Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
And I'm Joe. Wasn't thal Joe?
Did you ever play Magic the Gathering?
No?
Really, I've never played it. The only game I mean, I spent some time playing chess, and I yeah, I've talked about on the show before. And then outside of that, it's like I never had the capacity in my life to like really learn new games. So it's like, you know what, I'm gonna play chess, try to get better out of play on my phone. But I've never like then like I want to play some other game.
Man, you need to branch out.
I know.
Well, I just don't want to start. You know what the thing is, I don't want to start from the beginning. I'm just like, I'm like too old for that.
That's how you've learned new things. Okay, Well, speaking of being old, I spent countless hours in middle school playing Magic the Gathering. It was a huge thing in Let's see, this would have been around ninety four, ninety five, and almost everyone I knew at the time was playing it.
Where were you living in ninety five?
I was in Chicago, Chicago, So that's partly why. And you know, every recess was taken up with Magic, the gathering tournaments, and I really enjoyed playing, but for me, the collectibility of the cards was probably more interesting. I was obsessed with the cards.
One of my best friend's younger brother was like, really obsessed with the cards in the game. Oh, I got the Wall of Brambles or whatever it is? Is that a card?
No, that's not.
I don't think so, although it sounds like it could be, to be fair, I remember I had no it is there's.
A card called Wall of Brambles. But I think anyway, I just remember that, you know, I think it's, oh, look, you can buy one for twenty cents, so I guess it wasn't a very value card anyway. I was like around people who were really into their cards. I was Magic adjacent. I have had friends who play it. I didn't realize up until you played it. I was like sometimes when I would go like to like the bookstore and play chess or the game store, the or it'd
be other people playing. So I was around the game, but I just never played it myself.
Man, I spent so much time. I had so many cards, I had valuable cards. I had a Chavon Dragon at one point, and I really thanks show what.
Wow?
Okay, but this brings me to a serious Odd Lots esque topic, which is Magic the Gathering is really interesting, not just because it was one of the possibly the most successful card game of all time, but it had a lot of sort of economic aspects to it. So there was the card collection, and then you can imagine
within the card collection aspect of it. Obviously the goal is to play and win the game, but then you had this whole sort of market spring up around these super valuable cards, and there is a big discussion about whether or not the value of the cards was actually making the gameplay worse.
Yeah.
I so this I'm familiar with, and I get. You know, intuitively, you could sort of like get this phenomenon right, because a card can be useful in the game, but a card could also just be like a valuable thing that people buy and sell on eBay or Magic the Gathering online exchange things like that. But then the question is
like do they align? Does the collection of the cards lead to optimal gameplay, suboptimal gameplay, etc. Like you could see how like the value of a card from a monetary standpoint, and the value of a card from a gameplay standpoint might be like linear related, but might not be like perfectly aligned.
Right.
And the other interesting thing is Wizards of the Coast, the company that actually made Magic, at various times they tried to fit this problem. So they almost acted like a central bank of the cards in terms of issuance, like they would increase the supply of parts or decrease the supply of rare cards as needed to make the
game more interesting. So that's kind of fun too. But anyway, I could go on about Magic for many hours still, but I am very very excited to say that today we're going to be speaking with the creator of Magic, the gathering. We have Richard Garfield on the line all the way from Sydney, Australia, and we also have his colleague Arca Ray, the president and technical director of Popularium, which is the new gaming company that he's setting up with Richard. So very excited to have them both on
the show. Richard and Arca, thank you so much for joining our thoughts.
Well, hello, it's a pleasure to be here. Love talking about games, all right.
Thank you both really appreciate I really appreciate your having us here. We're really excited to be here.
I hope so many sarcastic tone to Tracy was not in any way coming off as dismissive towards the game.
Maybe it was.
Actually blocking Trady.
But I do want not want, I want to make it clear that I have no condescension whatsoever to the game. So I just want to get I feel bad about that already.
Anyways, I think I think you set up a lot of there for us to get into it with Richard, So let's let's let's do it. Yeah.
I wanted to say that back in the nineties, I thought that playing one game like chess was like reading one book or watching one I very quickly got past that because I realized games have this really special thing where the more you play them for a lot of games, the better they get. And so there's there's something which doesn't really line up with a lot of the other media. So so I think that is a perfectly good way.
To be Well, there's a very good there's a very good observation. Maybe I should play more games.
Joe over here just reading one book all his life past that, So Richard, maybe just to begin with you know, I use the sort of economics framing to describe some aspects of Magic, But do you think that that's like the right way of thinking about it as a sort of ecosystem or market of cards.
