Mood Swings

Game designer Mark Rosewater has been fighting to greenlight his passion project for longer than you might have been alive. You’d expect the lead designer and face of the longest-running trading card game, Magic: The Gathering, to have had an easier time making a second trading card game, but his persistence only recently paid off. First conceived in 1998, Rosewater’s project has changed forms several times – it existed for many years only as marker scribblings on playing cards – but his pitch has remained the same: what if you took a complex trading card game like Magic: The Gathering and refined it into its simplest, most accessible form.

The result is Mood Swings.

“People keep asking me, ‘Why did you spend 28 years trying to make this game?’ Aaron Forsythe, my boss, likes to say that persistence is my superpower,” Rosewater laughingly says to a crowd at MagicCon: Las Vegas. “There are literally things in [Magic: The Gathering] that I [implemented] by just outwaiting the person stopping me. And they laughed when I put it in. So in my heart of hearts, I really believed [Mood Swings] was a good game. [...] It’s very exciting that it’s finally getting made.”