Magic the Gathering's Creator Wants to Create an Even Better Game

31:27Well, to clarify, there are like two formats. There's like standard and 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 2000 something, it's considered modern in like non-pro tournaments and so on. But there is also a banned list, which Richard might want to talk about, which Black Lotus and cards are on, which will never be reprinted, which does contribute to a great extent to the incredible value of something like a Black Lotus. because 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 gameplay is concerned.

32:06But there will never be another Black Lotus printed because of many interesting reasons, which I don't know if you have time or Richard wants to go into. I'm curious. Yeah, it's actually worth pointing out. It's a very sticky relationship between the power of the card, how many have been printed, and whether it's available, 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.

32:52You 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? The time 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 did. And at the time, I got really into black, like all sorts of combinations of black.

33:31So I got into black, white, black, red, etc. So there was one card that I think was a gold card that was printed in like M11 or something like that. that was called the dark tutelage and uh that just had uh the most the coolest art on it if if if you want to look it up um of this guy with the blindfold uh guys with this blindfold and eyeballs and this like demon looking character like it was just uh oh that is cool yeah it's a it's a really fun like you know like it combos really well with red red cards also um so i just i just really enjoyed the mechanic, both the life gain and life loss mechanic as resources.

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35:39Need AI to turn 100 pages of market research into five insights with a click? Do that with Acrobat. Need templates for a sales proposal that'll close that deal? Do that with Acrobat. Need an AI specialist to tailor the tone of your market report to sound real smart in real time? Do that with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. I have an embarrassing confession, which is I was scared of the black cards when I was growing up. 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.

36:20And, 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. Can we talk a little bit about the new company? And maybe, Arka, why don't you describe what is Popularium? And in the world of gaming, what are you trying to solve? What do you want to do that isn't being done 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 Popularium. Great. because yeah I mean on one hand I've been dreaming of you know starting a games company since I was 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 always want to come back to games and I had an opportunity a couple 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 change mentality that you're sleeping under your desk before you ship.

37:49So all of those things was like, you know, for me 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 our games that essentially through gameplay, create a new format. And then B, um 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 generative AI 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 started talking to Richard in 2021, late 2021, about some of these ideas, Richard and Scaf, you know, and Richard can tell you about Scaf, who's just an awesome person, you know, in his own right.

39:23Right. My goal was that, OK, 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 Scaf resonated on pretty much right away, and we have known each other for a while. So we've kind of talked about this 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 gaming innovation back, but definitely slows it down, is once something works for a certain group of people, a bunch of money goes into building facsimiles of that because you know that people are going to have fun in a certain way.

40:18and 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 uh you saying crazy 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 the 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 folks 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 wanted to lean into and obviously we've seen over and over again and you know while I I was at Microsoft, we built Xbox Live pretty much from the ground up.

41:15So I've seen 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 kind of had in mind was actually something that he had been thinking about and working on for 20 plus years. And maybe Richard, I want to maybe ask you to talk a little bit about how things came together before we actually put the company together. Yeah, so this concept that I've been working on for 20 plus years was something that had been gnawing at me ever since Magic came out, which was that the way its popularity in some ways undercut one of the things which I really loved about the game.

42:09and 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, 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 they become more like commodities. And this is not the way we played originally.

42:57It'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 uh exciting in sort of this different way and so um the way i uh came up with to to recreate that was to make it so that players decks were unique so that is when uh 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 um and uh and it took a while for printing technology to catch up with that um yeah but but keyforge uh was was the first unique deck game and every deck in that game is unique and has its own unique name and the resulting play was so interesting and the audience for it was so sort of thirsty for 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.

44:15In 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 uh arca um he was uh uh asking what what he could do to bring some of our ideas to life and i was just coming off of uh uh dealing with many different companies who wanted games but they were all very concerned with how limited they make it so the cards were immediately valuable they were talking about like play to earn money and and uh and and uh 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 uh this well what we began with this economic uh um they were building it on this foundation of of economics rather than on the foundation of gameplay.