Yes, I think it's the most important thing with a game like Magic is the economics around the cards. And it doesn't take much to shift the game from being something which isn't primarily a game, but is more an economic tool. And that is in fact, you mentioned that Wizards acted like a central bank. Who was very much the case back in the nineties maybe ninety five, where the game, the price of the game was so out of control. Uh, there was the speculation bubble, and and
there was a conflict within the company. A lot of people thought this was amazing because who doesn't want the product to hit the hit the shelves and immediately be worth you know, three times as much. But from the people who were actually making the game, like me, it was terrifying because it if you can't afford the game, you can't play it. If you can't play it, then
it's not really a game. So we very intentionally overprinted the set Fallen Empires and and the market crashed hard, and people said that was the end of the game and on the other but as it worked out, play sprang up because at its route, it's a it's a it's a it's a game, it's a strong game, and the community loved the game and and uh and then
you know, it flourished. So ever since then, I've been really skeptical of games and game companies which are intentionally trying to keep the prices of their cards or components high.
You know one thing, and I definitely I don't know if we want to even go down the store. I mean I certainly had that thought, Like in twenty twenty one when they were trying to do like and if T related games. It's like it was the point to play the game, or is the point to think? It didn't seem like any of those games were fun something I'm curious though, in nineteen ninety five, we didn't you know, eBay, I don't think it really existed by ninety five barely.
I mean, if it did, it barely did hardly anyone was using it. How at Wizards of the Coast were even monitor were you able to get like real time or semi real time feedback on price to find that optimal equilibrium between the value of the cards and the amount of gameplay.
There was I'm not sure what tools were being used, but I know we had data, and in fact the data was I'm not sure about eBay. It might have been eBay, but the data was so clear that I know at least one doctoral thesis that was put together using data from Magic the gathering and the idea there was that was that. The person who did it, the one I know of, was Dave Riley. He found it as a perfect tool to test different auctions to see how that affected the final prices of the sales.
That's super interesting, so, Richard. One of the things that was sort of built into the game, at least initially was the idea of actually playing for anti so if you lost, you would have to give up a card from your deck your opponent, and it was sort of one way of actually building up your decks and you know, becoming an even better player. How come you built that aspect of it into the game.
When we began the game, I did not anticipate it being the success it was, and in fact I expected players to buy one to four decks maybe, and so I wanted to make sure that there was some method for there to be a variety in what players had even if they stopped buying cards. Now, of course they can trade, and I expected that to be a part of the game, but I also knew that there were people uncomfortable with trading, so I thought that Anti would be a good way to get that circulation of cards.
And it also acted as something of a leveler between decks. If you've got a very valuable deck, then you're going to be anting more valuable cards. This idea there were some dedicated advocates of it. It was a very exciting way to play, but it was pretty clear very early on that we were going to have to drop it because so many people hated losing the cards and so and so. I imagined by the second expansion there were no more ANTI cards the and it was phased out.
Joe.
One of my greatest triumphs as an eleven year old was I won a signed card in Magic the gathering. It was signed by the artist, and the person I wanted from was very upset because we didn't you know, we're all ten or eleven year old kids at the time. We didn't have a lot of signed cards circulating among us.
Can I say I did not realize that the card loss. I sort of assumed that still existed, that you could lose your card. It shows you how much that I've underd that I knew about magic. I for some reason I thought maybe that was still part of it. But I could see that would seem really stressful, and I would not want to collect a deck, or I would not want to be a parent buying decks for my kids, my thirteen year old kids, and then having them lose
them during lunch at the game. So I could see why that wasn't a particularly stable thank you.
I should want to interject there on that though, that like today, it would be completely a non starter. And one of the one of the things was that when it was published, we didn't see them as being valuable in the way they are today. Very quickly there was a price settle on them, and so once there's a price settle on them, they actually are gambling when they play for antics.
Yeah, fine, but I don't know if you want kids gambling, I guess yeah.
And yeah, back when when it was play test cards and when they were first out, when I was picturing them just being treated as these sort of components you might have sentimental value to it was it was different, but once they become cash, yeah, it's not really an acceptable thing to bake into your game.
So just to sort of get the narrative right, can you just give the quick overview of how long were you involved? You're the creator of Magic the Gathering Wizards of the Coast. It existed as a game publishing company prior to you linking up with them, I think, and then obviously it took off. How long were you sort of involved with the business of Magic.
I was with Wizards until about two thousand and one, so that was about eight years. I mean, I guess maybe ten years if you go back before Magic was published, since technically I guess I was working for them then. But yeah, one Hasbro bought Wizards. I was around for a little while, but then went off on my own.
So Richard, just going back to the very beginning when you actually came up with the game. I think I read somewhere that you're a mathematician or you studied mathematics at university. Did that influence the way the game was designed at all?
I was actually teaching math at the college level and it probably did influence the design of Magic. But I always like to point out that when you're a game designer, sort of all subjects are grist for the mill, just like being an author. So if you had an economics PhD or studied literature or anything, it will affect what you write about and it'll affect what sort of games you make.
And Arca. I want to bring you in as well, because of course you are now working with Richard at the new gaming company Popularium. Did you play Magic when you were younger.
