Trivia / Magic: The Gathering

• Ascended Fan Nickname:
  • Morphling earned the nickname "Superman" for its high power level at the time. So when the designers made an enchantment that could give Morphling's abilities to any of your creatures, they called it Pemmin's Aura—an anagram for "I am Superman."
  • For decades, players had been using the term "Mill" to refer to the action of putting cards from the top of your library into your graveyard in reference to the card Millstone; however, it would take Wizards of the Coast until 2020 to print tournament-legal cards with "mill" as a keyword.
  • There was no definitive name for the various color combinations of Magic (i.e. Blue-Green, Red-Black) until the original Ravnica block released, at which point people began using the names of various guilds to refer to those color combinations (Simic for Blue-Green, Rakdos for Red-Black, etc). Shards of Alara and Khans of Tarkir gave rise to similar naming conventions for three-color combinations, and these have been recognized by WotC in various places, such as naming the preconstructed Challenger Decks things such as "Izzet Phoenix" (a red-blue deck focusing on the card Arclight Phoenix) or "Gruul Stompy" (red-green focusing on making creatures huge and overrunning your opponent with them).
• Ascended House Rules:
  • Rules taken for granted today like the limit of 4 of each card and "play or draw" (the choice between going first or being able to draw an extra card) started as house rules.
  • The fan-made format Elder Dragon Highlander, later renamed Commander, had its own official unofficial rules put together by people outside of Wizards of the Coast. It has since been promoted to an official format that gets dedicated sets and decks.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • Mark Rosewater has confirmed that particularly-poorly-received mechanics are less likely to return for future sets.
  • Wizards dropped Kiora's last name after it was brought to their attention that it resembled a Maori word that touched on a central religious concept.
    Doug Beyer: If we learn that any of our worlds, terms, or characters disrespectfully tread on the sincere beliefs of our fellow humans in contemporary, living cultures, we feel it’s important to take steps to correct that as best we can.
  • When War of the Spark: Forsaken released, it sunk the popular Chandra/Nissa ship in favor of Chandra/Gideon. While this would be controversial on its own, it did so by insisting that Chandra only liked "decidedly male" hunks and had no interest in women, which contradicted many previous stories where Chandra was depicted as pansexual. This caused outrage not only in the game's audience, but within Magic's own Creative staff. After an apology from Wizards of the Coast, future stories completely ignored it, still portraying Chandra as pansexual. Since the War of the Spark novels weren't very popular or well-received in the first place, it's now viewed as a meme-worthy anomaly that's completely ignorable rather than any earnest attempt at Hide Your Lesbians.
  • In 2020, seven cards from 1994 and earlier were effectively removed from the game over racially or culturally insensitive names. These cards were banned in all formats they were previously legal in, had their art removed from Gatherer (Magic's official card search tool), and a promise was made that the cards would never be reprinted. Wizards was also clear that they were banning these seven cards first and other bans over similar concerns were explicitly not off the table. This included cards like Jihad, Pradesh Gypsies, and the infamous Invoke Prejudice, which features an expy of The Klan. This was somewhat followed up when it was revealed that select Dominaria United collector's boosters would feature cards from Legends packs that had been sitting in storage for almost three decades. This set is notably the one in which Invoke Prejudice and a couple other banned cards are from. They were withheld and presumably destroyed. Also withheld were other cards with art by Invoke Prejudice's illustrator Harold McNeil, who is an alleged Neo-Nazi based on his other, non-Magic artwork, suggesting McNeil himself has also been disowned and Un-Person'd by Wizards.
• Banned in China: For a while, it was illegal in China to depict human skulls in artwork, and some cards' art had to be modified to accommodate the Chinese regulations.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: The game is successful enough to eventually let Wizards of the Coast buy Dungeons & Dragons, and became so lucrative that Hasbro snatched up the company. Magic has consistently been the company's top-selling game since Hasbro bought them out.
• Contest Winner Cameo: Each winner of the Magic Invitational (the game's most exclusive tournament) got to design a card and appear in its artwork. Notable examples include Solemn Simulacrum, Dark Confidant, and Snapcaster Mage.
