Itsorijk Narestos
The toy department of the People’s Household Goods Commission had never been a priority to the Communist Malaszec government. Malaszec kids’ time is best spend outside, after all, and sports equipment was already manufactured by the sports department, sponsored by the Cultural Commission which hosted the national games, beloved by all. Every child wanted to be like Sarjek “Lightning Bolt” Kostova, the best Team Mitzan player in all the universe. Meanwhile, children outgrew their stuffed animals and dolls quickly, and it’s not as if the toys division ever had anything new to offer them.
That’s why the toy department was the best place to put a man like Itsorijk Narestos in 1995, who just a year prior caused the disastrous Model 8801 oven, which had been in installed in hundreds of government tenements, to be forcibly recalled due to a manufacturing defect under his supervision. Yes, the toy division, small and inconsequential was the perfect place for him, where he can pretend to be in charge of something while causing no trouble to the higher-ups at all. It was there in the PCHG toy division where the story of the Narestos toy empire began. A dusty government office of faux-wood grain desks piled to the ceiling with old papers and spare equipment from other departments.
Narestos had a bright mind that was always racing with ideas, and since nobody really cared what his department did, he was free to make all his ideas come to light. His first idea was to repurpose the playing card-printing equipment that had fallen into disuse, since the government was trying to curb gambling by halting card production. He knew kids loves sports, and loved playing pretend. As a kid, he and his friends used to assemble pretend teams of famous Mitzan players, and argue about whose team would beat the others’, and he wanted to capture that experience. Thus the Mitzan trading card was born. It was a simple game: each trading card had a picture of a famous Mitzan player, with strengths, weaknesses, and abilities matching up to their real-world performance. You’d assemble a team with your cards, along with some reserve players, and face off against your opponent’s team. The more successfully you faced off, the more points you earned. Whoever had the most points at the end of a match would win.
He was dismissed at first by the People’s Cultural Commission for the representation rights of famous Team Mitzan players, but his sheer persistence won them over. To dispel the association between card games and gambling, he pitched his TCG as a game of math and statistics, and pointed out that the rules had no gambling involved. Distribution began January 1996, but the game did not have much initial success. Nobody really knew what the cards were, so few actually bought them. To the higher-ups, it seemed the PHGC toy department was to remain in obscurity as expected, but Narestos didn’t give up. He decided to send a huge production run of trading cards to the Food and Agriculture Commission for free to distribute singles of his cards with popular snacks, which everyone thought was a huge waste of money and would get him fired for sure. However, this strategy gave his cards the exposure they needed. Kids started playing this neat new card game with their favourite Mitzan players, and when they wanted to get an edge on their friends, they’d go and ask their parents to buy them a whole pack of these cards. Thus a whole subculture of Olosjan, or card-heads, was born.
There were card-heads at every school and every playground. The card craze was inescapable. Kids who had just finished a Mitzan match would sit down only to play with Mitzan cards, swapping cards with each other trying to build the best teams. New cards released every so often, with new and updated stats and abilities. You could even face off new players with old players who weren’t even in the league anymore, since new players were added as cards when they joined the National League. Trading cards had become a phenomenon, and during the height of the card craze, trading cards for different sports emerged, and the Mitzan TCG even gained a competitive scene of its own.
Although in 2071 physical Mitzan trading cards are very much a thing of the past, their legacy lives on. Janlej Interactive TZe, the computer game studio most known for resource management and 4X games like Population Node, has used Mitzan cards in every user interface for its game series, Mitzan Pro League Team Management Simulator. Janlej Interactive itself is one of many spinoffs of the modern toy brand, Toys n’ More, which was created out of Narestos’ PHGC toy division during the formation of the Malaszec Federation. Without Narestos and his trading card game, Malaszec’s multi-billion Proj toy and game industry wouldn’t exist as it is today.