Yes, yes I did, And you know, I grew up in India and it was a it was a very insulated community when it came to came to games pretty much, you know, people cared about cricket and that was pretty much it. So I had some cousins over here in the US who would come by and introduce me to, you know, cool things that they were doing, and obviously
magic was a big thing. So one summer they came over and this was I think, yeah, ninety four, ninety five something like that, they came to visit and they had these gods that they were playing, and you know, I was I was someone who basically when I was five six years old, I would take you know, I would make my own versions of Monopoly and things like that. So making games was something that was so when I saw the cards, it was just like, you know, this
this world of wonder that just exploded. And obviously I only had a handful of gods, so there's only so much I could do. But I remember trying to teach everyone I could how to play the game. So it you know, just seeing his name on those gods and you know, being here now with him. So when did you know?
When did you know you wanted to make a career in gaming? I mean, I imagine it's funny you said that my daughter is really good. She's seven. She's really getting it into Monopoly right now. It's the first game that she's really into and that's really exciting, and she's starting to develop strategy, et cetera. When in your mind did it go from Okay, you love playing games. The cards were sort of fascinating to you to thinking, oh, this could be a career of building gameplay of various sorts.
Yeah, you know, and it sounds geezy, but it actually was around the time when I was eleven. I swear schools because I switched cities that my parents were living in, and it was the first time I was exposed to a computer and programming. And as soon as I, you know, it was like basic or something like that was the language. And as soon as I got one and I started like writing this quiz game and that's all I would do, you know, when I was on lunch breaks and things
like that. So and then obviously I discovered actual games and you know, got a computer at home and played Doom and things like that, and then you know, people would ask me, okay, what do you want to do when you when you grow up, and we're like, oh, I want to make video games, and often people were like, wait, what are video games? So it was that's that's kind of like why I immigrated through the US. I came here to study computer science specifically because I wanted to
learn how to build games. And then it was fortunate enough to join Xbox in the early days of Xbox three sixty and that was, you know, the winding path that took me to meet Richard and scaff who is Richard's game design partner. Back in twenty eleven twenty twelve, when I was starting my first company and here we are.
I definitely want to get into the new game that you're launching with Richard and how it's sort of maybe similar and also different to Magic the Gathering. But before we do, I just have a few more questions about magic. Just let humor me and let me relive Tracy.
If I were interviewing the creator of Chess, I would have a thousand questions.
So you go to town, So Richard, you know, you described that analogy of Wizards of the Coast sort of acting as the central bank and deciding at one point to flood the market with new cards in order to bring down prices in the secondary market and make it more equitable so that everyone could have fun playing the game. Can you talk a little bit more about what that decision was actually, Like, you know, you're in the room
at Wizards of the Coast. What are those conversations that are happening at that time?
Wow?
Well, there were a lot of people involved with magic and sort of on the sidelines of magic who saw it as a fad, and they saw it like, you know, I don't know what fads are. Cabbage patch kids, babys, beanie babies. There you go, and uh, baseball cards, and that when you had a speculation bubble, it was going to crash and that was the and the best you could do was ride that out. And UH, and and I thought, and we in R and D thought that that was, uh, that was not not going to be
healthy for the game. And we had some faith in the game in the sense that we had been playing with the first set of cards for over two years and and the play the playtesters were just hooked on it. They loved it. And so if if it crashes and goes away, uh, you know that that that won't be shared with any body, there won't be any long term
to the to the game. And uh So within Wizards there were lots of very heated arguments that you know that if you overprinted, some people believed it was going to crash and then we were, you know, basically the game was done. And other people who thought, if you overprint it and it crashes, that'll give players an opportunity to actually play the game. And since, uh, since I was a committed crasher, and the president of the company, UH,
Peter Peter Adkinson took my advice seriously. He was a committed crasher, and so we went through with that, and and it really the the the sort of the reputation that the set which crashed it Fallen Empires got was very bad. I mean it looked, you know, people people hated it. They hated the set, and uh, but it wasn't about how it actually played. It was about the fact that it was cheap. It was they could they
could buy it remaindered. But you know, the number of players just exploded after that, and and we we began to reformulate how we printed the cards to make it so that anybody who joined the game wouldn't have to pay secondary prices, secondary market prices that were substantially above buy from the company.
Well, so I understand the sort of and I like the way you put it. You're a committed crasher. You want people to play the game, you want low prices, and that's I think that's awesome or it sounds really cool.
But it still seems that even within the committed crasher philosophy, the challenge may not be, Okay, you want to have the cards cheap so everyone can play them, but you still need to get the proportions right in terms of you can't There still has to be some variability between the really powerful cards can't be printed as much as the less powerful cards. There has to be some rarity.
How do you calibrate that aspect of it such that you get the proportion of powerful to less powerful cards right even within the crash mentality, the crash framework.
