Hello there, EmiSwap users (present and future)!
Today we’ll talk about… magic. Our EmiSwap NFT Magic Cards do feature cutting-edge blockchain technology, but they are also based on a long tradition of fantasy card games. Even if you’ve never played Magic: the Gathering, it’s something worth learning about!
The origins: Dungeons & Dragons
D&D (first published in 1974) isn’t a card game: it requires nothing but dice and a rulebook, plus a Dungeon Master. However, it was an early inspiration for the creator of Magic: the Gathering, Richard Garfield, who used D&D as an early inspiration for Magic.
A D&D set
MGT enters the scene
Magic: the Gathering (or simply MGT) is the world’s most popular roleplaying card game, played by over 12 million people. Interestingly, its creator Richard Garfield is a researcher specializing in combinatorial mathematics. Another curious fact is that the company that printed the game, Wizards of the Coast, was based in its CEO’s basement. But that’s how all great international projects start, right?
The CEO of Wizards wanted a very portable game that fans could play at game conventions in between events. Garfield’s idea was pure genius: card decks that fit into your pocket and that you can mix and match to create your own custom decks.
The first edition of Magic: the Gathering came out in 1993 and was an instant success. The visitors to the Origin Game Fair in the US bought the whole supply in a couple of days, and new decks had to be printed urgently. By November 1993, 10 million cards had been sold. (By the way, in the early years, there were just 295 different cards; as of 2021, over 12,000 have been issued.)
Soon, a tournament rulebook was developed (called DCI), and in 1996, the first Magic Pro Tour was held. We’ve used the MGT tournament system as an inspiration for our own EmiSwap Magic Cards tournaments, which we plan to launch in 2021.
Yet another trait that our NFT Magic Cards inherit from MGT is that the more powerful cards are very rare. The difference is that in MGT, you just have to keep buying packs, hoping to find a good card inside, while in EmiSwap, you can farm even high-tier cards — you’ll just need to stake more tokens in our liquidity pools.
Into the digital age with Hearthstone
As the popularity of online gaming grew, Magic: the Gathering also decided to go digital — first with its Windows-only Magic Online and then with the much more popular MGT Arena. Strangely enough, it took Wizards very long to produce a mobile release: the early Android version was only made available in January 2021.
The first MTG-like game that managed to gain a huge online following was Hearthstone. It was released in 2014 by Blizzard Entertainment for both desktop and mobile devices. While the game itself is free to play, you need to pay for new card decks (though you can also get free cards as a reward for completing quests — we’ve built on this idea in our bonus and farming systems). By late 2018, it already had 100 million players.
Hearthstone cards come in 5 tiers: Basic, Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. Sounds familiar? That’s because EmiSwap NFT Magic Cards use a very similar tier system: Ordinary, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary, and Mythic. The reason we used these names isn’t that we can’t invent anything original, but rather that we want our Magic Cards to feel familiar to Hearthstone players. Even if they don’t know anything about decentralized trading or NFTs, they will be attracted to our Magic Hall platform and start using ESW to farm Magic Cards. This way we hope to expand the overall DeFi audience.
The new generation
In the past few years, we’ve seen many more excellent online collectible card games, or CCGs. They include Eternal, Faerla, Shadowverse, and Gwent (set in the Witcher universe), The Elder Scrolls: Legends, and Ascension (created by MGT tournament champions).
Some of these games attract users with the opportunity to win free cards, others with a great single-player experience, and others still with a gorgeous design. But each of them has a great idea or two that we plan to incorporate in our EmiSwap NFT Magic Cards. We’re not just building the first DeFi card game — we want it to be as good as it can be.
Speaking of NFT Magic Cards: you can get your first card for free if you participate in our token sale and buy at least 500 ESW. This special offer is for the first 1000 token sale participants only, so be quick!
Join the community to stay tuned on the latest news:
Exchange: https://emiswap.com/
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