By Erik Hane
The first time I thought they might actually get away with it was in 2021, when I first saw Mina Harker. Wizards of the Coast had just released a set of Magic: The Gathering cards titled Innistrad: Crimson Vow, an elegant set with vampires as its central motif. As always, the set came with the usual assortment of alternate illustrations for some of the marquee cards, which was something that I and most people who took the competitive side of the game seriously to an embarrassing extent made a routine of ignoring. This time though, the theme for the alternate art series wasn’t some stupid-looking sideshow—it was Stoker’s Dracula. A select few cards, including some that would be the strongest and most frequently played in the entire set, would have secondary but playable versions depicting recognizable characters from the literary classic.
The problem was that they nailed it. The illustrations were beautiful and restrained, a fun and relatively unobtrusive tribute to Stoker, released right in the middle of spooky season. This included Magali Villenueve’s new drawing of Mina Harker, Dracula’s protagonist, cast here as the alternate version of a card called Thalia, Guardian of Thraben.
The card choice mattered as much as the excellent art. Thalia herself is an iconic character in the world of Magic, and a powerful-enough card that, from a competitive standpoint, you’re usually either playing the card yourself or showing up with a plan to beat her. This meant that Mina Harker, a character with no relation whatsoever to Magic: The Gathering, was now constantly appearing in games of Magic. Between the quality of the art, the ubiquity of the card, and Dracula having a literary sheen far less offensive than both previous and future attempts at this sort of intellectual-property bait-and-switch, people got used to it.
Give an inch, lose a mile. I start with Dracula because of how quaint it is in retrospect, how tasteful. But anyone with even a passing familiarity with Magic knows where that impulse toward a “crossover event” would go. Spongebob Squarepants Secret Lair drops; basic land cards featuring illustrations of pizza from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; a full destruction of the standard format at the hands of a minor character from Final Fantasy. Perhaps something you love is undergoing a similar transformation—endless intermixing with other creative properties such that the barrier between the two wholly blurs, entries released at intervals so frequent that their creators can’t possibly have done a worthwhile job, a lurking sense that someone else is being pandered to in order to keep the line going up. But who? Who, apart from Hasbro’s shareholders or the WotC C-suite, is any of this for?
The answer is fandom. It was a culture of fandom that said We like this to the people whose job it was to exercise editorial control over the art and design of Magic. And if you yourself didn’t like it, well, you were probably already invested in the game enough that you were willing to put up with it. At root, that’s the bet, wherever this sort of corporate decision appears: if you care about something, you won’t go anywhere even if you notice its erosion, all while new customers show up. A Growth Opportunity was making itself clear, at least as extrapolated by sales data. And in the end, isn’t Growing the Game the most important thing of all?
We live in the golden age of fandom. If you like a thing—Star Wars, for instance, or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or even something less sprawling or prone to licensing deals like the 2002 film 28 Days Later—you can consume content stemming from that Intellectual Property until you’re something well past full.
Never before in human history have your prior choices for entertainment been so forcefully reflected back at you to purchase again in the present. Nostalgia plays a major role, of course; it’s no accident that corporate entertainment’s trend toward resuscitating every last cartoon and movie from the 1990s and Y2K era comes right as millennials hit their mid-thirties and theoretically come into some discretionary income, free to be put toward recapturing what life felt like before debt and kids.
But the content colossi do more than just reach into your imagined past—they reach sideways in the ephemeral present as well. Did you enjoy seeing Iron Man in that movie? Well, what if Iron Man also appeared in this other movie as well? You’d get a charge out of that too, we’d bet. And what if, in that other movie, something happened that referenced that first Iron Man movie you had previously enjoyed—something that, get this, only those of you who saw that first movie would be able to recognize, such that suddenly you’re experiencing both movies at once, while also feeling the dopamine rush of having noticed that signal at all, which we placed there just for you?
On the individual level, a logical response emerges: don’t participate. If enough people choose to opt out of too many offerings, each transparently lazier and creatively soulless than the last, won’t the higher-ups get the message? Perhaps yes—except that’s not what’s happening, not with Magic and not with anything else. People are not opting out, because fandom—a cultural impulse equal parts completionist, deferential, uncritical, and easily excited by anything with a familiar logo on it—does not opt out. It participates, and makes a show of participating, and feeds you endless and frictionless content about how meaningful it is to participate, and encourages you to do the same.