So there's a misapprehension there that's underlying your question, which is I was also from the start a big advocate of not making the rare cards more powerful. Now there were more powerful rare cards. But if you make the common cards very broadly powerful, generally useful, easy to use, then people who buy not too many decks have less of the disadvantage against somebody who gets a lot of decks. And so this was early on one of the ideas. I had lots of ideas. Some of them worked like this,
and some of them didn't like anti. But this approach makes it so that so that your your power goes up, you know, logarithmically, as you purchase decks at the beginning rather than linearly. And and and so now the value of the cards, that's something different. It does have something to do with the power of the cards. And there
were powerful rare cards. I certainly wouldn't deny that. But one of the things that I enjoyed doing when Magic first came out is going to game stores across the country and and playing against players gunslinging we called it. I think that became a term we stopped using. And I would play against them with the deck of all common cards, and my record against the you know, the the champs of the stores was eighty percent or something
like that. And people would bring out their their their x with their black Lotuses and their vampire Shiven dragons, and I would clean their clocks and it would be all, you know, top to bottom common cards. And it's just because you know, I've been playing many years longer than them and was a better player and recognized the power that was there. And the common cards, now, the best decks,
of course, are going to be a mixture. But but you look at the top decks even played today, and there will be a good, you know, good trunk of common cards that are being played by all the players.
I guess I just sort of assumed, Tracy that there must be must have been some relationship between like, if you have these really valuable cards, they must be overwhelmingly powerful. So I did not realize that also, it's just sort of funny to imagine, you know, the the ultimate creator of the game popping into the local the local D and D board game store and whatever town and cleaning all the local right.
Some guy who spent countless hours, you know, building the deck ofvaluable cards suddenly losing to someone who's playing with some really common ones. But just on this note, Richard, you mentioned the Blackloadus card, which of course is probably the most famous card in all of magic history. And I looked up on one website before we have this conversation. I think the pricing for like the most rare version of the Black Looadus was something like twenty two thousand dollars.
I have no idea if that's accurate or not. It seems slightly inflated.
But are you gait I see half a million? Really?
Wow?
Yeah? Yeah?
I think I think twenty two thousand is I saw an article about a proxy black Lotus that is one that the players made selling for some incredible amount, huh, like twenty thousand dollars, but.
The actual one is closer to half a million?
Is that right?
Maybe I was looking at the wrong version.
Yeah, five hundred and forty thousand have access to my mark twenty twenty three in auction house six hundred and fifty thousand for a black Loader.
Okay, well this gets to my question, are you surprised at the secondary market values for some of these cards nowadays? And especially because this kind of gets to the other thing that you did in order to make gameplay more interesting and more fair. Is I think at one point for the Pro League, and yes, Joe, there is a Pro Magic League, you banned the use of certain cards like I think BLACKLOADUS, like the really powerful cards you
couldn't play with anymore. So I guess my question is why do they still have or seem to have so much value in the secondary market if they're not allowed in some of the games.
That is one of the most important tools we used for making the game accessible to players coming into it. That is not making it so they felt like they had to bla BLACKLOADUS. The tournaments and the environment which Wizards supports is only the last couple of years worth of cards, and so if they're beyond that, players can still play them, of course because they own them and
there will still be events set up around them. But that's not where the focus of the companies of tournaments and play is which means if you come into the game, you know that you're not competing against black Lotuses and all the old cards. And so it wasn't just Black
Lotus that was banned. It was basically any card that was too old became I forget what they call it, but I don't know, a legacy card, and those there were special legacy events, but that wasn't part of the current game environments, and that was one way we managed to keep it so that the card prices were under control, and yet you have this long term collectibility, so it was collectible like stamps, but not like Panie Baby.
Yeah, I didn't realize that the older cards were banned in pro play. I guess I probably didn't play Magic long enough for that to kind of be an issue. But that's interesting.
Well, to clarify there is there are like two formats. Is like standard in the other one. The standard is the rotation that Richard is talking about. You can play anything that's modern, which is like I think after two thousand and something, it's considered modern in like non pro
tournaments and so on. But there is also a band list which you know Richard might want to talk about which Blackloaders and cards are on which which will never be reprinted, which does contribute to a great extent to the incredible value something like a Blackloaders because it will there are there's a possibility for a legacy card, as Richard said, to be potentially reprinted and it's considered exactly the same card as far as the gameplay is concerned.
But there will never be another Blackloaders printed because of many interesting reasons, which I don't know if we have time or Richard.
Yeah, it's actually worth pointing out, like it's a very sticky relationship between the power of the card, how many have been printed, and whether it's available of whether it's in tournaments. So, for example, very early on, we realized that when we reprinted an old card which had some cachet to it, the price on the secondary market of that card would go up. And the reason for that is because that meant the card was legal for tournaments
because it wasn't an old card anymore. You could bring your older version which might have different art or a different cardboard or something like that. But it seemed contradictory that you're printing more of them, and now the price goes up.
