Hugely successful trading card game Magic: The Gathering changed the face of tabletop gaming forever when itwas released in the early 1990s.
The game puts two or more players in control of planeswalkers, mighty wizards who use spells, items and creatures depicted on cards to wage war on each other.
Magic: The Gathering was the first game of its type and is still the most popular trading card game in the world. It is owned and operated by Wizards of the Coast, which also owns Dungeons & Dragons and the licensed Pokemon Trading Card Game.
Magic: The Gathering has continually had new sets of cards released over the years and also been adapted into videogames, most recently Duels of the Planeswalkers 2014.
Recently I interviewed Aaron Forsythe, director of research & development on Magic: The Gathering, to find out more about the game.
Fantasy pop culture is huge right now - The Hobbit movies are some of the most expensive movies ever made, Game of Thrones is one of the biggest TV shows around. Why do you think the genre is so popular?
I think we finally have the tools to deliver film and TV that lives up to people's expectations of what epic fantasy should be now, with the special effects and the higher budgets. We've hit a point with Peter Jackson's version of Middle Earth and the Harry Potter movies being so immersive, so real-looking, it's hard not to fall in love with them. I think people have been waiting decades for such realisations of what they imagine fantasy to be like. People innately love that kind of stuff; it's escapist. Everyone kind of understands the fantasy genre, with the knights, the wizards, the dragons and what not, that just makes sense to us on a very core level. I'm really happy that Magic: The Gathering can coexist with that stuff and I think we're benefiting from the increased amount of fantasy pop culture out there.
I love fantasy art; my favourite artist is Boris Vallejo. As someone that doesn't play Magic: The Gathering a lot, the art is an aspect that appeals to me greatly. What is the process of creating that art for each new Magic card?
It starts with our design and development team and they usually start with mechanics first, like what the card is going to do in the game. Sometimes that starts off as a concept, like if we wanted to make a dragon egg for instance, that's not a card we've made before. What would a dragon egg do? So then you design the card, make it so when the card goes to the graveyard you get a baby dragon or something. Then we'd come up with the rules text, then give it to our creative team which includes our art director Jeremy Jarvis, who is extremely talented. He has a team of external artists who are all contracted outside of the building. There's got to be a couple of hundred of them now. I think we're the largest employer of fantasy artists in the industry. We do hundreds and hundreds of illustrations every year. Our creative team writes down what they want the card to look like then Jeremy picks the perfect artist and sends it off to them. We get to review the sketches, and then they submit a final painting. A lot of them are digital now but we still get a lot of traditional oil or water paintings sent in. It's awesome to look at a full-size Magic painting hanging on the wall. I am super proud of our art; I think it's one of our defining characteristics. The sheer quantity and quality of fantasy art we produce every year is mindboggling.
When you were introducing the upcoming Theros set at the PAX Australia panel, it was obvious there are deep storylines behind the cards. How important are those storylines to the gameplay?
They're not all that important to the gameplay, but I believe a lot of great games have ways of allowing players to immerse themselves further even when they're not in the act of actually playing. Our story does that a lot. We've written some eBooks and novellas about our sets recently. Last year's Return to Ravnica block, we have an eBook out on Kindle that tells the story of the Planeswalkers journey through Ravnica and their travails there. We want to make our world deep, rich and inviting. We want to give our players some characters they can identify with and we do that with our storytelling. All a card can give you is one still picture and a sentence or so, so we try to write a lot of web content and novels to further bring it to life for players.
In the Magic: The Gathering panel you hosted at PAX, people expressed a desire in buying a hardcover book of the game's art. You said you're waiting for the right time to release one - this 20-year anniversary seems like a good time, doesn't it?
Yeah, that would be right, but everything for the 20th anniversary is kind of already in the can. So I'll keep that in mind for our next big anniversary, I guess our 25th in 2018 would be a good time to put together a retrospective Magic art book.
What makes Magic: The Gathering such a successful game?
In this digital age, it's still a face-to-face experience with paper cards. It's important for gamers to get together with a group of like-minded people and have a great time, have fun, be competitive and show off. It's so different getting around a table and doing that than sitting in front of your Xbox or computer. The interaction is so much better. Magic is the most robust and complex game of all time. You can play it any number of different ways, there's all sorts of different pieces. You can stick to the current stuff, you can use stuff from 15 years ago. It's like Lego - every Lego fits with every other Lego. We've been making cards for 20 years, they all work together and you can make whatever you want. The customisability is through the roof. It's also stood the test of time; it's the first and best trading card game ever.
What's the balance between skill and luck in Magic: The Gathering?
They're both there, like there are in a lot of great games. In sports like football, one team might be better than the other but anything can happen. It's the same with Magic: The Gathering. In a game like chess where there's effectively no luck, the better player will win every time. But in Magic, stuff can go right for the weaker player, they can get the perfect combination of cards, they can draw the right card they need at the right moment. That suspense and drama makes it really interesting even when player is a lot better than the other. It sometimes hurts - if you know you're a better player and stuff went their way and they beat you, it can make you a little upset. But skill way, way outperforms luck in the game, there's just a variance there to keep it interesting no matter what.
Speaking of balance - how do you make sure all the cards are balanced? There's a huge amount of Magic cards out there now, is it a nightmare to ensure there's a balance across the power of all cards?
