The Fandom Strain: On the IP Illness That's Killing Magic: The Gathering

The first time I thought they might actually get away with it was in 2021, when I first saw Mina Harker. Wizards of the Coast had just released a set of Magic: The Gathering cards titled Innistrad: Crimson Vow, an elegant set with vampires as its central motif. As always, the set came with the usual assortment of alternate illustrations for some of the marquee cards, which was something that I and most people who took the competitive side of the game seriously to an embarrassing extent made a routine of ignoring. This time though, the theme for the alternate art series wasn’t some stupid-looking sideshow—it was Stoker’s Dracula. A select few cards, including some that would be the strongest and most frequently played in the entire set, would have secondary but playable versions depicting recognizable characters from the literary classic.

The problem was that they nailed it. The illustrations were beautiful and restrained, a fun and relatively unobtrusive tribute to Stoker, released right in the middle of spooky season. This included Magali Villenueve’s new drawing of Mina Harker, Dracula’s protagonist, cast here as the alternate version of a card called Thalia, Guardian of Thraben.

The card choice mattered as much as the excellent art. Thalia herself is an iconic character in the world of Magic, and a powerful-enough card that, from a competitive standpoint, you’re usually either playing the card yourself or showing up with a plan to beat her. This meant that Mina Harker, a character with no relation whatsoever to Magic: The Gathering, was now constantly appearing in games of Magic. Between the quality of the art, the ubiquity of the card, and Dracula having a literary sheen far less offensive than both previous and future attempts at this sort of intellectual-property bait-and-switch, people got used to it.

Give an inch, lose a mile. I start with Dracula because of how quaint it is in retrospect, how tasteful. But anyone with even a passing familiarity with Magic knows where that impulse toward a “crossover event” would go. Spongebob Squarepants Secret Lair drops; basic land cards featuring illustrations of pizza from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; a full destruction of the standard format at the hands of a minor character from Final Fantasy. Perhaps something you love is undergoing a similar transformation—endless intermixing with other creative properties such that the barrier between the two wholly blurs, entries released at intervals so frequent that their creators can’t possibly have done a worthwhile job, a lurking sense that someone else is being pandered to in order to keep the line going up. But who? Who, apart from Hasbro’s shareholders or the WotC C-suite, is any of this for?

The answer is fandom. It was a culture of fandom that said We like this to the people whose job it was to exercise editorial control over the art and design of Magic. And if you yourself didn’t like it, well, you were probably already invested in the game enough that you were willing to put up with it. At root, that’s the bet, wherever this sort of corporate decision appears: if you care about something, you won’t go anywhere even if you notice its erosion, all while new customers show up. A Growth Opportunity was making itself clear, at least as extrapolated by sales data. And in the end, isn’t Growing the Game the most important thing of all?