Arka, I have to ask, now, what was your I don't want to say most valuable card because it kind of undermines a lot of the purpose of the game, But what was your favorite card that you accumulated when you were.
Playing that I was playing Magic. Probably the most was when I was at Microsoft, just because you know, that was one of the things that we we did, and at the time, I got really into black, like all sorts of combinations of black, so I got a you know,
got into black, white, black, red, et cetera. So there was one one card that I think it was a gold card that was printed in like M eleven or something like that, that was called the Dark Tutelage, and that just had the most the coolest art on it if if if you want to look it up of this guy with the blindfold guy. There was this blindfold and eyeballs and this like demon looking character like giving.
I was just, yeah, it's a it's a really fun like you know, like it combos really well with red red cards also, so I just I just really enjoyed the mechanic, the both the life gain and life loss mechanic as resources.
I have an embarrassing confession, which is I was scared of the the Black Cards when I was growing up. I like, I never played with them because some of the images of like so the Black Cards, for people who don't know, are sort of associated with like death and scary things, and you know, there's lots of demons and pictures of skeletons and things like that, and they freaked me out when I was little. I was scared of them.
Okay, Uh, can we talk a little bit about the new company and maybe ARCA. Why don't you describe what is popularium and in the world of gaming? What are you trying to solve?
What? Uh? What?
What? What do you what do you want to do that isn't being done in elsewhere in the gaming world.
That's a great question, and you know, I think it's best answered a little bit through the story of how actually we started Popularity and because yeah, I mean, on one hand, I've been dreaming of, you know, starting a games company since I was as a kid. But you know how things go, Like I started my company, and you know, I'm a technical person, so I got into building enterprise software for a while, and that was all
fun and all that in a different way. But I always want to come back to games, and I had an opportunity a couple of years ago because of a combination of events with my prior company and you know, some availability of some some financing COVID, giving people the opportunity to like basically become much more comfortable with completely distributed development systems because you know, games especially has been a very you know, you go in, you build games,
you know, and the whole like you know, classic crunch mentality that you're sleeping under your desk before you ship. So all of those things was like, you know, for me, it was the right time to start thinking about putting something together. And it was really accelerated by two things. First was that for me, what has always been very interesting is a games that essentially, through gameplay, create a new format and then be generate narratives out of the
pure gameplay itself. And something that Richard's games have always done is basically, whether or not you understand the lore of the Magic Universe, let's say, or Netrunner or whatever it might be, when you're playing the game, the game is creating a narrative for you that duel that you're having with summoning the specific creatures, the counters, you know,
the stack. It's it's like if you know, actually someone should do it if they haven't, is you can actually take the output of a magic game and maybe like actually train a general awaya like an LLM or something like that to actually output a wonderful narrative of like, you know, what was the battle and that you know is created purely through gameplay. And for me, we really hadn't explored that that fully in a digital format. The
power of that fully in a digital format. And when I when I started talking to Richard in twenty twenty one, late twenty twenty one about some of these ideas Richard and Scaff, you know, and richardian tell you about Scaff, who's just an awesome person and you know in his own right. My goal was that, Okay, what can I do to create a playground for you guys where you can take the ideas that you've been cooking for a
long time. And the thing that Richard and I and Scaff resonated on pretty much right away, and we have known each for a while, so we've kind of talked about this over over time, was the idea of empowering gamers to pursue their fun their way while also leaning into gameplay innovation, because I think that one of the things that doesn't really hold game gaming innovation back but definitely slows it down is once you know something works for a certain group of people, a bunch of other money,
a bunch of money goes into building fact similies of that because you know that people are going to have fun in a certain way. And what's amazing another amazing thing about Richard's work is that exactly what I was talking about earlier with that whole like black approach, and you know, with with basically you saying cracy that that that you know, you were not really into the black decks at all, And I can't imagine no, no, I'm completely with you, Like you know some of this they
are genuinely not like pleasant things to look at. But I can't imagine playing magic without you know, black cards. But there's an entire like gamut of four such as yourself who you know that's not so that is what's so cool about. So how do we lean into innovation while also empowering gamers to pursue the joy of gaming? The fun of gaming in the way that they want without feeling like, oh, you know, I'm not good enough or my fun is not fun enough unless I'm winning
all the time. And that was my philosophy, and you know what I want to lean into. And obviously we've seen over and over again, and you know, while I was at Microsoft, Beep built Xbox Life pretty much, you know, from from the ground up. So I've seen like how much how hard it is to keep toxicity out of communities.
And one of the ways that you can actually do that is if from the germination of your game you are letting people genuinely lean into fun and telling them, you know what, no matter how you want to have fun, it's okay, we will accommodate and so on. And then what Richard you know, kind of had had in mind was actually something that he had been thinking about and
working on for twenty plus years. And maybe Richard, I want to maybe ask you to talk a little bit about how things came together before we actually yeah, with the company together.
