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7 mo. ago
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The Creator Of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong | Defector
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r/magicTCG – The Creator Of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong | Defector
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7mo ago
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Edited 7mo ago
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Obviously Richard Garfield is a talented designer, and some of his post-Magic projects have been exceptional. I’m hoping he comes back for another Magic set sometime.
But I don’t think he has a good sense of what makes a product actually sustainable on the market. SolForge, Artifact, and KeyForge all had big problems with their business models, even if fundamentally they were fun to play.
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7mo ago
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He’s a fantastic game designer but unfortunately the companies that buy his designs are godawful at taking them over. KeyForge was an initial success but Fantasy Flight took a nosedive with it as soon as Richard moved on. IIRC part of the reason why it failed was because the deck generation formula was lost after a disgruntled employee was let go.
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“Ever since Magic was published I’ve been trying to recapture something that I thought was lost after release,” he told the magazine. “When Magic was first designed everyone had their own treasured collection, but those treasures became commodities, and we lost some of that magic. Since then I’ve been trying to figure out how to get back to that.”
Yeah but that’s now how trading card games survive. They only do so because there’s a healthy secondary market that serves as the foundation for the actual demand of the game. Otherwise, you’re just making a board game with some extra customization. The problem is that board games are isolated experiences, and with some exceptions, they don’t have years/decades worth of expansions to help make the game deeper.
He tried that with Keyforge, and by all intents and purposes, the nature of how its products were sold are neither in line with TCGs or board games. Especially when the “starter kit”/decks are not actually able to play the game right out of the box.
There was no magic to be lost with the commodification of the game, in fact the magic was only bolstered by the fact that a healthy secondary market goes directly in hand with “the Gathering”. Had MTG not have the baked-in infrastructure of being the first trading card game, it would have been just another board game. Which is fine, but he wouldn’t be able to have the su
ccess he has, because of it.
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