I know what you picture when I say Magic: The Gathering. A strain of nerd with poor social skills and worse hygiene, slapping cards down on a table under fluorescent lights while narrating all the ways he’s outsmarted you by caring about the game more than you. And, look. I won’t tell you not to believe your lying eyes. But for a moment just look with me at the thing itself, Magic, so that you might also see why I’m certain that what’s happening to it now is a genuine and irrevocable artistic tragedy.
Magic’s premise is simple and campy. You and your opponent are both in possession of a library of spells (your deck of cards), which you will cast in order to reduce your opponent’s life total to zero while preventing them from doing the same to you. The macro-level rules are beautifully simple, which allows for the cards themselves to create the game’s infinite variation and complexity. It’s like chess; the goal is straightforward, you can learn how the different pieces move within a few minutes, and the interactions that stem from this simple crucible push the limits of modern computing and make some of the sharpest minds on earth go fully insane.
Now though, imagine if every few months chess released new pieces you could choose to sub in for your bishops. The rules of the game remain the same, but the pieces now vary in capability, utility, and power, and you now have to decide which ones to include or not while accounting for the variation your opponent might be bringing to the table with the new options at their disposal as well. Now imagine if these periodic releases went on for decades, such that when designing a deck in 2026 you needed to make sure you’ve got answers ready for a card printed in 2005. Perhaps you can see how the complexity involved here turns Cambrian pretty quickly.
Mechanically, the game contains infinite possibility. The calculations that happen at its highest levels, both in terms of which cards belong in a deck based on the current metagame and how those cards get deployed in real time once the game starts, are mind-numbing. It’s beautiful. It’s genius. And so are Magic’s artistic and aesthetic choices that stitch together this ongoing infusion of new cards.
In order to keep the fantasy setting fresh and varied, Magic relies on a “multiverse”—disparate planes of reality that serve as the setting for a given thematic set of cards. There’s Dominaria, a lush old-world fantasy landscape from which the game’s original heroes hail; Ravnica, a city that spans a whole world, full of gothic towers and guilds competing for influence in its mazelike streets; Kamigawa, a Japanese-inspired plane where ancient myth collides with cyberpunk dystopia; and dozens more, ranging across different cultural and historical traditions and literary genres, allowing for endless variation on the game’s core themes. Each of these places have been beautifully drawn, conceived, written, and returned to over time in service of a massive singular story across the game’s full history, and the work that goes into each plane has produced unforgettable visual pieces by artists who frankly deserve commissioning well beyond drawing art for trading cards—except they love it, because designing a Magic card means something, because when a whole lot of talented people spend decades building something irreplaceable like this it should fucking mean something.
It’s worth seeing how carefully these decades’ worth of storytelling and cards balance together on both artistic and gameplay levels. We should enjoy that balance now, in its dying days—something like Magic cannot and will not be found anywhere else ever again, because the creative environment and incentives that foster it—even while sales go up, ever upward, upward and to the right like all lines must always go—are rapidly going extinct.
Fandom takes different forms in different places. Collecting memorabilia or other artifacts, for instance, or self-publishing fan fiction based on the given universe or characters inside it. Magic’s particularly virulent strain of fandom combines both these elements into something that is now so large a presence that it dictates how Magic itself is designed: a fan-made format of the game called “Commander.”
Too quickly: Commander is a version of Magic that features 100-card decks instead of 60sixty cards, allows for only one copy of any given card rather than the standard four, can feature up to four players at once instead of just two, and has players designate a “Commander” card that exists outside their deck and which dictates the identity and strategy of the deck as a whole. The priority of most of these games is not purely winning—it’s making sure that everyone’s deck gets to “do its thing” so that every player has a good time, geared more toward social interaction amongst players and celebrating whatever splashy or humorous theme you’ve built a deck around. Like squirrels, for instance. Or trying to set up elaborate combinations that kill everyone at once, for laughs.
In concept, it’s a great time. If you have an attachment to a given strategy or character, you can design a deck around it and have a great night with your friends. Media around the game has responded accordingly—YouTube and other platforms’ Magic-related content revolves first and foremost around having fun playing Commander. It’s also a natural response to Magic’s officially sanctioned competitive scene, which involves constantly needing to find or purchase new cards, can feel cutthroat, and quickly snuffs out any strategy a player tries “just for fun.” Commander is where you run flea-flickers and double reverses in the backyard; the actual game of Magic is running inside zone for four solid yards to set up second-and-six.
