Richard Garfield

Richard Channing Garfield, born June 26, 1963, is an American mathematician and game designer best known as the creator of Magic: The Gathering, the first widely popular collectible card game.¹³¹⁰ Trained in combinatorial mathematics, Garfield applied the dynamics and combinatorial interaction of rules and components to game design, an approach that runs through much of his work.¹³ He holds a B.S. in computer mathematics and a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics, and he taught for a time at Whitman College? in Walla Walla, Washington.¹³

Garfield was born in Philadelphia in 1963; his father’s work in architecture took the family around the world before they settled in Oregon when he was twelve.⁸ He designed his first game at age thirteen.¹¹ He has described discovering Dungeons and Dragons as a turning point — a game that “radically stretched the bounds of what the game could be” and thrust players into the role of game designer — though his reaction was to fall in love not with that one game but with games in general, and he went on to seek out wargames, traditional games, and role-playing games of all kinds.⁸

Garfield graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 with a degree in computer mathematics, worked for about two years at Bell Labs, then returned to his alma mater to pursue a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics.¹⁸ His dissertation was titled “On the Residue Classes of Combinatorial Families of Numbers”.¹ He began teaching at Whitman College in 1992.¹⁸ Concluding that game design was not a viable career — there was not even a bestseller list or regular newspaper review for games — he planned a future of studying and teaching mathematics with game design as a hobby.⁸

The creation of Magic

Garfield has traced the lineage of Magic in detail in a 1993 essay, “The Creation of Magic: The Gathering”.⁶¹⁹ He named Cosmic Encounter — originally published by Eon Products and re-released by Mayfair Games — as the game’s “most influential ancestor,” a game in which players take alien races, each with a unique rule-breaking ability, that gave the design its sense of limitless variety.⁶¹⁹²² From his own ideas he added a longstanding notion of a deck whose composition changes between rounds, players adding and removing cards so that each game began with a different mix.⁶¹⁹ He also drew on childhood memories of trading and competing with marble collections and on Strat-O-Matic Baseball, in which participants draft and field their own teams.⁶¹⁹

These ideas first took shape in a 1982 card game Garfield called Five Magics, an attempt to distill the modularity of Cosmic Encounter into a card game.⁶¹⁹²⁴ The path to publication ran through a board game, RoboRally, which Garfield designed by 1985 and which his friend and partner Mike Davis tried to sell on his behalf.⁸¹⁸ After FASA acquired and then returned RoboRally, Davis approached Wizards of the Coast, a small role-playing-game company.⁸¹⁸ At a meeting in Portland, Oregon with Wizards’ Peter Adkison and James Hays, Adkison passed on the board game but asked whether Garfield could make something that could be played quickly with minimal equipment and would go over well at conventions.⁶¹⁹²⁰

Within days Garfield conceived a trading card game, drawing initially on a 1985 card game of his called Safecracker before returning to the Five Magics idea.¹⁹ The first release was named Alpha; it consisted of 120 cards split randomly between two players, who would ante a card and duel over the ante.¹⁹ A central early design problem was the “rich kid syndrome” — the fear that a player could simply buy enough cards to dominate — which Garfield addressed in part through the ante mechanism and the discovery that overpowered decks tend to defeat themselves.¹⁹ By Garfield’s account, the inspiration struck in the summer of 1991 on a hike past Moulton Falls in Oregon, combining influences from Dungeons and Dragons and Cosmic Encounter.¹⁶²²

Magic: The Gathering launched in 1993, an instant hit for Wizards of the Coast, where Garfield was a co-owner.⁴¹⁰ He left academia to design games full time and served as lead designer at Wizards for roughly ten years.⁸ In the game, players take the role of “planeswalkers,” powerful mages who battle across a multiverse using five colors of mana — white for plains, black for swamps, blue for islands, red for mountains, and green for forests.¹¹⁰ The game sold more than 10 million cards in its first six weeks and, by 2009, comprised more than 10,000 unique cards in more than 70 countries.¹¹¹⁰ Garfield has said the design was inspired by mechanics first, with the magical theme attached only months later, and that the game’s collectability — its bleeding into real life through trading and circulation of cards — is what gave it longevity.¹⁵

A piece of Magic’s lore concerns its rarest card, “Proposal,” which Garfield commissioned from artist Quinton Hoover in 1993 to propose to Lily Wu.⁴ Because he assigned the card a high casting cost of four white mana, it reportedly took him four games to play it legally and complete the proposal; the couple later commissioned the cards “Splendid Genesis” and “Fraternal Exaltation” in 1997 and 1999 to announce the births of their children.⁴ The card “Stasis” in Alpha was illustrated by the established artist Fay Jones, Garfield’s aunt, as a favor to her nephew.⁷

Other games and legacy

Beyond Magic, Garfield designed several other collectible card games, including Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, Netrunner, the BattleTech CCG, and the Star Wars Trading Card Game.¹³ His board game RoboRally, in which players program robots through an obstacle course using instruction cards, was eventually published by Wizards of the Coast about two years after Magic.¹³⁸ His other designs include The Great Dalmuti, the dice game King of Tokyo, and Complex Hearts, a variant of Hearts in which scores are complex numbers and the goal is to keep the magnitude of one’s score low.¹³¹⁵ Later work includes KeyForge, the first unique-deck game, and Artifact, a digital card game built with Valve and set in the world of Dota.¹⁷

King of Tokyo - Richard Garfield: Launch TrailerXBOX

Garfield co-authored a textbook, Characteristics of Games, with two collaborators.¹⁷ In 1999 he was inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame, and Magic itself was honored at the Origins Awards.⁵ He has continued designing into recent years, releasing the game Vanguard Exiles.¹⁶ Garfield has described games as a way of understanding the world and of connecting with people, building games to make sense of complicated ideas such as economics or evolution, and has likened game design to architecture.¹⁷