Image courtesy of The Nacelle Company

The Role of Dueling Wizards

If you've ever been curious about the origins of Magic: The Gathering, it's never been easier to learn the story behind the 30-year-old game.

It might not have been what filmmakers Brian Stillman, Kelley Slagle, and Seth Polansky initially set out to document - their original aim was much more ambitious - but what resulted from their ambition is a tight, accurate retelling of the birth of Magic by way of new feature-length documentary Igniting the Spark - The Story of Magic: The Gathering. 

The film, which chronicles the origins and legacy of Magic, features interviews with its progenitors and is available now for viewing via streaming.

The Idea

But it was sometime in 2019 when the small team of documentarians had an idea.

They were fresh off the completion and release of their first full-length documentary, Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons & Dragons, which served as a love letter to the visual storytelling of the famed tabletop RPG and the artists who created those images. That doc was shown at Lucca Comics and Games Festival in Italy that year, and in attendance was a familiar face when it comes to Magic: The Gathering: Gavin Verhey.

Shortly before that fated meeting, however, the team - co-directors Brian Stillman and Kelley Slagle and producer Seth Polansky - had discussed a possible follow-up to Eye of the Beholder. Each are working professionals in their own right, so the next collaborative project would have to work around their individual schedules. It had to be something special.

"Kelley said that she was thinking of doing a Magic documentary, and I said, 'Oh, that's funny. The very top of my list is Magic documentary,'" said Stillman. "Why don't we make that our next project? And we all kind of jumped in, there and then."

To undertake such a monumental task requires connections, and luckily, the team already had an extremely valuable one in Lisa Stevens, Wizards of the Coast vice-president in 1993 when Magic was first published. Between Stevens and Verhey, the network was wide enough to do the story of Magic justice, a past-and-present confluence of Magic shepherds.

And of course, getting Verhey on board took place over a game of Commander. Polansky, whose first Magic set was The Dark, said Verhey trounced him with his own Commander deck - a situation that provided Stillman with considerable schadenfreude. "I was very happy about this, because Seth and I spent a lot of time playing Magic on the road. Seth taught me to play, and I'd lose regularly," said Stillman. "So when I heard that Gavin wiped the floor with him, I was thrilled."

Following Verhey's dismantling of Polansky, dinner was had: the two competitors, along with Stillman and Mary Hawkins, the project's art director. "And that's, I think, when we talked a little bit more about this idea of doing the documentary over this sort of awesome Italian meal," said Stillman. "And that is what planted it in our heads."

An Independent Spirit

Former Wizards of the Coast CEO Peter Atkinson prepares for his interview with his trademark humor.

Igniting the Spark isn't associated with Hasbro in any way, which was important to the team behind it. According to Stillman, the documentary was not made in coordination with Hasbro or Wizards of the Coast beyond some interviews with current WotC staffers. "We knew we wanted to do a movie where we spoke to all the original people at Wizards, who we knew would be free to talk to us, but we also wanted to talk to people (currently) at Wizards," he said.

"And if corporate was going to shut us down, I think we still would have made the movie, because we would have had all the other people, but we wouldn't have been able to bring it up to the modern day a little bit. At least at the time, that was a goal."

Despite operating outside of the direct blessings of Hasbro, Stillman said there weren't really any issues with securing interviews with current WotC employees, as seen in the finished product. "We wanted to know if corporate was going to tell people currently working at Wizards 'you can't talk to these people,' which is what we expected," he said. "To be honest, we were all kind of surprised that they were allowed to talk to us."

Knowing that interviewees had the freedom to talk about Magic without fear of reprisal was valuable to the team. "There was this awareness that we knew people at Wizards who we wanted to talk to and who wanted to talk to us, but their fear or their concern was, 'Can we talk to you and not get in trouble?' And that's why we kind of went through the effort to reach out to Hasbro, or to Wizards anyway, to make sure that they'd be cool with that," said Stillman.

"But if they weren't cool with it, we would have still reached out to everyone we knew. But it's on them to decide, you know, if it's safe for them to talk to us, and we didn't want to get anyone fired over this, obviously."

Weaving an Elaborate Spell

The team had to overcome significant logistical challenges in order to film every interview featured in the documentary.

Originally, the vision for the film was to cover the entirety of Magic history. Over three decades of stories, twists and turns would be ambitious to distill into a feature-length documentary, however. "We changed the shape of the movie as we edited it. But at the time, we wanted to interview everybody.

It was critical for the team to give viewers an experience where they felt like they're getting a complete story, even though it would be impossible to cover every single aspect of Magic. "It can't be done in one movie, and it's something we almost set out to do," said Stillman. "In the beginning, we had these grand ambitions, but I think you come to understand very quickly that you have to narrow your focus, which is how we ended up telling what's essentially an origin story with a lot of context around it, so that people would kind of understand why it matters, why it's important, why it's thrilling, especially for people who don't play Magic."

The story of Magic: The Gathering is a very complex and ever-evolving one, and as a result of that, hundreds, if not thousands, of people have been involved in shaping that story. It's logistically impossible to talk to all of them, let alone condense those interviews into a cohesive narrative. As the team set about compiling their interviews, it became clear that the "bigger problem," according to Stillman, wasn't people saying no to an interview, but saying yes.

"Everyone was very cool about agreeing to speak with us, which was great, but so many people have been involved in Magic over the years, and at some point you have to just be like, well, 'I can't interview all of them.'" he said. "That's the more likely issue to come up - 'Who do we? How do we? How do we make a list? How do we pick people who can tell the story?'

