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If you play Magic: The Gathering, you’re probably familiar with the game’s creator, Richard Garfield. Garfield came from a mathematics background when he created Magic: The Gathering, and much of his original vision for Magic is shaped by this. Today, the game has evolved from its inaugural Alpha set released in 1993, but one part of Garfield’s original plan for Magic is an aversion to the concept of “strictly better.” 

I’ll let Magic’s head of game design, Mark Rosewater, explain exactly what “strictly better” means in a blog post from the Magic: The Gathering website. “‘Strictly better’ means that one card is in all occurrences (within reason) better than another. An example of a ‘strictly better’ would be Lightning Bolt versus Shock. Barring a really convoluted set-up (you know your opponent has Eye for an Eye and you're at 3 life while he's at 2), you would always want Lightning Bolt over Shock. For an identical cost, it just does exactly the same thing, but better,” writes Rosewater. 

At MagicCon Las Vegas 2026, a panel of R&D veterans like Skaff Elias, Mike Turian, and Aaron Forsythe dished on the difficulties that Garfield’s policy against “strictly better” created once the game continued to grow with each expansion. The panelists were quick to also point out that Garfield had broken his no “strictly better” rule in Alpha twice, but the rest of the development team wasn’t allowed to cross that line. However, the team was able to get around the problem of “strictly better” by throwing their support behind the emergent Standard format. 

“What we did to break the iron grip of this rule was pushed really strongly for [Standard] back then, because then the old cards could rotate out and if they weren’t in rotation, for the competitive play, Richard [Garfield] was okay with how that went,” Skaff Elias said. “So once you have that and rotation, then you don’t have to do the ‘strictly better’ thing… So beginning of ‘97 is the first time that Rich would be okay with that.” 

And the rest is history. 

Whether you are a Commander player, a regular at your local game shop's FNM event, or simply love collecting Magic: The Gathering cards, you've landed in the right place. From Universes Beyond to the furthest reaches of the Magic Multiverse, we've got you covered here at Popverse. 

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