The inaugural Magic: The Gathering world championships was held in 1994 at Gencon in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A year earlier, the collectible card game had made a shacky debut at the same event but now found itself dominating the gaming convention, with 500 fans competing in the tournament. Bertrand Lestrée from Paris, France, and Zak Dolan of Missouri met in the finals, with Dolan winning the best-out-of-three competition. In the minds of many, Dolan’s victory was the defining moment for Magic: The Gathering.
“The first World Champions brough it all to an emotional boil,” designer Mark Rosewater later reflected. “Everyone seemed to get that this was the beginning of the road.”
In his 2017 book Generation Decks: The Unofficial History of Gaming Phenomenon Magic: The Gathering, Titus Chalk relates the long journey that led to Gencon ’94 and beyond, with the collectible trading card game gaining twenty million fans in seventy different countries by the time Generation Decks was published. The story begins as a tale of two cities located on opposite ends of the United States – Seattle and Philadelphia – and involves two gaming fans named Peter Adkison and Richard Garfield.
Adkison lived in Seattle and was determined to break into the gaming industry with his fledgling company Wizards of the Coast. He wrote about his plans on a Usenet gaming forum in 1991, and his posts were noticed by a Philadelphia college student who was marketing a game called RoboRally. Adkison agreed to meet the creator of the game – PhD mathematics student Garfield – but ultimately passed on producing RoboRally.
Garfield gracefully accepted the rejection, then asked what kind of game would be of interest to Adkison. The answer was rather simplistic – something portable and fast paced that could be played at conventions. Adkison was also a fan of fantasy art and wanted to see artwork incorporated into the game as well.
Upon returning to Philadelphia, Richard Garfield began constructing a game based on Peter Adkison’s wish list. After deciding that it needed to be a card game in order to be portable. Garfield then proceeded to break the mold on traditional card games. Instead of a single deck, each player would have their own deck constructed from common, uncommon, and rare cards that could be purchased in starter sets and booster packs.
Using fantasy art for each card would make them collectible, similar to trading cards. And to make the game fast paced, each player would start with a “life total” of twenty, with the winner being the first to eradicate their opponent’s life points.
After having come up with the basic premise, Richard Garfield constructed a 120-card prototype deck containing images drawn with Magic Markers. He then tested the game – which he called Magic – with friends at the University of Pennsylvania. Everyone was immediately hooked. Continual playing allowed Garfield to further finetune the concept, and a more elaborate test set of multiple decks was designed using cut-out images from old comic books. Since everyone’s set was constructed differently, Garfield’s friends began trading with each other to acquire the cards they most desired, adding a broader social aspect to the game as a result.
Back in Seattle, Peter Adkison was preparing to launch the initial two products from Wizards of the Coast – a role-playing book called The Primal Order that was designed to complement other rule books, and an already established role-playing game that the company had acquired the rights for called Talislanta. Then the first Magic test decks arrived.
“We were very excited,” Vice President Lisa Stevens says in Generation Decks. “But we were also scared, because we were such a small company, and we didn’t have much money at all. Here we had this great card game that we were all addicted to right off the bat. But we didn’t have the money to publish it and, if we showed it to anyone else, it might get stolen from underneath us.”
The financial situation became even more dire after The Primal Order was released in April 1992. The book featured rules used by other companies, intertwining them to make them more compatible. One of the companies filed a lawsuit against Wizards of the Coast for copywrite infringement. In order to protect Magic during the proceedings – which were later settled out of court – a new company was formed called Garfield Games, with Wizards of the Coast and Richard Garfield each owning stock in the company. Adkison then set to out to raise the $100,000 he believed was needed to publish Magic.
Jesper Myrfors was a student at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. He was a fan of both fantasy art and role-playing games and was glad that Wizards of the Coast had acquired the rights to Talislanta. Myrfors was less happy to learn that the only options for a fantasy artist were album covers and book jackets. He was also told that he would have to move to New York or Los Angeles to break into either field. Determined to find an alternative path, he approached Wizards of the Coast about creating artwork for Talislanta and was hired by the company.
Myrfors was initially shut out of the closed-door meetings surrounding Magic. When he was finally brought into the loop, he became addicted to the game like everyone else. He also believed that each card needed to contain an original piece of high quality art. Peter Adkison had originally envisioned using secondhand artwork but was swayed by Myrfors. Financial restraints, however, meant that each artist could only be paid $50 in cash, $50 in stock, and fifty artist proofs for each piece. A percentage of Magic sales would also go into a royalty pool and divvied up between the artists.
Despite the financial limitations, Jesper Myrfors was able to convince a number of his fellow students at Cornish College of Arts to create original fantasy artwork for Magic. “To us, it just sounded a lot of fun,” one of those artists, Julie Baroh, later explained. “And Jesper really loved the concept, He emphasized to us what a completely new type of game it was and pretty soon, we were all caught up in his enthusiasm for it.”
Because the word “magic” was too common to be copyrighted, Peter Adkison changed the name to Magic: The Gathering. The release of the game was then scheduled to coincide with the 1993 Gencon in August. Instead of driving the direct 1,990 miles from Seattle to Milwaukee, Adkison wove his way down the West Coast, then through Arizona and New Mexico before turning north. Along the way, he stopped at every gaming store he passed – most of which had already received a small shipment of Magic: The Gathering – and demonstrated how the game was played.
By the time Adkison arrived in Milwaukee, there was a buzz in the air. The shipment of cards that Wizards of the Coast intended to sell at Gencon, however, didn’t arrive until the convention was at its halfway point. Once they were available for purchase, over $25,000 worth of Magic: The Gathering starter sets and booster packs were sold in a mere 48 hours. By September, stores throughout the United States were sold out as well.
When the next Gencon was held the following year, Wizards of the Coast had the largest booth. “Everyone seemed to get that this was the beginning of the road,” designer Mark Rosewater wrote afterwards. In reality, the road was already well traveled, and for Magic: The Gathering, there would be no looking back.
Anthony Letizia