Mike Elliott
what if you built the game while you played it?
Who Is Mike Elliott?
Mike Elliott was a bridge player living in Phoenix, Arizona, when a friend introduced him to Magic: The Gathering in the early 1990s. He started competing in tournaments. Then he did something unusual: he designed his own Magic expansion. He called it Astral Ways—a full set of cards, complete with new mechanics, built by a player who thought he could make a good set and decided to prove it.
At a game convention, Elliott met Joel Mick from Wizards of the Coast’s R&D department. He mentioned the homemade expansion. Mick looked at it, liked what he saw, and that conversation led to a job offer. Elliott joined Wizards in January 1996. When Mark Rosewater put him on the Tempest design team, Elliott brought his Astral Ways file to the table. Two of its biggest mechanics—Slivers and shadow—made it into the published set. A third, echo, surfaced a year later in Urza’s Saga. Fan fiction became canon.
Elliott spent a decade at Wizards, designing Magic sets and leading the Duel Masters, Harry Potter, and Neopets trading card games. He left at the end of 2005, moved through WizKids, then went freelance—designing Thunderstone, Quarriors!, Battle Spirits, and Star Trek: Fleet Captains in rapid succession. He was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame at Origins in 2017. He might be the only game designer in history with an anime character based on him, courtesy of the Battle Spirits television series in Japan.
Invention No. 1
Any-Card-as-Mana Resource System — Duel Masters (2002)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 7Richard Garfield’s mana system in Magic: The Gathering was brilliant and flawed in equal measure. Dedicated land cards generate mana to cast spells, but because lands and spells share the same deck, you sometimes draw too many lands and sometimes too few. Players call this mana screw and mana flood, and it has been the single most debated design feature in trading card games for thirty years.
Elliott solved it. In Duel Masters (2002), there are no dedicated resource cards. Any card in your hand can be placed face-down as a mana source. Every card is both a spell and a potential resource. The agonizing decision shifts from “did I build my deck right?” to “which of my good cards am I willing to sacrifice for power?” You never get screwed. You always have choices. You just have to live with them.
No trading card game before Duel Masters had eliminated dedicated resource cards this way. Force of Will TCG and others later adopted variants of the idea. Hearthstone (2014) went a different direction, giving players mana crystals automatically, but Elliott’s solution preserved strategic tension while removing randomness. Classification: INVENTED. Hard ceiling of 8 under Garfield as Father of Collectible Games.
Invention No. 2
Themed Deckbuilding — Thunderstone (2009)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 7Donald X. Vaccarino invented the deckbuilding genre with Dominion in 2008—the idea that players start with a small, weak deck and buy new cards during play, shuffling them in, gradually constructing an engine from nothing. Dominion was abstract. Elegant. Mechanical. It didn’t pretend to be about anything other than optimization.
Elliott looked at that engine and saw a dungeon crawl. Thunderstone (2009) grafted an RPG adventure theme onto deckbuilding: you recruit heroes, equip them with weapons and spells, level them up with experience points, and send them into a dungeon to fight monsters. The depth of the dungeon affected combat—you needed light sources to fight deeper in. It was the first game to prove that deckbuilding could carry narrative weight, not just mechanical efficiency.
Clank! (2016) followed. Legendary (2012) followed. Aeon’s End (2016) followed. The entire themed-deckbuilder genre descends from Elliott’s proof of concept. Thunderstone Quest raised over $500,000 on Kickstarter in 2017. Classification: COMBINED. Deckbuilding existed. Dungeon-crawl themes existed. Elliott was the first to fuse them, and the fusion created a template the industry kept building on.
Invention No. 3
Dice Building — Quarriors! (2011)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 7If deckbuilding works with cards, what happens when you replace the cards with dice? Elliott, co-designing with Eric M. Lang, answered that question with Quarriors! (2011). Instead of buying cards from a central market and shuffling them into your deck, you buy custom dice and drop them into a bag. Draw dice from the bag, roll them, use the results to summon creatures or generate currency. The bag is your deck. The dice are your engine.
The concept spawned an entire subgenre. WizKids expanded it into the Dice Masters line—Marvel, DC, Dungeons & Dragons, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles editions. Orléans (2014) and Altiplano (2017) adopted the bag-building mechanic for Euro-style board games. War Chest (2018) used it for abstract strategy. Quarriors! won the 2013 Origins Award for Best Family Game. Classification: COMBINED. Deckbuilding existed. Custom dice existed. Bag-drawing existed. Elliott and Lang translated the deckbuilding loop into dice and bags, and a genre emerged.
