Since bursting onto the scene in the mid-1990s,
Magic the Gathering
has become one of the most popular games of all time, with millions of players collecting cards to battle each other in an imaginary fantasy realm. But
Magic
's early success came with a problem; the price of the game's most powerful and rare cards surged along with its popularity. Eventually,
Magic
's creators worried that the game would become too expensive and was at risk of becoming a short-lived fad. So how do you pop a bubble in collectibles without completely alienating collectors? In this episode, we speak with Richard Garfield, the creator of
Magic the Gathering
, and Arka Ray, a long-time game developer at Microsoft who's now CEO of Richard's new gaming studio, Popularium. They talk about the surprising parallels between MTG and central banking, what they've learned from
Magic
, and how they're applying those lessons to
Chaos Agents
, Popularium's first new gaming launch. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Key insights from the pod
:
The economics of Magic: The Gathering — 6:26
How to make a game popular — 10:11
How a game creator is like a central bank — 19:16
How a game is made accessible — 26:44
What Richard Garfield and Arka Ray are doing now — 32:02
How do you make money in games? — 43:12
The games that Richard and Arka like to play — 51:00
---
Tracy Alloway (00:00):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
Joe Weisenthal (00:04):
And I'm Joe Weisenthal.
Tracy (00:08):
Joe, did you ever play Magic: The Gathering?
Joe (00:11):
No, I've never played it. The only game I know, I mean, I’ve spent some time playing chess, as we've talked about on the show before. And then outside of that, it's like, I'd never had the capacity in my life to really learn a new game. So it's like, you know what? I'm going to play chess, try to get better at it, play on my phone. But I've never then said, ‘Oh I want to play some other game.’
Tracy (00:40):
Man, you need to branch out.
Joe (00:43):
I know. You know what the thing is? I don't want to start from the beginning. I'm just like, I'm too old for that.
Tracy (00:50):
That's how you learn new things. Well speaking of being old, I spent countless hours in middle school playing Magic: The Gathering. It was a huge thing in, let's see, this would've been around ‘94, ‘95, and almost everyone I knew at the time was playing it.
Joe (01:12):
Where were you living in ‘95?
Tracy (01:14):
I was in Chicago. So that's partly why, and every recess was taken up with Magic: The Gathering tournaments. I really enjoyed playing, but for me the collectibility of the cards was probably more interesting. I was obsessed with the cards.
Joe (01:34):
One of my best friend's younger brother was, like, really obsessed with the cards in the game. He's like ‘Oh, I got the Wall of Brambles,’ or whatever it is. Is that a card?
Tracy (01:44):
Wall of Brambles?
Joe (01:44):
That's not a card?
Tracy (01:45):
I don't think so. Although, it sounds like it could be, to be fair.
Joe (01:50):
No, it is. There's a card called Wall of Brambles, I think. Anyway, I just remember that. Oh look, you can buy one for 20 cents, so I guess it wasn't a very valuable card. I was around people who were really into their cards. I was Magic-adjacent. I have had friends who play it. I didn't realize you played it. I was like, sometimes when I would go to the bookstore to play chess or the game store, there would be other people playing. So I was around the game, but I just never played it myself.
Tracy (02:18):
Man, I spent so much time, I had so many cards. I had valuable cards, I had a Shivan Dragon at one point.
Joe (02:27):
Wow, you had a Shivan Dragon! Wow.
Tracy (02:28):
Thanks Joe, for your faint enthusiasm. This brings me to a serious Odd Lots-esque topic, which is Magic: The Gathering is really interesting, not just because it was one of the, possibly the, most successful card games of all time, but it had a lot of sort of economic aspects to it.
So there was the card collection, and then you can imagine within the card collection aspect of it, obviously the goal is to play, right? And win the game. But then you had this whole sort of market spring up around these super valuable cards, and there was a big discussion about whether or not the value of the cards was actually making the gameplay worse.
Joe (03:14):
This I'm familiar with, and intuitively you could sort of get this phenomenon, right, because a card can be useful in the game, but a card can also just be like a valuable thing that people buy and sell on eBay or Magic: The Gathering online exchange, things like that. But then the question is, do they align? Does the collection of the cards lead to optimal gameplay, suboptimal gameplay, etc.? You could see how, like, the value of a card from a monetary standpoint and the value of a card from a gameplay standpoint might be linear-related, but might not be perfectly aligned.
Tracy (03:52):
And the other interesting thing is Wizards of the Coast, the company that actually made Magic, at various times they tried to fix this problem so they almost acted like a central bank of the cards in terms of issuance. Like they would increase the supply of cards or decrease the supply of rare cards as needed to make the game more interesting. So that's kind of fun too.
I could go on about Magic for many hours still, but I am very excited to say that today we're going to be speaking with the creator of Magic: The Gathering. We have Richard Garfield on the line all the way from Sydney, Australia, and we also have his colleague, Arka Ray, the president and technical director of Popularium, which is the new gaming company that he's setting up with Richard. So, very excited to have them both on the show. Richard and Arka, thank you so much for joining Odd Lots!
