AN AUDIENCE WITH…

The creator of Magic: The Gathering on card games, videogames and gameshows

By Alex Spencer

Few tabletop-game designers have had as much influence on videogames as Richard Garfield – even if you ignore everything but his single most famous creation. That game was conceived in the early ’90s when a nascent RPG publisher told Garfield it couldn’t afford to publish a boardgame he’d designed called RoboRally. “I quickly came up with this concept of a trading card game – which was not cheaper, not by a long run,” he tells us. “But it was so exciting to Peter Adkison, the president of Wizards Of The Coast, that we made it work.”

It was a smart decision. That card game was, of course, Magic: The Gathering, a three-decade success story that made Wizards’ owner $1bn in 2022 alone. Magic’s impact on videogames is such that not only does the game have obvious digital heirs in the likes of Hearthstone and Slay The Spire, but has also been cited as an inspiration by more unlikely developers, including Hidetaka Miyazaki.

And this, again, is only Garfield’s most famous creation. He’s also responsible for Cyberpunk CCG Netrunner (which enjoyed a second life in the 2010s as Android: Netrunner) as well as lighter boardgame fare such as kaiju battler King Of Tokyo and Half Truth, a trivia game with a push-your-luck twist. Today, Garfield is also a remarkably prolific designer of videogames – perhaps most notably, and notoriously, Valve’s Dota 2 card battler Artifact. But he’s worked in a variety of genres beyond digital card games, from shmups to auto battlers, the latter of which has become something of a preoccupation for Garfield.

We speak to the designer to mark the early-access launch of Vanguard: Exiles, one of two auto battlers Garfield has worked on since the genre’s inception with Dota Auto Chess in 2019. He explains his fascination with the genre, which he sees as the perfect meeting point of analogue and digital games, as part of a wide-reaching conversation that takes in everything from AI and blockchain to gameshows and sports.

What first made you want to become a game designer? Did you have a formative encounter with any one particular game?

I think the most important inflection point was discovering Dungeons & Dragons when I was about 13. Before that, I liked games – I would never have walked away from an invitation to play – but I wouldn’t have gone to a game shop or anything like that. But when Dungeons & Dragons came along, it blew my mind.

Here was this game that broke all the rules of what I thought of as being ‘games’. Like, you don’t have a winner – the length of the game is open-ended. And I thought, if this game existed and I’d had no idea about it, then what else does the world of games have to offer? And so I threw myself into playing war games, and traditional games like bridge, and every game I could find in old game books, and just fell in love with it as a whole.

“I THINK D&D – AND ROLEPLAYING IN GENERAL – IS SPECIAL, IN THAT IT MAKES PEOPLE INTO GAME DESIGNERS”

I think D&D – and roleplaying in general – is special, in that it makes people into game designers. This is very much true if you’re running the game, as a GM, but it’s also true for players. Everybody participating understands that they’re responsible for their own play experience, and become part of the ensuing game design. And so I really learned a lot from it.

Given how important that experience was, have you ever wanted to make an RPG of your own?

I worked on D&D Third Edition, but not a lot. I’ve done a lot of homebrew RPG design for myself, and I’ve occasionally done some soul searching as to whether I have anything original enough to offer to tabletop roleplaying. The answer to date has been, ‘I don’t think so’. But I’ll continue to work on it, because I love the category.

Magic began with a traditional fantasy setting, but that’s changed over the years