Yeah. So this concept that I've been working on for twenty plus years was something that had been gnawing at me ever since Magic came out, which was the way its popularity in some ways undercut one of the things which I really loved about the game, and that was that when you first play Magic, even today, when you first play Magic, but originally very much so, it was a game filled with sort of endless possibilities and treasures, and your deck was distinct. It was yours and your
friends decks were distinct as well. You had the sense that the world was infinite, infinite. But then when you start playing more and begin to play tournaments, the emphasis of the game is on constructed decks. That is, you choose which cards you want to play, and you play them, and they're readily available, so to become more like commodities. And this is not the way we played originally. It's a fun way to play, so I don't mean to take away anything from players who love that way of playing,
and there are plenty. But when we first played, we played with this very limited pool and it was exciting in sort of this different way. And so the way I came up with to to recreate that was to make it so that player's decks were unique. So that is, when you get a deck, it's your deck, and you can trade the deck, but you can't break it up. And so I wanted the back of the cards to be unique, and it took a while for printing technology
to catch up with that. But Keyboards was the first unique game, and every deck in that game is unique and has its own unique name, and and the the the resulting play was so interesting and the audience for it was so sort of thirsty for this, this sort of gameplay that didn't involve making decks and collecting cards, that I began to think about how to apply those
ideas to other games. In particular, you would think that even though printing technology took so long to catch up to this concept, that digitally it shouldn't be that hard to do. And when I was talking with Arka, he was asking what he could do to bring some of our ideas to life. And I was just coming off of dealing with many different companies who wanted games, but they were all very concerned with how limited they make
it so that the cards were immediately valuable. They were talking about like play to earn money, and and and and putting out a certain limited number so that people's initial investments go up. And so they were approaching the games entirely as sort of this this well, what we began with this economic they were building it on this foundation of economics rather than on the foundation of gameplay. So ARCA was was very interested in supporting this idea
of building the game on a foundation of gameplay. Uh and and and deal with the economics as sort of a secondary thing, which is there to sort of maximize the enjoyment of the game to the player rather than return on investment for the player.
Tracy. This reminds me, by the way, there is a sort of corollary in the chess world, which is, you know, you think of chess as a game, but so much and it is, but so much of modern chess is just sort of wrote memorization of the first fifteen to twenty moves. And so there's this other version of chess that I think Bobby Fisher came up with Fisher Random Chess, in which you don't know in advance the order of the pieces that are going to be so it's gameplay
from the beginning. There's like numerous ways that the pieces can be ordered on your back rank, so it's gameplay from the beginning.
I see, you don't have like the queen in the middle.
Yeah, So what it does is you have to figure out the game right away rather than you have twenty five lines committed to memory.
Well that seems much more interesting.
Yeah, it theoretically, I think it's a better game. The pros don't really play it, but I do think it's widely considered to be more interesting gameplays.
But you know, but you know what's interesting is if you I mean, I'm trying to I'm sure you've seen this and scap and Richard will tell you all about this also, But if you look at you know, folks like Carlson, what they try to do in their games is basically try to move to a position as quickly as possible that has not been.
Seen its novelty.
Yeah, yeah, that's that is exactly the for them. Glad you picked that. That's exactly the analogy that you know. What Richard explained is that like the idea of going in with Okay, you know the cards, you know the specifics of the units of power, but the combination, the engine that that builds with the deck is not something that you've ever seen before and that you have to figure out in real time, and that is what's you know, interesting about it.
So Richard just touched on this idea of pay to play, and you know the fact that there are games out there that kind of focus on building up the value of existing assets or cards, and maybe this is one for both Arka and Richard, But how do you resist that temptation, like, how do you actually monetize the game? Because I imagine in the gaming industry the temptation now is to ring as much money as possible out of play.
And it does seem like some of these are you know, expensive to run, expensive to design, expensive to produce, So how do you manage to do it where others are focused very much on the revenue opportunities.
This goes back to the question traces are Joe asked earlier, which is one of the fundamental philosophies that we have behind doing this company because Richard, myself, John Scaffei, we all have done things in the past where you know, at this point of time, we want to build something
that brings us, you know, true joy and satisfaction. And one of the things that we all very much agree upon is that if you bring if you bring people through joy and true fund through gameplay, that translates to economics in a much more scalable way than if you try to build gameplay experiences that are optimized for economics, and you see this happening intentionally and unintentionally, you don't have to just look at recent examples, like if you go back and look at World of Warcraft and you
know the amount of gold farming that was completely not legal, but it was used to happen all around the world, and the amount of value that was created and transacted.
Why because people wanted to use that utility, you know, within within the game and Magic, you know, the fact that is just an example is an amazing, glorious example of that phenomenon that has just lasted for for for decades at this point, which is if you create that interactivity and you know, I don't mind saying is the one of the geniuses of Magic is this idea of
massively modular gameplay. That is that is a term that that I know Richard likes, of being able to let people construct the pieces to build their piece of the game in a way that is that is very flexible. If those two things come together, then the repeatability comes naturally. And I think that a lot of fo who try to essentially start with the economics, start with the business model and then retrofit the gameplay probably do themselves and
their their gamers at a service. Anyway, That's something that you know, very passionate on my part, I don't want to shoot if you had any thoughts.