Richard Garfield (04:49):
Well, hello. It's a pleasure to be here. Love talking about games.
Arka Ray (04:54):
Thank you both. Really appreciate, I really appreciate your having us here. We're really excited to be here.
Joe (04:59):
I hope my slightly sarcastic tone to Tracy was not in any way coming off as dismissive towards the game.
Arka (05:08):
No, no.
Joe (05:10):
I was maybe just mocking her just a little bit.
Tracy (05:11):
Mocking me is okay.
Joe (05:12):
I want to make it clear that I have no condescension whatsoever to the game. I feel bad about that already.
Arka (05:22):
I think you set up a lot of great stuff there for us to get into with Richard. So let's do it.
Richard (05:29):
I wanted to say that back in the nineties, I thought that playing one game like chess was like reading one book or watching one movie but I very quickly got past that because I realized games have this really special thing where the more you play them, for a lot of games, the better they get. And so there's something which doesn't really line up with a lot of the other media. So I think that is a perfectly good way to be.
Joe (05:59):
Well, there's a very good observation. Maybe I should play more games.
Tracy (06:04):
Joe over here just reading one book all his life, how sad. So Richard, maybe just to begin with, I use this sort of economics framing to describe some aspects of Magic, but do you think that that's like the right way of thinking about it? As a sort of ecosystem or market of cards?
Richard (06:26):
Yes, I think it's the most important thing with a game like Magic is the economics around the cards. And it doesn't take much to shift the game from being something which isn't primarily a game, but is more an economic tool. And that is in fact you mentioned that Wizards acted like a central bank was very much the case back in the nineties, maybe ‘95, where the price of the game was so out of control that there was this speculation bubble and there was a conflict within the company.
A lot of people thought this was amazing because who doesn't want their product to hit the shelves and immediately be worth three times as much? But for the people who were actually making the game, like me, it was terrifying because if you can't afford the game, you can't play it. If you can't play it, then it's not really a game.
So we very intentionally overprinted the set of Fallen Empires and the market crashed hard and people said that was the end of the game. But as it worked out, play sprang up because at its root it's a game. It's a strong game, and the community loves the game and then it flourished. So ever since then, I've been really skeptical of games and game companies, which are intentionally trying to keep the prices of their cards or components high.
Joe (08:19):
You know, one thing, and I don't know if we even want to go down this road. I mean, I certainly had that thought in 2021 when they were trying to do like NFT-related games. It's like, is the point to play the game? To me it didn’t seem like any of those games were fun.
Something I am curious about though, in 1995, eBay, I don't think it really existed. Did it exist by ‘95? I mean, if it did, it barely did [because] hardly anyone was using it. At Wizards of the Coast, were you able to get, like, real time or semi real time feedback on price to find that optimal equilibrium between the value of the cards and the amount of gameplay there was?
Richard (09:04):
I'm not sure what tools were being used, but I know we had data. In fact the data was, I'm not sure about eBay, it might have been eBay, but the data was so clear that I know at least one doctoral thesis that was put together using data from Magic: The Gathering. The idea there was that the person who did it, the one I know of was Dave Riley, he found it as a perfect tool to test different auctions to see how that affected the final prices of the sales.
Tracy (09:45):
That's super interesting. So, Richard, one of the things that was sort of built into the game, at least initially, was the idea of actually playing for ante. So if you lost, you would have to give up a card from your deck to your opponent, and it was sort of one way of actually building up your decks and becoming an even better player. How come you built that aspect of it into the game?
Richard (10:11):
When we began the game I did not anticipate it being the success it was and in fact I expected players to buy one to four decks, maybe. I wanted to make sure that there was some method for there to be variety in what players had, even if they stopped buying cards. Now of course they can trade and I expected that to be a part of the game, but I also knew that there were people uncomfortable with trading.
So, I thought that ante would be a good way to get that circulation of cards and it also acted as something of a leveler between decks. If you've got a very valuable deck, then you're going to ante more valuable cards. There were some dedicated advocates of it. It was a very exciting way to play, but it was pretty clear very early on that we were going to have to drop it because so many people hated losing their cards. And so I imagine by the second expansion, there were no more ante cards and it was phased out.
Tracy (11:27):
Joe, one of my greatest triumphs as an 11-year-old was I won a signed card in Magic: The Gathering. It was signed by the artist and the person I won it from was very upset because we were all 10 or 11 year old kids at the time. We didn't have a lot of signed cards circulating among us.
Joe (11:46):
Can I say I did not realize that the card loss, I sort of assumed that still existed, that you could lose your cards. It shows you how much I knew about Magic. For some reason, I thought maybe that was still part of it, that would seem really stressful and I would not want to collect a deck, or I would not want to be a parent buying decks for my kids, my 13-year-old kids, and then having them lose them during lunch at the game. So I could see why that wasn't a particularly stable thing.
