MAGIC: THE GATHERING

It doesn’t come much bigger than this. The originator of Collectable Card Games, one of the biggest and most popular tabletop franchises to ever exist and literally billions of cards sold, Magic: The Gathering

was a literal game changer for the hobby.

Back in 1991, Mathematics Professor Richard Garfield had an idea for a board game where players moved robots through a hazardous factory. He pitched the game to Wizards of the Coast owner Peter Adkison, who liked the game but wasn’t able to risk funding a print run. Instead, he suggested Garfield pitched a game that would be quicker to play and cheaper to produce, to help raise funds for RoboRally.

After years of playtesting, Garfield had designed a game inspired by the wild powers found in sci-fi delight Cosmic Encounter with the thematic and combat elements of Dungeons and Dragons, a game where players would create their own deck of playing cards to use to battle one another in a wizard’s duel of wits and luck.

A lot of the game’s most iconic elements were included in this first edition, such as the land cards tapped for mana, the colour wheel of white, blue, black, green and red that each had their own thematic powers, even some of game’s most famous cards like Black Lotus and Lightning Bolt were part of the 2.5 million cards brought to Gen Con, all of which were sold before the convention ended.

The game was an instant smash hit in the gaming community, loved for its intuitive gameplay and innovative feature of actually building a personal deck to play with. The first release was so popular that the game’s first expansion, Arabian Nights, was also released before the end of the year in December.

The game has been in constant production since then, with now over 20,000 unique cards available and having printed over 25 billion cards, the game continues to expand and grow, leaving more and more players spellbound across the Multiverse.