The 1993 Origins, held in Fort Worth, Texas, is worth mentioning for its role in helping usher in a new future for tabletop gaming.  It was at this show that a small company from Washington State, Wizards of the Coast, would debut their new game, Magic the Gathering (MtG).  Though they did not have the game for sale at Origins, this was the first time the general public had access to see the game.  Though ubiquitous now, the concept of a collectible card game (CCG) was completely novel in 1993.  People lined up multiple deep for demos to see how this new style of play worked.  Many had difficulty understanding how purchasing it worked, since the idea of having to buy a game multiple times through something like booster packs was not necessarily intuitive to people accustomed to buying a game one time and having all of it.  Still, at this Texas Origins is where a new craze that would shortly take over the gaming world began.

Following the 1993 convention, which was reportedly one of Origin’s worst shows, GAMA had to find someone new to run the event instead of GEMCO.  They settled on the company Andon Unlimited, a group that was running its own convention and branching out into running other shows as well.  They ran one Origins, the event in 1994, before Andon was purchased by the booming Wizards of the Coast to help them run events around collectible card games.  Wizards effectively began organizing the convention through Andon and paid a licensing fee to GAMA for Origins and then footed the bill for the show itself.  They did this in an effort to help GAMA and get Origins back on its feet, though it also meant the show would begin to focus more on CCGs and board games rather than the historical wargaming it had been known for.  The strategy worked, and Origins began to climb back with a little under 5,000 people attending in 1994, and then for the convention’s final traveling show in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1995 attendance grew to around 7,000.