TRADING CARD GAMES SOLFORGE: FUSION

What happens when you mix a Magic: the Gathering Champion and game designer with the creator of Magic: the Gathering? SolForge: Fusion!

Interview by Charlie Pettit

Asa 17 year old, Justin Gary became the Magic: The Gathering US National Champion, going on to win a pro tour, grand prix, and the World Team Championships. After changing his mind on law school, he went full time into game design, working on everything from the Versus. System trading card game, to the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game, later starting his own company with Stone Blade Entertainment, and launching Ascension: the Deck Building Game. There’s a new expansion for that, but that’s not the focus of our article today, rather, the opportunity that it opened and that Justin maximised…

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“Ascension created a lot of opportunities for me.” Justin says of it. “Not only was it a fun game that I’m still making 15 years later, but I got to meet Richard Garfield when we did a PAX dev conference in Seattle. Of course, I went to go hear Richard talk because it’s Richard Garfield - he’s the guy that created Magic! He’s the guy that defined the course of my life. And at the end of the talk, somebody asked him a question. Hey, what’s your favorite game right now? And he said Ascension. I jumped up like a kid in a candy store. Everybody laughed, but it created an opportunity for me to go and have a conversation with him. And so then he and I started that conversation, and we talked for three hours about what we want to design next, what we’re excited about, and that was the original version of SolForge”. SolForge was the first digital trading card game, that optimised early for mobiles. SolForge gave way to SolForge Fusion, which Justin describes as “Using new technology to digitally print and algorithmically generate decks of cards to be able to scan those decks into an online account, play them online, have a one-to-one collection” - all the fun of a trading card game but using new technology so that you actually get that process of discovery.