Among trading card game aficionados, Richard Garfield is a name that carries with it a mountain of respect, gravitas, and reverence. Essentially, he's the man that created trading card games with his incredibly popular and successful release of Magic: The Gathering back in 1993. Sixteen years later, Magic is still selling and Richard is still working on collectible strategy games, albeit this time with the digital realm in mind. 

To make his pixelized visions a reality, Richard teamed up with Mind Control, and the digital studio and creative genius are hard at work on a new project code-named “Mind Twist.” To learn more about Mind Twist, Ten Ton Hammer turned to another transplant from WotC, Randy Buehler, to get to the bottom of this upcoming collectible online game and where Mind Control hopes to take the title.

Ten Ton Hammer: Recently, the big news from Mind Twist was getting you from Wizards of the Coast. Why did you decide to leave? For a lot of people, Mind Control seems like a smaller company, so why did you decide to make that transition?

Randy Buehler: Two reasons. First, while I was at Wizards, I got to actually do some work with Mind Control folks and I got blown away with just how good they are. They really have the ability to move quickly and bring new ideas to life. I was impressed by that.

The second reason is that I am personally very passionate about strategy games and I really wanted to work on new digital strategy games and that is something that Wizards had decided to move away from. Wizards is going to focus on its table top business and they are doing some digital extensions of their two big brands, Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, but in terms of new digital games, they’ve decided not to focus on that opportunity right now. I looked at Mind Control, and they’re interested in exactly the kinds of games I’m interested in and I’ve always been impressed by their ability, so it seemed like a really good fit.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think that a company, not even necessarily Mind Control, but a company could really get the same sort of name recognition that Wizards has had through the digital domain? People seem very ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) when they go online and start playing digital games. Do you think that a company could bring and generate that sort of name recognition that Wizards has through the digital domain and digital strategy games in particular?

Randy: I think that if you’ve got a good quality product, it’s actually a lot easier to  build a name for yourself now than it was ten or twenty years ago. Because of the connectedness of the web, because of things like social networking, it’s so easy for somebody who likes your game to pass along the recommendation to somebody else that there’s an opportunity now to build a name for yourself that really, ten years ago, when all video games were essentially boxes on a shelf at Best Buy, that you had to have a name then that I don’t think is required these days.

Ten Ton Hammer: You're planning on releasing Mind Twist on iPhone and PC. Do you think that’s a major advantage that these sort of digital products, these simpler games have over kind of big titles like World of Warcraft? Is that the major advantage, the fact that you can just spread yourself across so many different digital areas?

Randy: I think there are two questions in there that I’ll try to answer. On one hand, people have been saying for years that we’re going to see what’s called platform play, but nobody’s actually delivered it. With Mind Control, we’ve already built it, our orbital game platform at this point.

When I’m playing Mind Twist, I’m playing on my iPhone vs a PC. I’m going over to Richard Garfield’s house (the creator of Magic: The Gathering) later and we’re going to be playing his PC vs my iPhone. Platform play is something that Mind Control has now actually built. Absolutely that’s an advantage of this game, and it’s something we haven’t seen out there. I mean, you see a little bit of what I’ll call massively-single player games. All you’re really doing is putting up a high score with that sort of registered high score board list. What we’re doing is actual multiplayer matchmaking across all platforms.

One thing that turn-based strategy games definitely have an advantage on is that it doesn’t matter what your input device is, so we’re able to do cross platform matchmaking in a way that doesn’t give anyone an unfair advantage. If you’re playing a shooter, it’s such a different experience if you’ve got a mouse vs a console controller vs an iPhone, you can’t really make a fair game across platforms, but with a turn-based strategy game it’s “how well can you think”. The input device isn’t really what the gameplay is all about. So, on the one hand, that’s the style of games that I like, that Richard likes, and that Mind Control likes, and on the other hand, it does lend itself to cross-platform play, that works out really well for us.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you looking to branch the product to other places besides PC and iPhone? Are you looking to go anywhere else besides the two that you mentioned?

Randy: Absolutely. We wanted to start with a smaller target, make sure we get the game up and running, start getting feedback from the customers on what they really like and what they don’t like, but absolutely, the medium term plan is to start adding more platforms. The different platforms have different constraints. PC and iPhone happen to be the easiest for us to self-publish on, but something like Xbox is interesting and I like the user-base that’s there.

But things get complicated depending on which platform you’re talking about. But as far as do we intend to branch out? Yeah, absolutely, that’s definitely the plan. We just have to get something up and running first.

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you talk a little bit about the game itself? The term turn-based strategy games is a kind of broad sort of term because there’s a lot of games that kind of fall under that umbrella. What are we going to be looking at: cards, figures, something else? How are things going to be represented on the screen?

Randy: Both Richard and I have a background in collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering. That said; we don’t want to do just another card game. I don’t expect complicated booster packs.

What I do think makes a really good strategy game, and what this game is going to have, is a collection of digital objects that you own. You get to customize your gameplay experience by figuring out which of those objects you want to take into battle with you. That’s something that Magic has in deck building and it’s something that Dungeons and Dragons has in terms of character building. It’s something that I think is the real hallmark of what we would call on the table top side of the business as hobby games, games that you can spend a lot of time thinking about. You have the solo activity of customization that you can play while you’re getting ready for the real game, which is your inherent multiplayer experience, so the game is being designed with multiplayer first.

