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.