And for a long while, this balance worked fine for everyone. Commander was the casual entry point that brought people in and led them to try Magic for the first time, and if they wanted to “get serious,” they would soon find the game’s sanctioned ways to play. Crucially, they were playing Commander with cards designed for real Magic—this was a derivative, fan-made format after all, not something that required attention from the game’s creators.
But then they did acknowledge it. The line has to go up, after all, so how could the designers of the game afford not to pay attention to a rapidly growing player base that was right there asking to be recognized? Never mind that these people were not playing Magic—these were paying customers. Commander-specific products and sets of cards appeared on the release calendar. Suddenly, and subtly at first, the fandom had a seat at the creative table. And this, whether in games or films or book publishing or any other creative pursuit, will always be the death of one thing and the birth of something else.
Fandom, if you let it, will swallow you and your editorial discretion whole. I know this because, in the hours I don’t spend trying to make Golgari midrange decks work in a Standard format that has long ago accelerated past them, I work in book publishing.
At one point in book publishing’s even recent history, it was the publisher’s job to introduce readers to things they might like to read, even if the book came from an author they hadn’t encountered before or featured a style that might at first scan as unusual. This is for instance what used to be exciting about the “debut novel”: a publisher whose reputation and editorial eye you trusted was saying to you, “here is someone and their work whom we think are quite exciting, and we think you will too.” You, the reader, trusted the work that went into that curation, quality control, development, promotion—and on the flip side, doing those things carefully was the essence and responsibility of good publishing. Not every book or author needed to be an immediate sales success; artists were worth investing in even before they became financially successful, and some books got published just because editors believed they might add to the reputation of theto the shop to have done so.
Then Goodreads happened.
By this I mean: an entire technological and social apparatus appeared that allowed for publishers (and of course authors) to hear directly from the customers in so forceful a way that it began to affect publisher behavior. This featured Goodreads itself of course as the initial site of Yelp-style consumer reviews of books, but then social media too: “Book Twitter” as stratified across different genres and target age ranges of fiction, then “Bookstagram,” then “BookTok,” and now it is impossible for editors to make an acquisitions decision about a manuscript without considering how it will be discussed, indexed, and rallied around or not in these online spaces.
Publishers will cancel book deals based on social media outrage. You’ll find “As Seen on BookTok” display shelves in Target and Barnes &and Noble. Authors themselves are now evaluated on “platform,” which very frequently means “online footprint,” and an ever-increasing amount of the onus of promoting their work falls on them via these channels. All of this is, in my view, a full abdication of editorial responsibility on the part of the publisher. Expertise and creative control have been outsourced to a vague notion of “what readers want,” a question that never has a correct answer and leads only to risk-aversion and triangulation. It is the announcement that you have stopped proactively designing something and have started trying to fulfill expectations from elsewhere. And once fandom gets in the room, it is very difficult to escort it back out.
That’s barely a figure of speech—publishing now really will literally spend exorbitant sums to acquire and repackage fan fiction. Just this winter at the London Book Fair, publishers bid auction-style for a novel titled Wolf Boy. It’s an adaptation of a Harry Potter fanfic posted by an author with the username MsKingBean89 on AO3, aarguably the world’s most popular fan-fiction website. The rumored price level of the auction for the book is easily into seven figures. And this isn’t even the first time that publishers have made this highly specific play: last year Penguin Random House acquired Manacled, another piece of Harry Potter fan fiction, on the strength of its preexisting Goodreads and TikTok reception.
Commander, which again started essentially as interactive Magic fan fiction, is now by far the most played format of the game. Its presence dwarfs that of sanctioned formats like “Standard” or “Modern,” despite those being—and there’s no non-snotty way to say this—the actual game. And the participants, while playing something that looks a whole lot like Magic, are inarguably playing something else. They’re playing a game with different objectives, and they hold different desires for what a Magic card should be or do.
The stewards of Magic have responded to this surge in the same way book publishers did: they’ve tried to feed a beast that will never be sated. As a result, card design has spiraled ever outward in both art and mechanics. Maybe the cards should have Marvel superheroes on them; if they’re fans of one thing, they’re probably fans of another thing too, right? Or Final Fantasy, or Lord of the Rings, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Avatar: The Last Airbender. The brand-collaboration possibilities are infinite once you’re for sale and open to suggestion. Better make sure too that the cards are “fun” enough for Commander—powerful abilities on the most recognizable figures in order to produce splashy, satisfying interactions for people with no interest in Magic’s original concept. (One imperfect but still useful way to track this metric is a simple count of how many words appear on the cards. Paragraph-long descriptions of effects set in tiny font now replace the clean keywords and short phrases that appeared on cards from a cycle ago.) And if those overpowered cards with a different company’s characters on them affect a game of Standard Magic, well, that’s a drop in the bucket when the line is otherwise going up.
