right So now that we have a basic understanding of the game, and I do mean like very cursory, we don't have a whole lot more time to, like there's just been so much to talk about already. But I would like to ask first,

what is your favorite non-magic the gathering video, game concept or video game or video game element that's been clearly inspired by magic. I mean, I love the CZGs in Final Fantasy. Like, Triple Triad is just such a fantastically designed game.

But really, for me, it's more that this notion of colors and resource management that you get of like these rock paper scissorsy type things, but just having factions that are so different from each other that, I mean, I mean, magic didn't create factioning,

but it definitely gave it definition and gave it an understanding. And so I love how RTSs have taken for magic these ideas of, for instance, you can make a weenie deck, which is like all these tiny creatures that come out super fast and go aggressively, very hard. Or you can build like a slow lumbering type of deck that's controlling.

Like, I destroy all your stuff whilst I build my end game out. And in RTS games and stuff, you see that a lot. They've started to take these ideas of control decks of aggressive decks of mid-rangey type things and using them in context outside of card games. And I think that's such a fascinating way to build a multiplayer. Even in fighting games, you see that a lot with like the slow bruiser,

Zangiv types versus the super fast soccer types. And just you get this really interesting way to balance a game that I just find super fascinating. Bill, how about you? I would say that one of my favorite elements of playing magic

is building an engine. in. That is where you're like converting different types of resources from one to another. And in magic, usually that's you have lands and then you're able to get more cards, which allows you to in turn play more lands and that gets you more cards, et cetera, et cetera. So when games are able to keep that kind of loop where there's an ever escalating exchange of resources going, I have a lot of fun with that. And I'll use a very contemporary, if you'll pardon me, example of the Final Fantasy 7 remand, where, you know, I'm spending a lot of time with Tifa as my main character, and she, you know, she hits really fast and hard, which allows her to build up her meter more quickly for limit breaks. Then once you hit your limit break, you can use this ability of refocus, which lets you use your abilities more often. You can use them at like a 33% elevated rate. So then I can even go through the cycle more quickly where I'm hitting. I'm using my extra ability. abilities to, like, heal people or cast spells or do super moves and stuff like that.

And one of those moves is we're called unbridled strength, where it lets you kind of power her up multiple times and then unleash a fierce combo of just, like, bam, four moves right in a row. So, like, you know, hitting the enemy. That's definitely not like magic to me. Yeah, yeah, like hitting the enemy, refocus, unbridled strength, unbridled strength, unbridled strength, and then throwing out all four of like the super moves right in a row. satisfying when that goes off correctly. Interesting. Yeah, listening to you talk about the like the conversion process. I realize, you know, Final Fantasy 8 had triple triad, the CCG that you, or TCG that you could

play throughout the game and had like shifting rules and things like that. But even the, the actual gameplay loop was really kind of built around the idea of this engine that you're talking about where you could turn enemies into cards and convert them into items and resources. that you could use in combat, and you could kind of manage combat in the way combat scaled in difficulty by making use of the card function. If you turned an enemy into cards, then you wouldn't gain experience for that enemy, which means that because the entire game scaled to your players' party, enemies would not grow in strength, and you could kind of basically sort of determine how the world around you was going to

function and how it's going to challenge you based on the way you treated the card game and integrated that into your gameplay, which is, that's actually, huh, interesting. I'm having a revelation here. It's, it's cool. Also, I have to give a shout out to Hal's Super NES RPG Arcana, or Arcana, which was a role-playing dungeon RPG based around the idea of cards. It was tarot cards, really, sort of. That was kind of the inspiration.

But that was in 1992. That happened a year before Magic the Gathering. So there was something in the water, something in the air, I think. Parallel thoughts. Yes, exactly. So final question. And we're getting back to Magic the Gathering here. Each of you, what do you think is the best Magic the Gathering licensed video game, game

actually based on magic? If there were one that you would recommend a fan of Magic who's only played the card games to spend some time with download for their computer or console, what would that be? I think I'd have to go with MTG Arena, which is the current, you know, free-to-play online client for playing Magic Online digitally. I'm just, unfortunately, with a lot of the older games that kind of try and put a twist on the Magic Formula, like there was Magic Gathering Battlegrounds for the Xbox and Battle Mage for the PlayStation 1, those either did.

not turn out too well, they've not aged very well, or they're just very, they're not going to be ported to modern systems. And with a chandelier, which is the probably most popular one of the most enduring magic of gathering video game per se, it's technically possible to run it on modern computers, but it is a fair amount of work. Yeah, so I would go with arena. I mean, my choice, honestly, is like, Chandelier is one of my favorite games of all time. It was super fun to play, but it's really archaic. And if you don't know the rules of magic from 1994, it's really, really challenging. My choice would actually be Dools of the Plainswalkers from 2014,

which was, it's available on Steam and Xbox and stuff like that still. And it was one of the most fun single player ways to play magic. It had some of the best decks in it. And it had this great mode called Arch Enemy, where you could sit there and have three people fighting against one person who had a, a deck that had also a set of cards that would help them fight against three people at once, so they would get extra bonuses and stuff. And it was a complete blast to play.