Richard (12:18):
I want to interject there on that though, that today it would be completely a non-starter. And one of the things was that when it was published, we didn't see them as being valuable in the way they are today. Very quickly, there was a price set on them. And so once there's a price set on them, they actually are gambling when they play for ante.
Joe (12:44):
Which could be fun and gambling is fine, but I don't know if you want kids gambling, I guess.
Richard (12:48):
Back when it was playtest cards and when they were first out, and when I was picturing them just being treated as these sort of components you might have sentimental value to, it was different. But once they become cash, it's not really an acceptable thing to bake into your game.
Joe (13:27):
So, just to sort of get the narrative right, can you just give a quick overview of how long you were involved? You were the creator of Magic: The Gathering. Wizards of the Coast, it existed as a game publishing company prior to you linking up with them, I think, and then obviously it took off. How long were you sort of involved with the business of Magic?
Richard (13:52):
I was with Wizards until about 2001 so that was about eight years. I mean I guess maybe 10 years, if you go back before Magic was published since technically I guess I was working for them then. But when Hasbro bought Wizards I was around for a little while, but then went off on my own.
Tracy (14:11):
So, Richard, just going back to the very beginning when you actually came up with the game, I think I read somewhere that you are a mathematician, or you studied mathematics at university. Did that influence the way the game was designed at all?
Richard (14:25):
I was actually teaching math at the college level and it probably did influence the design of Magic, but I always like to point out that when you're a game designer, sort of all subjects are grist for the mill, just like being an author. So if you had an economics PhD or studied literature or anything, it will affect what you write about and it'll affect what sort of games you make.
Tracy (15:00):
And Arka, I want to bring you in as well because of course, you are now working with Richard at the new gaming company, Popularium. Did you play Magic when you were younger?
Arka (15:10):
Yes, I did and I grew up in India and it was a very insulated community when it came to games pretty much. People cared about Cricket and that was pretty much it. So I had some cousins over here in the US who would come by and introduce me to cool things that they were doing and obviously Magic was a big thing. So one summer they came over and this was, I think ‘94 or ‘95, something like that.
They came to visit and they had these [cards] that they were playing and I was someone who basically, when I was five, six-years-old, I would make my own versions of Monopoly and things like that. So when I saw the cards, it was just like this world of wonder that just exploded. And obviously I only had a handful of cards, so there's only so much I could do. But I remember trying to teach everyone I could how to play the game. So just seeing his name on those cards and being here now with him, it's quite an opportunity.
Joe (16:22):
When did you know you wanted to have a career in gaming? I mean, I imagine, it's funny you said that, my daughter is seven and she's really getting into Monopoly right now. It's the first game that she's really into and that's really exciting and she's starting to develop strategy, etc. When in your mind did it go from, okay, you love playing games, the cards were sort of fascinating to you, to thinking ‘Oh, this could be a career of building gameplay of various sorts?’
Arka (16:54):
It sounds cheesy, but it actually was around the time that I was 11. I switched schools because I switched cities that my parents were living in and it was the first time I was exposed to a computer and programming. It was Basic or something like that was the language, and as soon as I got one I started writing this quiz game, and that's all I would do when I was on lunch breaks and things like that.
Then obviously I discovered actual games and got a computer at home and played Doom and things like that. And then people would ask me, okay, what do you want to do when you grow up? I'm like ‘Oh, I want to make video games.’ And often people were like ‘Wait, what are video games?’
That's kind of why I immigrated to the US. I came here to study computer science specifically because I wanted to learn how to build games and then was fortunate enough to join Xbox in the early days of Xbox 360. And that was the winding part that took me to meet Richard and Skaff [Elias], who is Richard's team design partner back in 2011, 2012, when I was starting my first company. And here we are, 10 years later.
Tracy (18:03):
I definitely want to get into the new game that you're launching with Richard and how it's sort of similar and also different to Magic: The Gathering. But before we do, I just have a few more questions about Magic. Just humor me and let me relive childhood.
Joe (18:20):
Tracy, if I were interviewing the creator of chess, I would have a thousand questions so you go to town.
Tracy (18:28):
So Richard, you described that analogy of Wizards of the Coast, sort of acting as the central bank and deciding at one point to flood the market with new cards in order to bring down prices in the secondary market and make it more equitable so that everyone could have fun playing the game. Can you talk a little bit more about what that decision was actually like? You're in the room at Wizards of the Coast. What are those conversations that are happening at that time?
Richard (18:59):
Wow. Well, there were a lot of people involved with Magic and sort of on the sidelines of Magic, who saw it as a fad. And they saw it like, I don't know what fads are, Cabbage Patch Kids.
Tracy (19:15):
Beanie Babies!
Richard (19:16):
Pop Rocks, Beanie Babies, there you go. And baseball cards. When you had a speculation bubble, it was going to crash and the best you could do was ride that out. I thought that that was not not going to be healthy for the game and we had some faith in the game in the sense that we had been playing with the first set of cards for over two years, and the play testers were just hooked on it, they loved it. And so if it crashes and goes away, that won't be shared with anybody, there won't be any long term to the game.