• Creator Backlash:
  • A number of older cards had elements that could be interpreted as racist, most notably Invoke Prejudice, which depicted a knockoff Ku Klux Klan. While updated production standards ensured such cards wouldn't be created in future, they hung around as uncomfortable background facts of the game until 2020, when they were banned from all official tournament play and had their art unpersoned from Gatherer.
  • Mark Rosewater also has a few sets he isn't very proud of, chief among them Unhinged ^note Which was a commercial failure and which featured the hated Gotcha mechanic, ultimately killing Un-sets for thirteen years until Unstable and Battle for Zendikar ^note Which had numerous problems, from weak cards to bad draft gameplay to a story which largely ignored the charm and flavor of the original Zendikar block in favor of just focusing on the battle between the Gatewatch and the Eldrazi. He's also shown some annoyance with the Gatewatch's Fan Nickname of "Jacetice League".
  • Aaron Forsythe has called the Cascade mechanic^note A mechanic which allows you to exile cards from the top of your library until you find a spell with lesser mana value, and then cast that spell for free. from the Alara block a failure of design; Cascade was meant to make games more chaotic, but instead, people built Cascade decks specifically to cast spells with Suspend^note Spells with Suspend often have no mana cost at all, but allow you to exile them for their Suspend cost to cast them on a later turn from the Time Spiral block, many of which were mechanical Call Backs to powerful cards from the early days of Magic.
• Demand Overload: The game's early days were plagued with supply issues. Wizards is on the record stating that they expected most players to buy a starter deck and maybe a few booster packs, but that was all. It also created much of the early game's severe Competitive Balance issues, as they planned for "balance by rarity". Wizards knew that certain cards could be game-breakers in large enough quantity, but they didn't expect people to buy hundreds of booster packs at a time to load their deck with just three different types of cards (such as in the infamous Channel-Fireball deck). This has greatly improved over time.
• Development Hell: A live-action film adaptation was announced in the 2000s but nothing much else came of it for years. Fox would pick up the project in 2014...then do nothing with it for some years afterward. After the studio's merger with Disney, the film was scrapped and the rights returned to Hasbro, who opted to produce an animated series instead.
• Distanced from Current Events: As a part of collaboration with Toho, Ikoria: Land of Behemoths featured a set of alternate-art cards featuring various Kaiju - one of them nicknamed Spacegodzilla, Death Corona (after its Breath Weapon, the Corona Beam). Unfortunately, this card ended up revealed right in the middle of the COVID-19 Pandemic, causing the name to hit way too close to home for many people. Wizards quickly admitted the poor timing and announced that card will be renamed for online release and future reprints.
• Flip-Flop of God: Earlier Word of God statements about the Portal Three Kingdoms set, which features characters from the Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms, said that it took place on a plane very similar to Ancient China (like how the Arabian Nights expansion takes place on Rabiah, a plane reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights). More recent Word of God is that the set takes places on Earth in Ancient China and isn't canonical to the Magic multiverse, like Universes Beyond sets.
• Follow the Leader: Magic was the "leader". See the Collectible Card Game article for those who followed.
• He Also Did: Mark Rosewater, Head Designer of Magic R&D, was a writer for Roseanne for a short time before he worked at Wizards of the Coast. This fact has become something of a Running Gag in his weekly column on the official website.
• In Memoriam:
  • The Planar Chaos card Timbermare was designed in honor of the memory of Marilyn "Mare" Wakefield, wife of pro player Jamie Wakefield (who was well-known for playing green stompy decks that used cards like Timbermare). Marilyn loved horses.
  • Sheldon Menery, one of the main proponents of the Commander format and a founding member of the Commander Rules Committee, died from cancer in 2023; in early 2024, a Secret Lair dedicated to him, complete with cards associated with him and some that he helped design, was announced, with proceeds benefiting the American Cancer Society.
• Late Export for You: The exclusive rights for publishing Arena in China, Hong Kong, Macau and all of Southeast Asia were given to Chinese company Tencent. This resulted in players from these regions being separated from them after the closed beta… or at least it would, if not for Tencent delaying the open beta for Arena months after it started for the rest of the world. SEA players were less than pleased with Wizards effectively grouping them with China.
• No Dub for You: Starting in the 2020s, Wizards of the Coast has begun cutting back on how many languages are supported by paper Magic products; by Q4 2024, Portugese, Chinese (both traditional and simplified), Korean and Russian will no longer be supported.
