The colors shifted around, but, eventually, red aggression came from mountains, black ambition from swamps, blue rumination from islands, white orderliness from plains, and green growth from forests. He granted elemental characteristics to five distinct colors of energy that arose, as in many other fantasy games of the period, from different geographies. Garfield himself made a game called Five Magics. Titan had players commanding an army of mythological creatures like centaurs and griffons to attack the other players’ titans. Wiz-War had wizards hurling fireballs at each other in a maze. The ideas that bubbled up in the following decade flowed in a similar direction.
manuals all went out to make their own games. Like the misfit musicians who bought the Velvet Underground’s first album, the young kids of the seventies who pored over the first set of D. “The game was very hard to learn from the rules, which is something it shares with Magic, I guess, but its brilliance shone through.” The books themselves “were dreadfully written,” he said. “It puts players in the position of game designers,” Garfield told me. Players would collectively tell a story about their characters wielding enchanted swords or picking locks, with dice rolls deciding many of the consequences. manuals finally arrived, he was astonished to discover that you could keep playing the game indefinitely. “You could move around the map and go into different rooms and then there would be monsters in these rooms.” You could also “win” in Garfield’s version. “It was more like a Clue board,” he recalled. A lack of language had never stopped him before he made something up.
Back in the United States, around the age of thirteen, he began to hear about a game called Dungeons & Dragons-he was told that it had pit traps and orcs and treasure-but his local game store didn’t have the rulebooks yet, and none of his classmates knew how to play. Garfield didn’t speak Bengali or Nepali, so, to make friends, he would unpack a deck of cards or spill out a bag of marbles. Before his family settled in Oregon, in the mid-seventies, he spent many of his early years in Bangladesh and Nepal, places where his father worked as an architect. Tone that down and add a handful of uncommons and a lot more commons.In his youth, Richard Garfield, the mathematician who created Magic: The Gathering, liked to play and invent games.
WotC and Arena developers feel they need to create sets that have 20 unique mythic and 60 unique rare cards (at least). Release M16 gradually over time? If you don't have the Yearly format yet, allow in Historic. Cast cost of 2, equip cost of 3 unless it's a Warrior or Soldier, then just 2. An example might be a card named Long Sword (Artifact - Equipment). So my suggestion is to implement a card in both a soon-to-be released set *and* M16.
I believe they already face this dilemma for new sets. the problem becomes: Designing cards for all of those back-dated sets. For instance, there is a gap between M15 and M21. They could release a "late" yearly edition every so often and not on any regular schedule. They should consider a format using ONLY yearly editions dating back 6 years? Or farther back? I know with the loss of the last edition screws that up as far as continuity. Maybe they should come up with a new format in Arena. It was easy to recognize & easy to determine rarity. Never forgot how cool it was to get Fourth Edition with the roman numerals for it's logo.
I liked the basic yearly edition of card sets for Magic: The Gathering. This is a way for Arena to generate more income, btw.