Two years ago a novelist and as-yet-unproduced screenwriter named Nic Kelman went to work for Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes the popular collectible card game Magic: The Gathering. Kelman’s job, though he might not put it this way, was to write a grimoire—a kabbalistic story bible. “Rules for magic out of the rules for Magic,” as Kelman says.

The company needed that grimoire because it was going to try to cast a spell in the real world—to transform a popular albeit niche game, complicated and nerdy, into a cross-media franchise. That has happened for comic books, for literature, even for toys, heaven help us. Lots of people would agree that existing franchises can turn into games. But can a famously intricate game turn into a story? That was Kelman’s task. Make it reasonable to produce Magic novels, Magic comic books, even—you saw this coming—an animated series on Netflix, produced by the people who wrote and directed the last two Avengers movies, to debut next year. And then maybe live action. Movies. Turn the universe of Magic: The Gathering into a story universe.

It’s … possible. Games are already stories, kind of, with beginnings, middles, and endings, and rules that govern their universes. Magic certainly has all that. Invented by Richard Garfield in 1991 at Wizards of the Coast, which is now a subsidiary of Hasbro, Magic: The Gathering is the ur-version of the “collectible card game.” MtG is a complexified riff on the old kids’ card game of War. Players compete by throwing down cards with numerical values for certain attack-or-defend abilities, partially controlled by belonging to a particular suit designated by color. Some cards can enhance or decrease the values of other cards by dint of their own values, or of floating rules written on the cards themselves.

Buying more cards—from an available catalog of thousands, with more introduced regularly—allows players to create reservoirs from which they build ever more usable “decks.” Business-wise, Magic is working—Bloomberg reported that the game brought in $500 million in revenue last year. Hasbro owns Monopoly and Scrabble, but Magic is its top game brand. The company is building out a new online version called Arena and an eSports version.

But the take I just laid down is as essentialist as calling Dungeons and Dragons a dice game. It doesn’t explain why 38 million people around the world play MtG. Part of the explanation is in the art on the cards themselves, which are lavishly decorated by fantasy illustrators to represent individual characters, monsters, locations, weapons, magic spells, and other trappings of various fantasy subgenres. It gives gameplay an epic quality; you’re not just playing a trump, you’re giving an elf warrior the ability to telekinetically ward off fireball attacks from above, or whatever. (I should say, I haven’t played the game myself in 25 years, but the teenager who lives in my house is hardcore.)

None of that is story, though. Backstory, maybe. But not narrative. “Magic is like an operating system, and the cards are like programs,” Garfield told me when I interviewed him for Newsweek in 1997 (for, ahem, a story about Wizards of the Coast trying to make Magic bigger and more mainstream). In fact, in creating new cards, Kelman says today, the teams responsible for story continuity and the universe’s timeline (including a “Loremaster”) interact with the team that does game mechanics, to make sure that a card’s capabilities are in keeping with the overall world of the game. If nothing else, that ensures a card with interesting play aspects also has a cool name and good art. Oh, and Garfield was super-right, it turns out; in April of 2019 a team of computer scientists found that Magic is “Turing complete,” which is to say that it’s a generalizable computer language. Fascinating! But, again, not a story.