Games - Magic: The Gathering

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	Games - Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering (colloquially "Magic" or "MTG"), is a collectible card game created by Richard Garfield, Ph.D. and introduced by the company Wizards of the Coast in 1993. Magic inspired an entirely new game genre, and has an estimated six million players in over seventy countries worldwide, as well as a successful Internet version. The game is a strategy contest which includes an element of chance due to the random distribution of cards during shuffling.

Each game represents a battle between very powerful wizards called "Duelists" or "Planeswalkers" who use magical spells, items, and fantastic creatures to defeat their opponents. Though the original concept of the game drew heavily from the motifs of traditional fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons
, Magic as a game bears little resemblance to role-playing games.

The game has an official tournament system, in which the game is played for cash and scholarship prizes, and the game has a number of professional players. The cards themselves also have value, much like other trading cards, but in the case of Magic, a card's value is based not only on scarcity and intangible aesthetic qualities such as the quality of the card's artwork, but is primarily a function of its game play potential, with more powerful cards carrying a correspondingly greater value.

History

When Peter Adkison, then CEO of the fledgling Wizards of the Coast games company, met Richard Garfield, then a graduate student who would become a mathematics professor, it was to discuss Garfield's new board game RoboRally. Adkison was not very keen on the idea, as board games are expensive to produce and difficult to market. He did enjoy Garfield's ideas and mentioned that he was looking for a portable game that could be played in the downtime that frequently occurs at gaming conventions. Garfield returned later with a prototype he had been working with on and off over the last few years under the development name of Mana Clash. Adkison immediately saw the potential of the game and agreed to produce it.

Role-players were enthusiastic early fans of Magic, but the game achieved much wider popularity among strategy gamers. The commercial success of the game prompted a wave of other collectible card games to flood the market in the mid-1990s. Many of them were poorly designed and failed both commercially and in popularity. Although Magic's gross card sales have been surpassed in recent years, particularly by Japanese import games based on the Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! franchises, Magic's popularity continues to grow steadily.

In 1996, Wizards of the Coast established the "Pro Tour", a circuit of tournaments where players can compete for top prizes in excess of US$30,000 for a single weekend-long tournament, with a total purse of over US$200,000. Officially sanctioned through the Duelists' Convocation International, the popular series of tournaments adds an element of prestige and weight to the game by virtue of the large payouts and media coverage from within the community. The system is similar to the ones used in golf, tennis and other professional sports. The company publicizes good players who win frequently in order to create a "star" system, and examples to which other players to follow and aspire.

In 2002, an official online version of the game was released. While less functional methods of online play exist, Magic: The Gathering Online was the first to capitalize on this interest. It has features which are lacking in other methods; specifically, it handles game rules automatically. The online version has been a runaway success for the company and has inspired similar products from many popular collectible card games.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Magic: The Gathering ]

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