Editing Wizards of the Coast (section)

==Early History: Oh~ Oh~ Oh~, It's Magic!==
Wizards started out as a small-time game publisher, releasing new editions of defunct old niche games and small dribbles of their own material.  They'd probably have gone the route of [[Iron Crown Enterprises]] or be languishing in obscurity today, if not for a stroke of good luck.  [[Richard Garfield|Some math major]] with an eye towards game design walked into their office and pitched a board game to them.  They liked it, but they didn't have the cash to produce it, so they asked him to come up with something cheaper to produce, something portable and quick to play.  Well, to make a long story short, he went home, ran some numbers, and [[Magic the Gathering|the rest is history]].

''Magic: The Gathering'' was (and, if you're into the Skinner Box of CCGs, still is) a damn fine collectible card game, the first commercially successful one of its kind in the world... which isn't actually that impressive, considering the only other CCG at that point was a baseball card game from the early 1900s. Still, it started an industry, won shitloads of game-design awards, and led to Wizards using its patents on various basic card game mechanics ("tapping," counters, etc.) to ruthlessly crush all competitors.  Sometimes, they were justified in protecting their IP against hacks and shovelware imitators.  Sometimes, they just went after people they didn't like.  Let's just say there's a ''reason'' ''L5R'' used to make you lose points if you accidentally said "tap" instead of "bow."

It also made them more money than can easily be imagined, not least because the 90s was the age of know-nothing idiots speculating on "nerd shit," a trend started in the comic-book industry.  (Humorously, the cards from this time have sometimes ended up being ''[[Arabian Nights|more]]'' [[Legends|valuable]] than the pointless comics bubble ever would be.)  Rather than blowing it all on hookers and blow, in the tradition of the 80's, they funneled it back into their RPG business, buying up various old games and refurbishing them, including ''Ars Magica'' from fellow swaggering new kid on the block [[White Wolf]].  Most of them had enjoyed only moderate success at best, not least because the market then was smaller than it had ever been following the fundamentalist-o-caust of the 80's purge and the company was putting its fingers into too many pies and failing to support all its games, but eventually, they managed to land the biggest fish of all.