Magic: The Gathering

• 1. Introduction

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  Magic: The Gathering was born in the summer of 1993, when a doctoral candidate in combinatorial mathematics walked out of a hiking trail near Multnomah Falls with an idea that would eventually generate a billion dollars a year. That candidate was Richard Garfield, and the idea he carried down from the trail was deceptively simple: what if a card game could be customizable, collectible, and expandable forever? By the end of that year's Gen Con in Milwaukee, a shipment of 2.5 million cards had sold out completely. By October 1993-10 million cards were gone. Wizards of the Coast, the small Seattle outfit that published the game, was so overwhelmed by demand that it was reluctant to advertise. Magic had crossed a threshold. By the time Hasbro acquired Wizards for $325 million in 1999, the game had reshaped an entire industry. Fifty million people would eventually play it. More than twenty billion cards were printed between 2008 and 2016 alone. The rarest single card, an Alpha Black Lotus, sold at auction for $3 million in April 2024. What started as a portable game for gaming conventions became one of the most economically significant games ever made. This documentary traces how that happened, and what it cost.

• 2. Richard Garfield's Long Road

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  Before Garfield designed Magic, he spent much of his childhood without a common language. His father was an architect whose projects took the family to Bangladesh and Nepal. Without shared words, the young Garfield discovered that card games and marbles crossed every barrier. That early lesson shaped everything he built later. Back in the United States, Garfield heard about Dungeons and Dragons but could not find a copy at his local game store. He designed his own version based on descriptions he had read, which he thought was closer to Clue. When he finally got the actual rulebooks, he found them open-ended in a way he had not expected, and he described the writing as "dreadfully written". That open-endedness still inspired him. He began developing a game he called Five Magics, built around five elemental schools drawn from geographically diverse places. He never planned to publish it. By 1991, Garfield was a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and an adjunct professor at Whitman College. He had also been developing RoboRally, a board game about robots navigating a hazard-filled factory. His colleague Mike Davis pointed him toward Wizards of the Coast, a company founded by Peter Adkison, a systems analyst for Boeing in Seattle. The three met near Garfield's parents' home in Oregon. Adkison liked RoboRally but considered it logistically too risky. He told Garfield he wanted something portable, a game that could fill the downtime at gaming conventions. That conversation sent Garfield back out hiking near Multnomah Falls, where the Five Magics concept fused with the idea of customizable color-themed card decks. He met Adkison again in Seattle within the week. Adkison immediately recognized that a game expandable with new cards indefinitely was unlike any tabletop game then on the market, and he later wrote on a USENET post: "If executed properly, the cards would make us millions."

• 3. Building the Game

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  Garfield returned to Pennsylvania and worked quickly. Within a few months he had completed roughly 150 cards. The color-based structure of Five Magics carried over intact, with red representing aggressive attack and the other four colors each claiming distinct philosophical territory. Games like Cosmic Encounter and Strat-o-matic Baseball influenced the design because both created different experiences depending on which cards were in play. Early test cards were printed on paper using available copyrighted art and put in front of volunteer groups at the university. About six months after the Oregon meeting, Garfield had the first complete version of the game. He also established the narrative frame: a Multiverse called Dominia, composed of infinite planes, from which players as wizards draw their power. That frame was designed from the start to accommodate an unlimited variety of creatures and magics. One of the game's foundational rules, the "Magic Golden Rule", stated that whenever a card's text directly contradicts the base rules, the card takes precedence. That single principle, borrowed in spirit from Cosmic Encounter, is what made the game's complexity scalable. Meanwhile, Adkison was preparing to publish it. He brought in local Cornish artists, paying them with shares in Wizards of the Coast. While most company investment was being drawn to The Primal Order, a role-playing rulebook, Wizards was also sued by Palladium for copyright infringement over that book. The case was settled out of court and financially damaged the company. Adkison formed a separate entity, Garfield Games, to publish the card game. A lawyer advised that the name Magic alone was too generic to trademark, so the game was briefly solicited under the name Mana Clash. Everyone continued calling it Magic regardless. After further legal consultation, the name Magic: The Gathering was chosen, which could be trademarked.

