Mark Rosewater replies to problematic questions around Magic: The Gathering on his Tumblr blog
Every single tech CEO said something similar to this at some point, only to backtrack as soon as the eye of Donnysauron shines their way. Don’t fall for this.
Couple things here, Maro is a designer for the game, not the CEO. He has a very active blog, including a podcast during his drive to work. He regularly shares his opinions; often times stating when he is opposed to the direction of wotc/hasbro but it is vetted by management because of trade secrets. MTG is a very inclusive community because it caters to the fringe communities that are inherently different. They really don’t want to alienate their diverse fan base, they are a very expensive hobby that anyone can walk away from.
I am also going to recommend you actually read the article rather than a snippet/summary. He goes into detail about the user he was responding to is wrong, because he was unable to provide insight required for character building and how culture is whitewashed. This was not a push/PR piece he reached out to enlighten a user that was wrong. He is championing people to embrace diversity because it has visible value and gives examples. He is also doing this during an era of opposition which is when it’s most important. Maro is an amazing person that has done significant work towards all kinds of game development, I highly recommend checking out some of his comicon panels.
Mark Rosewater isn’t a CEO, though.
I think Maro is a good enough, normal guy. MTG has made a lot of effort over the last 15 or so years to be really, radically inclusive, and its done a pretty good job (for example, a trans woman, Alesha, multiple same sex couples) along with few well meaning missteps (uh, Chandra’s War of the Spark narration, the reason Kaladesh is now called Avishkar).
My guess is that if the order comes to straiten and whiten up Magic, it will come from Hasbro Corporate.
My favorite queer thing mtg has ever printed:
Honestly still mad about chandra/nissa. I was reading the online story bits and they were really building it up, then they allegedly uploaded an old draft by mistake and it was INCREDIBLY GAY (but also awkward because Chandra doesn’t know how to communicate).
Fuck it here’s the whole ass screenshot I took.
But all that was fine. Sometimes things don’t work out. It was just more proof that the tension was literally the author’s intent, and presumably Wotc direction. So that made the absolute slap in the face of war of the spark a million times worse.
Unrelated, but that combined with the onslaught of standard bans after kaladesh, eldrazi winter, and modern horizons shit breaking the format then getting banned, and fucking over LGS with secret lairs, and printing more new cards in the past few years than the entire history of magic, I’m getting pretty fucking burnt out.
And Marky Mark will comply.
Well, that’ll be an interesting day
I thought Wizards already jumped the shark but was never close enough to the material to care.
From what I’ve seen everything that company touches is bad. But I’ve also managed to keep my distance so I’m probably biased.
This is the MTG I thought you were posting about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Taylor_Greene
Those three letter acronyms can screw you over
That wouldn’t even make sense in context.
I don’t get it, then.
I read the headline 5 times and was about to [gasp] read the article to figure out wtf is going on here. Thanks, you saved me a click.
