[On why making a Pro Tour was a good idea]
Richard: Obviously Magic was super-successful, but it was still in this turbulent non-stabilized state. I very much believed in this idea that if you took a game seriously that would help all levels of the game. The example that was used was that of basketball. The existence of the NBA didn't make it so that everybody's games are all super serious and exclude people who didn't participate in the NBA.
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Richard: When Ice Age came out, there were early posts analyzing the set, and they said there were only two good cards in the set. This is an unbelievably bad result for someone who's been working on the set for years and years. You look at that you just think, "This is ridiculous," with putting all this time, and in the end there were two cards that are of interest to people because they wanted to play with all these old, powerful cards. If we were in the business of selling cards to people, we were going to run out of cards sooner than we wanted. But if we were in the business of selling environments, we could make a new environment whenever we want. That's basically where the game was before the Pro Tour came around.
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Mark: We wanted to name the Pro Tour, and one of the first things we came up with was "The Black Lotus Pro Tour." We sent out postcards announcing it, and we later learned that the lotus had connotations in some foreign markets that were not good. It is symbolic of drug trafficking in Asia, for example. We were just calling it the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour internally, and eventually that stuck.
Richard: The main thing was that there were a lot of design issues. As far as designing the way the tournament would work at the timepayouts, what would happen if people took too long playing, and so onthat was hard work, but it was minor compared to politically getting the company on board with it. Because if it [didn't] have the support of the company and a unified vision coming from them, then it wasn't going to work.
I remember a board meeting in those days with people talking about how to get in touch with what the players wanted. I suggested we could hire the players, and most of the people at the board meeting laughed. It just showed such a huge lack of respect for the people buying the product. All this political stuff had to be overcome. For me, this was the [most pressing] of the difficulties we faced.
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While it was still pretty common for tournaments to be held using what would now be considered Vintage as the default format, the format for that first Pro Tour was a modified version of Standardor, as it was known at the time, Type 2. For this tournament, players build their decks including at least five cards from each set that was legal in the format: Fourth Edition, Chronicles, Ice Age, Fallen Empires, and Homelands.
Mark: The whole point of the Pro Tour is that it's a marketing vehicle. We want to be aspirational, but we were also trying to get them to focus on what the latest sets were going to be. Obviously right now Pro Tours are named after the new set that's just come out. Our problem was that the latest set to come out right before that first Pro Tour was Homelands....
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In the early days of the Pro Tour, the field was broken up into two divisions: Seniors and Juniors. The Junior Division was held on an entirely different floor of the building that housed that first tournament. While the Seniors were cutting to a Top 16, the Juniors cut to a Top 8. Also all the prize money for Juniors was paid out in the form of college scholarships.
Skaff: I know this sounds almost quaint now, but at the time it was very controversial to put money on tournaments. You could put all sorts of other prizes, but you very rarely saw straight cash payouts. We wanted to not get on the bad side of parents, and it felt like that could happen if we put cash on the Juniors. So the prizes for the Juniors at the first Pro Tour weren't cash, they were scholarships. For the whole Junior tour they were managed as scholarships. There was a bit of marketing there, and we wanted the right emphasis for kids. We wanted to encourage kids to go to college.
Graham: I almost didn't go to college, because I already knew I wanted to work in the wine industry and I had a fair amount of experience. It was because I had that $12,000 scholarshipwhich essentially paid for all my tuition and booksthat I was able to go to community college in Santa Barbara and then UCSB. It's pretty incredible that it worked out that way. It was really awesome.
Richard: Wow, that's cool!
Skaff: Honestly that makes me feel so good. That is exactly what we wanted to happen. We were all nerds growing up and we felt bad that people with hand-eye coordination and muscles could get scholarships. There are just not the amount of academic scholarships that there are for sports. We really wanted people to be able to take their hobbywhich is essentially what you do with baseball or basketballand have that equivalent for intellectual sports. We wanted more respect for intellectual pursuits.