Invention No. 4
Shuffle Building — Star Trek: Fleet Captains (2011)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 7Deckbuilding gives you individual cards. Shuffle building gives you whole sub-decks. In Star Trek: Fleet Captains (2011), co-designed with Ethan Pasternack and Bryan Kinsella, players choose pre-constructed ten-card command decks—Science, Combat, Diplomacy—and shuffle them together before play begins. Your strategic identity is set by which sub-decks you pick. The combinations create emergent variety without requiring anyone to construct a deck card by card.
Paul Peterson’s Smash Up (2012) popularized the concept a year later—choose two faction decks, shuffle them together, play the mashup. Smash Up made shuffle building a household term in gaming. But Fleet Captains was first. No prior game had used pre-built sub-decks combined by the player as the core system. Classification: INVENTED. A clean first that someone else made famous.
Invention No. 5
Slivers — Magic: The Gathering — Tempest (1997)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 6Every Sliver on the battlefield shares its abilities with every other Sliver. Play one that grants flying, and all your Slivers fly. Play one that grants first strike, and all your Slivers strike first. The more you play, the more powerful the swarm becomes. Elliott designed them for his unpublished Astral Ways set, inspired by Plague Rats from Magic’s original Alpha edition. If Plague Rats could boost each other’s stats, why couldn’t creatures share abilities?
Slivers became one of Magic’s most beloved creature types. They’ve returned across multiple expansions over twenty-five years. The tribal synergy mechanic—creatures that power each other up by type—became a cornerstone of TCG design. But Slivers exist within Garfield’s architecture. This is a development-level innovation inside an existing system, not a standalone creation. Classification: INVENTED. Scores 6—genuinely novel but architecture-capped.
Invention No. 6
Core Economy — Battle Spirits (2008)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 6In Battle Spirits, physical tokens called Cores serve as the universal resource for every action in the game—summoning spirits, activating effects, powering defenses. Cores move between your reserve, your field, and your trash. The economy is finite and shared, creating a tension where spending on offense literally depletes your defense. It was novel enough to anchor a TCG that ran for over a decade in Japan, spawned an anime series, and made Elliott an unlikely animated character.
Adoption outside the Battle Spirits ecosystem was minimal. The system is genuinely unique—no other TCG uses physical tokens as a universal action currency in quite this way—but it didn’t travel. Classification: INVENTED. Niche adoption limits it to 6.
Invention No. 7
Physically Modular Cards — Hecatomb (2005)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 6Pentagonal plastic cards that physically stack and rotate to create combined creatures. Place one card on top of another, align the edges, and the visible portions of both cards contribute to the composite monster’s abilities. No trading card game before Hecatomb had made the cards themselves physically modular—where the spatial arrangement of plastic on plastic was the mechanic.
Elliott co-designed this with Paul Barclay, Brandon Bozzi, Aaron Forsythe, and Robert Gutschera. It was audacious. It was also expensive to manufacture and impossible to sleeve. Hecatomb lasted nine months before Wizards of the Coast cancelled it. No other game has adopted the format. Classification: INVENTED. A genuine first that died on contact with production economics. Scores 6—zero adoption blocks the gate to 7.
What Those Things Built
The pattern is hard to miss once you see it. Any-card-as-mana: you build your resource base from the same cards you play. Thunderstone: you build your adventuring party from the market during play. Quarriors: you build your dice pool from purchases during play. Shuffle building: you build your deck from pre-fab modules before play. Slivers: you build your army’s abilities from creatures during play. Even Hecatomb: you build your monster from physically stacked components during play. Elliott keeps returning to the same structural idea—the game as something you construct while it’s happening, using the game’s own materials as both the tools and the product.
He found this idea in Magic, where deckbuilding happens before you sit down. Then he spent fifteen years moving the construction process closer and closer to the moment of play itself. Duel Masters collapsed the resource system into the action cards. Thunderstone wrapped the construction in narrative. Quarriors! moved it from cards to dice. Fleet Captains gave you pre-built modules to combine. Each game is the same impulse expressed in a different medium.
He walked into Wizards of the Coast carrying a homemade Magic set and walked out, a decade later, having designed across more game formats than almost anyone in the industry—TCGs, deckbuilders, dice games, miniatures games, board games, a children’s MMO. The Hall of Fame induction in 2017 was overdue. The anime character was a bonus.
Score 7. Seven classified innovations. Portfolio: 7, 7, 7, 7, 6, 6, 6. Pioneer. Toolmaker. The designer who kept translating the same idea into every material he could find, and kept finding it worked.