To design a card with this culture in mind is to complete the same fandom call-and-response circuit that I believe has deeply harmed the artistic horizons of book publishing. The fans, whose prior role was to interact with pieces produced by a design and creative team, grew large and loud enough to dictate behavior. But that shouldn’t even matter, because editorial discretion is or should be the voice that tunes out noise while you make something worthwhile based on your own vision and skill. That voice is gone. Contemporary book publishing has not been the same since. Magic won’t be, either.
Players will point to different moments, sets, or even individual cards that signaled when they noticed it had all gone haywire. To me there is just one, a Wolf Boy-scale fan-fiction acquisition of Magic’s very own, a card that not only dominated gameplay but announced that there is no escape from the Fortnite-ification of a body of work that really did once matter on its own terms.
The One Ring.
You need not have ever heard of this Magic card to know already what it is. Tolkien, obviously, the headline card from the official Lord of the Rings branded set released in 2023. Preexisting lore collided with card design here to create an inevitable problem: you can’t invoke the ring from Lord of the Rings as a piece in your game without also making it overwhelmingly powerful.
It was. For a solid year of competitive play, The One Ring was the most powerful card-draw engine in Magic, while also being “indestructible,” while also offering the player who cast it “protection from everything,” a phrase I doubt needs explanation to non-players for why that might be “good.” It had a practically negligible downside that could be easily worked around, and a casting cost so flexible that any deck in any color could play it, regardless of strategy. That last part is key—if in designing your deck of Magic: The Gathering cards you were choosing not to include maybe the most recognizable object from the most recognizable series in all of fantasy literature, you were making a mistake. You could not avoid the aesthetic dissonance of The One Ring appearing in Magic’s most important and visible events; it was a catastrophic artistic breach paired with a completely imbalanced spike in power level in order to justify it.
In case you’re wondering if designers viewed this ever-tightening knot as a problem: Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth was immediately upon release the best-selling set of Magic cards of all time.
That’s a way of saying that the correction isn’t coming. In fact, no one with control over the game’s trajectory even believes a problem exists. Why would they? The strain of fandom for whom the cards are now designed are happy to see a Ninja Turtle they recognize from somewhere else, sales are better than ever, the line only goes up. Book publishing consistently reports healthy sales most quarters too, by the way. Though in both cases, as someone invested not in a corporate conglomerate’s bottom line but in the idea that what gets made matters just as much as what someone else can sell it for, I’m inclined to ask: sales of what?
It didn’t need this. That’s what kills me. Magic contains its own beautiful, layered multiverse; within its own tight editorial bounds are more characters and settings and stories than could ever go stale, each ironically possessing devoted fans of their own. But the infinite brilliance of the game’s own core design doomed it—the more artistically dynamic and breathable you make something, the easier it is for capital’s agents to find a way to stick Spider-man in it. This might even delight some of Spider-man’s fans, who probably don’t really like card games but would happily open a box of these cards for fun. Another unit sold. Look how the game keeps growing!
I would like to believe that this ends somewhere, that this age of extracting every last drop of profit out of a beautiful thing they’ve already bled dry will run its course. Endless crossover, remake, reskinning, whatever other form of zombified content production in spaces where art used to be—in my heart I don’t think people actually want this, no matter how far up and to the right the various lines of their choosing continue to go. But that shift, when it comes, will arrive alongside the death of things we once held dear. I hold Magic dear; I know I’m a sucker for doing so, the way we’re all suckers for caring about anything even while we watch it destroy itself. I’ll spend the rest of my life looking elsewhere for the heartbeat that made Magic special, in the things people create in defiance of a culture that would rather you instead ingest the slop. I won’t. I don’t think you will either. And I still think that strong editorial vision can show people that they deserve better and should expect better. Get the fandom out of the room. In the end, they’ll thank you for it.
Until that day comes, if you want to see Sephiroth fight Squidward, boy do I ever have the card game for you.
Erik Hane is a writer and literary agent in Minneapolis. His fiction and essays have appeared in Triangle House, Welcome to Hell World, Mount Hope, and many other outlets. He is a co-host of Print Run Podcast, a show about the publishing industry.