When Magic: the Gathering started dipping their toe in licensing other IPs for unique, tournament-legal Magic cards with the Secret Lair x The Walking Dead product in October 2020, players were nervous. In addition to concerns about diluting Magic's own flavor and lore, one of the major worries was that tying cards to licenses not owned by Hasbro would actually affect the game itself by making it legally impossible to make those cards available enough. What happens if Negan becomes a tournament staple and there just aren't enough copies to use?

This worry isn't theoretical. The two high-level tournament formats in Magic that allow cards printed throughout its history, Legacy and Vintage, are both highly constrained by this same issue. Decades ago, in an attempt to mitigate an over-printing snafu that was eroding confidence in the value of Magic cards as collector items, Wizards of the Coast promised never to reprint a specific set of cards. This set, known as the "reserved list", contains cards that are still linchpins of the eternal formats to this day, and as such playing these formats in paper costs thousands of dollars more than Magic's already-substantial monetary barrier to entry.

At the time, the response from Wizards of the Coast was essentially "don't worry about it, we could reprint these cards with a different name if it's relevant". Having two otherwise-identical cards with different names isn't exactly the same as having one in Magic, but don't worry about that, they can paper over it in the rules. The real problem here is that this requires WotC to actively choose to do that and release a product for it for every relevant card.

Flash forward two years to October 2022. Wizards of the Coast's investment in cross-licensing is growing. No longer are they just doing "drops" of a handful of cards, they're now releasing the Warhammer 40,000 Commander Decks product with 168 totally new cards that exist only in the Warhammer universe. Nor are these cards clearly casually-focused either: there's real power in them, cards that start showing up in tournament Magic. They announce that these cards will be available on Magic: the Gathering Online "soon", then eventually "August 2023".

I am writing this in February 2024. The cards are still not available on Magic: the Gathering Online. The holdup? Licensing issues, of course.

Is Wizards of the Coast going to come up with new names for all 168 cards so we can finally play with them online? Or will the online version of these eternal formats continue to just be inexplicably different because of easily forseeable legal issues?

If I sound bitter about this, it's because I am. Despite everything its stewards do, I love this game dearly, and because of the pandemic and the world's refusal to acknowledge or mitigate it the only way I can safely play it is online. I don't expect a corporation to care about me, but it would be nice at least not to have them spit in my face and tell me it's raining.


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in reply to @nex3's post:

oh goodness, what a mood in that last paragraph there - I've drifted so far from magic these days because at this point it's gonna be years still before it's approaching safe for me in person, if it ever does.

(and then add on top of feeling super alienated by a most of the folks who I thought were at least sensible, friendly acquaintances just gleefully hopping back into the event cycle with no thought for their own health (and certainly not the disabled), which has made the game as a whole a... prickly subject for me emotionally lately)

Well put.

I took a break from the game during the pandemic that turned into total retirement due to the way WotC has handled the game for the past four years. The power creep, the complexity creep, the product creep, the price creep. My relationship with the game felt more and more taxing every week. Since I've left, they've started sending Pinkertons after YouTubers and trying to claw in money from supporters with the OGL fiasco.

The game's fundamentals are still solid. I can't imagine giving the company money at this point.

I've said for a very long time now that the Reserved List is and was a mistake. This does contain my highly personal emotional opinions about things so heads up.

As a company who exists to make and maintain the state of games, why the fuck should you take the opinion of collectors with any weight at all?! (I know the answer to this is capitalism). They don't care about the game at all! They only care about the value of their, and I cannot stress this enough, very speculative """"""""""investment""""""""""! Don't get me wrong I used to play competitive paper for several years. I spent plenty of money on the game, but never once did I think about trying to get my money back out of it when buying anything. TCGs have always been a pay to play experience. Buying expensive cards in every format is sadly the nature of the beast when it comes to card games. Sure there are expensive cards you may just not want to buy because they are so much and you can't justify it. This is not to be confused with me supporting the absurdly high value of legacy (in this case meaning old, not the format) cards. No one should be spending, or more importantly have to spend thousands of dollars on a deck of cards to play a game in recognized competitive play! This is even more so when a majority of that cost is just for land cards that aren't even the interesting part of any deck (unless you're playing Lands or something). Of course this mostly refers to playing Legacy or (shudders) Vintage.

My point is that while I also haven't touched the game in years because of the damage WotC (courtesy of Hasbro) have done to the state of the game, I still really love Magic and want people to experience this game I love so much. The Reserved List and limited edition prints of unique, tournament legal cards only pushes to gatekeep this game rather than open it up to new players. More people being able to play your game is a good thing! Especially if that means you can play it in person at a game store with other people and hoping no one notices the proxy cards in your deck, or more importantly care. Magic, and other TCGs should be about a player's creativity in deck building and skills as a player, and not that you dropped a bunch of money on a deck that is so strong it'll make up for your lack of skill playing it.