Richard Garfield (born 1966) is a game designer who created the card games The Gathering, Netrunner, BattleTech, The Eternal Struggle (originally known as Jyhad), The Great Dalmuti, Star Wars Trading Card Game, and the board game RoboRally. Magic: The Gathering is his most successful game and its development is credited with creating the collectible card game genre.

Biography

---

Garfield designed his first game as a teenager. He had a wide range of interests, including math and language. In 1985, he received a bachelor of science degree in computer mathematics. He joined Bell Laboratories and worked there for a couple of years, but then decided to continue his education by attending the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

He began designing a game called The Gathering as a student in the late 1980s. An "East Coast" group of playtesters, comprising mostly fellow Penn students, formed around the developing game. While searching for a publisher for RoboRally, he found Peter Adkison of newly founded Wizards of the Coast. Adkison agreed to publish his board game and expressed an interest in a game like Magic that would have little setup and short games.

Garfield studied under Herbert Wilf and earned a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics from Penn in 1993. His dissertation was entitled "On the Residue Classes of Combinatorial Families of Numbers." But Garfield believed that game design would not offer a steady living and became a professor of mathematics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. He had previously been in contact with Magic playtesters from the west coast and his move brought him closer to them and Wizards of the Coast.

Magic: The Gathering became incredibly popular after its commercial launch in 1993. Garfield left academia to join Wizards of the Coast as a full-time game designer in June 1994. After the game took off, Richard Garfield moved to Kennewick, Washington. There he was known to play Magic: The Gathering with some friends and others from around there.

"Richard Garfield, Ph.D." is also the name of a card from the joke Magic: The Gathering set Unhinged. This theme had been previously explored with the card "Phelddagrif", the name being an anagram of "Garfield, Ph.D.".

Garfield was also a primary play tester for the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition bookset.

He still sporadically contributes to The Gathering, most recently (as of 2006) as part of the design team for the 2005 expansion, Ravnica. ^*

Richard has personally created three Magic cards celebrating events in his life: One for his marriage proposal (this was done by pasting a color photocopy onto another card) and one for the birth of each of his two children (both professionally printed). Several of each card were given out to friends and associates and they are considered extreme rarities by collectors. ^*

There is a commonly-accepted rule among the fanbase of The Gathering that if Richard Garfield personally alters a Magic card by hand, the change is permanent for that particular card. This has spawned many urban legends. The subject of Richard Garfield possessing godlike powers within the Magic universe is immortalized in his eponymous card, Richard Garfield, Ph.D..

References

---

• "Just like magic". December 27, 1998. PolkOnline.
• "Legendary Difficulties". March 8, 2002. MagicTheGathering.com.
• "Immer für eine Überraschung gut: Richard Garfield: Der Mann hinter Magic" (PDF). January 30, 2004. Amigo Spiele

1966 births | Board game designers | Collectible card games | Living people | Magic: The Gathering

Richard Garfield | Richard Garfield | Richard Garfield | Richard Garfield | Richard Garfield