On that, yeah, I would like to add to that. So there's been many games I've put out, and this one we're working on is part of this where where there's some question as to how much value you give to the player who just dips their toe in, and my philosophy on it is, if you have faith in
the game, you give them lots of play value. That's why the common cards were powerful in Magic, and that's why in KEYBOARDE you get your single deck has many different avenues that you can play with, so it is not something where you play with it and immediately get bored. There's many different things you can do with it. Now, the cynical would say, well, that is limiting your audience
because because people are going to buy one deck. That hasn't been my experience because this massive modularity gives a world of variation which people want to explore. But it gives the opportunity for people to to get involved with a very uh with with with a very modest investment, and and so and so that's something we're talking about
with our game. And and I want to see that that a player with a single character has sort of can get an amazing amount of value from that and not feel particularly limited by that.
Uh.
And and that is with this this faith that you know, some players will stop there and that'll be right for them, but other players will want to get different variations.
When does the new game Chaos Agents actually come out?
It's a great question. So basically, you know, just to bring home the question from earlier, Richard sort of gave me this one pager this was end of twenty one early twenty two called Maelstrom that he had written up around this idea of basically, how what would it be if the deck of cards, Each card represented a unique skill that together sciller ability, that together made up this
globally unique superhero. So the idea would be to have this entire large, you know, sixty plus heroes battling each other, and each hero would be controlled by this kind of unique invisible deck of cards in the background. And one of the things that Richard was sort of really into at the time was this idea of auto battlers, which is another very interesting genre of games that I'm sure
Richard can talk about for a long time. But this idea of auto battlers would would basically be that, you know, unlike games where you need a lot of input, a lot of reflexes or twitch, an auto battler lets you sort of make some decisions, sort of like almost like a football and American football coach make some decisions, call the play and then see what happens, and then adapt and call the next place. So there's this lean forward, lean back experience. So Richard was like, what if we
blended these two things? And I was like, that sounds amazing cool.
Game chat experience, something new it is.
And that's obviously like for people like me who have like not played competitively for like ten plus years, that's the only way that you know, I can play something like that. But what was super cool is that then you know, when we hear Richard Garfield, we think card games. And my idea was that, okay, we're going to build something like Heartstone, but in a big way. And you know, my really good friend John Bankert from from Xbox was actually running the Heartstone product team, so so my to
my great joy. He was like, yeah, you know what, Richard's on. All the battlers, I love them. Let's let's let's jump on. But then what happened was when Richard and Scale came back with the detailed design document, it turned out that it was not just a card game.
It was actually a full fledged you know, battle Royale where instead of instead of you know, you controlling your character, your character is this AI controlled bot that you're essentially coaching and giving you know, good advice to, so to speak. And that took it to a completely different technical level. But that's kind of what we've been building for the
past year and a half, almost two years. So to answer Tracy's question, the reason why we're kind of like talking about all this right now is we just launched what we are calling our tre alpha, So we are not necessarily like letting everyone through the door, but basically we're letting a ton of folks to the door to come and experience a sort of with the first version of the game, give us feedback, and we are hoping to get into alpha around the late springs, around late
Q one early Q two timeframe, when the public more members of the public can start experiencing, So that's kind of like the early access time frame that we're looking at, and then we're going to be in beta by the end of the next year. That's kind of like when we'll be in public. But the reason why we wanted to talk to Magic fans especially is because that's whom
we are prioritizing. Is because you know, even you Tracy, if you play Chaos Agents at this stage, you'll be like, oh, I see how this takes some of the core concepts of for Richard Garfield game and just translate this translates it to something that can only happen in the digital format, and that was sort of our fundamental goal. So sorry, that was a much longer your.
Question, but you know, no, that's very cool and I am excited to play this game. We just have time for one more question, and this one comes from our producer Carmen, although I think it's actually for Joe's benefit so that he can branch out into some new things. But other than Magic and Chaos Agents, what games do you like to play? What are your favorites?
Wow? Well, I, as I said at the beginning, I think there is some merit to uh to really getting good at a game and playing it again and again, and that that goes against my my curiosity of games. Uh and uh so so I have this tension between wanting to play everything that comes to the market and trying to discipline myself to return to my favorites and play them again and again. But so so Uh. Some of the games which which I returned to again and
again are Hanabi that's my favorite cooperative game. And uh, I am actually playing a bunch of Fairy Chess right now, which is Chess variations and uh and I play uh Lost Cities, uh my my my, one of my favorite two player games. But lots of classic games like like like Jass and Gain and the Bridge.
Yeah, maybe it looks like a fun game. Maybe I'll play with my family.
