The game Garfield envisioned was played with Ante, which is something the community ran away from real quick. His game also had no serious text templating, so it was a far harder game to play. He might not have envisioned play to win, but he designed some of the craziest cards printed in the history of the game, and basically every single one of them had the highest rarity: He knew that Ancestral Recall was much better than Healing Salve.
It's difficult for me to go back and think that the best times for Magic were the moments when he was in charge: Magic's R&D team has done more work on the game that basically anything else in the boardgame industry, or the videogame industry. The need to keep printing new sets at ever speeding cadences (far more than 2 sets a year), causes failing sets, but from a design perspective, I'd argue that the golden age of the game is way past Garfield's intervention. I'd say the golden age of the game was from Invasion in 2000 to Return to Ravnica in 2012. Garfield left the game in better hands in 1995 or so.
I'd put the end of the golden age a few years past that, but I fully agree with the notion that the point where the game was at its best was long after he was in charge. He created a fun game, but not a game that people would continue to play for decades, and Magic R&D turned it into a game that I had far more fun with than anything he ever envisioned.
He also designed the Netrunner rules that Android: Netrunner was based on, and that had such a committed community that when Wizards pulled the license from FFG, the fans just kept developing the game.
Was it harder to play? If you didn't understand the rules amongst friends you made them up. But the game also tended towards more battles like "my flying bear defends against your dragon, oh no a lightning bolt". I tried getting back into it a few years ago because I still love the idea of MTG and every card had a book of text and all the best combos were sorted out the second a set released.
Which -- I understand why people like that. I'd still like my flying bears back.
It's difficult for me to go back and think that the best times for Magic were the moments when he was in charge: Magic's R&D team has done more work on the game that basically anything else in the boardgame industry, or the videogame industry. The need to keep printing new sets at ever speeding cadences (far more than 2 sets a year), causes failing sets, but from a design perspective, I'd argue that the golden age of the game is way past Garfield's intervention. I'd say the golden age of the game was from Invasion in 2000 to Return to Ravnica in 2012. Garfield left the game in better hands in 1995 or so.