There will be a single player mode. We’ll have a campaign that can serve as a tutorial and will be a fun thing to do when you’re not in the mood or don’t have someone to play against, but it’s the multiplayer aspect that we think is going to really make this shine. It’s designed to be played head to head competitively. It’s a game where I’m matching my brain against yours. I’ve got my strategy, and you’ve got yours, and we’re going to play it out.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is it going to be an inherently one versus one experience or are you going to have some scenarios where you have four players against one uber boss?

Randy: Since it’s designed to be played PvP. we've crafted it specifically to be a one versus one experience. We will contemplate expanding that to multiplayer, but the experience that we’re going to focus on first, getting it right is a one to one, human vs human strategy game.

The next piece, the thing we know we also need, is some PvE modes. Our vision of it is a campaign mode where I can go through and play a series of computer AIs, but they’re essentially simulating another player.

Ten Ton Hammer: Time is really the big resource that all hobbies and video games seem to be running up against these days, because there are so many games out there and so many different hobbies that take up so much of a person’s time. Why would a person play Mind Twist over these other games? Do I even have time to devote to Mind Twist or any card game?”

Randy: The simple answer is that you can play a complete game in five to ten minutes. We’re talking about short session gameplay, snack sized games. I think that there are a lot of really good MMOs out there that ask you to devote all of your time if you’re grinding, if you’re leveling up. Those games are fun, but the thing that I don’t see enough of other company’s trying to do is smaller game experiences, where instead of a four hour raid you’re looking at a five minute match.

Now, I may choose to play fifty matches in a row, I mean you certainly can play and spend all of your time on a game like Mind Twist if you want to, but the game doesn’t require that of you. If you only have ten minutes, then hop on, play one game and try out a new strategy. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t, but you can get a complete gameplay experience in about five or ten minutes. That’s definitely in contrast to the four hour raid style of gameplay, and that’s what we think that our game has. I think there are people out there that want games like this that are not getting them. I know that this is the kind of game that I want to play and it’s hard to find it right now.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is Richard the guy behind this game building or is it Richard and his team? What’s the creative team look like right now?

Randy: Richard [Garfield] is the Lead Designer on the project. He’s working closely with Skaff Elias, another one of the original Magic designers, but Richard is driving. Skaff is his usual partner on these sorts of games, and they’re driving the design. Mind Control is doing the development and all the production on the game, but it’s pretty much Richard’s vision and Mind Control’s role is to bring that vision to life.

I essentially am the matchmaker. I was thinking about spinning up my own company. I was talking with Richard about possibly working with him as a Game Designer and then I ran into Andrew Leker [Ed. - Creator of SkyRealms of Jorune] at GDC this year and pretty quickly realized that we had exactly the same business plan in our minds and it just seemed a lot easier to join forces. Essentially I became the matchmaker that put Mind Control together with Richard, and now I’m sort of helping bring this project to life.

Ten Ton Hammer: I wish you could talk a little bit more about the game because I’m a huge CCG nerd. I want to see something that’s really immersive in the digital space but isn’t necessarily going to: A. Break the bank or B. Take up huge, huge amounts of my time.

Let's focus on breaking the bank. What kind of models are you looking at as far as how players get into this game? Is it going to be free-to-play?

Randy: It’s free-to-play with microtransactions. We will give you enough units to be able to play the game for free to try it out and see if you like it. We do not want to make this game as expensive as a typical CCG. We’re definitely aiming at a smaller number of objects and an easier way to acquire them so that if you want to try out a different piece, yeah buy it. We want to make that as easy and as cheap as we can. I’m hesitant to give out the details because it's really early, I don’t want to say anything that may turn out not to be true, but we’re not trying to break your bank like many trading card games.

Ten Ton Hammer: So maybe you’ll have options for players to buy a single units rather than always having to buy a booster pack to find that next unit?

Randy: That’s right.

Ten Ton Hammer: What kind of leader board system are you going to have? Are you going for a full on tournament a sort of event schedule? Are you going to have full blown tournaments or are just going to have some sort of competitive leader boards or something like that?

Randy: We definitely want tournaments. I think organized play is crucial to the success of a good strategy game. Having that social context, that social currency of “I won this tournament” and “you won that tournament.” We want leader boards, buddy lists, tournaments, absolutely.

Our vision is to build our Orbital platform as such that we’ve got that stuff done correctly and then we can potentially launch other games if we want to down the road. So that’s what’s going on from the business side of things.

Ten Ton Hammer: As my final question before we run out of time, are you thinking of running any tournaments in the physical world?

Randy: It’s an inherently digital game experience, so there would have to be computers of some kind involved in it. We’re not producing any kind of table top product to go along with it.

In fact, a lot of the fun of the project is sort of taking the shackles off of Richard, where he’s allowed to think up ideas that can only be done on a computer, and there’s a lot of good that he can do there.