Within Wizards, there were lots of very heated arguments that if you overprint it, some people believed it was going to crash, and then basically the game was done. Other people thought if you overprint it and it crashes, that'll give players an opportunity to actually play the game. Since I was a committed crasher and the president of the company Peter Atkinson took my advice seriously, he was a committed crasher and so we went through with that and the sort of reputation that the set which crashed it, Fallen Empires, was very bad. I mean, people hated it.
They hated the set but it wasn't about how it actually played, it was about the fact that it was cheap. They could still buy it remaindered, but the number of players just exploded after that. We began to reformulate how we printed the cards to make it so that anybody who joined the game wouldn't have to pay secondary market prices that were substantially above buying from the company.
Joe (21:35):
Well, so I understand and I like the way you put it: you're a committed crasher. You want people to play the game, you want low prices, and I think that's awesome, or it sounds really cool. But it still seems that even within the committed crasher philosophy, the challenge may not be okay, you want to have the cards cheap so everyone can play them, but you still need to get the proportions right, in terms of there still has to be some variability between the really powerful cards can't be printed as much as the less powerful cards. There has to be some rarity. How do you calibrate that aspect of it such that you get the proportion of powerful to less powerful cards right even within the crash mentality, the crash framework?
Richard (22:21):
So there's a misapprehension there that's underlying your question, which is, I was also from the start a big advocate of not making the rare cards more powerful. Now there were more powerful rare cards, but if you make the common cards very broadly powerful, generally useful, easy to use, then people who buy not too many decks have less of a disadvantage against somebody who gets a lot of decks.
This was early on, one of the ideas, I had lots of ideas and some of them worked like this and some of them didn't like ante, but this approach makes it so that your power goes up logarithmically as you purchase decks at the beginning rather than linearly.
Now the value of the cards, that's something different. It does have something to do with the power of the cards, and there were powerful rare cards. I certainly wouldn't deny that. But one of the things that I enjoyed doing when Magic first came out is going to game stores across the country and playing against players, gun slinging we called it — I think that became a term we stopped using. I would play against them with a deck of all common cards and my records against the champs of the stores was 80% or something like that.
And people would bring out their decks with their Black Lotuses and their vampires and their Shivan Dragons, and I would clean their clocks and it would be all top to bottom common cards. And it's just because I've been playing many years longer than them, and was a better player and recognized the power that was there in the common cards. Now the best decks, of course, are going to be a mixture. But you look at the top decks played today, and there will be a good chunk of common cards that are being played by all the players.
Joe (24:30):
I guess I just sort of assumed, Tracy, that there must have been some relationship between like, oh, if you have these really valuable cards, they must be overwhelmingly powerful, so I did not realize that. Also, it's just sort of funny to imagine the ultimate creator of the game popping into the local D&D boardgame store in whatever town and cleaning all the clocks.
Tracy (24:54):
Some guy who spent countless hours building a deck of really valuable cards suddenly loses to someone who's playing with some really common ones. But just on this note Richard, you mentioned the Black Lotus card, which of course is probably the most famous card in all of Magic history. And I looked it up on one website before we had this conversation, and I think the pricing for the most rare version of the Black Lotus was something like $22,000, I have no idea if that's accurate or not. It seems slightly inflated.
Joe (25:31):
Wait, I see half a million.
Tracy (25:33):
Really? Wow.
Richard (25:34):
I saw an article about a proxy Black Lotus, that is one that the players made, selling for some incredible amount like $20,000.
Tracy (25:47):
But the actual one is closer to half a million, is that right? Maybe I was looking at the wrong version.
Richard (25:54):
I could be wrong. I didn't have access to my internet [right now].
Joe (25:57):
March 28th, 2023, an auction house, $615,000 for a Black Lotus.
Tracy (26:02):
Well, this gets to my question, are you surprised at the secondary market values for some of these cards nowadays? And especially because this kind of gets to the other thing that you did in order to make gameplay more interesting and more fair, is I think at one point for the pro league, and yes, Joe, there is a pro Magic league, you banned the use of certain cards, like, I think, Black Lotus. The really powerful cards you couldn't play with anymore. So I guess my question is, why do they still have or seem to have, so much value in the secondary market if they're not allowed in some of the games?
Richard (26:44):
That is one of the most important tools we used for making the game accessible to players coming into it. That is not making it so they felt like they had to have the Black Lotus. The tournaments and the environment, which Wizards supports, are only the last couple years’ worth of cards. And so if they're beyond that players can still play them, of course, because they own them, and there will still be events set up around them, but that's not where the focus of the companies of tournaments and play is.
Which means if you come into the game, you know that you're not competing against Black Lotuses and all the old cards, and so it wasn't just Black Lotus that was banned. It was basically any card that was too old that became, I forget what they call it, but I don't know, a legacy card. There were special legacy events, but that wasn't part of the current game environment. And that was one way we managed to keep it so that the card prices were under control and yet you have this long-term collectibility, so it was collectible like stamps, but not like Beanie Babies.
