Why I’m quitting Magic the Gathering
There are exactly two stories that I have read that made me cry in the past 10 years or so.
The first is “The Truth of Names”, by James Wyatt. It tells the story of Alesha, Who Smiles At Death, the first openly transgender character in Magic: The Gathering story. Even though at the time it came out I was not openly transgender, it still spoke to me on an incredibly personal level. I felt seen, in a way I hadn’t been before, by a major corporation. (Note: Alesha appeared in Fate Reforged, a Magic set about time travel that takes place 1000 years in the past; so Alesha has not and will not appear in ongoing MtG story).
The second is, well, the entire Ixalan story by Alison Luhrs, but specifically “The Flood”. Two of the main characters are Jace Beleren, a human, and Vraska, a gorgon. I’m going to summarize main parts of that story here to make my point, but if you haven’t read it before, you really should, whether you read Magic the Gathering story or not. It’s incredible.
Jace, one of the flagship characters of MTG, is a mind-mage. He was bullied as a child, “mentored” by a number of authority figures who lied to him and took advantage of him, and had his memories manipulated or erased several times. The only real relationship he had was with Liliana Vess, a necromancer, and while I won’t get into details of it here, it was incredibly emotionally abusive.
Vraska, on the other hand was born into a society where Gorgons were feared and loathed. She was arrested, beaten and nearly killed by the Azorius Senate, the arbiters of law on her home plane, for no crime other than being born a Gorgon. With few other opportunities, she eventually became an assassin. Jace and Vraska had crossed paths before, on the plane of Ravnica, where they had an antagonistic relationship since Jace was in a position where he had to be an enforcer of the law and Vraska was, well, an assassin.
Fast forward to Ixalan’s story, where Jace and Vraska cross paths again. I’m not going to hammer the plot point by point, but these two characters, both emotionally broken in different ways give each other a chance. True compassion and empathy for one another. They open up and trust each other, and develop a deep friendship (and, it is hinted, something more).
Jace and Vraska are, by all appearances, both cisgender characters. Jace is male, and Vraska female. This is not, by definition, a queer relationship. However, it can definitely be read as a queer analogy. “The Flood” contains the following passage:
It’s over, Vraska thought. He is going to remember everything — our fight, my profession, his title. He will hate me, surely. Gorgons are meant to be despised. Vraska cursed and swam toward her friend with a mournful feeling building in her chest.
If you take out the word “Gorgons” and replace it with “Trans people”, you’ll get a pretty good idea why this story resonates so much with me. Vraska is worried that this budding relationship will end, that she isn’t worthy of love, and her only crime is being her authentic self. (Technically she did some literal crimes as well, but not the point.) As someone who came out as trans after being married, that fear that someone you care about may reject you for no reason other than you being your authentic self was so visceral to read.
My story has a happy ending, my wife has been wonderful and supportive of me, the person I am. “The Flood” has a happy ending as well. Jace recovers his memories and continues to support (and dare I say it, love) Vraska. Any new revelations do not phase him and their friendship is strengthened. Jace and Vraska is one of the most healthy, wholesome relationships I’ve seen. While again, this isn’t explictly a queer relationship, it’s one that was deeply personal to me; and so many of the relationships in movies and books that I see myself in end in tragedy. It was a big deal that this one did not.
There’s also a big evil dragon named Nicol Bolas who’s trying to do some shit to kill everyone and twirl his moustache, and Vraska, not knowing, had been working for him. In order for them to escape the plane and take the fight to him, the two come up with a plan. Jace will manipulate Vraska’s mind, locking away any memories of him so Bolas (also a mind reader) won’t know. Then, in the climactic battle, Jace can return those memories to her, she’ll remember and turn on Bolas, the two will triumphantly kill the dragon and then, presumably, smooches will be had. This is not relevant to the Ixalan story, but is, unfortunately, relevant to what comes next.
— — —
Outside of Magic fiction, the Magic community as a whole seemed to be taking steps to be more inclusive to folks who are non-straight, non-cisgender, non-white and/or non-male. Small things were happening.
In September of 2013, with the release of the set “Theros”, they released the first card to explicitly depict a same-sex relationship. “Guardians of Meletis” depicts two statues, and includes the flavor text “The histories speak of two feuding rulers whose deaths were celebrated and whose monuments symbolized the end of their wars. In truth they were peaceful lovers, their story lost to the ages.” Also in “Theros”, they introduced the planeswalker Ashiok, who is a nightmare creature that doesn’t explicitly have a gender.
