August, October, December 1993
Magic history starts with serendipity. Wizards of the Coast was a small publisher of roleplaying games, operating on a shoestring budget out of Peter Adkison’s basement. Richard Garfield, who was a mathematics professor at the time, met with Peter to show him a board game. Peter liked the games but the company couldn’t afford to produce it (later it would be made and called Roborally). He asked Richard to come up with something small, portable, and quick to play. Richard returned with a prototype for a new card game, then called “Mana Flash!” Everyone loved it, and Magic: The Gathering was born.
After two years of playtesting and development, Magic was ready to go in the summer of 1993. Wizards planned an ambitious limited edition of 10 million cards. This was far bigger than anything they had done before, but the playtest responses had been so enthusiastic that they felt selling that many was feasible. They raised enough funds to print the first 2.5 million; if those sold as well as expected, in about 6 months they ‘d have enough money to sell the rest.
Peter and company introduced the game on a month-long tour of game stores across th4e country to do demos and sell cards. The trip culminated with the GEN CON game fair, the biggest gaming convention the U.S. By that time, Magic was already the hottest topic on the Internet game discussion newsgroup. At GEN CON, Wizards sold every card they’d brought, and trading among players was fast and furious.
The “six month supply” sold out in six weeks.
Wizards had a tiger by the tail. They quickly moved up the schedule for the remaining 7.5 million cards and took the opportunity to correct a few errors (such as cards printed with letters instead of mana symbols in the text) and to add two cards that had been accidentally left out of the first printing(Circle of Protection: Black and Volcanic Island). They also added five more basic land pictures, to bring the set to the over 300 cards initially advertised. The second-printing cards should have been otherwise indistinguishable from the first ones, but it turned out that the corners were slightly less rounded. The public soon dubbed the reprint runs “Alpha” and “Beta”.
It soon became clear that the limited edition would be gone long before playtest for a follow-up set could be completed. Because of this, Wizards reprinted the same cards with white borders as “Unlimited Edition”. This would turn out to be a poor name in retrospect; that set too became limited as the Magic phenomenon grew beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