Tracy (28:02):
I didn't realize that the older cards were banned in pro play. I guess I probably didn't play Magic long enough for that to kind of be an issue but that's interesting.
Arka (28:13):
To clarify, there are like two form masters, standard and the other one, the standard is the rotation that Richard is talking about. You can't play anything that's modern, which is like, I think after 2000 something, it's considered modern like non-pro tournaments and so on.
But there is also a banned list, which Richard might want to talk about, which Black Lotus and [other] cards are on, which will never be reprinted, which does contribute to a great extent to the incredible value of something like a Black Lotus, because there's a possibility for a legacy card, as Richard said, to be potentially reprinted. And it's considered exactly the same card as far as gameplay is concerned. But there will never be another Black Lotus printed because of many interesting reasons, which I don't know if you have time or Richard wants to go into.
Richard (28:59):
It is actually worth pointing out. Like, it's a very sticky relationship between the power of the card, how many have been printed and whether it's available, whether it's in tournaments. So for example, very early on we realized that when we reprinted an old card, which had some cache to it, the price on the secondary market of that card would go up.
The reason for that is because that meant the card was legal for tournaments because it wasn't an old card anymore. You could bring your older version, which might have different art or a different cardboard or something like that. But it seemed contradictory that you're printing more of them and now the price goes up.
Tracy (29:48):
Arka, I have to ask now, what was your, I don't want to say most valuable card because it kind of undermines a lot of the purpose of the game, but what was your favorite card that you accumulated when you were playing?
Arka (29:59):
The time that I was playing Magic, probably the most was when I was at Microsoft, just because that was one of the things that we did. And at the time, I got really into black, like all sorts of combinations of black. So I got into black-white, black-red, etc. So there was one card that I think was a gold card that was printed in like M11 or something like that, that was called the Dark Tutelage. That just had the coolest art on it, if you want to look it up. It was this guy with a blindfold and eyeballs and this demon looking character.
Tracy (30:47):
Oh, that is cool.
Arka (30:48):
It's really fun and it combines really well with red cards also. So I just really enjoyed the mechanic, the life gain and life loss mechanic as resources.
Tracy (31:18):
I have an embarrassing confession, which is, I was scared of the black cards when I was growing up. I never played with them because of some of the images. So the black cards, for people who don't know, are sort of associated with death and scary things and there's lots of demons and pictures of skeletons and things like that. They freaked me out when I was little. I was scared of them.
Joe (31:41):
Can we talk a little bit about the new company and maybe Arka, why don't you describe what Popularium is? In the world of gaming what are you trying to solve? What do you want to do that isn't being done elsewhere in the gaming world?
Arka (32:02):
That's a great question and I think it's best answered a little bit through the story of how we actually started Popularium. I mean on one hand, I've been dreaming of starting a games company since I was a kid. But you know how things go, like I started my company and I'm a technical person, so I got into building enterprise software for a while, and that was all fun and all that in a different way, but I always wanted to come back to games. And I had an opportunity a couple of years ago because of a combination of events with my prior company and some availability of some financing. Covid giving people the opportunity to like, basically become much more comfortable with completely distributed development systems.
Because games especially, you go in, you build games and the whole like classic crunch mentality that you're sleeping under your desk before you ship. So all of those things were for me the right time to start thinking about putting something together and it was really accelerated by two things. First was that for me what has always been very interesting are games that essentially through gameplay create A, new format and then B, generate narratives out of the pure gameplay itself. And something that Richard's games have always done is basically whether or not you understand the lore of the Magic universe, let's say your net runner or whatever it might be, when you're playing the game, the game is creating a narrative for you. That dual that you're having with summoning the specific creatures, the counters, the stack.
Actually someone should do it, if they haven't. You can actually take the output of a Magic game and maybe like, actually train a generative AI like an LLM or something like that to actually output a wonderful narrative of what the battle was, which was created purely through gameplay. And for me, we really hadn't explored that fully in a digital format, the power of that fully in a digital format. And when I started talking to Richard in late 2021 about some of these ideas, Richard and Skaff. Richard can tell you about Skaff, who's just an awesome person in his own right. My goal was what can I do to create a playground for you guys where you can take the ideas that you've been cooking for a long time?
And the thing that Richard and I and Skaff resonated on pretty much right away, and we've known each other for a while, so we've kind of talked about this over time was the idea of empowering gamers to pursue their fund their way, while also leaning into gameplay innovation. Because I think that one of the things that doesn't really hold gaming innovation back, but definitely slows it down is once something works for a certain group of people, a bunch of money goes into building families of that because people are going to have fun in a certain way. Another amazing thing about Richard's work is that exactly what I was talking about earlier with that whole like black approach and with basically you saying Tracy, that you were not really into the black deck at all.
Tracy (35:48):
Some of them were scary.