45:13So ARCA was very interested in supporting this idea of building the game on a foundation of gameplay 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 rote memorization of the first 15, 20 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.

46:01So 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 oh i see so you don't have like the queen in the middle yeah and so what it does is you have to figure out the game right away rather than you have 25 lines committed to memory that seems much more interesting yeah it's 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 gameplay but you know but you know what's interesting is if you i mean i'm I'm sure you've seen this and, and Scaf and Richard will tell you all about this also.

46:39But 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. It's novelty. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that is exactly the analogy. I'm glad you picked that up. 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.

47:13So 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 Arca 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 wring as much money as possible out of players. 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?

47:58This goes back to the question, Tracy, that Joe asked earlier, which is one of the fundamental philosophies that we have behind doing this company. Because Richard, myself, John, Scaffi, 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 people true joy and true fun 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.

48:38and you see this happening intentionally and unintentionally. You don't have to just look at like recent examples. Like if you go back and look at World of Warcraft and the amount of gold farming, that was completely not legal, but it 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 within the game. And magic, that is just an example, is an amazing, glorious example of that phenomenon that has just lasted for decades at this point, which is if you create that interactivity and, you know, I don't mind saying this, one of the geniuses of magic is this idea of massively modular gameplay.

49:25That is a term 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 very flexible. If those two things come together, then the repeatability comes naturally. And I think that a lot of folks who try to essentially start with the economics, start with the business model, and then retrofit the gameplay probably do themselves and their gamers a disservice. Anyway, that's something that, you know, very passionate on my part. I don't know, Richard, if you had any thoughts on that. Yeah, I would like to add to that. But so there's been many games I've put out, and this one we're working on is part of this, where there's some question as to how much value you give to the player who just dips their toe in.

50:19And 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 uh in key forge uh you get your single deck uh has many different avenues that you can play with uh 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 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 get involved with a very modest investment.

51:13And so that's something we're talking about with our game. And I want to see that a player with a single character can get an amazing amount of value from that and not feel particularly limited by that. And that is with this faith that 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 21, early 22 called Maelstrom that he had written up around this idea of basically what would it be if the deck of cards, each card represented a unique skill that together, skill or ability that together made up this globally unique superhero.

52:20So the idea would be to have this entire large, you know, 60 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 uh reflexes or twitch um an auto battler lets you sort of make some decisions sort of like almost like a football an american football coach make some decisions call the play and then see what happens and then adapt and call the next play so there's this lean forward lean back experience so richard was like what if he blended these two things and i was like that sounds amazing cool i want to play an auto battler game you should it is it Branch out, experience something new.

53:18It is. And that's obviously like for people like me who have like not played competitively for like 10 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 Hearthstone, but in a big way. And, you know, my really good friend, John Bankert from Xbox was actually running the Hearthstone product team. And so to my great joy, he was like, yeah, you know what? Richard's on, auto battlers, I love them. Let's jump on.

53:50But then what happened was when Richard and Scaf came back with the detailed design document, it turned out that it was not just a card game. It was actually a full-fledged battle royale where instead of you controlling your character, your character is this AI-controlled bot that you're essentially coaching and giving good advice to, so to speak. That's cool. 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're calling our tree alpha.

54:28So we are not necessarily like letting everyone through the door, but basically we're letting a ton of folks through the door to come and experience sort of the first version of the game, give us feedback. and we are hoping to get into alpha around the late spring. So around late Q1, early Q2 timeframe when the public, more members of the public can start experiencing. So that's kind of like the early access timeframe that we're looking at. And then we're going to be in beta by the end of 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 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 a Richard Garfield game and just translate this, translate it to something that can only happen in a digital format.

55:18And that was sort of our fundamental goal. So sorry, that was a much longer answer than 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, as I said at the beginning, I think there is some merit to really getting good at a game and playing it again and again. And that goes against my curiosity of games.

