“When you first start out playing Magic, when you’re playing with kids in the schoolyard or around the kitchen table with cards that your older brother played with, that is the way it works. Your friend will have a card you don’t have. But when you enter the store system, then that’s no longer the way it works, you just get many, many more cards, to the point where the magical aspect of having unique cards which nobody else has goes away.”
This wasn’t just nostalgia talking. There seems to be something objectively more magical, more infinite-seeming and treasurable about this smaller, more limited version of Magic. But wasn’t the idea of deck-construction the epiphany Garfield had at Multnomah Falls: that you should be able to choose any card and put it in your deck?
“It wasn’t that you should be able to choose any card that was printed. It was any card that’s available. I was not picturing that you’d get the thing you wanted from the store, and I was not thinking that anybody would ever purchase an entire box of boosters or anything like that.”
The Creator Of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong