Innovation often stems from tinkering and applying mechanics from unrelated experiences to solve existing problems.
The speaker details the creation of Magic: The Gathering, explaining how the founder adapted the mechanics of collecting marbles to create a revolutionary card game. ✦ AI generated
Sam Parr · My First Million · 2026-08-04 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 27:30
“I want to tell you about a company that is I had written off.”
Magic the Gathering has been compounding 17% a year on average for 17 straight years. ... The backstory is pretty fascinating. ... He has this idea of like, hey, what if I take that mechanic from marbles where it's this like infinite set of possibilities. You have your own collection, you bring the pieces to the game. It's not a game where the pieces are already inside the box. And that was the core insight for Magic of the Gathering and why 20 years later it's printing, you know, $500 million this quarter off of that single insight about like what if the players had their own collection that they would bring to the game rather than like a fixed set of pieces.
verbatim transcript · starts at 27:30
27:14know if it was a game or not. >> Yeah. So, it's a it's a it's a game you can play. Two people can sit down and you can kind of like have a duel. So, it's like a card game, but and this is kind of the genius of it. A lot a lot of the fun isn't even playing the game against each other. Like Pokemon, it's about collecting. And so, how did they
27:30do this? And so, the backstory is pretty fascinating. So, for so, first of all, Hasbro is this company that owns Monopoly. They own Nerf guns. They own u they own a bunch of stuff but like every you know of every dollar that comes in one out of every three is driven by magic. It's like it is their cash cow. Magic will do you know 2 billion this
27:48year in revenue? It's been just cranking along. This was like you know an all-time best quarter. So you'd think like is this old IP not like fizzling out? No. No. It's like having its best quarter ever. If you read the true backstory, you realize one thing, which is what true sort of tinkering, the power of tinkering. So, this guy starts with this, he's making this game called
28:09Five Magics. And Five Magics is a game he makes, doesn't go anywhere, but he puts a lot of heart and soul and sweat into it. And he he puts it on the shelf cuz who cares? And then he goes along and he's working a job. But then he creates this he has this other idea for this like more advanced game like robo something where you like kind of like
28:26build robots in the it's like a board game where you're actually like building a robot. And then he pitches it to this guy who's doing this wizards game and that guy's like, "Dude, this is too hard to build. Can you build something that's like more like kind of, you know, this sort of sci-fi lore type of game, you know, this wizarding lore fantasy stuff and make it like something simple? not
28:45the like you have to build a robot but like just like a card game or something. So he goes back and he's thinking and he's on a hike one day and he has a sort of eureka moment. He's like, "Oh, I could take five magics, but I could change it." And he has this really good insight which is most games like chess or checkers um at the time were all like
29:04fixed games, meaning you open the box and the pieces are all what they are, Monopoly. like the the pieces are exactly what you think they are and I'm going to play with you and then when we're done we put the box you know put close the lid on the box and the game stays in the box and when Richard was growing up he had a very unique
29:23upbringing and this is very this is like a fascinating part of this how these like this like butterfly effect so his dad moved them when he was very young to like Bangladesh and Nepal these countries that you know totally fish out of water didn't speak the language and so to make friends really the only thing he could do was play games because uh he didn't he didn't know how to talk. So