Card Sharks Believing in magic pays off for the creators of America's favorite fantasy game.

If you don't like the cards you've been dealt, get a newdeck. It worked for Peter Adkison and Richard Garfield, who cast apowerful spell over the game industry in 1993 when they unleashed agame called Magic: The Gathering.

Magic is a three-headed hybrid of a standard card game likebridge, a fantasy role-playing game like Dungeons and Dragons, anda collectibles hobby like baseball cards. Those three interlockingfacets make the game both fast and absorbing, portable andintense.

But unlike any game played with a traditional 52-card deck,Magic employs an always-growing number of cards--currently morethan 2,000--only a small fraction of which figure into any oneround of the game. That makes each round entirely different fromevery other. Unlike Dungeons and Dragons, where the rule bookcontains hundreds of pages and can stretch one game into aweeks-long marathon, Magic has few rules; a novice can learn thegame in less than half an hour. Finally, unlike baseball cards,these collectibles aren't just bits of a collection,they're functional parts of the game--amassing cards is a wayfor players to build their arsenal, not just gather more stuff.