BattleTech TCG – “Go Ahead, Mech My Day!”

“‘The first time I heard about doing BattleTech was in 1993,’ recalls Richard Garfield, research and development coordinator at Wizards of the Coast and designer of Magic, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle and the just-completed BattleTech CCG. ‘In ’93, Wizards had Magic as a hot property, and we were going around acquiring licenses. One of them was BattleTech. So it’s been technically in the works for a long time.”

— Rick Swan, “Go Ahead, Mech My Day!” in InQuest* #20

I’ve mentioned the nineties BattleTech CCG many times (search battlegrip.com), so it should come as no surprise that part of my digging back into the game’s history included chasing down magazines that featured the game. One of the better discoveries was InQuest issue 20, a magazine that I owned decades ago and then . . . well, I’m not quite sure what I did with my old copies of InQuest, but they’re long gone now. Fortunately, the internet makes it easy to chase down old gold, and my collection once again includes the issue that featured BattleTech on the cover.

This InQuest article, as well as the feature from The Duellist (posted here), were my first looks at the BattleTech trading card game before getting a chance to play the game. Fortunately, both articles did a wonderful job of selling me on the game, so it wasn’t long after it hit shelves that I was buying a few starters and a handful of boosters. And in playing the game, I was instantly hooked! I’ve never been all that much of a Magic fan, but the BattleTech gameplay grabbed me instantly.