MAGIC THE GATHERING

This article is going to introduce the popular Trading Card Game Magic: The Gathering, and explore how its structure and relationship to game design offers interesting mappings to educational game design. In particular, the structure of Magic allows for players to factor design considerations as a component of strategy in the game itself, allowing the game to be a bridge to systems thinking and test-driven design
strategies. These are fairly unique components of both game design and instructional material, and could be expanded on with new games tilted towards specific design-driven learning objectives. A prior version of this work was presented at the Games+Learning+Society 10 Conference.