Use a thing. Get caught. Lie and say you won't use it again. Use it again, get caught a second time. Lie that you didn't. Get pressured on it, admit it, then insist that it's no fault of yours since it's third party work and AI tools are emergent in industry standard tools.
I am done pussyfooting around it. Magic and D&D's cultural prominence is a fucking millstone around the necks of nerd fandom and it needs to be done with.
PLAY. ANOTHER. GAME.
Reminder that Wizards of the Coast also sent the Pinkertons after someone due to a shipping error.
If you still play their games, steal them.
🔔 We're fairly big Magic fans, and I'll be blunt, we've never been more tempted to just sell our collection for cash and convert it into furry art commissions as an act of spite. This ongoing behavior has been gnawing and chipping away at our love of the game since Secret Lairs were announced and it became utterly clear that Hasbro view Wizards of the Coast as something to strip-mine for value and not one of its blue-chip forever-imprints. They effectively had a license to print money and instead they've pushed the machine so hard it's caught fire.
It depresses the hell out of us. Some of our fondest memories involve Magic. Going to GPs with friends, running prereleases, commander nights, trading between our binders, ruminating on the merits of our favorite basic lands. But now it's all just... gone sour. It was always, to a degree, predatorially-monetized, but we could ignore it because the underlying game beneath was genuinely exciting to play, genuinely stimulated our mind. But around the time people had to go 'this fucking random person from The Walking Dead who only showed up in a Secret Lair is Legacy-playable,' the air had been let out of the band.
It's a product now, even more nakedly than it was before, intended to convert FOMO, nerd entitlement, and cardboard into golden parachutes. I don't know what happened to the Magic we love, but God save us, I can't find it anymore.
yeeeeaaaaahhhh, that's a hard one to swallow once you see it coming.
But on the plus side, just like with GW, there are plenty of fun alternatives, and part of that fun is in getting to come to new games and new systems with fresh eyes.
