The next generation of great strategists aren’t bothering with chess or poker

Years ago, after-hours poker supplanted corner-office chess as the way white-collar workers sharpened their wits against one another. But tomorrow’s leaders are battling one another on more ethereal planes — on Plains, in fact. Along with Islands, Swamps, Mountains, and Forests.

“Magic: The Gathering,” the trading-card game that Vice President-elect JD Vance said he grew up playing, is supplanting poker as the casual yet competitive strategy game of knowledge workers everywhere.

The fantasy-themed game, invented by mathematician Richard Garfield in 1991, has maintained a devoted following. But in the game’s third decade, it’s seen strong growth marked by a series of “Magic”-is-having-a-moment media trend pieces. In 2022, “Magic” earned nearly $1.1 billion, becoming toy giant Hasbro’s first billion-dollar brand. 

But for most of the game’s existence, the word “toy” in the above sentence has stigmatized its mostly adult player base: isn’t “Magic” for kids? Nerdy kids? In practically the same breath Vance said he’d been into “Magic,” he swore that he’d “dropped it like a bad habit” when he perceived the game might repel 15-year-old girls.

For decades, this stigma led many players to keep it a secret from their friends and coworkers. But then fantasy entered the chat with hits like “The Lord of the Rings” and exploded with “Game of Thrones” and “Stranger Things,” which normalized wizard-and-dragon talk everywhere.

“Magic" is not just a strategy game; it might be the strategy game. In a 2019 study, titled “Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete,” “Magic” was called “the most computationally complex real-world game known in literature.”

The premise of the game is simple and not unlike chess. Instead of two generals commanding identical and opposite 16-unit armies, “Magic” features two or more wizards “casting” spell cards at each other, using magical energy “tapped” from land cards they control. Like poker, “Magic” can be played in different formats; just as poker has five-card draw and Texas hold ’em, “Magic” has Standard and Commander. 

But unlike poker, “Magic”’s strategy challenges don’t begin when 52-card playing decks are shuffled up and dealt. Players choose from a massive pool of 28,878 unique cards, millions of which have been printed since the game’s introduction. “Magic” publisher Wizards of the Coast maintains different sets of rules and legal card lists for different casual and competitive formats.

Which formats a player plays, strategies they like to use within those formats, and cards they choose to play reflect the player’s personality and creativity. Are they aggressive, straightforward people who like to attack opponents directly with spells like lightning bolts? Or maybe they prefer to cleverly foil their opponent’s plans with “control” decks full of counterspells? Even whether a player spends hours building their own decks with online tools or just copies whichever decks are winning big events right now says a little something about them: do they outsource their deck-building strategy and focus on play, or try to innovate their own synergies and combos?

You start learning about your opponent when they put their first land on the table. Each of “Magic: The Gathering”’s five basic land types produce a different color of magic, and each color is associated with different classical elements, spell types, and play styles. While every color has creatures that can be summoned, green, the color of Forests, nature, and growth, has the biggest ones. Every color has spells that involve a sacrifice, but the black of Swamps, death, and ambition has the most — and the nastiest.

Vance told Semafor his favorite deck was built around the black card “Yawgmoth’s Bargain,” long banned from most formats. It sacrifices a player’s own life total to draw cards much faster than the usual one per turn. Longtime players told The Independent this choice reveals Vance to have been a “ruthless,” power-hungry player who put winning above everything else.

Imagine a 13-year-old Vance triumphantly putting this card down on the table across from you, with its art of a mummified skeletal figure in a tattered robe entreating with a mechanical bug-beast across a moat of ghastly green. And at the bottom, one line of text: “He craves only one commodity.”

You and Vance now both know he’s going to win; the only question is how long it will take him.

It’s a game, but it’s serious business

From the beginning, “Magic” eschewed generic fantasy trappings and myths for original illustrations, characters, settings, and lore. 

“‘Magic’s greatest asset has always been its art,” Sam Gaglio, the academic and essayist behind popular YouTube channel Rhystic Studies, told Sherwood News. Gaglio, who holds a doctorate in Italian studies, said “Magic” folks like to say that Wizards of the Coast is just behind the Catholic Church in the number of individual commissioned paintings in the history of time.

Cameron Kunzelman, an assistant professor of communications at Mercer University, is the author of a forthcoming book on “Magic”’s cultural legacy and influence, tentatively titled “Cumulative Upkeep.” Though Kunzelman’s colleagues know his focus is in game and media studies, he told Sherwood News he still often shuts the door to his office when working.

