# Richard Garfield - Maker: Game designer - Date: b. 1963 - Houses: Wizards of the Coast - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/richard-garfield/ > A combinatorics PhD student who crossed a fantasy card duel with baseball-card collecting and created Magic: The Gathering, the first collectible card game. **Why it matters:** Garfield invented the collectible card game. Magic created a new genre and industry, turned Wizards of the Coast into the company that bought Dungeons & Dragons, and showed that a game could keep changing, expansion by expansion, for decades. ## Quick answers **Who is Richard Garfield?** A combinatorics PhD student who crossed a fantasy card duel with baseball-card collecting and created Magic: The Gathering, the first collectible card game. **When was Richard Garfield born?** Richard Garfield was born in 1963 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. **What is Richard Garfield known for?** Richard Garfield is best known for Magic: The Gathering. **Why does Richard Garfield matter to fantasy and games?** Garfield invented the collectible card game. Magic created a new genre and industry, turned Wizards of the Coast into the company that bought Dungeons & Dragons, and showed that a game could keep changing, expansion by expansion, for decades. ## Life Richard Channing Garfield was born on June 26, 1963, in Philadelphia. His father's work in architecture took the family around the world during his childhood, and they settled in Oregon when he was twelve. The family has some unusual history: he is the great-great-grandson of President James A. Garfield, a grand-uncle is credited with inventing the paper clip, and his aunt, the artist Fay Jones, later painted a single Magic card for him. He always loved puzzles and games, but it was [Dungeons & Dragons](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/original-dungeons-and-dragons/) that made games his passion. He designed his first game at 13. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1985 with a degree in computational mathematics, worked briefly at Bell Laboratories, and returned to Penn for a doctorate in combinatorics under Herbert Wilf. His 1993 thesis was titled *On the Residue Classes of Combinatorial Families of Numbers*. He then became a visiting professor of mathematics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. ## Work Garfield had been designing card games for years. Around 1982 he made one called Five Magics, inspired by the board game *Cosmic Encounter*, and in 1985 he designed RoboRally, a board game of programmable racing robots. While looking for a publisher for RoboRally, he met [Peter Adkison](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/peter-adkison/) of the young [Wizards of the Coast](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/wizards-of-the-coast/). Adkison liked the game but could not afford to produce it. He asked for something else: a quick game that needed little equipment and could be played in the downtime at conventions. Garfield combined his old card-game prototypes with another idea: what if a card game were collected and traded like baseball cards? He built a full game from that idea in about a week. Players are dueling wizards, drawing [Mana](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/mana/) from lands to cast spells and summon creatures, and each builds a personal deck from a much larger pool of cards, so no two opponents bring quite the same game. Because of D&D, he wanted decks to be as customizable as roleplaying characters. The game, first called Manaclash, was playtested mainly by his fellow Penn students and developed through a shell company, Garfield Games, to keep it clear of a lawsuit then facing Wizards. [Magic: The Gathering](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/magic-the-gathering/) launched in August 1993 and was an immediate success; by October 1993 Wizards had sold out its supply of 10 million cards. Garfield left academia in June 1994 to design for Wizards full time. He guided the game's growth carefully, balancing players' experience against business demands, bringing in other designers, and helping Wizards build one of the first serious tournament circuits in hobby gaming. RoboRally was finally published in 1994. He designed more collectible card games: *Jyhad* (1994), based on [Mark Rein·Hagen](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/mark-rein-hagen/)'s [Vampire: The Masquerade](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/vampire-the-masquerade/) and renamed *Vampire: The Eternal Struggle* in 1995; *Netrunner* (1996), an asymmetric game in which the two players have entirely different cards and goals; and the *BattleTech* card game. He was also a primary playtester for [Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dnd-3rd-edition/). Later Garfield became an independent designer and his range widened. His board and card games include *The Great Dalmuti* (1995), *King of Tokyo* (2011) and its sequels, and *Bunny Kingdom* (2017). His digital work includes Valve's *Artifact* (2018) and the roguelike deck-builder *Roguebook* (2021). *KeyForge* (2018) printed every deck as a unique, algorithmically generated set, a new answer to the question Magic had posed. He also taught "The Characteristics of Games" at the University of Washington. ## Legacy Magic's influence extends well beyond cards. It created the [Collectible & Trading Card Games](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/collectible-card-game/) as a genre and prompted a wave of imitators, among them TSR's Spellfire and [Legend of the Five Rings](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/legend-of-the-five-rings/). Its revenue let Wizards buy [TSR, Inc.](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/tsr/) in 1997, and with it the future of D&D. Its model of a core game renewed by regular expansions and supported by organized competitive play is often seen as a forerunner of live-service digital games, and of the deck-building genre that followed. Garfield's innovation was structural. He made the collection part of the game, so that the hunt for cards and the construction of a deck became play in themselves. He and Magic were inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame together in 1999. More than three decades later, the game he built in a week for a small Seattle company is still in print, and still expanding. ## Facts - He is the great-great-grandson of U.S. President James A. Garfield. - He designed his first game at 13, and Dungeons & Dragons is what made him passionate about games. - A card game prototype he called Five Magics, inspired by Cosmic Encounter, dates to about 1982, more than a decade before Magic. - Magic's working title was Manaclash, and his first playtesters were mostly fellow University of Pennsylvania students. - He earned a PhD in combinatorial mathematics at Penn in 1993 under Herbert Wilf, the same year Magic launched. - He was inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame in 1999, alongside Magic itself. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garfield) - [Wikipedia: Magic: The Gathering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering) - [Three Donkeys (official site)](http://www.threedonkeys.com) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.