Cartoonish ‘Magic’ cards

If you know anything about me, you probably know how staunchly opposed to capitalism I am. It’s one of my primary driving forces behind my ideals. You may think that is odd to bring up in a piece about gaming companies, but I promise my socialist ideals are relevant.

Recently, I found myself getting into the trading card game “Magic: The Gathering”. Me and a few friends get together when we can to play with decks we’ve purchased or made. It’s fun most of the time. But because of that interest I have recently been more closely following news and releases within the MTG community. Which is how I discovered the latest case of Cartoonish Evil perpetrated by Wizards of the Coast.

This May will see a follow-up release of cards to the recent story beat “March of The Machines”, known as “March of the Machines: Aftermath”. And as Wizards of the Coast often does, they try to tease a few cards in advance, this is called “Spoiling”. However, it appears that WOTC only likes it when they do that, because when a small YouTuber by the name of “Oldschoolmtg” received (on accident) a few packs of Aftermath cards, and took this opportunity to make a video opening them and discussing them. In response to this, Wizards of the Coast sent members of the Pinkerton Detective Agency to threaten him into returning the cards and deleting the video.

In case you were not aware. Yes, the Pinkertons are still a thing. And in case you were super unaware, the Pinkertons are a private army of union busting thugs that can be hired by any corporation with enough money to do basically whatever they want. They have no legal authority and only get their results through violence and threats thereof. Many people know that the Pinkertons are the primary antagonists of Rockstar’s “Red Dead Redemption”. Yes, you’ve read that correctly. The main villains of a cowboy video game are going around threatening people for stuff they received on accident.

The Pinkertons are also well known for being the folks who were sent to break up a strike, and when that failed they killed 16 men and wounded 23 more.

Either way. This isn’t even the first time Wizards of the Coast have done something this stupidly evil. At the start of the year they announced a change to the license they use for fan creators that would essentially give them rights to all the stuff fans made. In an absolutely cartoonishly evil movie, they tried to claim that they just weren’t making enough money off of the most successful tabletop roleplaying game of all time. When fans canceled their subscriptions in droves, WOTC walked that decision back. However, we can’t really do that with this. We can just sit back and laugh at how entirely stupid this choice was.

Braedon Martin is a Hutchinson sophomore studying journalism. He is the Collegian’s Opinion Page Editor and Managing Editor for Design.

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