Richard Garfield
and walked out having invented a billion-dollar genre.
Who Is Richard Garfield?
Richard Channing Garfield was born June 26, 1963, in Philadelphia—great-great-grandson of President James A. Garfield, which is the kind of biographical detail that sounds invented but isn’t. His father was an architect, and the family moved constantly. They settled in Oregon when Richard was twelve. He designed his first game at thirteen. Dungeons & Dragons had lit the fuse.
He studied computational mathematics as an undergrad, did a stint at Bell Laboratories, then headed to the University of Pennsylvania for a PhD in combinatorial mathematics under Herbert Wilf. His dissertation was on residue classes of combinatorial families of numbers. While still a graduate student, he designed a board game about robots navigating a factory floor—RoboRally—and went looking for a publisher.
Peter Adkison at Wizards of the Coast liked RoboRally but couldn’t afford to produce it. He asked Garfield for something cheaper—fast-playing, minimal components, the kind of game people could play between rounds at conventions. Garfield spent about a week combining two ideas he’d been carrying around: a card game where each player builds their own deck, and the collector’s impulse behind baseball cards. His Penn classmates were the first playtesters. Magic: The Gathering launched in 1993 and sold out its entire first print run of 2.6 million cards in weeks. Garfield finished his PhD the same year. He left academia in 1994 to join Wizards full-time, was inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame in 1999, and eventually went independent—designing games for companies including Fantasy Flight, IELLO, and his own ventures.
Invention No. 1
The Collectible Card Game — Magic: The Gathering (1993)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 10Before Magic, card games came in a box. You bought the box, you had the game. Everyone played with the same cards. After Magic, card games came in randomized booster packs. You opened the pack and didn’t know what you’d get. You built a deck from your personal collection, and your deck was different from everyone else’s. The game happened before you sat down to play—in the deck construction, the trading, the hunt for rare cards.
This was a new kind of game. Not a variant of poker. Not an expansion of bridge. A new category that combined game design with collectible distribution, where the act of acquiring cards was part of the experience. Garfield patented it—U.S. Patent 5,662,332, the first trading card game patent ever awarded, a Guinness World Record. Pokémon TCG followed. Yu-Gi-Oh! followed. Hearthstone translated it to digital. Jordan Weisman applied the collectible model to miniatures with Mage Knight in 2000. Every collectible game on earth descends from this one idea, from this one week of design work by a math grad student in Philadelphia.
Classification: INVENTED. No predecessor. Garfield is both The First and The Best—Magic remains the gold standard thirty years later. Score 10: Father of Collectible Games. The genre doesn’t exist without him.
Invention No. 2
Tapping — Magic: The Gathering (1993)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 8You rotate a card ninety degrees to show it’s been used. That’s it. That’s the invention. You tap a land to produce mana, tap a creature to attack, tap an artifact to activate its ability. The card stays turned sideways until it untaps at the start of your next turn. A binary state—available or spent—encoded in the physical orientation of a piece of cardboard.
No board game or card game before Magic had used card rotation as a state-change mechanic. Garfield patented it as part of the broader TCG patent. The patent was broad enough that competing card games had to invent their own terminology—exhaust, bow, boot, kneel—to avoid infringement while copying the identical action. The word changes. The ninety-degree turn doesn’t. It appears in virtually every trading card game published since 1993. Classification: INVENTED. Patented. Universally adopted. Ceiling 8 under the Father.
Invention No. 3
The Mana System — Magic: The Gathering (1993)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 8In Magic, some cards are spells and some cards are lands. Lands produce mana. Mana pays for spells. Both spell cards and land cards live in the same deck, drawn from the same shuffled pile. This creates the fundamental tension of the game: every land you draw is a resource that lets you cast bigger spells, but it’s also a card that isn’t a spell. Draw too few lands and you’re helpless. Draw too many and you’re flooded with power you can’t spend.
No card game before Magic had dedicated resource-generating cards that power other cards. The system’s famous flaw—mana screw and mana flood—has inspired three decades of alternatives. Hearthstone gives you mana crystals automatically. Mike Elliott’s Duel Masters (2002) let any card become a resource. Flesh and Blood uses a pitch system. All of them are reacting to Garfield’s original design, trying to solve its known problem while preserving its strategic depth. Garfield built the mana system deliberately to prevent players from stacking decks with nothing but powerful spells—resource constraints force trade-offs. The system’s imperfection is part of its genius. Classification: INVENTED. No predecessor. The most replicated resource model in card gaming.
Invention No. 4
The Color Pie — Magic: The Gathering (1993)
Confidence: MEDIUM Score: 7Five colors. White is order and community. Blue is knowledge and control. Black is ambition and power at a cost. Red is chaos and emotion. Green is nature and growth. Each color has things it can do mechanically and things it cannot. White gets lifegain but not direct damage. Red gets burn spells but not card draw. The color pie isn’t flavor text—it’s a design constraint that governs every card printed.
Garfield acknowledged the influence of Cosmic Encounter (1977), where each player had a unique alien power that broke the rules in a specific way. His unpublished prototype Five Magics (1982, named after a Lyndon Hardy novel) was an early attempt at translating that modularity into card form. But Cosmic Encounter gave one power to one player. The color pie assigns mechanical identity to hundreds of cards across five factions. Mark Rosewater has refined the system extensively since 1993—the modern color pie is far more codified than Garfield’s original. That refinement is why this scores 7 rather than 8: Garfield planted it, but Rosewater grew it into what it is today. Classification: INVENTED. Confidence MEDIUM due to the Cosmic Encounter lineage.