Arka (35:48):
No, I'm completely with you. Like they are genuinely not like pleasant things to look at, but I can't imagine playing Magic without black cards, but there's an entire gamut of folks such as yourself who that's not the case. That is what's so cool about how we lean into innovation while also empowering gamers to pursue the joy of gaming, the fun of gaming in the way that they want, without feeling like ‘Oh, I'm not good enough, or my fun is not fun enough unless I'm winning all the time.’ And that was my philosophy, and what I wanted to lean into. And obviously we've seen it over and over again, and while I was at Microsoft, we built Xbox Life pretty much from the ground up.
So I've seen how hard it is to keep toxicity out of communities. And one of the ways that you can actually do that is if from the germination of your game, you are letting people genuinely lean into fun and telling them, no matter how you want to have fun, it's okay, we will accommodate. What Richard had in mind was actually something that he had been thinking about and working on for 20 plus years. And maybe Richard, I want to maybe ask you to talk a little bit about how things came together before we actually put the company together.
Richard (37:05):
So this concept that I've been working on for 20 plus years was something that had been gnawing at me ever since Magic came out, which was that its popularity in some ways undercut one of the things which I really loved about the game. That was that when you first play Magic, even today when you first play Magic, but originally very much so, it was a game filled with sort of endless possibilities and treasures and your deck was distinct, it was yours. Your friend's decks were distinct as well.
You had the sense that the world was infinite, but then when you start playing more and begin to play tournaments the emphasis of the game is on constructed decks. That is, you choose which parts you want to play, and you play them, and they're readily available, so they become more like commodities.
This is not the way we played originally. It's a fun way to play so I don't mean to take away anything from players who love that way of playing, and there are plenty. But when we first played, we played with this very limited pool, and it was exciting in a different way. And so the way I came up with to recreate that, was to make it so that players' decks were unique. So that is when you get a deck, it's your deck and you can trade the deck, but you can't break it up. I wanted the back of the cards to be unique and it took a while for printing technology to catch up with that.
Keyforge was the first unique deck game, and every deck in that game is unique and has its own unique name. The resulting play was so interesting, and the audience for it was thirsty for this sort of gameplay that didn't involve making decks and collecting cards that I began to think about how to apply those ideas to other games.
In particular, you would think that even though printing technology took so long to catch up to this concept that digitally it shouldn't be that hard to do. And when I was talking with Arka he was asking what he could do to bring some of our ideas to life. And I was just coming off of dealing with many different companies who wanted games, but they were all very concerned with how limited they make it so that the cards were immediately valuable.
They were talking about play to earn money and putting out a certain limited number so that people's initial investments go up. And so they were approaching the games entirely as sort of this, well, what we began with this economic they were building it on this foundation of economics rather than on the foundation of gameplay. So Arka was very interested in supporting this idea of building the game on a foundation of gameplay and dealing with the economics as sort of a secondary thing, which is there to sort of maximize the enjoyment of the game to the player, rather than return on investment for the player.
Joe (40:52):
Tracy, this reminds me, by the way, there is a sort of corollary in the chess world, which is, you think of chess as a game, but so much, and it is, but so much of modern chess is just sort of rote memorization of the first 15, 20 moves. And so there's this other version of chess that I think Bobby Fischer came up with — Fischer Random Chess — in which you don't know in advance the order of the pieces that are going to be, so it's gameplay from the beginning. There's like numerous ways that the pieces can be ordered on your back rank, so it's gameplay from the beginning.
Tracy (41:24):
Oh, I see. So you don't have to have, like, the queen in the middle.
Joe (41:27):
What it does is you have to figure out the game right away rather than you have 25 lines committed to memory.
Tracy (41:34):
Oh, that seems much more interesting.
Joe (41:36):
Theoretically I think it's a better game. The pros don't really play it, but I do think it's widely considered to be more interesting gameplay.
Arka (41:45):
But Joe, what's interesting is I'm sure you've seen this, and Skaff and Richard will tell you all about this also, but if you look at folks like Carlson, what they try to do in their games is basically try to move to a position as quickly as possible that has not been seen.
Joe (42:02):
That's a novelty?
Arka (42:03):
That's exactly the analogy. I'm glad you picked that up. That's exactly the analogy that Richard explained, like the idea of going in with, okay you know the cards and you know the specifics of the units of power, but the combination, the engine that builds with the deck is not something that you've ever seen before. And that you have to figure out in real time. And that is what's interesting about it.
Tracy (42:28):
Richard just touched on this idea of pay to play, and the fact that there are games out there that kind of focus on building up the value of existing assets or cards. And maybe this is one for both Arka and Richard, but how do you resist that temptation? Like, how do you actually monetize the game? Because I imagine in the gaming industry, the temptation now is to wring as much money as possible out of players. And it does seem like some of these are expensive to run, expensive to design, expensive to produce. So how do you manage to do it where others are focused very much on the revenue opportunities?
Arka (43:12):
This goes back to the question, Tracy, that Joe asked earlier, which is one of the fundamental philosophies that we have behind doing this company because Richard, myself, John, Skaff, we all have done things in the past where at this point of time, we want to build something that brings us true joy and satisfaction. And one of the things that we all very much agree upon is that if you bring people true joy and true fun through gameplay, that translates to economics in a much more scalable way than if you try to build gameplay experiences that are optimized for economics. And you see this happening intentionally and unintentionally.
