https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2020-06-10

Also of note is the banning of said cards from tournament play. The list of cards:

Invoke Prejudice
Cleanse
Stone-Throwing Devils
Pradesh Gypsies
Jihad
Imprison
Crusade

i think only two or three of these are probably bad although maybe the others just go over my head

cleanse almost seems like a joke

probably reasonable to err on the side of caution though

Here's a twitter thread that goes into possible whys https://twitter.com/MerfolkMagic/status ... 8836998146

I clicked on this thread thinking it was a joke.
Looking at the writeups in the thread Deadpoet linked, and some of these were a lot more racist than I figured.

Censoring crusade was a real stretch though. White's the "holy" color, no the "white people" color, so granting white creatures a bonus isn't exactly racist there. Jihad was less of a stretch, but runs into the same problem. "Crusade" is thrown around to mean a lot of things these days. "Jihad" considerably less so.
Imprison makes no sense to me. There's nothing to suggest that the person imprisoned in the art had to be dark-skinned; presumably anybody could be chained up like that. Nothing points to anything specifically from real world history.

I get some of those, but I really hope this doesn't mean that we completely take away Magic's edginess. The fact that some of the cards actually are disturbing is part of what makes the game great.

I have complicated feelings about this matter. Obviously, I'm opposed to the rhetoric they see in these cards, I can respect their intent.
But I'm staunchly opposed to the idea of burying this or censoring it. Partly because, while these specific cards getting binned doesn't bother me so much, once you start, it's going to be easier to do again. And this kinda thing works on a sliding scale. What happens in the future when something innocuous is no longer acceptable? And then even later?

Judging the past through the filter of the modern day is dangerous if it means scrubbing it out. (Even at the time these cards were printed, it was, at BEST in poor taste if not deplorable) Acknowledging the context that it was a different time and we've moved past that is a more powerful message than outright erasing it.

So, since they did this, when are they going to remove elves from the game for their decades of racism?
(This is a hyperbolic statement.)

Given the history of both, I can see WOTC wanting to distance themselves from war campaigns heavily motivated by religious and ethnic differences. It's an odd territory for them; the game is telling stories, often of evil people, but at the end of the day, it's still a game first. Alienating your audience because your main bad guy is a raging bigot doesn't seem worth it. This isn't a novel where you can show such characters with nuance and argue their evil existence.



It's important for them to keep their history intact, own up to their mistakes, and properly contextualize that past for those who seek to study it. But from a gameplay point of view, getting rid of the offending content makes sense. Magic is a game first and foremost and it's their job to cultivate it toward maximum enjoyment. Gatherer is the primary tool for referencing cards and Oracle text for gameplay. Removing the cards from the formats they oversee and from the primary tool they use to communicate that information is just making the game a better place for more people. The history is still there; it's just less visible and given better context now.

I feel like it's still a mixed bag. This phrase can be interpreted in two ways, but who was even effected by these changes? The cards are so old that I can't think anyone actually used them at all... and since it only really impacts some kind of tournament play, does it make any difference? They're still legal cards for the game itself because casual play is a thing.

Now, that statement actually applies in both the positive and negative connotations. It's a nice gesture, but I can't see how it actually accomplishes anything given how ancient those cards are. Which also means it's not really any reason NOT to remove them either.

But the catch 22 is... even calling them out? That's just going to have a streissand effect on them, making people MORE aware of cards they likely had a really low chance of seeing in the first place.
It might also spike prices on the secondary market with the announcement too.

There was a big thread on Twitter a few days ago calling WotC out for their historic lack of diversity in creative roles and the prevailing lack of accountability within the company. Invoke Prejudice was a footnote in the accusation, but it was the only part of it WotC could address quickly in order to save face. So that's what they did.

Looking at them on a card-by-card basis, here's my verdict. For some background, I should say that I'm half-Arabic/North African, half-white, white-passing, and not religious.

Invoke Prejudice: This is a no-brainer. There's an explicit 1488 reference, there's no way you can argue that this card wasn't deliberately made for the purpose of being racist.
Pradesh G******: I mean, it has a racial slur in the title, this is also a no-brainer.
Stone-Throwing Devils: Seeing the lore behind it, yeah, it makes sense why this one was banned.
Imprison kinda makes sense. Maybe there's an innocent explanation, but the imagery is kinda, well, evocative.
Cleanse is also in the maybe pile. Unless there's bonus context I don't know about that makes it clear that it's designed with racist intent, I don't think it's necessarily trying to express ethnic cleansing.
Crusade is a reasonable ban, since it's a reference to a specific historical event whose imagery is now commonly used a rallying cry for the modern far right. Pretty much every medieval-era war game has a subcommunity of fans obsessed with Deus Vult memes who fantasize about murdering the Muslims out of Europe.
Jihad is imo the most sketchy one. I don't think there's anything white supremacist about "white creatures", since the Islam isn't primarily practiced by white people, and "Jihad" meaning "scary Arab terrorist blowing people up for Allahu Akbar" is itself a racist cultural construction.

When I first read the thread title, I thought it was a bit unnecessary for them to do, but looking at the context behind them, I think most of the bans make pretty good sense.

Some of these are fine, some of these should have stayed so people could have mature discussions about the story and about the past. Namely crusade. I think that's the only card I have a problem with them banning. All these cards are trash anyway so who cares.

Interesting, curious to see if they will indeed do a second round because if they felt crusade crossed the line I wouldn't be surprised if a couple more cards also did.

tabletop games of this nature probably aren't the ideal setting for mature discussions about racially sensitive topics.

also the crusades were a set of real wars that were basically explicitly xenophobic in nature so its not surprising they wouldn't want them around.

i imagine they wouldn't want cards named "holocaust" or "genocide" in the game either.

Jihad seems to specifically be a card with the flavour of declaring a war against a certain caste of people and then continuing to fight them until they're entirely wiped out. I know Jihad is a nuanced concept in islam and i don't claim to know that much about it, but i imagine this depiction of it is problematic for a lot of reasons.

After reading that thread cleanse is the only one i think there wasn't a lot of justification to ban

Except these are explicitly negative qualities white is known for, as well as fundamental altruism stating you have no right to individualism.

An in-setting equivalent of the crusades would arguably be justifiable, but using a real event in a casual fantasy setting is inappropriate, i think. Wizards has and presumably will continue to tackle concepts like racism and prejudice within their settings, but I think its best they do that without invoking real people and real events, because of the kind of game magic is.

Perhaps, but there are actors outside Wizard's control that also may draw lines of in-setting issues to real world problems, citing allegory and then become belligerent that Wizards do something.
That's one of the primary issues with a lot of this discourse, because there are very certainly things to be upset about, but the rhetoric extends beyond those issues. There are some who just want to FIND things to be upset about, beyond things that are legitimately upsetting.

That'll be an issue when its an issue, and is unrelated to whether or not crusade is problematic as a card.

Maybe it won't happen, but it's a discussion that should because you have to ask how something becomes problematic. Why is crusade problematic, because the culture changed. What informs the culture? Discourse.

But I'll take your point and I'll back off. I'm just concerned where this will lead us because we've seen this sort of moral panic before.

I'm not really comfortable with this. It feels like the "Removal" of demons in the Weatherlight Saga era, but more revisionist.

Especially poor Crusade. From staple reprint with representation in modern frame to eternal banned-as-sinful.

Does everything else illustrated by Harold McNeill go next?