In September of 2014, “Fate Reforged” was released, including “Alesha, Who Smiles at Death”, the first transgender character on a Magic Card.
In September of 2016, “Kaladesh” was released. The set included a new race, “Aetherborn” who are zombie construct type creatures made of the pure energy from the plane. They do not reproduce, they are birthed directly from the Aether, and when they die, they return to the Aether. The creative decision was made to refer to these creatures with the singular “they” as they don’t have traditional genders.
In October of 2016, in the “Commander 2016” product, (which is an auxillary product that is not legally playable in most tournaments) a card was made for “Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis”, the aforementioned Guardians of Meletis.
In April of 2018, with the release of the set “Dominaria”, Wizards of the Coast started changing the templating of cards to use the singular “they” to describe an unknown opponent rather than “he or she”. The set also contains “Hallar, the Firefletcher”. Supplemental materials suggest that Hallar uses an elvish nonbinary pronoun.
It would be easy to look at this timeline as the “first” time each type of queer character were introduced, but no. It’s an exhaustive list of all of them, as of early 2019. Progress was happening, new queer characters were being created, but precious few and most of them were created in the past or in incredibly ancillary positions where they wouldn’t affect the ongoing story. But it seemed as though, at least some people at Wizards of the Coast were putting some energy toward increasing inclusion.
In February of 2019, at the first “Mythic Championship”, Autumn Burchett, a nonbinary magic player, won the tournament, out of a field of nearly 500 of the most skilled MtG pros. This is the first time a nonbinary person has won a prominent Magic tournament, and throughout the weekend, the casters on coverage did an amazing job of always using the correct pronouns.
In March of 2019, Owen Turtenwald, a Magic Hall-of-Famer and member of the Magic Pro League, was uninvited from the Mythic Invitational tournament. Wizards made no statement for the reasoning of his removal, but Kotaku reported that he had harassed several female magic players. No official statement condemning his actions was ever made by WotC but he was removed from the MPL and his slot was given to Autumn Burchett. (He remains in the Hall of Fame).
Later, after another pro was forced out of the MPL after a cheating scandal, he was replaced by Jessica Estephan. The Magic Pro League stands at 30/32 players being male.
This is a history of tiny steps in the right direction, but steps in the right direction nonetheless. Magic remains dominated by straight cisgender males. It’s an international game with competitors from many countries; however, the pros from America are almost exclusively white. Ask any female, any queer person, any nonwhite person who plays Magic and they will tell you stories of times they were made to feel unwelcome, as though they didn’t belong. Inclusion and diversity are incredibly important, and while things seem to have been slowly trending forward, it has been all too slow.
— — —
For one final piece of context, let’s talk briefly about Nic Kelman and War of the Spark.
Magic Story had, for several years, been written in-house by Wizards staff — people in the building who lived and breathed story, who knew the intricacies of lore in and out because that had been their literal job for years.
Wizards decided to go a different direction. This makes some sense, Magic the Gathering is expanding beyond just the cards more and more. There’s been talk of a movie for years that seems to have stalled out, there’s a Netflix show on the horizon. There’s new comic books for the first time in like 5 years. They wanted to have a whole department to work specifically on all of the narrative, not just on the cards and the fiction accompanying the sets.
To head this new division, they hired Nic Kelman. Nic Kelman is an author whose published work is a novel entirely about adult men having sex with underage girls. Graphically.
For more on this, check out Aemarling’s essay on it. To put it briefly, due to his past, Nic Kelman’s continued employment at Wizards is something that gives a large portion of its customers a great deal of unease. If WotC is trying to make the game a safe space for women, to increase diversity, then why the Hell was this guy hired?
This has been brought up, very publicly, by several prominent members of the community. Wizards’s response has been, predictably, to say nothing.
But I mention Kelman not just to shed additional light on his past but because he is in charge of the entire narrative department. Since so much of the work the narrative team does is done as a team, it is hard to blame any one person for any one decision. Yet, all the narrative missteps I’m going to mention happened only after Nic Kelman came on, and several of them seem to result directly from decisions he implemented. When creative problems stem not from a single person, but from a department, it is fair to criticize the person who is the head of that department.
The early decades of Magic story were largely disconnected stories. This changed with 2015’s Magic Origins. This kicked off a 5-year meta-story of Nicol Bolas’s grab for power. This was, as I mentioned earlier, written in house by WotC staff and released for free on dailymtg.com. The wonderful Ixalan story from 2018 was the last of this content to be written in-house before Kelman took over the department.