• 4. Launch and Early Explosion

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  The game's public debut was always going to be Gen Con in Milwaukee in August 1993, but Garfield and Adkison nearly missed their window. Without funds to ship cards to game stores in time, Adkison took a single box with a handful of complete decks to the Origins Game Fair. Representatives from Wargames West watched the demonstration, brought their CEO over, and took Adkison to dinner. They negotiated funding terms that night. Magic: The Gathering had a general release on the 5th of August 1993. Adkison and his wife then drove toward Milwaukee, stopping at game stores to demonstrate the game along the route. Early stops were quiet, but word spread from store to store. As they moved south and west, larger and larger crowds were already waiting. At Gen Con, their shipment of 2.5 million cards arrived a day late, but by the end of the convention every card was gone. The game's initial audience was largely drawn from Dungeons and Dragons players, but the following expanded quickly to all kinds of people. New expansions followed fast. Arabian Nights, designed by Garfield and based on One Thousand and One Nights, was released in December 1993. By the end of 1994, the game had printed over a billion cards. The first expansion of the Legends set, released the same year, introduced multicolored cards with a gold border, mixing two or more color costs. In 1996, Wizards established the Pro Tour, a circuit of tournaments with cash prizes. In 2009 alone, the top prize at a single tournament was $40,000. A patent was granted to Wizards in 1997 covering the novel method of gameplay and components, including the concept of "tapping" a card by rotating it 90 degrees to indicate use. That patent later became part of a legal dispute with Nintendo over trade secrets related to the Pokemon Trading Card Game, which was settled out of court.

• 5. How the Game Actually Works

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  Five colors anchor everything in Magic. White, blue, black, red, and green each represent a philosophical school of magic, and their arrangement on the Color Wheel describes which schools are complementary and which are opposing. The Research and Development team at Wizards built the Color Pie to differentiate each color's strengths and keep the game balanced. White draws mana from plains and represents order and light; its creatures are often individually weak but strong in groups. Blue pulls from islands, associated with intellect, manipulation, and control; its creatures tend to be evasive rather than powerful. Black draws from swamps and represents power through sacrifice and corruption; many of its creatures are undead. Red pulls from mountains and represents chaos and fury; it holds the strongest direct-damage spells, such as fireballs that can be powered up with extra mana. Green draws from forests and represents life and nature; it commands the widest array of creatures and can generate additional mana and life points. Most cards are single-color, with a colored border. Multicolored cards were introduced in the Legends expansion, and hybrid cards, introduced with Ravnica, can be cast using mana from either of two colors. Cards fall into permanents, which remain on the battlefield until removed, and non-permanents like sorceries and instants, which resolve once and go to the graveyard. Players begin with seven cards and work through a set phase order each turn: drawing, generating mana by tapping lands, casting spells, attacking with creatures, and resolving remaining actions. Complex interactions resolve through the Stack, a system that works on last-in-first-out order, the same logic used in computer programming. The most common win condition is reducing an opponent's life total to zero through creature combat damage, though many alternative win conditions also exist.

• 6. Formats and Organized Play

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  Constructed formats require players to build decks from their own card collections, typically with a minimum of sixty cards and no more than four copies of any card except basic lands. Standard, which limits play to recently released sets, was designed partly to prevent power creep and give newer players a fair footing against veterans who have been collecting for years. Commander, a 100-card format, changes most of those rules: every card in the deck must have a unique name, each player designates a legendary creature as their Commander that can be played at any time without drawing it, and all other cards must share their color with that Commander. Commander draws from any set ever released, subject to its own separate ban list. Limited formats take a different approach entirely. In Booster Draft, each player opens a pack, selects one card, and passes the remaining cards to the next player; three packs are opened in total, passing direction alternating left-right-left. Players then build decks from what they picked. Organized play evolved substantially over the game's history. The Wizards Play Network, formerly the Duelists' Convocation International, governs sanctioned events. Friday Night Magic, sponsored by the WPN, draws thousands of game shops worldwide and is described as a place for new players to start building community. Grand Prix events were open to the general public and sometimes drew more than two thousand players. The largest Magic tournament ever held was Grand Prix: Las Vegas in May 2015, with a total of 7,551 players. The Pro Tour ran from 1996, offering Swiss-format rounds over three days, until Wizards announced in 2018 that 2019 would be the final Pro Tour season. A Magic Pro League followed, with the top 32 players from the previous season receiving a $75,000 annual salary. That structure itself ended after the 2021-2022 season, with Wizards announcing a return to Pro Tour branding, featuring a simplified point system and a World Championship with a prize pool of $1,000,000 open to roughly 128 players.