56:01And 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 some of the games which I return to again and again are Hanabi. That's my favorite cooperative game. And I am actually playing a bunch of fairy chess right now, which is chess variations. and I play Lost Cities, one of my favorite two-player games, but lots of classic games like Chassin and Jhin and Bridge. Hanabi looks cool. Yeah, I was just thinking about it. It looks like a fun game. Maybe I'll play it with my family.

56:54It's a wonderful game, and I can vouch for the fact that Richard plays a lot of games. And Tommy and I were talking about this at the top of the hour. Richard is it plays like and that is actually amazing because like for me you know I 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 me oh you know what you should check that one out and that's you know I have three recommendations of different sort of um fidelities let's put it that way one that you know anyone who's interested in an auto battler should check out vampire survivors that was one of the first games that Richard uh recommended to me and it has really blown up since then so So a lot of folks in the gaming community know about it, but it's just a fantastic game.

57:32It'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. But it's been something that has been a great game for me and my family to play together. It's called The Case of the Golden Idol, which is this little indie game that essentially gets you to solve this mystery set in the fictional 19th century. Oh, that looks 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 you should just go in blind, but it doesn't take, you can probably beat the whole game in less than five hours.

58:09And it's just such a fun experience. So always, always fun to support indie developers. And, you know, for anyone who's not heard yet, I mean, I highly recommend Alan Wake 2. It's just, it is just so cool to see that kind of innovation in AAA gaming. And this has just been an amazing year for gaming overall, just in the quality of games. But something like Alan Wake 2 is just like shows us the next bound, the next kind of like boundary that we are hitting in the blending of like passive entertainment, interactive entertainment, because, you know, no one can look at Alan Wake 2. Like, you know, there's just stuff you can go and watch, you know, people, Let's Play and things like that.

58:48No 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 threshold where, you know, gaming is undeniably getting into that category. So it's exciting to see where things go. Sorry, add to that list my favorite auto battler since that's where we're working now, which is Hearthstone Battlegrounds. I think it's really added a lot of innovation to the auto battler category. Well, Arka and Richard, I think you're both going to be responsible for a massive dip in OddLot's productivity as we go off and experiment with all these new recommendations.

59:23And of course, Chaos Agents as well. Thank you so much. That was so great. I'm going to order Hanabi 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, Richard and Arca, thank you so much. That was fantastic. Thank you for, 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 fun spending this hour.

59:59Thank you. It's always fun to talk about games. It could go on forever.

1:00:12Joe, you're inspired now? Yeah, I am. I'm inspired. I love that conversation. I'm going to play more games, maybe. You know what I was thinking as we were talking about Magic the Gathering and Richard's purposeful avoidance of building a sort of ecosystem that was all about the economics and the value of the game? I was thinking about Axie Infinity and how it was kind of like the polar opposite. Exactly. Right. I had the exact same thought, which is that no one could actually explain how that was a fun game. No one even really tried to make the argument that the gameplay was fun. It was clearly all about the value of the various NFTs in the game.

1:00:56It 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 valuable cards. That is negative for gameplay. So he talked about he was a 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.

1:01:32And so, you know, just this idea of continuing to pursue fun, active, creative, of improvisational gameplay and how to avoid these other traps where other factors start to overwhelm that I thought was really interesting. Well, also Arca's points about the pay to play model 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 i read at the time yeah god don't judge me um 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 People like the game.

1:02:33Yeah, 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 Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmin, Dashel Bennett at DashBot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And thank you to our producer, Moses Andam. For more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots, where we have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter that comes out every Friday.

1:03:09And you can chat about all our episodes in our Discord 24-7 with fellow listeners. Go check it out. Really fun place to hang out. Discord.gg slash OddLots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you want us to do more episodes on the gaming industry, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.

1:03:32Thank you.

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