Okay, I'm pulling on the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work.

Okay, so today, last time I did my unintentional three-parter. So I decided today I was going to do

a kind of intentional three-parter, although a little bit different. I often talk about something that when Richard Garfield traded the game, I often claim that he

had three great inventions, that magic was the culmination of three different really cool

ideas.

And I call that the Golden Trifecta, my name for it.

So the Golden Trifecta is made up of three things.

First is the concept of a trading card game.

Second is the idea of the color wheel.

And the third was the mana system.

All of those are very important, so important, that I've decided to dedicate a whole podcast to each one of the three.

So as a sort of informal three-part thing, I mean, each one will stand on its own.

So today I'm going to start with the beginning, the trading card game.

So I want to talk about what exactly Richard Garfield came up with and sort of walk through a lot of the problems he had to solve.

Because I think if you really want to understand design of magic, to be honest, of any trading card game,

you've got to explore trading card games themselves and understand, you know, kind of what makes them tick.

So let's start from the very beginning.

So I think trading cards have existed for a long time.

I mean, most famous trading cards probably are baseball cards.

For those that don't live in America, baseball are very popular American sport.

All the players of baseball get put onto cards.

The cards have their picture on the front. Usually on the back are statistics about how good they are.

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