"Because it's not a profile of every person. That's the thing."

Knowing this going into filming was key. Each interview served to add nuance and context to the underlying story, and the team began to crystallize what exactly that story was. It wasn't the broad "this is Magic" sort of narrative, but a more focused one, on the origins of the game. And the interviewees weren't the story necessarily, but the facilitators.

"The two exceptions being Peter (Atkinson, founder of Wizards of the Coast and CEO in 1993) and Richard (Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering), who are so fundamental as people to the story, that it does end up becoming about them as much as it is about Magic," said Stillman. "So it's one of the tricky things about documentary making."

The team poses for a photo with Dr. Richard Garfield, inventor of Magic: The Gathering

Then there's also the logistics to consider, added Polansky. "70 interviews, each is at least two hours, two camera angles, 4k footage. We're at tens of thousands of dollars of storage solution space to edit from, right?" he said. "So, mechanically, it would spiral out of control if we kept adding more and more people, so we had to be somewhat selective."

However, the end result proved they made the right choices. "I think who we did get tell the story perfectly," said Polansky. "And we've actually had some of the the key people who've seen the movie so far tell us we got it right."

In the film, the crew was provided access to several troves of archival footage and physical artifacts from Magic's nascency, and both Stillman and Polansky were quick to credit Lisa Stevens for being invaluable in this regard. When the crew headed to Stevens's home to conduct her interview, she provided the team with a "banker's box full of gold" in the form of '80s and '90s-era VHS tapes containing hundreds of hours of Wizards of the Coast and Magic-related footage.

Polansky said he spent an entire summer digitizing every minute of it, much of which had never been seen outside of early '90s Wizards of the Coast, running the gamut from camcorder footage to marketing videos. He said all-together, there was approximately 250 hours of footage. "It's their history. It's the stuff they love, right?" said Polansky. "They gave us so much, and that was incredibly useful, and it was a wonderful thing."

Stillman added that when setting out to create a documentary, unless you already have it in-hand, there's no expectation that this sort of footage even exists. "If you had asked me in the beginning, 'What do you expect to have in this thing?' I'd be like, 'Well, if I had to guess, we'll get a lot of photos from people.' You know, people have photos that they took, and maybe we'll find some ads out there that ran at some point, if there were any, and if we're lucky, maybe some marketing video made it online that we're able to get access to," he said. "We totally lucked out. Lisa had all this stuff, and so that completely flipped my job on its head by making it a thousand times easier. But the other weird thing is, the thing that I think we had the most trouble getting were photos, like stuff that I had assumed would be a little easier."

Producer Seth Polansky shows off some of the relics of the game saved by interviewees.

It wasn't just the footage, either. Many interviewed for the film who were around during the creation of Magic had their own little troves, like Mark Poole's original sketchbook or Atkinson's deck stuffed with Power Nine. "Peter's deck that he showed us in the movie, it's literally in a box in his closet," said Polansky. "Tens of thousands of dollars worth of the rarest cards, beaten up; he's just casual about it."

Every Inferno Begins With a Spark

While the film began in earnest around 2019, it didn't see a full, finished release until July of 2025. It was a labor of love in every regard. Logistics, a pandemic, and even heart surgery threw up roadblocks that the team had to overcome. And then there was the editing process, which Stillman estimated required two-and-a-half years of work. "It is such a big story to tell, and finding a narrative within that that holds together as a movie," he said.

"Because what you don't want to do when making this is you don't want it to just be an information dump. You don't want it to just be like spitting all this stuff out there."

Nearly all documentaries have that cohesive narrative that Stillman said as filmmakers "you have to find and you have to shape," and there might be components of the story that originally seem perfect in the film that in the process of editing it's discovered that they don't necessarily fit properly. "There are a million ways to tell a story, but you have to have a story," said Stillman.

Eventually, the team returned to the location where the idea for a Magic: The Gathering documentary first formed, in Lucca, Italy. The town's annual Comics and Games Festival held a screening of an unfinished version of Igniting the Spark - or, roughly half of the final product, said Stillman. Following that screening, a rough cut was also shown at IX (Illuxcon in Reading, Pennsylvania).

So in the months leading up to a final release, "people had seen bits and pieces," Stillman said, but no one had seen the full story. That is, until Gen Con.

As featured in Igniting the Spark itself, Gen Con as an event holds a very special place in the history of Magic, so it was a bit of a full-circle moment for the documentary team to premiere the final cut in Indianapolis earlier this month. And it wasn't just any premiere; Igniting the Spark earned "Best Documentary" honors from the Gen Con Film Festival jury. "Despite having a million things to do at Gen Con, we still had a practically packed house," said Stillman of the premiere. "I don't know how many people were there, but I have to figure these people have other things they want to do at Gen Con, and they still came to watch our movie. So I really appreciate that."

But now, the movie's done and out there, in the wild. "We can't mess with it anymore," said Stillman.

Igniting the Spark

Fans of Magic are encouraged to check out the film via streaming platforms Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube and Google Play.

Igniting the Spark - The Story of Magic: The Gathering premiered at Gen Con on Aug. 2 and was released worldwide on Aug. 5.

The documentary comes from The Nacelle Company, the studio behind pop-culture docuseries “The Toys That Made Us,” “Icons Unearthed,” and “Disney’s Behind The Attraction.” Brian Stillman and Kelley Slagle directed the film and Seth Polansky produced. The trio previously collaborated with the Nacelle Company to explore an iconic game in 2019’s “Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons & Dragons.”