I owe a lot to Magic, and I’ll keep playing with friends and family, but, sadly, I’m done with Wizards. As I said above, this has been some time in coming. The company’s slide to the woke left has been quite apparent, as has a drop in quality. For quite some time there were unaddressed issues with card stock, and, more recently, they’ve taken to policing their art. They’ve even gone to far as to censor art deemed “insensitive,” or somehow “racist” from their Gatherer database. Moreover, while I’ve not bought much new stuff in the last few years (something I’m glad for now), it is clear that the art quality has declined in two ways. In the first, they’re getting cheap, preferring digital artists over those who actually paint. This results in less distinctive art styles, and less interesting art. Even worse, they’ve been making the art much more PC via “body diversity,” heavy handed “racial diversity,” deliberately taking on more of an anti “male gaze” approach to portraying women (while not doing the same for men), along with inserting more heavy handed SJW stuff into the game. But I’m not here to go into depth on all of that.

The final straw for me was what Wizards just did to longtime artist for the game, Terese Nielsen.

Anyone who’s played Magic for any length of time will have heard her name and seen her art. She’s one of the best the game has ever had, and was one of the few remaining artists with a truly distinct style.

That’s over now. Yup, she’s been officially canceled, for the high crime of following some of the wrong people. You can read more about it at the archived article here. Long story short, she followed some of the wrong, people, and held some wrong beliefs. So despite the fact that she’s part of the LGBT community herself, she was summarily dropped. After over 25 years of quality work, and causing no apparent problems beyond said bits of wrongthink.

Is Wizards going to disappear her art from the Gatherer too? Wouldn’t shock me.