• Official Fan-Submitted Content:
  • Magic has held a "You Make the Card" event four times, allowing players to submit and vote on cards that would eventually become Forgotten Ancient, Crucible of Worlds, Vanish Into Memory, and Waste Not .
  • The now-discontinued annual Magic Invitational tournament invited the game's top players to compete for the chance to submit their own custom card to the game and get their face featured in its artwork. Similarly, the 2018 world champion, Javier Dominguez got his likeness on a card in Throne of Eldraine, though he did not get the chance to design it.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Many current members of the R&D team that creates the game started off as regular players. Notably, contestants in the Great Designer Search received internships in R&D as a reward for winning a card design competition, and are now full-time employees.
  • The Canadian comedy group LoadingReadyRun, after making a sketch about their love of Magic, was been approached by Wizards and asked to do a whole miniseries (and later full series) of them. They also started to host official "Pre-Prerelease" events, which showcase new card sets several weeks before they're available in stores.
• Referenced by...:
  • Knights of Buena Vista mentions playing "Sorcery The Rendezvous", a Bland-Name Product of Magic.
  • In one chapter of No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, Tomoko is seen playing a trading card game whose card style looks suspiciously like that of Magic's. In the anime, this is expanded into the colors, and the black mana symbol is visible on a few cards.
  • Okiku, Star Apprentice: As mentioned in the caption for an official screenshot:
    Apparently, I have a thing for Magic: The Gathering references.
  • Touhou Lost Branch Of Legend: The game uses the five colors of mana, Black, White, Red, Green and Blue, but that's just the basics:
    • The achievements for having 5 mana gems of a color base reference the basic lands: Black: "The Bottomless Swamp", Red: "The Endless Mountains", Green: "The Ancient Forest", White: "The Boundless Plain", Blue: "Islands Not Found In Gensokyo".
    • The Black Lotus exhibit, whose Flavor Text references the effect of the card of the same name:
      Wouldn't it be nice if it could add three mana of any one color?
  • El Goonish Shive has had two whole storylines that feature "Magickal Gatherings", a Bland-Name Product of Magic plus miscellaneous strips referencing it.
  • Destroy All Humankind. They Can't Be Regenerated. revolves almost entirely around the game, as the story takes place in 1998 and focuses on two middle school students as they bond over playing it. The title itself is a reference to a common ability description found on most Magic cards.
  • Fallout 2 had a Bland-Name Product version of Magic called Tragic: the Garnering that could be played against Wooz in the town of Gecko. Funnily enough, Fallout: New Vegas has a lore entry that states that Tragic was created in 2023... the same year that an official "Universes Beyond" Crossover between Magic and the Fallout franchise was announced.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Wizards has cut ties with a few artists, over the years:
  • Harold McNeill worked on a few pieces of art in the 90's, and then it came out that he was a neo-Nazi. Among the cards he did art for was Invoke Prejudice, which is now banned for cultural sensitivity reasons.
  • Terese Nielsen became controversial in 2018 due to her political views, which include support for QAnon and trans-exclusionary radical feminism. The situation got worse in 2019, when she gifted art to the far-right YouTube channel, Edge of Wonder. Doug Beyer eventually confirmed that "[Wizards hasn't] commissioned new art from Terese Nielsen in quite a while... The last product that will have any reprint art from her is this fall with Zendikar Rising."
  • After Noah Bradley confirmed allegations of sexual misconduct with members of the Magic and artist community, Wizards made an official statement that they would they would stop commissioning artwork from him and reprinting his work.
  • Jason Felix was found to have plagiarized fanart of Nicol Bolas for his rendition of the card Crux of Fate, as was proven by the fact that Bolas in the art had five fingers instead of his canonical three, which was a mistake the original artist also made. Wizards announced they were suspending further work with him as a result.
  • Fay Dalton plagiarized from multiple artworks of Trouble in Pairs, with sources consisting of the cover of a Cyberpunk 2020 novel drawn by Donato Giancola, a Morton Kunstler painting, and a magazine cover drawn by Will Hulsey, among others. Wizards announced that Dalton was no longer working with them as a result of this.
