Keyforge
Do you know who Richard Garfield is? I honestly have no idea how famous he is by name, but he's like a god to me. A lot of fields--especially young fields--seem to have a figure emerge that just produces an impossibly large amount of extremely high quality work. Think Michael Phelps or LeBron James--just the absolute stars of the stars. For videogames, that figure is Shigeru Miyamoto. It's just not fair to the rest of the industry that one guy was able to create Mario and Zelda and Donkey Kong and Pikmin, and that he has consistently produced content of the highest quality in all of those franchises at an impressive clip for decades on end. For card games, though, that figure is undoubtedly Richard Garfield.
I read in a chemistry book in high school that if Einstein hadn't come up with the theory of relativity, he'd still probably be the most accomplished scientist of his generation, if not all time, for all the other work he did. That's how I feel about Richard Garfield and card games. Even if Richard Garfield hadn't created Magic: The Gathering, the undisputed king of card games, he'd still probably be one of the greatest designers in tabletop gaming history for Netrunner, King of Tokyo, The Great Dalmuti, and more. He just has an astoundingly great output of top-tier games.
But I've always had to learn about Garfield's games after the fact. I've had to play them after they've risen to the top, and had to read about their history in the past tense. I've never had the privilege of being there on day 1 for a Richard Garfield masterpiece. Not until 2018, anyway.
