RICHARD GARFIELD

The creator of Magic: The Gathering on card games, videogames and gameshows

- ALEX SPENCER

Few tabletop-game designers have had as much influence on videogames as Richard Garfield — even if you ignore everything but his single most famous creation. That game was conceived in the early ‘90s when a nascent RPG publisher told Garfield it couldn’t afford to publish a boardgame he'd designed called RoboRally. “I quickly came up with this concept of a trading card game — which was not cheaper, not by a long run,” he tells us. “But it was so exciting to Peter Adkison, the president of Wizards Of The Coast, that we made it work.”

It was a smart decision. That card game was, of course, Magic: The Gathering, a three-decade success story that made Wizards’ owner $1bn in 2022 alone. Magic’s impact on videogames is such that not only does the game have obvious digital heirs in the likes of Hearthstone and Slay The Spire, but has also been cited as an inspiration by more unlikely developers, including Hidetaka Miyazaki.

And this, again, is only Garfield’s most famous creation. He’s also responsible for Cyberpunk CCG Netrunner (which enjoyed a second life in the 2010s as Android: Netrunner) as well as lighter boardgame fare such as kaiju battler King Of Tokyo and Half Truth, a trivia game with a push-your-luck twist. Today, Garfield is also a remarkably prolific designer of videogames — perhaps most notably, and notoriously, Valve’s Dota 2 card battler Artifact. But he’s worked in a variety of genres beyond digital card games, from shmups to auto battlers, the latter of which has become something of a preoccupation for Garfield.

What first made you want to become a game designer? Did you have a formative encounter with any one particular game?

I think the most important inflection point was discovering