This Joke Was Il

Maro, as a straight white old guy who’s been playing since The Dark, I wanted to thank you and everyone else making Magic for the diversity and inclusion on the cards. Characters like Ral, Nissa, Nico, Daretti, and others mean a great deal to other players (and for me they are just great characters), please continue to show everyone how much variety the multiverse has room for.

We have no plans to change that. Some of us still recognize that diversity, equality, and inclusion are good and valuable things.

Need is and always has been the wrong metric.

We don't NEED movies or most any art at all. I forget which ancient Greek it was that settled on needing not even a cup to drink to from once he learned to use his hands. We NEED very little, and that's assuming the the need at all is to survive.

I want six+ more sequels to James Gunn's The Suicide Squad, and I'm interested in seeing one or two more of those holiday portals from The Nightmare Before Christmas, amongst other as yet non existent concepts from my own head or other stories. Obviously I don't NEED them, but if done well, it would be enormous fun and/ or satisfying, and that's what I want.

Still my favorite card.

Hedge Troll (Planar Chaos Promos) - Paolo Parente

More cards with art by Paolo Parente on Scryfall

Highlighting this bit, but the whole thing is amazing. Another killer from Rosewater.

"But why are we “making it the forefront of their character”? We’re not. We’re making it a part of their character. But in a world where you’re not used to ever seeing it, it feels louder than it is. Things that are a natural part of the world that you’re used to feel like the background of the story because you understand the context to it."

I want to speak out against the whole push towards DEI. I feel that ever since you made the push to make identity the forefront of a character it has hurt the stories you tell. Captain Sisay's race was never the focus of her character and she was a complete badass! And I fear if you did it over again Gerrard would be trans, black and disabled just because. It also cheapens the stories of world devastation when characters worry more about their gender than Bolas destroying everything.

The reason I started this blog is so we can have frank conversations about things, so please let’s talk about this.

Imagine if every time you turned on the TV or watched a movie, no one looked like you. For some of us, that’s never happened. We see ourselves constantly, so it’s hard to truly understand what not seeing yourself represented in media is like.

I do have a personal window to this experience. While I am white and male, there’s an area where I am the minority - my religion. Jews are just under two and a half percent of the US population. I have had many experiences where I’ve been in situations where everything is geared towards a group I do not belong to, and zero consideration is given that not everyone at that event is part of the majority.

You just feel invisible and like an outsider. It’s not a great feeling. And I just experience it a tiny portion of time, only things that are geared specifically towards something religious. Most minorities have this feeling all the time, whenever they’re outside their personal community.

Now imagine, after years of not seeing yourself ever, you finally see someone that looks like you, but nothing about the character rings remotely true. They don’t sound like you, they don’t act like you, the facts about their day-to-day life are just wrong. It’s clear whoever wrote the character didn’t truly understand the lived experience of the character, so the character feels fake.

You bring up Sisay. Michael Ryan and I didn’t technically create Sisay (she played a small role in the Mirage story), but we did do a lot to flesh out her character as the creators of the Weatherlight Saga. We turned her from a minor character into a major one.

And while I’m proud, in general, of our work on the Weatherlight Saga, I don’t think we did justice to Sisay as a character. Neither Michael nor I have any knowledge of what it’s like to be a black woman. Nor did we ever talk to someone who did.

And if you’re someone like us that has no knowledge of that experience, you probably didn’t notice. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

Imagine if we made a movie about your life, and we just made everything up. We invented people you never knew, we gave you a job you never had, and we had you say things you’d never say. The movie might even be a good movie, but your response would be, but that’s not my life - that’s not me.

Now imagine we put the movie out, and people that never met you assumed that was what you were like. When people met you for the first time, they assumed things, because, you know, they’d seen the movie.

That’s what misrepresenting people does. It not only makes them feel not seen, it falsely represents them, spreading lies, often stereotypes, making people believe things about them that aren’t true.

Our move towards diversity is just us trying to better reflect the world and the people in it. We’re trying to do to everyone else what a certain portion of people get every day without ever having to think about it.

But why are we “making it the forefront of their character”? We’re not. We’re making it a part of their character. But in a world where you’re not used to ever seeing it, it feels louder than it is. Things that are a natural part of the world that you’re used to feel like the background of the story because you understand the context to it.

If a man kisses his wife before going off to a battle, that’s not a big deal. It’s just a thing a husband might do to his wife when he leaves. It’s not the forefront of his character. It’s just part of his life. But you’ve seen it hundreds of times, so it feels normal.