“There is a cultural association that games are a waste of time,” he said. “Someone who walks by and sees you reading a novel in an academic setting assumes you’re doing research. Someone who sees you doing a games-based leisure activity will not think the same thing.” 

“Magic”’s 296-page comprehensive rules guide may be one reason the game has lagged behind “Dungeons & Dragons” adoption. 

“Lots of people like looking at a dragon, but as soon as you’re like, ‘And that’s the power, and that’s the toughness, and this is the attack step,’ it’s still a big turn-off for many,” Kunzelman said. But that same requirement — needing someone to explain the rules they’ve learned by doing — can work in the game’s favor.

Take Richard Dahl, 55, who works in management in the healthcare sector. He had no interest in strategy or fantasy games until eight years ago when he walked into the break room at work and noticed a group of employees playing a card game he didn’t recognize. Most happened to report up through him, so he naturally took an interest in what they found so interesting.

“I’d sit there and watch, just trying to figure out what it was they were doing,” he said, trying to follow their complex and intricate moves. Day after day, they kept playing, and he kept watching and chatting. He was drawn in by the game’s ability to build social bonds at work — like when a new hire who’d been struggling to connect with people got advised to start playing “Magic,” and through the playgroup quickly forged new relationships. 

Finally, for Dahl’s birthday, the playgroup pooled together and bought him a preconstructed deck for his birthday and told him he had no excuse left not to join the community.

“Much to my wife’s dismay, and a lot of money later, I’m still very much into it,” he said.

When Mike Swensen first heard about “Magic” in 1993, he teased his brother for being nerdy enough to play it. But in adulthood he was “able to look past that stigma to see the strategy game underneath and the beauty and the creativity and the artwork, and all the things that make ‘Magic’ unique. It got me hooked.”

At one job, Swensen’s employer was encouraging workers to try to form special-interest groups with one another. Swensen and another “Magic” player asked around and quickly ended up with a regular lunchtime playgroup of nearly 30 people.

“We came up with the idea of using ‘Magic’ as a networking tool,” Swensen said. They held a big tournament after-hours at the office, inviting students and networkers to come in and play. Anyone who beat an employee won a pack of cards.

“A couple hundred people showed up for that first event,” Swensen said, and they held several more. Swensen remembers playing against someone with a computer-science degree who was working a non-tech job, because he thought there weren’t any opportunities in the area. Not only did that person end up landing a call-center job with one of the participating tech companies, Swensen then slyly paired him up in a game of “Magic” with that company’s VP of engineering, and the two started a mentor-mentee relationship that resulted in a developer job.

Swensen soon changed jobs himself, joining a business-insight software developer. Of course he asked for permission to start a “Magic” playgroup, and Swensen soon realized that getting together 35 “Magic” players meant he quickly got to meet 35 people, not just on his team but across the organization.

“I’m in software development,” he said. “I get tickets from customer support all the time. Most of the time, most of my career, those have been faceless names. But here, I get tickets from Mark, who I know and play “Magic” with, or Sarah. Instead of, ‘Ugh, another ticket,’ it’s, ‘Oh, I’ll ask them about this at lunch.’” 

As Swensen expanded with cross-company tournaments, he ran into quite a few companies who weren’t interested, not because they’re not interested in “Magic” but because they already run their own internal “Magic” leagues or events.

The poker boom lit the fuse for a “Magic” blast

In Nate Silver’s new book, “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” he explores how the poker boom of the past 20 years prepared tech workers, founders, and venture capitalists to understand probability and risk, assess threats, and build the confidence to take big chances to achieve big payoffs.

“Magic” hones those same skills, Swensen says, but also teaches you to consider problems from many different angles and see many different solutions using many different tools. While every great poker player can tell you how many outs they have with the river about to hit the table, “Magic” presents so many different possibilities that an algorithm literally can’t tell who’s going to win.

When asked if there were any common traits “Magic” players tend to take with them into the working world, nearly every person in this story brought up attention to detail. 

“You get a lot of people who are very focused, think things through,” Swensen said. “That does reflect in the way they play the game as well. People who, to a degree, are a little obsessive. We get a lot of those: people who will not let a problem go until they have a solution.”

Gaglio agreed, adding that the psychographic profile of a “Magic” player is something he’s thought about a lot.