Kelman oversaw a transition: magic fiction would still be published for free on the web, but it would now be written by professional fantasy novelists instead of the talented staff in-building. This lead to mixed results. Some stories, such as those by Kate Elliott and Brandon Sanderson were well received. Others, such as the Dominaria story by Martha Wells were not.
The Dominaria story, the first to be released under this new model, contained a fairly large continuity error. Jace had been on Ixalan for several months, but pops up in the Dominaria story after only a week. This continuity error would have been easily caught by the in-house team that worked on all the fiction, but was published (and not corrected) once the department moved toward having a different creative write each chunk of story without communicating with each other.
This is, comparatively, a minor gripe compared to things to come but it sets the stage that problems were apparent immediately and not corrected.
Which brings us to “War of the Spark: Ravnica” by Greg Weisman. After 5 years of Nicol Bolas’s machinations in story, it all lead to this moment. The final battle between our heroes and Bolas for all the stakes. And here, Wizards of the Coast (under the leadership of Nic Kelman) decide to pivot back to novels. After 50+ months of weekly story published for free, the story will now conclude in its pivotal final chapter, and you will have to pay to read it.
There were MANY things wrong with “War of the Spark: Ravnica”, but before I get too deep on that, let me list a couple highlights:
- Ral Zarek, an existing character is revealed to be gay and in a relationship with a new character named Tomik
- Chandra and Nissa, two existing female characters are heavily hinted that they will be entering a relationship together
- Jace and Vraska end up together, kind of
- They defeat Bolas I guess?
But this novel was doomed from the start. A lot of things went very wrong with it.
For starters, it is now fairly obvious that this was intended to be the second story in a trilogy. It had been teased that if you sign up for the Del Rey Books mail list before the release of WotS Ravnica, you would get “bonus stories” emailed to you. It was eventually revealed that these stories were in fact an entire novel, “The Gathering Storm” by Django Wexler. (Side note, the Gathering Storm, once it was finally released, was fantastic.) The Gathering Storm takes place before “War of the Spark: Ravnica” and leads directly into the novel.
The first chapter of War of the Spark: Ravnica features the ghost of Niv-Mizzet, a prominent character who we had not seen die (he died in The Gathering Storm). The next chapter has Ral Zarek and company exhaling, having just won a challenging fight, and mourning the loss of Hekara, a character nobody has heard of (Hekara and this fight take place in The Gathering Storm). At one point Lavinia is telling Jace the status of the guilds of Ravnica, and the book literally turns into a 10-point bulleted list, explaining guild by guild what they had been up to during the previous months (all covered in The Gathering Storm).
Knowing that The Gathering Storm exists, it is abundantly clear that War of the Spark: Ravnica was intended as a sequel; and once it was clear that it would be made to stand alone instead, it was hastily adapted to make it as palatable as possible. Much of the story is poorly written, and it was my belief that much of it was first draft hastily added/adapted to fix the story last minute.
Nowhere is this problem more apparent than in its continuation of the Jace/Vraska storyline from Ixalan. If you recall, when we left off, Jace and Vraska had both grown beyond their tortured past, Vraska had her memories of Jace wiped, but they had a plan set up to restore those memories at a key moment to fight Bolas and were ready to pursue a relationship together.
Jace in the early parts of the book, basically does not think about Vraska at all. He does think a great deal about Liliana, his abusive ex.
When we first see Vraska, she is off-plane. She had recovered her memories on her own, then with all the memory of growth that she had from Ixalan, she had murdered a guild leader in service to Bolas and then fled. She is mad at Jace.
WHAT??? (Part of this was explained in The Gathering Storm, but I’ll remind you that came out much later)
Magic story had carefully built a beautiful relationship, set up a plot point to pay off, and all of that was destroyed, off-camera, between stories. If you were anticipating the resolution of the Jace/Vraska storyline, as I and many others were, this was a devastating letdown.
Jace and Vraska share one scene in the book, near the end, and, um, yikes:
He shrugged. “Look,” he said, “I already tried to kill one ex today. Can we table the angst until Bolas is dead or we are?”
She smiled ruefully. “Oh, am I an ex now?”
“I hope not,” he said, looking panicked.
“Don’t we have to be an item before we can be exes?”
“I hope so,” he said. “Um, the first part, not the second.”
