Magic: The Gathering, a card game mixing elements of Dungeons & Dragons, Stratego and a bad drug habit, emerged in recent years from its West Coast cult following and became arguably the world's most popular and most profitable fantasy game.
As with all the classic pastimes, gameplay is easy to learn but deceptively complex and difficult to master. Each player constructs a deck of at least 60 cards, each representing a type of spell that may be cast against one's opponents. Players can direct fireballs, summon goblins and even counter their opponent's spells in an attempt to deal damage to their enemies. When a player's life total is reduced to zero, he is declared dead and the game is over.
Players may draw their spells from five "colors," each of which represents its own particular brand of magic and with unique powers at its disposal. The colors are black, green, red, white, and blue. Decks are not limited to any number or combination of colors; in fact, most advanced players prefer to draw from the strengths of multiple colors when building competitive decks. Occasionally, decks utilizing all five colors appear but aren't common due to the difficulty of obtaining enough "mana" of each color to be effective.
Land cards are used to extract mana (pronounced "man-nah"), essentially the currency with which spells are paid for. Swamps give you black mana, forests give you green, mountains spew forth red mana, plains grant white mana and islands issue forth blue mana. Only one land card may be played each turn, thus limiting a player's ability to cast costlier, more powerful spells until later in the game. Much of the game's strategy is spent attempting to circumvent this limitation, thus creating an early power disadvantage.
Black represents death and treachery; its spells summon zombies, assassins and cause opponents to discard valuable cards from their hands. Black spells can often grant great strength, but at a high cost. Certain creatures, like the "Lord of the Pit" and "Abyssal Horror," are immensely strong but cause as much harm to you as your opponents. That's part of the bargain when you mess with evil.
Green stands for nature's ancient strength. All the denizens of the forest and the elemental powers of Mother Earth are at a green spellcaster's fingertips. Powerful creatures and green's unique ability to acquire great amounts of mana early on in the game make it a force in the game, but its lack of game-breaking spells usually relegate green cards to a supporting role in tournament-level decks.
Red spellcasters use the strength of fire and earth to subdue their opponents. Its direct damage spells are easily the most cost-effective and annoying (if also simple-minded) spells in the game, damaging opponents without warning. Fireballs and lightning bolts can turn games around in moments with little risk to their casters. Unfortunately, red is a notoriously slow developing color as well.
White is the color of all that's good and holy in the world. White spellcasters can summon hordes of "weenies," weak but cheap to cast creatures (soldiers and knights, mostly) that can overwhelm opponents by sheer mass. By nature, it's a defensive color, emphasizing healing and protection over unrelenting force. Some white spells, like "Wrath of God" and "Armageddon," are among the game's most powerful, wiping out all cards of a specific type in one shot. Players quickly learn the value of trading one card of your own for three to four times as many of your opponents. As such, white is widely though to be the strongest of the colors.
Blue cards can be spectacularly strong as well. It has at its disposal the power of water, wind and time, a devastating combination. In the game's earliest versions, blue cards allowed players to draw nearly unlimited cards and even take extra turns. When clever players learned to abuse these cards, they were quickly removed from the standard card sets. Cards like "Ancestral Recall" and "Time Walk" are among the most sought-after, at times demanding over $200 for mint copies.
Though Blue's strength has been diminished somewhat in recent years, it retains the sole ability to "counter" opponents' spells and to take control of them as well. It is an extremely reactive color and requires a great deal of skill to be played effectively, but decks heavy on blue have long dominated tournament play.
What makes the game interesting from a commercial standpoint is how its makers have taken to remaking the game almost constantly with so-called "expansion sets." These expansions are released every three to four months, and invariably contain a handful of very powerful cards that are quickly in high demand. Players purchase dozens of booster packs, at $3-5 a piece, in search of these cards, usually ending up with other neat-looking but largely useless cards instead.
The game's makers, Wizards of the Coast, Inc., have successfully parlayed their addictive game into a franchise of sorts. By running "professional" tournaments with big prizes that are only open to players playing with the most recently available cards, Wizards ensures that the hardcore Magic players keep coming back for more. Provided that they bring their wallets with them, of course.
The game's commercial success is unparalleled in the fantasy genre. Magic has quickly become a multibillion-dollar industry. Awash with success, Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, Inc., the makers of Dungeons & Dragons in 1998, a move comparable to Microsoft buying out IBM. Its retail stores have appeared in malls across the country, opening up access to whole new markets and regions full of eager young males with allowances to burn. Even in the current recession, prospects look good for Magic's continued success.
Excellent artwork, easy-to-learn gameplay, a loyal fan base and very high replay ability ensure that Magic: The Gathering won't follow Pokmon cards and all the rest into post-fad obscurity. Its national championships are currently broadcast on ESPN2, but don't be surprised if this simple card game of wizards and monsters appears on the networks sometime soon. As costly a hobby as it might be, for many, the high-speed excitement and mental challenge Magic offers is entirely worth it.
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