"Now in its ninth edition, Magic not only dominates card games and the paper gaming hobby; it also looms large in the history of games on the internet. Magic reshaped net gaming, and vice versa. This caught Wizards off-guard. Adkison the engineer was, by the standards of the early 1990s, remarkably net-savvy; he secured wizards.com the instant he started his company, long before most publishers had ever heard of a domain name. Yet the net confounded his expectations about Magic's players, and the players in turn bulldozed Wizards' early plans for the DeckMaster series."

"'We certainly can't go around taking risks randomly. Part of the UltraCorps thing is it's a controlled risk. We don't know if we will make a bunch of money on it, but we're pretty sure that we won't lose a bunch of money on it. And we will learn a lot that will position us to do other things later, or make us a better partner for other online publishers who want to take a license.

We have so many properties out there that could be turned into computer games. If I were fully-funded now for everything I want to do, there wouldn't be time to do them all for the next five to 10 years.'"

"So why must games be 'fun'? Who said that was the highest, or even worse, the only value? Is it a function of our status as a medium that is truly for kids? Is it a function of a development community dominated by Peter Pan types who won't grow up? (I'll cop to that, if you will.) Is it that games are just different from other media in some way I can't define? Maybe I'm missing something; maybe the serious games movement is where our not-fun games are being made."

"Balancing the desires of an old-school British tabletop game company with the urges of Mark Jacobs and the Mythic team can be, he says, 'a difficult job. Games Workshop is rightly protective of Warhammer, and Americans are naturally optimistic that they can understand anything.' He serves as a liaison between the two, he says. 'I spend most of my time helping both sides get the best out of each other, explaining the needs of Mythic to Games Workshop and vice versa.'"

"The game, called the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, is being published by Upper Deck and aims to bring the persistent, massively-multiplayer experience of WoW offline, pitting two friends against each other in heated battles. Of course, you don't just sit down one day and say, 'Hey, let's make a card game of this really successful MMOG.' It requires a lot of work."

Each week we ask a question of our staff and featured writers to learn a little bit about them and gain some insight into where they are coming from.

This week's question is:

What's your favorite collectible card game?