You don't have to just look at recent examples. Like if you go back and look at World of Warcraft and the amount of gold farming. That was completely not legal, but it used to happen all around the world and the amount of value that was created and transacted. Why? Because people wanted to use that utility within the game.
And Magic is just an example of an amazing, glorious example of that phenomenon that has just lasted for decades at this point, which is, if you create that interactivity, and I don't mind saying this, one of the geniuses of Magic is this idea of massively modular gameplay. That is a term that I know Richard likes, of being able to let people construct the pieces to build their piece of the game in a way that is very flexible.
If those two things come together, then the repeatability comes naturally. I think that a lot of folks who try to essentially start with the economics, start with the business model, and then retrofit the gameplay probably do themselves and their gamers a disservice. Anyway, that's something that is very passionate on my part. And I don't know, Richard, if you had any thoughts on that?
Richard (45:16):
I would like to add to that. So there's been many games I've put out and this one we're working on is part of this where there's some question as to how much value you give to the player who just dips their toe in. And my philosophy on it is, if you have faith in the game, you give them lots of play value.
That's why the common cards were powerful in Magic and that's why in KeyForge you get your single deck that has many different avenues that you can play with. So it is not something where you play with it and immediately get bored. There's many different things you can do with it. Now, the cynical would say, well, that is limiting your audience because people are going to buy one deck.
That hasn't been my experience because this massive modularity gives a world of variation, which people want to explore, but it gives the opportunity for people to get involved with a very modest investment. That's something we're talking about with our game and I want to see that a player with a single character can get an amazing amount of value from that and not feel particularly limited by that. And that is with this faith that some players will stop there and that'll be right for them, but other players will want to get different variations.
Tracy (47:02):
When does the new game, Chaos Agents, actually come out?
Arka (47:06):
That's a great question. So basically, just to bring home the question from earlier, Richard sort of gave me this one pager at the end of ‘21, early ‘22 called Maelstrom that he had written up around this idea of basically what it would be if the deck of cards, each card represented a unique skill or ability that together made up this globally unique superhero.
So the idea would be to have this entire large 60 plus heroes battling each other and each hero would be controlled by this kind of unique invisible deck in the background. And one of the things that Richard was sort of really into at the time, was this idea of auto battlers, which is another very interesting genre of games that I'm sure Richard can talk about for a long time.
But this idea of auto battlers would basically be that unlike games where you need a lot of input, a lot of reflexes or twitch. An auto battler lets you sort of make some decisions, almost like an American football coach. Make some decisions, call the play, and then see what happens, and then adapt and call the next play. So there's this lean forward, lean back experience. So Richard was like, what if he blended these two things? And I was like, that sounds amazing.
Joe (48:27):
That's so cool. I want to play an auto battler game.
Tracy (48:27):
You should Joe. Branch out, experience something new.
Arka (48:33):
That's honestly like for people like me who have not played competitively for like 10 plus years, that's the only way that I can play something like that. But what was super cool is that when we hear Richard Garfield, we think of card games and my idea was that, okay, we're going to build something like Hearthstone, but in a big way.
My really good friend John Bankard from Xbox was actually running the Hearthstone product team. So to my great joy, he was like Richard's on auto battlers, I love them, let's jump on. But then what happened was when Richard and Skaff came back with the detailed design document, it turned out that it was not just a card game, it was actually a full fledged battle royale where instead of you controlling your character, your character is this AI-controlled bot that you are essentially coaching and giving good advice to, so to speak.
And that took it to a completely different technical level, but that's kind of what we've been building for the past year and a half, almost two years. So to answer Tracy's question, the reason why we are kind of like talking about all this right now is we just launched what we are calling our pre-alpha. So we are not necessarily like letting everyone through the door, but basically we're letting a ton of folks through the door to come and experience the first version of the game, give us feedback.
And we are hoping to get into Alpha around the late spring, so around late Q1, early Q2 timeframe when more members of the public can start experiencing. So that's kind of like the early access timeframe that we are looking at and then we are going to be in beta by the end of next year.
That's kind of like when we'll be in public. But the reason why we wanted to talk to Magic fans especially is because that's who we are prioritizing is because even you, Tracy, if you play Chaos Agents at this stage, you'll be like ‘Oh, I see how this takes some of the core concepts of a Richard Garfield game and just translates it to something that can only happen in the digital format,’ and that was sort of our fundamental goal. So sorry, that was a much longer answer to your question.
Tracy (50:39):
No, that's very cool and I am excited to play this game. We just have time for one more question, and this one comes from our producer, Carmen, although I think it's actually for Joe's benefit, so that he can branch out into some new things. But other than Magic and Chaos Agents, what games do you like to play? What are your favorites?
Richard (51:00):
As I said at the beginning, I think there is some merit to really getting good at a game, and playing it again and again. That goes against my curiosity of games, so I have this tension between wanting to play everything that comes to the market and trying to discipline myself to return to my favorites and play them again and again.