It was real, just fun way to play couch co-op magic. Like my wife, she loves to play magic, but she doesn't like to actually do the math part of it. So sitting there with me and we can do this as like a puzzle to fight against these enemies. It was incredibly fun. And it still holds up as a lot of fun today. Even though there's newer fancier ways to play magic, sometimes you just want to scratch that itch and do it solo. and I'm a big fan of the old duels to play's workers' games. If I can, I'm sorry, if I can just drop in real quick, one non-magic game that kind of adheres

to that chandelar formula. Thronebreaker, The Witcher Tales, kind of flew under the radar last year. It's based on the same, you know, story and universe of the Witcher, but it's that shandler formula of you are a person wandering around in just this field and you, you encounter a monster and you have to fight it, but you play the game, Quint, to the game. resolve all combat. Well, that's cool. And they, I think, make some really smart choices to evolve the formula where, just like

in The Witcher where, you know, you've got these very deep backstories with characters and, like, decisions you make, people who are in your party are in your deck, which means that if, like, you know, someone does you dirty and they betray you and they run away from and abandon you, they're not in your deck anymore. So, you know, you have to be a little careful about which people you trust and who you want to ally with. Oh, that's cool. I should check that out.

Yeah, I don't know. I think magic is such a good game just unto itself and under his own merits that it's very easy to just get sucked into that ecosystem and just basically always play magic. And I find myself doing that a lot these days, even playing like paper magic over discord, especially in these socially quarantined times.

But, you know, Magic Arena is really a great way to go. And obviously, you can sit and watch them on streams and stuff. Like, I've been doing a lot of Twitch broadcasts lately of commentating on other people's matches. It's super fun. Like, Arena is one of the prettiest ways to play magic they've ever had. So it's really cool if you're looking for a way to get in. Especially if you've been playing things like Heartstone stuff,

magic is very, very friendly to get into if you have the idea. And if you don't, it's rough, but the tutorials are at least getting better. All right. Well, I think that's all the time we have, but I actually feel like this was a pretty effective overview of the history of magic and kind of the workings of it and the way it's reached into video games. I'm glad someone, I'm glad Bill that you brought up Gwent because my, I haven't really played much of The Witcher 3, but my impression is that Gwent is very much cut from the same cloth as magic and has become kind of a big thing for CD Project Red. So yeah, I definitely think

that's a great example of how magic can be used to magic gathering, like that concept can be used to expand the world and, you know, create something that almost exists independently of another creation. So anyway, Bill, thanks very much for supporting the show and for bringing this topic request to bear and, you know, for stepping in to help explore this topic request. Hopefully you enjoyed it. Hopefully everyone listening enjoyed it. But before we go, I'd like for you to talk a little bit about yourself, where can people find you online? What kind of stuff do you create et cetera, if you have anything you want to share or talk about? Yes, absolutely, I do.

So first of all, I do a video game podcast called So Many Bits. It comes out every Monday and features interviews with different independent game developers. While it's not retro per se, we do interview people who have worked on retro influence games. So, for example, I've talked with people behind upcoming titles such as like Panzer Paladin or Cyber Shadow. I also stream on Twitch, Twitch.tv slash So Many Bits, Wednesday and Thursday nights. I actually had taken a bit of a break from Magic, but I've been getting back into it with the most recent sets.

And if you need to connect with me anywhere, I'm on Twitter at So Many Bits. All right. And Shivam. Cool. You can find me at Gearipuri Gears on Twitter, and you can find my podcast, Casual Magic, on the Greenlit Podcast Network.

And also it comes out every Tuesday, where I sit and talk to all sorts of my friends and various magic developers and stuff about the casual way to play magic. And yeah, that's pretty much it. Like, if you guys have any questions about Commander or anything, please feel free to hit me up. That is definitely a thing that I have a lot of influence on. And so please check out the podcast. Come see us on Twitters.

And that's how I got. All right. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as GameSpite. or you can find me writing weekly, daily, I don't know, frequently at Limited Run Games. You can also find my YouTube channel, just look for my name, Jeremy Parrish. There's only one R in Parrish. I'm not one of those weirdos who doesn't know how to spell Parrish. And, yeah, otherwise look for Retronauts this here podcast every Monday on your favorite podcatcher.

You can subscribe to the show at patreon.com slash Retronauts and get every episode a week early with a higher bit rate quality, better sound quality and no advertisements or promotions. And if you support at the $5 level or above, you get a patron exclusive episode every other Friday. And if you want to support like Bill did at the one with the life stream tier,

you can not only request a podcast topic every few months, but you can also take part in the podcast and get to have your say on a topic of your choice. So many opportunities for you to listen and participate and be part of the retronauts community. But, you know, you can always just listen to us for free on iTunes or whatever. I guess they don't call it iTunes anymore. But they used to, that's retro. Just like this show, Retronauts, that's right, we're old and we are out of here.

You know, I'm going to be able to be.