When someone does something that isn’t your lived experience it pulls focus. It seems like a big deal, but only because it’s new to you. It’s just as mundane a thing to that character as the man kissing his wife is to him.

Even the turn “pushing” implies that it’s unnaturally here, that we’re forcing something that naturally shouldn’t be. But why? That thing exists naturally in the real world, and it doesn’t make the real world any less. Maybe you’re less aware of it, but is making you aware of how others live their life “pushing” something on you?

How you live your life is represented constantly, everywhere. Why isn’t over-representing your experience at the expense of everyone else’s “pushing” it? Why is media only being the experience of those in power the “proper way”?

Having more depth and variety doesn’t lessen stories. It makes them deeper, more rich, more nuanced. In short, it makes them better stories. In my former life, I was a professional writer. I took a lot of writing classes. One of the truism of writing is “speaking truth leads to better stories”.

There’s another famous quote: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” You’re used to being over-represented, so being a little less over-represented feels like something has been taken from you. But really it hasn’t. Having a better sense of the rest of the world comes with a lot of benefits.

I’ll use food as an example. Let’s say all you were ever exposed to was the food of your heritage. Yeah, that food is really good, but sometimes isn’t it nice to eat foods of other nationalities? Isn’t your life better that you have a choice? Isn’t your exposure and access to the food of other nationalities a positive in your life?

Exposure to variety is a positive. It allows you to learn about things you didn’t know, experience things things you’ve never experienced, and get a better sense of understanding of your friends and neighbors.

Our actions are not to harm anyone, and if you think that’s what we’re doing, please take a minute to actually absorb what I’m saying. You’ve spent your whole life metaphorically eating one type of food, and we’re just trying to show you how much you’ve missed out on.

And while this might not impact you directly, we’re making a whole bunch of people felt seen. We’re bringing joy. Think of it this way. We make a lot of cards. Not every card is for you. But if it makes someone else happy, if they get to include it in a deck, and it makes Magic better for them, how is it harming you that we include it? You have so many cards that you can play.

To this poster or people that share their viewpoint, the narrative that a gain for someone else is an attack on you is just not true. As I just pointed out above, you play a game all about personal choice, about players getting to choose how they play and enjoy the game. Why should life be any different than Magic?

Thanks for reading.

This is a real bummer; at least I'm in good company.

How do I make it clear I also find it mind boggling that the game keeps printing color pie breaks? It normalizes the breaks and exacerbates the noise calling for more breaks and the precedence of the first break.

Preaching to the choir.

This is critical for everyone to understand about social media.

Any engagement encourages the algorithm. It's a skill to cultivate only your stuff, and on most meta platforms, impossible by design. They sneak (and often sledgehammer) stuff in to just engage you, especially stuff you might hate.

An explainer for why I don't fuck with algorithmic social media

If you give a pigeon a little button to peck that releases pigeon food, it will push the button when it's hungry.

If you give a pigeon a button to peck that releases food every 5 pecks, it will peck it more often.

If you give a pigeon a button to peck that releases food at a randomly selected, always shifting number of pecks, the pigeon will peck that fucking button all day long.

Algorithm based social media is not set up to give you the best most fun stuff all the time, it is set up to give you a bunch of stress and nothingness with a randomized reward of something that actually makes you happy, because they want you pecking that button all damn day. It is a slot machine of content, meant to keep you putting in quarters made of your time and attention till you've nothing yet.

At least if I'm having a shit day on my own Tumblr feed it's because I've made a bad choice about who to follow and I can fix it.

I love this guy.

rick astley did a cover of pink pony club and i loved him singing about having fun on stage in his heels

Honestly, this sounds fucking FANTASTIC to me, and we should do it. Cry harder, Mitch.

This is why I'm here

I truly am obsessed with how Knives Out was like. Hello Daniel Craig, man who has spent the past two decades of his career being alternately beaten up and objectified playing an action hero with no personality. Would you like to please put on a shirt and an incomprehensible vaguely Texan accent and flex your character acting dark comedy muscles as well as your pecs for a while. And he’s like BOY WOULD I and they made a work of art. Also love that they put Chris Evans in sweaters. Get your beefcakes then dress them nice make them soft and give them some bonkers character work to do it’s what cinema needs more of

In the wake of retiring Regenerate (my historically favorite mechanic, near to banding and retrace), adding protective activations and including the tap clause is such a healthy design decision. Instead of straight blanking card removal, it turns it into a Twiddle/ single tap down event, letting you prevent an attack or prevent it from blocking.

Such solid design IMO. I love this addendum to indestructible or any other protective activations, like this Hexproof one.

Prognostic Sphinx

Artist: Jesper Ejsing TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link