mathematics

Richard Garfield

Richard Garfield is a mathematics topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Richard Garfield rather than just read about it. In short: Richard Channing Garfield (born June 26, 1963) is an American mathematician, inventor, and game designer. Garfield created Magic: The Gathering, which is considered to be the first collectible card game (CCG).

Key takeaways

Richard Garfield belongs to mathematics; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Richard Garfield to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Richard Garfield from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Richard Channing Garfield (born June 26, 1963) is an American mathematician, inventor, and game designer. Garfield created Magic: The Gathering, which is considered to be the first collectible card game (CCG). Magic debuted in 1993, and its success spawned many imitations. Garfield oversaw the successful growth of Magic and followed it with other game designs. Included in these are MetaZoo, Keyforge, Netrunner, BattleTech Collectible Card Game, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, Star Wars Trading Card Game, The Great Dalmuti, Artifact, and board games including RoboRally, King of Tokyo, and Bunny Kingdom. He also created a variation of the card game Hearts called Complex Hearts. Garfield first became passionate about games when he played the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, so he designed Magic decks to be customizable like roleplaying characters. Garfield and Magic are both in the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame.

Early life, family and education Garfield was born in Philadelphia and spent his childhood in many locations throughout the world as a result of his father's work in architecture. His family eventually settled in Oregon when he was twelve. Garfield is the great-great-grandson of U.S. President James A. Garfield and his grand-uncle Samuel Fay invented the paper clip. He is also the nephew of Fay Jones, who, already an established artist, illustrated one Magic card for him. While Garfield always had an interest in puzzles and games, his passion was kick-started when he was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons. Garfield designed his first game when he was 13. In 1985, Garfield received a Bachelor of Science degree in computational mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. After college, he joined Bell Laboratories, but soon after decided to continue his education at the University of Pennsylvania, studying combinatorial mathematics. Garfield studied under Herbert Wilf and earned a Ph.D. in 1993 with a thesis titled On the Residue Classes of Combinatorial Families of Numbers. Shortly thereafter, he became a Visiting Professor of mathematics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

Game design career

Precursors and development of Magic: the Gathering While searching for a publisher for RoboRally, which he designed in 1985, Wizards of the Coast began talking to Garfield through Mike Davis, but Wizards was still a new company and felt the game would be too expensive to produce. Peter Adkison of Wizards of the Coast expressed interest in a fast-playing game with minimal equipment, something that would be popular at a game convention. Adkison asked if Garfield could develop a game with lower production costs than RoboRally, with the idea of making such a game more portable and easy to bring to conventions; Garfield thought of an idea that came from combining a card game with collecting baseball cards and spent a week creating a full game from that rough idea. Garfield had been creating card games since at least 1982, starting with a card game called Five Magics that was inspired by Cosmic Encounter, and his work with this new card game built on his existing older prototypes. Garfield thus combined ideas from two previous games to invent the first trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. At first, Garfield and Adkison called the game Manaclash and worked on it in secret during a lawsuit filed by Palladium Games against Wizards. They were able to protect the game's intellectual property by using the shell company Garfield Games. Garfield began designing Magic as a Penn graduate student. Garfield's playtesters were mostly fellow Penn students.

Wizards of the Coast Magic: The Gathering launched in 1993. Playtesters began independently developing expansion packs, which were then passed to Garfield for his final edit. In June 1994, Garfield left academia to join Wizards of the Coast as a full-time game designer. Garfield managed the hit game wisely, balancing player experience with business needs and allowing other designers to contribute creatively to the game. With his direction, Wizards established a robust tournament system for Magic, something that was new to hobby gaming. Wizards finally released Garfield's RoboRally in 1994. Wizards published Garfield's Vampire: The Masquerade-based CCG Jyhad in 1994, but changed the name to Vampire: The Eternal Struggle in 1995 to avoid offense to Muslims. Netrunner (1996) was Garfield's CCG based on Cyberpunk 2020, where he included an element that made it an asymmetrical game, so that the two players each had entirely different cards, abilities, and goals. Wizards published the BattleTech Collectible Card Game in 1996, based on a design by Garfield. Peter Adkison was developing a Dungeons & Dragons MMORPG based on a design from Garfield and Skaff Elias, but left Wizards in December 2000 after Hasbro sold the D&D computer rights and cancelled the project. In 1999, Garfield was inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame alongside Magic. He was a primary play tester for the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition bookset, released by Wizards in 2000. He eventually left Wizards to become an independent game designer.

As an independent designer As of 2011, Garfield still sporadically contributes to Magic: The Gathering. More recently, he has created the board games Pecking Order (2006) and Rocketville (2006). The latter was published by Avalon Hill, a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast. He has shifted more of his attention to video games, having worked on the design and development of Schizoid and Spectromancer as part of Three Donkeys LLC. He has been a game designer and consultant for companies including Electronic Arts and Microsoft. Garfield taught a class titled "The Characteristics of Games" at the University of Washington. It is now taught as part of the University of Washington's Certificate in Game Design.

GameQbator Labs and MetaZoo In late 2024, Garfield was announced as the lead game designer for GameQbator Labs, a startup that acquired the intellectual property rights to the trading card game MetaZoo following its bankruptcy. Garfield and his team completely overhauled the game's mechanics for a revamped relaunch in 2025.

Games designed

A partial list of games designed by Garfield: Card games:

Turbo Hearts (1989) The Great Dalmuti (1995) Dilbert: Corporate Shuffle (1997) Twitch (1998) Ghooost! (2013) SpyNet (2016) Mindbug (2021) Creature Feature (2022) Collectible card games:

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Richard Garfield

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Richard Garfield claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In mathematics, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Richard Garfield before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Richard Garfield ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Richard Garfield

In research: Richard Garfield appears in mathematics research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Richard Garfield in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Richard Garfield is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1963 births, 20th-century American mathematicians, 21st-century American inventors, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Richard Garfield outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Richard Garfield in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Richard Garfield means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Richard Garfield out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Richard Garfield in simple terms?

Why does Richard Garfield matter?

Because it connects several mathematics ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Richard Garfield?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Richard Garfield.