I want there to be suspense, I want there to be tension, I want you to be worried that at any moment something horrible is going to happen because that’s what goes on in the horror genre.”Ī later set, Theros, was heavily influenced by Greek mythology and included gorgons, sea monsters and a pantheon of warring gods.
“For example, we did a set called Innistrad which was set in a gothic horror world and I said: ok, I want you, the player, to be afraid. When you play the game, I want to figure out what it’s trying to express and make sure that the gameplay itself evokes that emotion. “One of the things I really believe as a designer is that the mechanics are as much a part of the game’s flavour as the art or the text on a card. “We’re trying to create a world and a set of mechanics which we think match the flavour of that world,” he said.
Their work involves coming up not only with new mechanical aspects of the game, but also building new settings for players to do battle in - richly themed worlds filled with conflict and adventure, and populated by a cast of heroes and villains. Rosewater heads Magic’s design team, the group responsible for creating a constant stream of new cards for players to incorporate into their decks. It’s about exploring, and you get to constantly rediscover it.” “But what’s neat about Magic is that the game itself keeps changing. “If you compare it to something like Monopoly, every time you play you’re getting a pretty similar experience,” he said. He attributed the game’s popularity to its inherent variety and players’ ability to customise their decks. Its creator has since moved on, and today the man in charge of Magic’s development is Mark Rosewater, an endlessly energetic former television writer.
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It is published in 11 languages, has a thriving tournament scene, a professional league and even recently provided the basis for an episode of South Park.Ī recent episode of the cartoon series South Park revolved around Magic: The Gathering. Nowadays Magic is played by an estimated 20 million people around the world. Players obsessed over the process of building decks, endlessly hunting for the most effective card combinations and devising a huge range of winning strategies. From its release in 1993, Magic grew by word of mouth. The formula proved to be a lucrative hit for the game’s publisher, Seattle-based Wizards of the Coast. Players would assemble their own decks, with a near-limitless ability to personalise their game and develop their own tactics. Particularly powerful cards would be rarer than others, making collecting and trading them as much a part of the experience as actually playing matches. Where other card games were sold as a single packaged product, Magic cards would come in randomised packs, a model similar to collectible baseball cards. Magic was Garfield’s response, and it involved one major innovation that set it apart from any game previously released.
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A life-long tabletop gamer, he had approached a publisher to pitch an idea for a game about programming robots, only to be told that the company needed something more portable and cheaper to produce. The game originated in the early 1990s in the mind of Richard Garfield, at the time a graduate student working towards a PhD in combinatorial mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. Players in Magic: The Gathering build competing decks from their own collections of cards.