It's a wonderful game. And I can watch for the fact that Richard plays a lot of games and Common and I were talking about this at the top of the r Richard is it plays and that is actually amazing because like for me, you know, I would I would love to play that much. But you know, I kind of play vicariously through Richard because he comes back and tells the oh, you know what you check that
one out. And that's you know, I have three recommendations of different sort of fidelities with put it that way. One that you know, anyone who's interested in Auto Battler should check out Vampire Survivors. That was one of the first games that Richard recommended to me, and it's really blown up since then, so a lot for a lot of folks in the gaming community know about it. But it's just a fantastic game. It's just so simple but
so so deep. The other one that I highly recommend, it's a completely different type of game, but I'm sure it doesn't get that much coverage. So but it's been something that has been a great game for me and my my family to play together. It's called The Case of the Golden Idol, which is which is this little indie game that essentially gets you to solve this mystery set in the fictional nineteenth century.
Oh that sounds like so much fun.
Oh wow, it is just so cool, you know, Like I don't want to give away anything. It's one of those games that issues go in blind, but it doesn't take You can probably beat the whole game in less than five hours, and it's just such a such a fun experience, so always always fun to support indeed developers, and you know, for anyone who's not heard yet, I mean I highly recommend Alan Wake too. It's just it is just so cool to see that kind of innovation
in Triple A gaming. And this has just been an amazing, amazing up for gaming overall, just in the quality of games. But something like Alan Wake two is just like shows us the next bound the next kind of like boundary that we're hitting in the blending of like passive entertainment interactive entertainment, because you know, no one can look at alan Wake two like you know, there's just stuff you can go and watch, you know, people let's play and things like that. No one can look at that and
deny that it's you know, art. So I think at this point of time, we've you know, crossed that Roger t Wood spreshold where you know, gaming is undeniably getting into that category. So it's exciting to see what I think.
Sorry to add to that list my favorite auto battler since since since that's where we're working now, which is Heartstone Battlegrounds, I think it's really added a lot of innovation to the auto battle or category.
Well, Arka and Richard, I think you're both going to be responsible for a massive dip in all lots productivity as we go off and experiment with all these new recommendations and of course chaos agents as well.
Thank you so much. That was so great. I'm going to order Hanave right now on my phone, so I get it. I'm going to play more games. Even though I even though I appreciate Richard your endorsement of the single game approach, I think you've actually inspired me to maybe start playing more games.
Well one is a little bit narrow.
All right, Ton, Arka, thank you so much. That was fantastic. Thank you for allowing me to reminisce and be all nostalgic about Magic the Gathering and the middle school experience.
Thank you both for having us so much. It was so it was so fun spending this hour.
Thank you.
It's always fun to talk about games to go on forever.
Joe, You're you're inspired now, Yeah, I am, I'm inspired.
I love to I love that conversation. I'm gonna play more games.
Maybe you know what I was thinking as we're talking about Magic the Gathering and you know, Richard and Richard's purposeful avoidance of building a sort of ecosystem that was all about the economics and value of the game. I was thinking about Axie Infinity, and it was kind of like opposite, exactly right.
I had the exact same thought, which is that that's no one could actually explain how that was a fun game. No one even really tried to make the argument that the gameplayer was fun. Who's clearly all about the value of the various NFTs in the game. It felt like there are two levels to this. So there's the first level, which is that it's not a fun game if you have to spend a ton of money on rare cards, et cetera, and people just get obsessed with collecting collecting
valuable cards. That is negative for gameplay. So he talked about he was at pro crash price. And then there's the other element, which I thought was really interesting, which is that it also ceases to be less fun if the game becomes more and more about deck construction, what happens before two people sit down in front of each other, and less about the gameplay that occurs when the two
people are there. And so you know, just this idea of continuing to pursue fun, active, creative, improvisational gameplay and how to avoid these other traps where other factors start to overwhelm that. I thought it was really interesting.
Well, also Arca's points about the pay to play model, Yeah, and the idea that, like you can build a very popular game by purposefully resisting some of that temptation. And I think if you look at something like Magic, the proof is kind of in the pudding, right, Like, people are still playing this game. It's made a ton of money for Wizards of the Coast. I remember again in middle school, like there was a whole network of media tied to this. There were Magic the Gathering fiction books
that I read at the time. Yeah, God, don't judge me, but like this was a huge thing. And it wasn't because the cards themselves were valuable or because players were stumping up a ton of cash in order to play the game.
It was this.
It was everything. Yeah, it was everything, you know. It was the gameplay and everything attached to it in the community, and it was a fun time. Anyway, shall we leave it there, Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the ad thoughts Potcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Now I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart, follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, dash Ol Bennett at Dashbot and Cal Brooks at Calebrooks. And thank you to our producer Moses On. For more odd Lots content, go to bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where we have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter that comes out every Friday, and you can chat about all our episodes in our discord twenty four to seven with fellow listeners.
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