But some of the games which I return to again and again are Hanabi, that's my favorite cooperative game. And I am actually playing a bunch of Fairy chess right now, which is chess variations. And I play Lost Cities, one of my favorite two-player games, but then lots of classic games like chess and Gin and Bridge.
Joe (52:04):
Hanabi looks cool. It looks like a fun game, maybe I’ll play with my family.
Arka (52:09):
It's a wonderful game, and I can vouch for the fact that Richard plays a lot of games and Carmen and I were talking about this at the top of the hour. That is actually amazing because like for me I would love to play that much, but I kind of play vicariously through Richard because he comes back and tells me ‘Oh, you should check that one out.’
I have three recommendations of different sorts of fidelities, let's put it that way. One that anyone who's interested in auto battler should check out Vampire Survivors. That was one of the first games that Richard recommended to me, and it has really blown up since then so a lot of folks in the gaming community know about it, but it's just a fantastic game. It's just so simple, but so deep.
The other one that I highly recommend, it's a completely different type of game, but I'm sure it doesn't get that much coverage. It's been something that has been a great game for me and my family to play together. It's called The Case of The Golden Idol which is this little indie game that essentially gets you to solve this mystery set in the fictional 19th century.
Tracy (53:14):
That looks like so much fun.
Arka (53:15):
It is just so cool. I don't want to give away anything, it's one of those games that you should just go in blind, but you can probably beat the whole game in less than five hours, and it's just such a fun experience. It’s always fun to support Indie developers. For anyone who's not heard yet, I mean I highly recommend Alan Wake II.
It is just so cool to see that kind of innovation in AAA gaming and this has just been an amazing year gaming overall just in the quality of games. But something like Alan Wake II shows us the next kind of boundary that we are hitting in the blending of things like passive entertainment, interactive entertainment. Because no one can look at Alan Wake II, there's just stuff you can go and watch people play and things like that. No one can look at that and, and deny that it's art. So I think at this point of time we've crossed that Roger D. Woods threshold where gaming is undeniably getting into that category. So it's exciting to see where things go.
Richard (54:14):
Sorry, add to that list. My favorite auto battlers since that's where we're working now, which is Hearthstone Battlegrounds. I think it's really added a lot of innovation to the auto battler category.
Tracy (54:28):
Well, Arka and Richard, I think you're both going to be responsible for a massive dip in Odd Lots productivity as we go off and experiment with all these new recommendations. And of course, Chaos Agents as well.
Joe (54:40):
Thank you so much. That was so great. I'm going to order Hanabi right now on my phone, so I get it. I'm going to play more games, even though I appreciate, Richard, your endorsement of the single game approach. I think you've actually inspired me to maybe start playing more games.
Richard (54:54):
Well, one is a little bit narrow.
Tracy (54:59):
Richard and Arka, thank you so much. That was fantastic. Thank you for allowing me to reminisce and be all nostalgic about Magic: The Gathering and the middle school experience.
Arka (55:11):
Thank you both for having us so much. It was so fun spending this hour. Thank you.
Richard (55:15):
It's always fun to talk about games, could go on forever.
Tracy (55:27):
Joe, you're inspired now!
Joe (55:29):
I am inspired. I love that conversation and I'm going to play more games.
Tracy (55:36):
You know what I was thinking as we were talking about Magic: The Gathering and Richard's purposeful avoidance of building a sort of ecosystem that was all about the economics and the value of the game. I was thinking about Axie Infinity and how it was kind of the polar opposite.
Joe (55:55):
I had the exact same thought, which is that no one could actually explain how that was a fun game. No one even really tried to make the argument that the gameplay was fun. It was clearly all about the value of the various NFTs in the game. It felt like there were two levels to this. So there's the first level, which is that it's not a fun game if you have to spend a ton of money on rare cards, etc. and people just get obsessed with collecting valuable cards that are negative for gameplay.
Then there's the other element which I thought was really interesting and which is that it also ceases to be less fun if the game becomes more and more about deck construction. What happens before two people sit down in front of each other and less about the gameplay that occurs when the two people are there. Just this idea of continuing to pursue fun, active, creative, improvisational gameplay, and how to avoid these other traps where other factors start to overwhelm that. I thought it was really interesting.
Tracy (57:01):
Well, also Arka’s points about the pay-to-play model and the idea that you can build a very popular game by purposefully resisting some of that temptation. I think if you look at something like Magic, the proof is kind of in the pudding, right? Like, people are still playing this game. It's made a ton of money for Wizards of the Coast.
I remember again, in middle school, like there was a whole network of media tied to this. There was Magic: The Gathering fiction books that I read at the time. Oh God, don't judge me. But like, this was a huge thing and it wasn't because the cards themselves were valuable or because players were stumping up a ton of cash in order to play the game. It was the gameplay and everything attached to it and the community. It was a fun time. Anyway, shall we leave it there?
Joe (57:56):
Let’s leave it there.
You can follow Arka Ray at
@arkaray
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