That is a… not good resolution? All the care to build these two up as being in a complicated, healthy, adult relationship, and they’re both reduced to babbling teenagers nervous at the school dance. It puts them in a relationship that is moving forward, but so much of what made that relationship something worth caring about has been sucked out.
And to give Weisman the benefit of the doubt, he had to write a successful culmination to five years of story, that is a direct sequel to a story that nobody will have read, that contains 30+ main characters, had the plot spoiled by Wizards on cards a week before its release, and all the while was being jerked around by his publishers. Some amount of slack can be cut, some amount of poor writing can be forgiven, under the circumstances. But what should have been a triumphant conclusion was instead a jumbly mess, and you can’t mark this down as anything but a giant failure for Nic Kelman’s narrative department.
— — —
Which brings us up to November 2019. I didn’t intend to write 3000 words of backstory before describing the events of the past week, but here we are. I *LOVED* Magic. It has been incredibly meaningful to me. The events of the last week MATTER because Magic was so important to me, and everything that has transpired has been a betrayal of me and others like me.
November 8th-10th was Mythic Championship VI. Prior to the tournament, there was a Magic Hall of Fame induction ceremony (that was, in part, rebroadcast on twitch.tv/magic). During his acceptance speech, Reid Duke thanked his friend, Owen Turtenwald, for all the help and support he had received.
It is, at best, tone-deaf for Reid to praise someone who had been run out of the magic community for harassment. Sure, they were friends. Perhaps Owen is trying to become a better person. But Owen was kind to you, helped you, treated you like a human and not a sexual object because you are male. That is a degree of privilege many female players did not have.
Also, the event was the night of the 7th. It was prerecorded, and then rebroadcast during the Mythic Championship. It was not livestreamed, so WotC made the decision, deliberately or not, to air support for an accused predator during the highest profile tournament of the year. Much of the progress that had been made making women feel more welcome, making tournaments seem like safer spaces, was undone by choosing to praise an alleged harasser.
During the tournament, MPL member Autumn Burchett had written on their basic lands “Trans Rights are Human Rights” and “No TERFs on Gruul Turf”. Autumn was instructed that they needed to remove these cards from their deck. Here’s a couple of important pieces of context:
- Only the front of the card had any markings on it, and the cards were sleeved. The cards were not marked in any way that could have given any gameplay advantage
- The art on the cards in question was originally painted by Terese Neilsen
- According to tournament rules, cards that are autographed or lightly altered like these are 100% legal. The artist name is marked out on the card. This is also 100% legal.
- The judge staff, who are on-site to ensure that rules are followed did not instruct Autumn to remove these cards. It was someone directly from Wizards of the Coast.
To be clear: Wizards of the Coast instructed a transgender competitor who had not violated any rules that they had to take out legal cards due to messaging that that person deserved to be treated like a human. A rule was applied to a transgender competitor that was not applied to other, cisgender, competitors.
Reaction from viewers was swift anger and indignation; twitch chat for the event was immediately filled with “Trans Rights are Human Rights”. Reaction from WotC was silence. No public statement on the ruling has been made.
Eventually Wizards semi-recanted, allowing Autumn to play with lands with that message written on them, just not THOSE lands, not ones with Terese Neilsen art. Whether this is a backpedal or not, it reveals even more about WotC’s priorities in decision-making.
You see, Terese Nielsen is a fairly famous magic artist. Her art is BEAUTIFUL, for a long time, I had a signed framed print of Terese Nielsen’s Force of Will art up in my house. She, however, has drawn controversy when people saw her liking Alt-Right memes on twitter. She’s done her best to cover her tracks, and refuses to answer questions about her beliefs; however, her refusal to answer basic questions of whether trans people are worthy of basic rights and dignitude is itself, an answer.
(edit: Nielsen did, months later, release a second statement which indicated her support of trans rights. Some people accepted this, others did not. However, Nielsen’s beliefs about trans people, positive or negative, are not the point of this essay. Accurate or not, there is a perception that she doesn’t support trans people, and how WotC reacted to this known perception is the point of this essay)
So, either Wizards thought the phrase “Trans Rights are Human Rights” was offensive, banned it, then backpedaled after to try and save face; or they percieved that “Trans Rights are Human Rights” combined with the crossing out of the name was a direct attack on Terese Nielsen and took action accordingly. Even if the latter is true, Wizards directly valued the rights of a person who may believe trans people are inhuman to not have to defend those backwards beliefs over the rights of a trans person to affirm their own humanity.
