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The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
21–30 of 92 posts
Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
#22Linked from the article are the pre release testing cards.. According to Garfield - it all went wrong after this! Magic with it's twice a year new sets and pay-to-win is not what he had envisioned. https://www.magiclibrarities.net/955-rarities-alpha-beta-gam...
The game Garfield envisioned was played with Ante, which is something the community ran away from real quick. His game also had no serious text templating, so it was a far harder game to play. He might not have envisioned play to win, but he designed some of the craziest cards printed in the history of the game, and basically every single one of them had the highest rarity: He knew that Ancestral Recall was much bett…
Was it harder to play? If you didn't understand the rules amongst friends you made them up. But the game also tended towards more battles like "my flying bear defends against your dragon, oh no a lightning bolt". I tried getting back into it a few years ago because I still love the idea of MTG and every card had a book of text and all the best combos were sorted out the second a set released.
Which -- I understand why people like that. I'd still like my flying bears back.
Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
#23Linked from the article are the pre release testing cards.. According to Garfield - it all went wrong after this! Magic with it's twice a year new sets and pay-to-win is not what he had envisioned. https://www.magiclibrarities.net/955-rarities-alpha-beta-gam...
The game Garfield envisioned was played with Ante, which is something the community ran away from real quick. His game also had no serious text templating, so it was a far harder game to play. He might not have envisioned play to win, but he designed some of the craziest cards printed in the history of the game, and basically every single one of them had the highest rarity: He knew that Ancestral Recall was much bett…
I'd put the end of the golden age a few years past that, but I fully agree with the notion that the point where the game was at its best was long after he was in charge. He created a fun game, but not a game that people would continue to play for decades, and Magic R&D turned it into a game that I had far more fun with than anything he ever envisioned.
Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything always goes wrong when it leaves it's small niche and starts being monetised. The thing that mattered no longer matters, only money.
Magic was monetized from the beginning. It was the precursor to loot boxes in modern computer gaming and used the same hooks that get people addicted to gambling to encourage sales of booster packs.
The article covers how this is not true and how the transition to loot boxes was how it went wrong. The start is meandering but the meat is that the end.
Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
#25The guy who invented the power 9 complaining about these new designers making rares that are too good… right. Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.
Balancing a game is hard. You can hardly blame anyone for getting it wrong on their first attempt. But getting it wrong 30 years later…
Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
#26Part of the original magic that Garfield talks about, the player experience of discovering a world of cards you've never seen before, is captured by recent video games like Inscryption (especially) and Slay the Spire. Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outs…
Its probably the nostalgia talking but a lot of the early magic was the art as well. It was professional enough to look good but not so polished that it didn't have its own character. I had favorite artists and it was always fun just admiring the art.
The new cards just don't capture me the same way. Something about them is too polished or too homogenized. They don't leave any room for imagination. I feel the same way about D&D artwork as well. No surprise that both D&D and MTG are owned by the same parent company.
Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
#27Part of the original magic that Garfield talks about, the player experience of discovering a world of cards you've never seen before, is captured by recent video games like Inscryption (especially) and Slay the Spire. Dominion is also an excellent game as the progenitor of the deck-building game genre, where you build a deck from scratch inside each game (and Inscryption/Slay the Spire descend from), rather than outs…
And I will never be unsad about dominion.isotropic.org shutting down with its dead simple and fast dominion implementation, they promised to take it down if the company ever did its own thing and they did and you had to buy every expansion and it generally sucked.
Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
#28She was right. After Magic: The Gathering debuted at Gen Con in 1993, six months of product sold out in six weeks.
that was like the original bitcoin. anyone who still held on to those cards , especially the power 9 or dual lands, made a killing
Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
#29The guy who invented the power 9 complaining about these new designers making rares that are too good… right. Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.
> Also the hate on Arena is bizarre - it’s not perfect but it is polished and works well on (at least) iPhone PC and Mac.
The hate against arena isn't due to lack of polish or it not working well, it's about what it's trying to do. It's not about collecting or trading cards anymore it's about opening as many loot boxes (packs) as possible.
MTGA let you purchase specific cards, Arena does not and likely never will. That isn't an oversight, that's a conscious choice to get people to spend money on buying more digital packs. That's a big reason it gets hate.
Re: The creator of 'Magic: The Gathering' knows where it all went wrong
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Magic was monetized from the beginning. It was the precursor to loot boxes in modern computer gaming and used the same hooks that get people addicted to gambling to encourage sales of booster packs.
The article covers how this is not true and how the transition to loot boxes was how it went wrong. The start is meandering but the meat is that the end.
I think the hook is the same with loot boxes, gacha and booster packs. You pay money for the thrill of not knowing what you are going to get. For some people that thrill is addictive, so they keep spending more money for that brief moment of excitement.
From my perspective the idea of a game being compelling because of the mystery doesn't work with PvP because the fundamental mechanic pushes people to learn the meta so they can win. If the original goal of Magic was to allow people to feel the wonder of discovery, either it should have been a PvE game with a GM, or the booster packs actually are a core mechanic that provide the thrill of the unknown, in which case the game was structured from the start to make money.