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Mark: When Magic first came out, Richard Garfield's vision for the game was one of discovery. Richard didn't want information put out, he wanted people to discover Magic cards in the wild. So for the first year or year and a half, people were super secretive about what was in a deck. I covered Worlds in 1995 and I wasn't allowed to list the decks. I did play-by-play, and I showed what was in their hands, but we didn't tell you their whole decks. At this tournament not only were we going to tell you, but we were going to print [commemorative copies of] the decks so you could buy themyou could play them. That was a very different approach from how we handled Magic in the past.
Richard: By the time we were doing the Pro Tour, I had completely given up on that idea already. I think it [lasted] a year maybe where it was a real part of the game, and I took immense satisfaction when lists would come out in magazines or online that were incomplete or incorrect because people had to do all the research on their own. My memory is, which again could be fuzzy, that after about a year it was clear that the idea of people discovering things in that way was impossible and they wanted to get the answer. I had given up on [my previous vision].
In the beginning, the way I imagined Magic being played was with people buying one deck, having some fun, and then maybe buying another deck. Then maybe mixing and matching them. I didn't anticipate people buying more than four or five decks. If everyone in your group only bought four to five, there was going to be this process of exploration. That play group of eight people wouldn't even see all the cards, they're not even gonna all be there. It was pretty clear, pretty early, that this is not how it was going to go down. And I embraced that reality.
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Skaff: We had these sports marketing people from the beginning telling us we were crazy if we didn't make it all single-elimination, but we were confident that we wanted Swiss for two reasons. One, it is more skill-testing. It gives people more play. You don't want to drive six hours in that snowstorm and lose in the first round. So we knew we wanted Swiss, but you have this strong pressure of wanting single-elimination. Single-elimination is very easy for people to understand. It is crystal clear and every game is exciting and nail-biting. We wanted a combo of those two...so we just did it. We are sort of proud of that format. It has become the standard for Magic stuff, but you see it in other places too now.
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Mark: Skaff had it in his mind that it had to be in New York City. He also really wanted the Pro Tour to start in February, but he never seemed to piece together that it snows in February in New York City.
Jon: It was the blizzard of '96how could you forget the blizzard of '96? I probably drove inat the time I lived really close to the Holland Tunnel. My car was this old Mitsubishi Mirage hatchback that was definitely not optimized for winter driving. I'd drive the car to PTQs and $1,000 tournaments all over the place, and there must have been a 20% chance that I got into an accident, but somehow I always came out on the right side of it. I min-crashed with it.
Elaine: There had already been two huge blizzards, including the blizzard that dumped two feet of snow in New York. Then the Pro Tour happens and there's this third blizzard with another ten-plus inches. We nearly didn't make it to the city, our car was slipping and sliding all over the place. Once we got there, all of Manhattan was closed. Try to picture Manhattan with no cars, with nobody going anywhere; it was the most insane thing ever.
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Michael: The first night we got there...we were partying pretty hard. I'll never forget this, though: Richard Garfield, who at the time was kind of a big deal, was there and I had never met him. We were all practicing in the hallways of the hotel and I'd had a few too many drinks. I went up to him and I said, "Hey Richard! I'm Michael Loconto and I'm gonna see you Sunday when I win this thing!"
And then after it was all said and done and I'm standing there with him, he was shaking his head saying, "I can't believe you actually won." We used to have a really good time when we played.
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Graham: There were a lot of little kids there. It felt like maybe there were fifteen of us that were actually competing in the tournament. It was just unfair that a twelve-year-old had to play a seventeen-year-old, you know? The fact that I had a Necropotence deck and I was given that playing field? My entire match would be done in ten or twelve minutes.
I do remember judges laughing when I played Demonic Consultation for the first time. I was like "Okay, laugh all you want." They certainly weren't laughing at the end. I remember an incredible number of fast matches. I remember losing to this guy who played Karma [in his main deck]. That was my only loss. I had to have a judge question if that was seriously in his [main] deck and the judge said it was.
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Skaff: Once the tournament started, I don't remember very much. I had been called up to the Juniors several times. Finkel was crying, and I had to take care of that.