This is severely fucked up.
“I am a human being worthy of rights” is NOT an offensive statement, and even if the statement were “Hey Terese Nielsen, I am a human being worthy of rights” it STILL isn’t an offensive statement. To react to that statement by enforcing rules specifically against a trans person (even for as minor a punishment as “swap different unmarked lands into your deck”) is doing the exact thing that was being protested.
We are forced to make assumptions as to WotC’s intent, as no official statement was ever made. If this were a simple misunderstanding based on some universally applied policy we aren’t aware of, why not say so?
This hurt me as a trans person. Wizards has for a long time paid lip service to the fact that they are a queer-accepting and progressive company. They release shirts every year with the Magic logo colored in rainbow. They even made a trans person card! Once! Five years ago!
But when given the opportunity to back up their words with actual, real action, they did the exact thing they claimed to oppose.
This was not only a bad thing to do, it was a very bad time to do it, as November 12th the novel “War of the Spark: Forsaken” was going to come out. And it had been heavily teased as the novel where Nissa and Chandra finally, for real, become a couple.
It, um, did not do that. Early reviews of the book were terrible and snippets found their way to twitter:
On Ravnica, in the wake of Gideon’s death and Bolas’, they had admitted to each other that they loved. But both of them knew deep down they were only speaking platonically.
Yikes. Also:
Chandra had never been into girls. Her crushes — and she’d had her fair share — were mostly the brawny (and decidedly male) types like Gids. But there had always been something about Nissa Revane specifically, something the two of them shared in that great chemical mix — arcing between them like one of Ral Zarek’s lightning bolts — that had thrilled her. From the moment they first met.
Now everything’s different.
It was over. Before it had ever had a chance to begin. Maybe, maybe they had missed their moment.
Super yikes.
So let’s break this down here. A number of sins. First, and perhaps least important, the writing is BAD. We expect more from MtG story than “had admitted to each other that they loved”. What did they love??? Each other? Lamp? Fish Sticks?? WE WILL NEVER KNOW, only that “they loved”; not to mention that the pronoun/antecedent is messy AF and it seems like we are talking about Gideon and Bolas being in love (you know what, I’d read that story). But this is so sloppy it’s hard to believe it got a once over from a single editor and we deserve better.
More importantly, this takes one of the few queer relationships (and the ONLY girl/girl relationship)in all of Magic and destroys it. For a moment it looked like lesbians or femme bisexuals would be able to see themselves presented as a part of the magic universe but it was destroyed before it could even happen. I’m not personally invested in Chandra and Nissa specifically but if you’re not going to have Huatli and Saheeli pairing off romantically, you really should have somebody. Lesbians deserve representation.
Lesbians (and queer people and also magic fans in general) also deserve to be treated with respect and honesty. If your book isn’t going to include a queer relationship, DON’T TEASE THAT IT DOES TO GET US TO PAY YOU.
Also, if Chandra and Nissa were the only relationship to fall apart in the book, that’d be one thing. Jace and Vraska are on thin ice. Ral and Tomik are on thin ice. Every queer and/or healthy relationship is crushed in this story.
But by far, most importantly, this is Bi- erasure. Chandra is, and always has been bisexual. For them to repaint Chandra as a straight girl who had a crush, that is over, and now she’s just into “decidedly male” dudes is straight up SHITTY. Don’t take one of our precious few queer characters and retcon them into being straight!
I thought I had preordered “War of the Spark: Forsaken” and scrambled to cancel the preorder once I saw the news. Thank goodness I hadn’t gotten around to buying it, and I won’t be.
— — —
Let’s put this all in a neat package. Wizards of the Coast, real talk time.
You claim to support women, to want more women to play Magic. Yet you broadcast support for abusers on your twitch channel and continue to employ Nic Kelman. When challenged on these issues, your response is silence.
You claim to support trans people and people of all backgrounds, yet you specifically discriminated against one of your only transgender pros. When challenged on these issues, your response is silence.
You claim to have a diverse fictional world, yet you destroy queer relationships and retcon one of your few queer main characters to be straight. It’s only been a day since you were challenged on this issue, but so far, your response has been silence and I’m willing to bet that continues to be your response.
Your words say that Magic is a welcoming place for all people, specifically for queer people like me. But your actions say something else.
I no longer feel represented in your fiction. I no longer feel supported in your game.
Unless something drastic changes, I am quitting Magic. It’s been made abundantly clear that I’m not wanted.