Three decades later, can Garfield repeat this success? With Popularium, a new gaming studio founded by Garfield and three other industry veterans (Jon Bankard, Skaff Elias, and Arka Ray) he is about to find out as he launches the game Chaos Agents. Instead of being set in a fantasy world, this one exists in a space-opera-esque science fiction world, a kind of mish-mash of some of the more celestial Marvel comics but also at home with the texture of Larry Niven’s “Known Space” shared stories and novels.

Since bursting onto the scene in the mid-1990s, Magic the Gathering has become one of the most popular games of all time, with millions of players collecting cards to battle each other in an imaginary fantasy realm. But Magic’s early success came with a problem: the price of the game’s most powerful and rare cards surged along with its popularity. Eventually, Magic’s creators worried that the game would become too expensive and was at risk of becoming a short-lived fad. So, how do you pop a bubble in collectibles without completely alienating collectors? In this episode, we speak with Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic the Gathering, and Arka Ray, a long-time game developer at Microsoft who’s now CEO of Richard’s new gaming studio, Popularium. They talk about the surprising parallels between MTG and central banking, what they’ve learned from Magic, and how they’re applying those lessons to Chaos Agents, Popularium’s first new gaming launch.

As names go, Chaos Agents might seem a little vague. However, there’s nothing vague about Popularium Games’ ambitious plans for this distinctive upcoming free-to-play strategy game. This bold hybrid of auto battler and battle royale aims to offer a novel experience, where players master their own uniquely generated characters.

Battle royale titles are known for their mass combats, where only one player can walk away victorious, while auto battlers have players select strategies that their units will then carry out without their direct input. Both genres are titanic features of the video game landscape, but never before have the two met quite like this.