Invention No. 5
Simultaneous Multi-Step Action Programming — RoboRally (1994)
Confidence: MEDIUM Score: 7Players program a sequence of movement cards face-down, then all programs execute simultaneously, step by step. Your robot turns left when you told it to, but the conveyor belt has moved since then, and another robot just bumped you sideways, and now your carefully planned route sends you into a pit. The comedy of compounding errors is the game.
Garfield designed RoboRally in 1985—it was the game he was trying to publish when Magic happened. It finally reached shelves in 1994. But he wasn’t first. Swashbuckler (1980, Yaquinto Publications) had players writing six sequential orders that resolved simultaneously fourteen years earlier. What Garfield added was the constraint: instead of free-form orders, players choose from dealt cards, turning programming into a hand-management puzzle. RoboRally became the reference implementation. Space Alert, Colt Express, and Mechs vs Minions all descend from it. Classification: PERFECTED. Garfield is The Best. Swashbuckler was The First.
Invention No. 6
Asymmetric Card Pools — Netrunner (1996)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 7Two players. Completely different card pools, different terminology, different actions, different win conditions. The Corporation builds servers and advances agendas. The Runner installs icebreakers and hacks in. They aren’t playing variants of the same game—they’re playing two interlocking games that collide at the point of attack.
Cosmic Encounter had asymmetric player powers but a shared deck. Card-driven wargames had a shared deck with some faction-specific cards. Netrunner was the first card game where each side draws from an entirely separate, non-overlapping pool. Android: Netrunner (2012, revised by Lukas Litzsinger) is widely considered the definitive version, though it was discontinued in 2018. The concept of fully asymmetric card pools has been adopted in board games and other card games since. Classification: INVENTED. No card game predecessor.
Invention No. 7
The Spell Response Chain — Magic: The Gathering (1993)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 7You cast a spell. Before it resolves, your opponent can respond with a spell of their own. Before that resolves, you can respond again. The chain builds upward, then resolves last-in, first-out—the most recent response resolves first, unwinding down to the original spell. Garfield borrowed the concept from computer science’s stack data structure and embedded it in a card game.
The original 1993 version used a clunky batch system with interrupts. The clean Stack—a formal LIFO queue for all spells and abilities—was codified by the Wizards of the Coast rules team in Sixth Edition (1999). Garfield designed the concept; Bill Rose and his team perfected the implementation. Tom Jolly’s Wiz-War (1983) had card-based counterspells a decade earlier, but no game before Magic had a formalized priority system governing the timing and resolution of stacked responses. Classification: INVENTED. Garfield is The First for the system. The rules team delivered The Best.
Invention No. 8
Procedurally Generated Unique Physical Game — KeyForge (2018)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 6Every KeyForge deck is thirty-six cards, generated by algorithm, stamped with a unique name and ID. No two decks on earth are identical. Players cannot modify them—no deckbuilding, no trading, no customization. You open the box and that’s your deck, forever. Video games had procedural generation since Rogue in 1980, but no physical game had ever made every copy algorithmically unique.
It was a brilliant idea. Fantasy Flight published it in 2018. It sold well initially. Then it was discontinued in 2023. No other publisher has adopted the format. Classification: INVENTED. A genuine first that the market didn’t sustain. Scores 6—novel but unadopted.
Invention No. 9
Yahtzee-Style Symbolic Dice Combat — King of Tokyo (2011)
Confidence: HIGH Score: 6Roll custom dice with symbols for attack, heal, energy, and victory points. Keep what you want, reroll the rest, Yahtzee-style. The dice drive a king-of-the-hill monster brawl with a card-buying economy layered on top. No single component is new—Yahtzee is from 1956, king-of-the-hill is ancient, custom dice are everywhere. But the specific fusion of Yahtzee as a combat engine for a competitive monster game was novel, commercially successful, and spawned imitators like Dice Throne. Classification: COMBINED. The combination is his. The components aren’t.
What Those Things Built
The obvious story about Richard Garfield is Magic. It’s the biggest story in tabletop gaming since Dungeons & Dragons. But the registry tells a different story—or rather, a deeper one. Nine innovations across six different games spanning twenty-five years. Two separate card games (Magic, Netrunner). A board game designed before Magic existed (RoboRally). A dice game (King of Tokyo). A physical game with procedurally generated copies (KeyForge). He didn’t iterate on one idea. He kept inventing.
The hidden architecture is combinatorial. Garfield is a mathematician who sees games as systems of interlocking constraints—mana forces deck composition trade-offs, tapping forces timing trade-offs, the color pie forces strategic identity trade-offs, the stack forces sequencing trade-offs. Even KeyForge, his most audacious experiment, was an exercise in constraint: what happens when you remove deckbuilding entirely and let the algorithm impose the constraint instead of the player? Every Garfield design asks some version of the same question: what interesting decisions emerge when you limit what players can do?
He holds more scored innovations than any other designer in this registry. More than Gygax. More than Arneson. More than Stafford or Perrin. Most designers are lucky to have one clean first. Garfield has seven—plus a Perfected and a Combined. The sheer volume of novel output, sustained across decades, is unmatched.
Score 10. Nine classified innovations. Portfolio: 10, 8, 8, 7, 7, 7, 7, 6, 6. Father of Collectible Games. Pioneer. Toolmaker. A combinatorial mathematician who treated game design the way he treated mathematics—as a space of unexplored possibilities, each one waiting to be proven.