It's super tricky. I've seen 'power-creep' destroy a lot of great games. They want to keep people buying new upgrades and the easiest way to do that is to sell more powerful cards. We have tournament formats where you're only allowed to use the most recent cards. In those we don't have to worry too much about what we printed 15 years ago. A lot of players love that format because they want fresh, new, different games every time, they don't want to keep playing the same cards for 20 years. We're trying not to make the new cards more powerful, but to make them a little weirder, or taking them in a new direction. They may have a specific flavour or be a new creature we haven't seen before. We're not trying to outdo ourselves with power. Some of the most powerful Magic cards in the very first set of all time. We just know there's no way to make more powerful cards than that and keep the game healthy and alive. So as long as we keep making it fun, people are going to want to keep getting the cards.
Sometimes players transition into being professional poker players. There's a saying with Texas Hold 'Em Poker that goes 'It takes five minutes to learn but a lifetime to master'. Is the same true of Magic: The Gathering?
It takes a lot more than five minutes to learn, unfortunately. That's got to be our biggest barrier to entry; it is a pretty complicated game. We've done a lot to help people along that path and the best way is with the digital offering, Duels of the Planeswalkers. That helps you learn the rules, in your own home, away from the stress of doing it in a competitive environment. A lot of my friends played Magic and went on to play poker and the skills you learn in Magic help a lot. They can help you in a lot of facets of life, just the analytical thinking on the fly, math, probability and what-not. It's helped make people into great stock traders, great poker players and great game designers, even outside of Magic.
You mentioned Duels of the Planeswalkers there. What would you say are the pros and cons of playing Magic: The Gathering digitally rather than on a table?
The pros with Duels of the Planeswalkers are that it's low-stress, kind of a PvE experience which Magic doesn't have. So if you don't know the rules, that's OK. If you lose a lot, that's OK. It's great for learning. If you play face-to-face, your opponents have to cut you a lot of slack when you're new to help you along. The computer doesn't care how new you are, it'll help you through that. Then we have Magic Online, which is a full transliteration of the game onto a PC, including purchasing booster packs, deck-building and all that stuff. Everything you do on paper currently you can do on Magic Online. That's just great for that round-the-clock, any time, I wanna game right now in my underwear at midnight, it's there for you to do that. Ultimately though, for me, the face-to-face game is the best. Yes, it means the trouble of shuffling your deck a lot, managing your physical collection which computers do a lot better, it's a bit of a hassle, but the payoff is so much greater. To have a circle of friends that are players and to share experiences sitting around a table playing, that's the best for me.
Some rare Magic cards sell for massive amounts online. Do you know the largest sum someone has ever paid for one?
I don't know that. The Black Lotus is the card people always talk about as being the most expensive card, from the Alpha and Beta editions. People have started to get these graded, like how people get old baseball cards or comics graded by firms that will put it in a plastic case and put a label on it explaining how perfect the condition is. Those are pretty extravagant; they're collector's items in the truest sense of the word. People don't even want to play with them; they just want them because they're scarce and old. I don't have anything all that expensive in my own collection, but it's cool that people are into it. It props us up a bit to know that people are willing to pay huge amounts of money for some of our stuff.
As you can buy certain cards, is there a danger of richer players having an unfair advantage over poor players?
It's kind of always been there to a certain degree, ever since the beginning. Having access to certain tools means you have a better chance of building or making the pack you need to compete at any given time. We have attempted to mitigate that as much as we can. We offer various formats for competitive play, one that's been very popular at PAX Australia is sealed decks. With that you get six unopened booster packs and you have to build your deck out of them. That's a great equaliser. You don't get to show up with your huge collection of cards, you're on an equal footing to see who has more skill as a Magic player. We have a lot of formats that only allow recent sets too, which help out the people who don't have 20 years worth of cards to play with.
You were a professional player before you started working at Wizards on the Coast. With that experience as a player, have there ever been ideas floated within the company that you've had to refuse and just tell everyone it wouldn't work?
Yeah, but it helps a lot that me and all of the people that work for me in research and development designing the game, and a lot of our brand managers as well, spent years playing the game before working at Wizards. We have a great sense of what the customers want, because if we weren't working here, we would be the customer. We're not doing corporate guessing or anything like that. If we find it fun, if we want to buy it, then it's probably a good idea. We're owned by Hasbro, a huge company, but in general they leave us alone. They know that we have our own brand of witchcraft and they know we're the experts at keeping our customers so engaged with the game. They make toys and they let us make the trading card game and basically leave us alone because they know we know it better than they would and we know better than anyone else in the world what our customers want.
Obviously you originally played the game for fun. When you're not working, do you still play for fun? Are there family members or relatives that you still play with?
Yeah! I grew up in Pennsylvania and every time my brother comes to visit me, every year around the holidays, it's something we always do. We'll just bust out some of our old decks or I'll bring home a box of the new set and we'll draft it for fun. I still love it. I'll log onto Magic Online after work sometimes just to build a new deck that I heard about and try it out myself. I had a new employee recently who came from a different game studio, and he couldn't believe the amount of Magic the people that work on Magic played in their spare time.
You've just said you still love Magic dearly. What is it about it that makes you love it so much?
It's the self-expression and the fact that the game is so rich and flavourful. I like playing boardgames and other kinds of games where there is a story to tell, where I feel like I'm building a city or fighting a war. I don't like abstract games so much. Magic does a great job of making sure that every time a game is played, a story is being played out in front of the players' eyes. Some fantasy war, some crazy combination of spells, some new crazy artifact you haven't tried out before is working its mojo on the game. There's a plethora of new things to try every time. I've been playing it for 19 years and just yesterday I spent five hours playing against fans here at PAX - I could've easily stayed playing it for another five. It's still so fun and engaging for me after all this time.
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Magic 2014 - Duels of the Planeswalkers is available now on Steam, the PlayStation store, Xbox Live, the App store for iPad and for Android Tablets.
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