“It’s very detail-oriented people. I think anyone who likes strategic games appreciates the push and pull of lenticular design,” he said, explaining that while each card has surface-level attributes that don’t change, the context of each game can change their effect wildly.

Learning how and what influences those changes, he says, draws people into “Magic.” “I enjoy really difficult mind games. I love chess; I love playing ‘Magic’; I love complex board games.”

It’s no wonder a lot of “Magic” Pro Tour veterans have gone on to win big money in poker, and many have then gone on to be successful founders or hedge-fund managers. Nor is it surprising that, according to Gaglio, many poker players have turned to “Magic” for both competition and fun. 

Not just for nerds — or men

Desiree Maczynski was in high school in the early 2000s when she encountered “Magic,” and outwardly, she told Sherwood, she pretended to fit Vance’s stereotype of a nerd-repelled teen girl.

“Straight away I laughed it off with my friends, like, I was too cool for it,” she said. “But secretly I was, like, ‘Man, I really wanna play that.’”

She went on to serve in the Marine Corps. In 2015 her husband introduced her to the game so that she could play with their military friends. But like many women who get into “Magic,” the thought of doing in-person events with strangers put her off. She imagined the stereotypical reputation of game stores: male-dominated, asocial, and rife with opportunities to criticize her for the smallest mistake.

But during pandemic lockdowns, she said, she grew to fully understand and appreciate all of “Magic”’s intricacies. And in 2021 the support of her husband and a couple friends helped her get over the hump and into the store.

Maczynski said most people were welcoming and couldn’t have cared less about her gender. After an incident with a problematic jerk with persistent inappropriate comments and rude asides, Maczynski and her friends started talking about how they could bridge the gap between marginalized genders and what they saw as a cis-guy hierarchy. They started a Facebook group, “Women of Magic the Gathering,” which now has over 5,000 people, plus an umbrella site, Women of Gaming. Now they want to bridge the gender gap with live and virtual events, plus community outreach, support, and discussion.

The pandemic-powered turning point for “Magic”

Wizards’ online multiplayer version, “Magic: The Gathering Arena,” launched in 2019.

Covid and the expectations-beating 2021 launch of a mobile client drove not only millions in revenue but attracted millions of new online players, which in turn might have helped drive a 42% growth in card sales from 2020 to 2021.

When Wizards printed a one-of-a-kind “One Ring” card, there were some stories; when musician and “Magic” player Post Malone paid $2 million for it, there were lots more. And despite the associated “The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth” set driving Q3 growth on its way to becoming the bestselling set of all time, Hasbro just announced 3% year-over-year growth in Q3 driven by original sets “Modern Horizons III” and “Bloomburrow,” underscoring Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks’ point that the “Universes Beyond” series is about new-player growth, not one-off successes. A Netflix animated series is also in production, which should be the most accessible and buzzy on-ramp ever to the world of “Magic” lore.

And even though JD Vance’s “Magic” admission was about how nerdy it was, “The Daily Show”’s segment asking “Magic” players about it is still the kind of mainstream recognition that ultimately builds fans.

“‘Nerd’ is cool now,” Swensen said. 

While nerds would certainly agree, “Magic”’s uptake in the corporate world means that “nerd” is becoming normal. And the planning, creative problem-solving, self-expression, and conflict-resolution skills today’s workers are building with it will be reflected in the way we all do business tomorrow — emphasis on all.

“Women have always enjoyed these things that have been considered to be male-dominated, or ‘boys-only,’” Maczynski said. “We’ve just had to do it quietly because it hasn’t been seen as socially acceptable.”

“So I kind of feel bad for Vance,” she said, “that he decided to stop doing something he enjoyed because he thought girls wouldn’t like him or whatever. I know a lot of women who are considerably older than me and who’ve been playing this game for decades now — and to this day still play it and still love it. 

“Regardless of any scrutiny they’ve faced in the past, they continue to push through and play because, at the end of the day, it’s still a trading-card game, and games are meant for everybody.”

If Vance had kept playing “Magic,” we might have a better idea of the kind of leader he wants to become — and it might have helped him become a better leader. Or at least one who had more than one trick up his sleeve.

Ty Schalter is a professional writer and talker who loves to tell stories with numbers. He’s worked for FiveThirtyEight, VICE, Bleacher Report, and SiriusXM. Check out “Gimme Schalter,” his totally free newsletter.