I've been lurking for a while, but I finally have a topic to talk about.
Recently, Mtg has been burning down for the past couple of days due to the new Secret Lair. Usually it was just reprints with a new wacky twist, but is now actually new cards that are NOT from Mtg, but from The Walking Dead. Everyone's pissed, from it being new cards in a limited product to the addition of non-Mtg properties to Magic. This isn't the first time there were non-Mtg cards made, but those were silver-border(non legal cards made for fun times).
That sucked, but what really made me post was reading a post about how some PlayEDH group banned the Negan card not for its stupid concept, but because it depicted a rapist in the artwork. A fictional rapist in the artwork. They were near on the mark and they missed it by a mile. Considering this is Mtg, there are plenty of characters that have done way worse things than rape that are depicted on cards. This reminds of when WOTC did the "racist" card bans in June.
Here's the post I saw: https://archive.vn/LVTYV
What I'm trying to say is that everything is boring and broken now. I've played this game for 7 years now, and the first 6 were pretty alright. Now it feels like the game sucks, the story sucks, and the players sucks. Maybe I spent too much time on the subreddit, maybe I though that I could weather WOTC being woke, maybe I got too attached to a bad portion of the game. All this seems like something fun just got ruined, even if the ruin started years ago.
What I came here for is to look for an avenue to talk to other people about something I cherish, or cherished, very deep in my heart. What are other Mtg players' thoughts about all this? If there are no players here, then what are the general observances of the people here?
Former whale here. I played Commander obsessively for about 8 years, played Modern for two years, and could buy a nice car if I sold all my decks. Magic is garbage now. This might get a bit long, but here we go.
So starting in about 2015 WotC began to get more and more woke. The storylines on their website started to take a socjus bent with a lot of "diverse" writers and "diverse" characters that made little sense in the setting. They started to ship gays into the storyline. In early 2016 a clique of literal SJW trannies started orbiting WotC's social media presence. Bloggers, journos, small gaming channels, and some of the more "diverse" (read bottom rung) pro players wormed their way to the company's ear due to Mark Rosewater being a literal cuck with a literal Tumblr. This same clique then pushed tons of fellatio material for WotC on places like the official MtG subreddit, and became even more ingratiated with the company. One excellent example of this filth is a blog called, unironically, "Hipsters of the Coast" and one of their flagship writers, a TDS stricken tranny named Jess Stirba who left the site to become an ANTIFA activist. Yes, really.
When Trump got elected, this clique went nuts and their influence began to have more and more impact on WotC. The company started chasing the "whore's gold" of untapped SJW market at the expense of their existing fanbase. Among other things this lead to a split in their subreddit and the creation of r/freemagic after thousands of people got banned for muhsoggyknees, Rosewater himself embraced intersectionality and when called out for creating cards and characters just to tick socjus boxes replied "some boxes need to be ticked" to the response of thousands of upvotes. It has changed everything, from player bans to online conduct to what kind of sleeves you can use and the art on your playmat, to what kind of decorations a card store can display. For me the final straw was the recent banning of several classic cards due to "racist" artwork or name connotations, like the cards "Jihad" and "Invoke Prejudice", the latter of which I actually owned a 400 dollar copy of. Since I only played it in Commander I wasn't initially concerned, but when the Commander Rules Committee came out and banned the same list of cards "in solidarity" with Black Lives Matter it was the final straw.
Fuck Magic, fuck Wizards, and fuck all their product lines. Do not give money to people who hate you.