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.

"There's a high strategy element to playingMagic," says Max Szlagor, an 18-year-old from Schaumburg,Illinois, who has been playing the game since 1994. "There areabout 2,000 cards available, but you have to build a 60-card deckthat you think will be more powerful than the 60 cards each of theother players uses. The way the spells and powers [printed on eachcard] interact with each other makes it a different game everytime."

That promise of endless permutations captured the attention offantasy-game fans seemingly overnight. Just three years after thegame's debut, the company behind it, Seattle-based Wizards ofthe Coast, has sold more than 2 billion individual playingcards--usually in $8.95 packs of 60. Although the company won'tdivulge financial figures, it's estimated to be at least a $50million venture.

Indeed, the game's growth is nothing short of magical. In1993, Wizards of the Coast could barely cover its five-personpayroll; Adkison was subsidizing the venture with his "verysmall investments" and the $30,000 salary from his job atBoeing. Today, the company has 250 employees and operations inSeattle, Belgium, Scotland and France.

Another measure of Magic's success: A horde of imitators hasalready appeared, hoping to steal its crown. Still, the game standssolidly at the top of the heap--which seems only fair, consideringit's the game that got the heap started in the first place.

"They're the typical story of being in the right placeat the right time--and with a high-quality product," says L.Lee Cerny, executive director of the Game ManufacturersAssociation, a trade organization of the $750 million adventuregame industry. "They started a new genre, the collectible cardgame, and in doing so vastly increased the size of our industry byattracting many new players."

Nobody knows exactly how many people play Magic because fewplayers buy only one pack of cards. In their quest to put togetherwinning decks, some devotees get fanatical; Szlagor, for instance,owns some 10,000 cards. That's the kind of repeat business youdon't get for a game like, say, Monopoly.

"The concept was to make a game that is much bigger thanthe box it comes in," says Garfield. He designed Magic: TheGathering as sort of a spec job for Adkison, who was then running afailing game-development company called Wizards of the Coast fromthe basement of his Seattle home. "With most games, when youbuy the box, the whole game is in it. But the concept behind Magicwas `What if all the players had their own equipment and [pitted]that equipment against each other?' That way, when they buy adeck of cards, they buy a set of resources."

Set in a science fiction realm devised by Garfield, the gameentails pitting cards with characters like Varchild's Crusaderand Phyrexian War Beast--each equipped with specialstrengths--against each other. "Writing a game like Magic is across between writing a novel and writing a mathematicalformula," Garfield says. Instead of one start-to-finish storyline, he created a world, characters and background and set themloose to play out countless storylines, game by game.

On A Role

Considering the game that hit so big for Wizards of the Coast isall about combining strategy with magic, it's no surprise thatthose are the key elements of the company's phenomenal success.Adkison is the strategist, Garfield the magician.

Strangers until 1992, both men had enjoyed role-playing gamessince boyhood, but neither had ever been satisfied with theavailable games on the market. For years, each had tinkered withgame plans, trying to create something that would be more fun. Inthe mid-1980s, Garfield came up with a game called RoboRally, whichinvolved racing robots. His friend Mike Davis spent several yearstrying to sell it to game manufacturers but got no bites until1991, when Davis stumbled across Adkison in a games chat room onthe Internet.

In 1990, Adkison, then a 29-year-old systems analyst withBoeing, and some friends had launched Wizards of the Coast. To saythey hadn't done well was an understatement: "We probablywould have gone out of business within the next year," Adkisonsays.

RoboRally piqued Adkison's interest, so he contactedGarfield, who was working toward a doctorate in math at theUniversity of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and laid out astrategic challenge: Design a science fiction game whose solecomponent is playing cards. It may have been the only strategyAdkison could afford to pursue while his fledgling company was onthe ropes; it's much cheaper to print paper cards than tomanufacture game boards and pieces. Nevertheless, it was theperfect springboard for Garfield's talent.

"In one week, Richard jumped from the little description Ihad given him to the game that eventually became Magic: TheGathering," Adkison says. "It was a pretty big`Eureka!' " That's typical of the way Adkison thetactician defers to Garfield the magician. Amiable and not shyabout the remarkable success of the company he launched, Adkisonnevertheless takes credit only for the business end of Magic'ssuccess--which he's quick to point out is meaningless without agreat idea. "My sole contribution to the game was tellingRichard what kind of game I'd like to see," he says.

Though he now makes and plays games for a living, Garfield stilltalks like the mathematician he had studied to be: carefully,slowly and thoughtfully, as if he's working through complexequations with half his brain while using the other half to answerquestions. He admits he still can't figure out where his greatidea came from. All he knows is that it clicked instantly withAdkison, who asked him to work up a prototype and send it to him sohe could test it out.

"From the first time he described the concept, I knew thepossibilities were huge," Adkison says. "It was somethingthat had never been done before in gaming."

When the prototype arrived in late 1991 from Philadelphia, whereGarfield was still a student, it was an instant hit around Wizardsof the Coast's office. "Everybody was playing it,"Adkison recalls. They continued to play it for another two yearswhile the game slowly evolved into something marketable. Theyplayed even after they weren't being paid to; the money had runout, and the staff had all been laid off for the interval untilMagic: The Gathering started bringing in revenue.