Jon: Ten minutes after I won my first round, there were three cards sitting on our table. I had been Jester's Capped in Game 2 and our match went to three games. The judge asked me if they were my cards. I said they were, and I got a game loss for Game 3. I had won the matchthose cards could've been there for any number of reasons. I threw what could charitably be called a tantrum. It definitely involved cryingI'm glad there was no video. That's actually how I met Skaff, I was demanding my money back and stuff. They calmed me down, but I still think that game loss was kinda [unfair].
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Graham: I played the final match against a White Weenie deck played by Aaron Kline. That was a really tough match, and I topdecked a couple times to save my [bacon]. I remember topdecking a Nevinyrral's Disk to win. That was gnarly.
They told us to play slow and explain everything. I was always a very fast Magic player. I felt like if I played too slow I might lose my natural instinct for the game. I remember at one point they announced that Aaron had won the match. We didn't really communicate when it happened. I was gonna kill him the next turn, but he had Karma out. I had a Zuran Orb and could sacrifice my lands to gain life. I looked at him and he said "Yeah I get it." I just swept up all my cards and so did he. They just thought he had won. I would have died to Karma if I didn't sacrifice any lands, but I could just sacrifice all my landsit didn't matter[and] I was about to kill him.
At any Pro Tour after that, you would've had to be very specific about what you were doingabout every step. Aaron was nice enough to say "Yes, you're totally not gonna die to Karma while you have the Zuran Orb out." I think about that moment a lot. I should've been more professional, but I was a kid. It was just this minute of confusion where all the people thought that he won. He would've won the tournament with that game, but we went the full five games.
Michael: My deck used Millstones to run people out of cards. It was mainly defensive with lots of board wipes: Wrath of God, Swords to Plowshares (thank God for Swords), and Balance. You had Blinking Spirits and Mishra's Factories to block all their stuff. I was just trying to make the games last as long as I could and hopefully run [my opponents] out of cards.
I remember at the end it was gonna be a best-of-seven match for the finals and the deck just took way too long. I don't think they ever expected that kind of thing. They brought me and Bertrand in afterI think I lost the first game and won the second gameand said it was super late and they didn't rent the venue for long enough. They needed to have a winner. They said we could just split the money and play one game for the title. That's how it went.
Graham: Oh my God! Is that what happenedthey went from best-of-seven to best-of-three? Ours was nothing like that, we finished all five games!
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Mark: They both understood that this was the first Pro Tour and they both wanted to be the guy that won it. On top of thatpeople don't remember thisbut Bertrand Lestree played in the World Championship and lost to Zak Dolan in the finals. On paper Bertrand was supposed to win that match, but Zak won that one. He did not want to become the guy who also lost in the finals of the first-ever Pro Tour. He was going to take his time. They were playing slow, slow decks to start with, and they just didn't want to make any mistakes. Originally we were gonna play best-of-seven, but then after five hours we decided it was gonna be best-of-three.
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Mark: Necropotence got a one-star rating in Inquest magazine. What was interesting about the tournament was Graham Tatomer obviously wins with the Necro deck and Leon Lindbeck makes the Top 8 with ita really early version of the deck. It wasn't until that summer that that deck really took off.
Richard: I don't remember if we knew exactly how powerful that card was, but I knew it didn't surprise me. My design philosophy in those days was that if you didn't make a few banned cards, you weren't being aggressive enough. You had to be taking chances. My philosophy was give the players lots of interesting tools and let them play with those tools. My philosophy of discovery regarding the cards had gone by the wayside, but the discovery of combinations was very much a part of the game. Players are constantly finding new ways to combine cards in the game that we didn't anticipate.
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Richard: The experience of going to events, where people were excited to meet me, have me sign cards, and play with me, was not new. I'd been doing that for a few yearsbut the tenor here was changing, because this was the first time that I felt like the players were starting to become really good and were taking the game really seriously. On the surface this was very much like all those previous meetings, but I felt like something had changed. Before the Pro Tour I could go in any card shop and beat most of the players with an all-commons deck. It was ridiculous. Then the Pro Tour came around and I couldn't walk into a card shop and beat everybody with an all-commons deck anymore.
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