Mark Gottlieb

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Mark Gottlieb is an employee of Wizards of the Coast and is game designer and the rules manager of the Magic: The Gathering game. Within the community of enthusiasts of the game, he is a well-known columnist and public face of the company alongside Mark Rosewater.

Contents

[edit] History

Mark Gottlieb was born on August 30, 1974 in New York City and grew up in Fair Lawn, NJ. He has two brothers, Neal and Carl. Neal owns an organic ice cream shop in San Rafael, CA, called Three Twins Ice Cream.

Mark is an avid puzzler and his team won the MIT Mystery Hunt three times, has created two of their own and will create the next one. He is a member of the National Puzzlers League under the name of Wombat. He led the team to create the puzzle for the World Puzzle Championship 9, which is the largest international puzzle competition.

He was introduced to the game Magic: The Gathering at Random Hall, which was his dorm at MIT. As he was finishing college, he decided to apply for a job writing at The Duelist, a now-defunct Magic magazine, which he was not given. Later he applied for a job as a developer at Wizards of the Coast, which he was also denied. In 2000, he applied for a job as a Magic Technical Editor. He was already working as an editor at Random House in the crossword section of Times Books, plus he also played Magic, so he was given the job. Two years later, he was caught in a round of layoffs. Five months after that, he was contacted by Wizards asking him to be the Rules Manager for Duel Masters, another collectible card game.

At the same time, he was given his job as a columnist at MagicTheGathering.com. This column was principally centred around zany deck ideas and combinations between cards, often told in comedic style. When it was announced that he would be leaving, a small cult formed that claims to worship him. Since he ended his column, he has written four articles for the site (here, here, here, and here). As these articles show, Mark has also replaced Bennie Smith as the regular author of MagicTheGathering.Combos, a semi-regular feature that highlights quirky interactions of cards from each new release.

Meanwhile, he was rising through the ranks and worked as a developer on the Duel Masters, Neopets, and GI Joe trading card games. He also became the Magic Technical Writer and then the Magic Rules Manager. His current duties include: Magic Rules Manager, Magic Technical Writer, Duel Masters Rules Manager, and Duel Masters Creative Writer, and he tries to get onto design teams when he can. He was on the Dissension design team, he designed "Tigers" (a Duel Masters set), and he's on the Future Sight design team (Future Sight is the 3rd set in the Time Spiral Block and will be released in the spring of 2007).

Gottlieb is a member of the National Puzzlers' League under the nom Wombat.

[edit] House of Cards

Gottlieb wrote the "House of Cards" column on the official Magic: The Gathering website for about 2 years. He was not the original author of it but he took over it in early 2003 from Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar. When he left "House of Cards", the column went on hiatus for about half a year until the beginning of 2006, when Chris Millar took it over.

[edit] MaGo

The name MaGo was given to Mark by message board members as a spinoff of Mark Rosewater's nickname, MaRo. His "cult" following calls itself the Cult of MaGo after this. When he first received it, Mark disliked the name, but since discovering that it translates to "Mage" in Spanish and "Wizard" in Italian and Portuguese, he has taken more of a liking to it.

[edit] Articles of Note

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