Spreading The Word

Convinced Garfield had devised a truly outstanding game, Adkisoncarefully laid the kindling for the fire he thought Magic would setby getting the word--and the product--out all over the gameindustry. "We already had the distribution channels in placefrom our earlier games," he explains. "Even though noneof our games had done very well, people were carrying our line andknew we had integrity, so when we called to say `We have somethingwe know is going to sell better than anything else we'vedone,' they worked with us and ordered more."

One nationwide distributor in particular, Wargames WestDistribution in Albuquerque, New Mexico, spotted the game as afuture hit and pitched in with big advertising dollars, effectivelyhitching its wagon to Magic's fiery horses--and then had tohold on for dear life. "My initial order was for 24 units, mysecond was for 572, and my third was `Send everything you'vegot in the warehouse,' " recalls Wayne Godfrey,Wargames' CEO. Godfrey estimates he sold $700,000 worth ofMagic card sets in the last five months of 1993, then 10 times thatamount ($7 million) in 1994.

Godfrey decided to carry Magic after running into Adkison at aFt. Worth, Texas, game convention. At 2 a.m. one night, Godfreyhappened across Adkison wide-eyed and playing Magic with twoteenagers in the hotel lobby. "This was obviously a guy wholoved what he was doing," Godfrey says. "He wasn't init for money alone--he had a passion." Godfrey concluded thatAdkison was precisely the kind of entrepreneur he wanted tobankroll.

The next step for Adkison was to show the game to potentialplayers. Having worked without a vacation for three years, Adkisonand his wife, Cathleen, finally took one in August 1992, drivingdown the California coast with decks of Magic cards. They stoppedat some 15 fantasy game stores and hobby shops to demonstrate andhype the game. As soon as they got home, they hopped a plane forMilwaukee, where they showed the game at GenCon, a convention forhobby gamers.

"That's where we saw word-of-mouth really takeoff," Adkison says. "It is incredibly effective if yourproduct is genuinely better than anyone else's, which we knewMagic was. People think it's amazing, and they go home pumpedup and tell all their friends about it. It pulls the productthrough the pipeline."

Garfield says that while he was always optimistic about thegame's potential, he hadn't factored in the boost the gamewould get on the Internet, via the game chat rooms that firstlinked him with Adkison. "Word-of-mouth is one thing, buthaving people talk about your product on the Internet is likethrowing kerosene on the fire," he says. "It tookoff."

Sales boomed so fast, Wizards of the Coast had to run to keepup. Ask Adkison how he managed employee growth from five to 250 inthree years and he simply says, "Agonizingly." Moving outof the Adkison's basement into commercial office space in 1994to make room for all those employees helped. And to better handlethe boom, he recently enrolled in an MBA program at the Universityof Washington in Seattle ("I wish I'd done it beforeeverything went crazy," he says).

Despite their inexperience, Wizards' founders managed tosidestep some potentially dangerous pitfalls. A big one was legalprotection of their intellectual property--the characters in Magic."We didn't know we were in a position where somebody couldhave taken everything away from us," Adkison says. "Wegot it all registered and protected just in time."

Avoiding such potentially dangerous situations is easy, he says,if you get good advice. "I always tell people to do what we[eventually] did: Set up a board of directors made up of people whohave done what you're doing," says Adkison."Everybody has advice for somebody starting a business, butthe only advice worth anything comes from people who have done itthemselves."

Winning The Game

These days, Adkison works on managing the company that Magicbuilt. With offices in three other countries (to be close to thecompany's overseas printers and to "develop theinternational gaming community," he says), running the showinvolves as much strategic thinking as playing a championship roundof Magic. The game has been translated into six languages, a lineof comic books, and a four-novel series published byHarperCollins.

Garfield, meanwhile, works on developing new games. In 1994,after graduating from college and teaching math at Whitman Collegein Walla Walla, Washington, he joined Wizards of the Coast as afull-time game designer and owns 25 percent of the company. Sincethe wildfire success of Magic, three more Garfield creations haverolled out: In 1994, came Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, andRoboRally, the game that first put him in touch with Adkison; thenext year, the company unveiled The Great Dalmuti, a game whereplayers try to outdo each other on the social ladder. Next on hisagenda: networked computer games that would allow players atfar-flung computers to compete against each other in real time.

And, of course, there's always another Magic tournament toplay. This year's company-organized tournament is sponsored byMCI, which will also be releasing a set of calling cards inNovember featuring artwork from Magic's card decks.

Garfield and other staffers are normally barred from playing inthe tournaments--which sometimes draw more than 300 players from 30countries vying for cash prizes of up to $250,000. Occasionally,Garfield plays a round at an exhibition tournament. He also playsthe game a few times a week on his own; Adkison does, too.

Although both say they use different strategies every time theyplay, you have to believe that two guys who saw their little cardgame turn into a multimillion-dollar worldwide phenomenon must havea natural affinity for the Phyrexian War Beast. On that card isprinted the query, "Knowing its origins, how could they havethought they could control it?"

Dennis Rodkin is a freelance writer in Chicago.

Contact Sources

Game Manufacturers Association, P.O. Box 602, Swanton, OH43558, (419) 826-4262;

Wargames West Distribution, 2434 Baylor S.E.,Albuquerque, NM 87106, (505) 242-1773;

Wizards of the Coast, 1801 Lind Ave. S.W., Renton, WA98055, (206) 226-6500.