• 7. Cards as Commodities

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  Common cards rarely sell for more than a few cents and are typically sold in bulk. Uncommon and weak rare cards range from ten cents to about a dollar. At the other end of the market, the oldest and rarest cards sit on the Reserved List, a commitment Wizards made never to reprint cards from the Alpha through Urza's Destiny sets of 1994 to 1999. Legacy-only cards on the Reserved List can be worth $200 to $1,000 or more. Cards classified as Vintage, especially the nine cards known as the Power Nine, often exceed $1,000 individually. The Black Lotus is the most expensive card ever in regular print. In 2019, an unsigned Alpha Black Lotus graded Pristine 9.5 by Beckett Grading Services sold for $166,100. A PSA Gem Mint 10 example framed and signed by its artist Christopher Rush went for $511,100 in January 2021. A similar card sold for $540,000 in March 2023. A mint-condition Alpha Black Lotus sold for $3 million in April 2024. A secondary market ecosystem grew up around these valuations. Card prices were once set somewhat arbitrarily by comic book and hobby shop employees. Hobbyist magazines then began surveying stores and publishing price lists. With the internet, tournament deck lists became the primary driver: if a card appeared frequently in winning decks, its price climbed. TCGPlayer.com, launched in 2008, was the first platform that both compiled pricing data and allowed direct buying and selling of cards; it introduced the TCG Market Price metric based on the most recent completed sales, functioning like a real-time stock ticker. Wizards introduced a holo-foil stamp on all rare and mythic rare cards from Magic 2015 onward to combat the growing counterfeit market. In July 2023, the singleton "One Ring" card from the Lord of the Rings crossover set was found by a retail worker in Toronto and later sold to rapper Post Malone.

• 8. Crossovers and the Expanding Universe

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  Wizards of the Coast began introducing promotional crossover cards carefully, keeping them outside Standard legality. Four cards sold at HasCon 2017 featured Transformers, Nerf, and Dungeons and Dragons. A three-card set based on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was sold both as physical product and within MTG Arena to support the Extra Life charity. The Ikoria set in April 2020 included sixteen kaiju monsters licensed from Toho as promotional cards, among them Godzilla. The Secret Lair series expanded this further with play-legal cards that used existing mechanics under new art, names, and flavor text. A 2020 Secret Lair collaboration with The Walking Dead on AMC was described by the development team as a natural fit given that zombies already existed in Magic. Land cards in a Secret Lair release featured paintings licensed through the estate of Bob Ross. In 2024, a Secret Lair drop included a Tim the Enchanter card based on the Prodigal Sorceror, acknowledging that the Magic community had already been calling that card "Tim" for years in honor of the Monty Python character. The Universes Beyond series went further still, producing full sets with Commander decks and booster packs using properties like Warhammer 40,000, The Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, Jurassic Park, Fallout, Assassin's Creed, and Final Fantasy. In 2025, Wizards announced that all future Universes Beyond sets would be legal to play in all formats. Reception to the crossover strategy has been mixed. Magic's head designer Mark Rosewater acknowledged "ongoing complaints" about IP integration and higher prices for crossover cards, while also arguing that critical sentiment shrinks over time. A Bank of America analyst downgraded Hasbro stock in November 2022, citing concern that accelerated Magic card production was, in his words, "killing its golden goose" and "destroying the long-term value of the brand". Wizards announced in 2025 that 2026 would see seven standard-legal sets, the most ever released in a single year, before returning to six in 2027.