• Schedule Slip:
  • Heads I Win, Tails You Lose was a Secret Lair Commander deck sold in November of 2021; rather than release with the rest of the Secret Lair product that following April, it didn't arrive until a year later for undisclosed reasons. Some people who ordered the 30th Anniversary Secret Lair in October of 2022 got it before Heads I Win, Tails You Lose. Going forward, Secret Lair Commander products will be pre-printed in limited quantities to avert this issue.
  • Unfinity was originally meant to release on April 1st, 2022, as would be fitting for an Un-set; however, issues with the way in which the stickers included with the set were printed forced the release back to October of that year.
• Sleeper Hit: Wizards of the Coast wasn't big until got a hold of Magic, and at that point their only call to fame was being the holder of the Ars Magica RPG franchise. A decade later, it was big enough for Hasbro to come calling.
• Throw It In!: Mindless Null, Zendikar's much-maligned three-mana 2/2 creature with a drawback, was originally intended to cost two mana. Due to a typographical error, its mana cost was accidentally increased by 1. R&D decided to stick with the mistyped version, and the rest is history.
• What Could Have Been:
  • When making the first true expansion, Arabian Nights, the idea was tossed around that cards from different sets would have different card backs to determine what set they were from (Arabian Nights's was going to be purple with gold accents). The change was averted at the last minute, seeing how the different card backs—as deck protectors weren't that widely used yet—would help players fix their decks. Instead, we were given the expansion symbols that appear on the right side of the card between the art and the text box. And the rest is history.
  • Originally, Withengar's art was going to depict him as being much smaller and missing a finger, which was supposed to have been the blade that he was sealed in. When the artist, Eric Deschamps, was told to redraw Withengar so that he was as big as a building, Withengar's fingers were much larger than knives, so Deschamps drew Withengar without any missing fingers and redrew the blade.
  • At some point, there was speculation around the Time Spiral block that there would be a sixth purple color to reflect the universe coming apart at the seams. The R&D had playtested and created a few cards with the color, but it was eventually dropped.
  • Arkhos and Mongseng are two planes that were introduced in the Planechase products, and were meant to be potential locations for future stories. However they were later reworked into Theros and Tarkir respectively, for various undisclosed behind-the-scenes reasons. It's been stated that canonically all planes coexist within the multiverse, but Akrhos and Mongseng have effectively been replaced by the others and will not be visited.
  • A design concept for a land which was nicknamed "Barry's Land" was brought about: being a basic land that taps for colorless. For years, the idea was thought about, until Battle for Zendikar replaced the idea with Wastes lands.
  • Depending on the choice of the players, any of the four Ixalan factions (the Brazen Coalition, the Empire of the Sun, the River Heralds, or the Legion of Dusk) could have taken over Orazca. Alternate endings for the three losing factions were published on Magic's story website and are considered non-canon.
  • Both Dominaria and War of the Spark were planned to be two sets long, in fitting with the two-block paradigm - however that quickly proved unpopular and changes were made to implement the three-and-one model. Dominaria became a standalone set while codename "Salad" was replaced with Core Set 2019, and the War of the Spark follwup codenamed "Cookies" was dropped entirely, with Throne of Eldraine moving forward instead.
  • Throne of Eldraine was originally going to be two sets, and the figure responsible for the disappearance of King Kenrith would have been a character called "The Whispering Witch" - though card art would show that she was Sheoldred, the black Praetor of New Phyrexia. However several changes were implemented during the development, including condensing the story into a single set and making it a Breather Episode since it was the immediate follow-up to the War of the Spark storyline that had been brewing for the past decade. Instead the first warning sign of New Phyrexia's invasion was Vorinclex appearing two years later on Kaldheim, and Sheoldred's new card was not debuted until the invasion of Dominaria in Dominaria United. In addition, the original plan was for Will to be killed by Sheoldred during Throne of Eldraine, with the event being Rowan's Start of Darkness.
  • Prismari was originally conceptualized as the "hard science" college of the five Strixhaven colleges (as Blue and Red encompass most of the game's Elemental Powers), before becoming the arts college in the final product; the "hard science" theme would instead be split between Witherbloom and Quandrix.
  • Due to the original Kamigawa block being so divisive both with players and developers, when the design team was planning out Neon Dynasty there was a distinct possibility that they would be asked to make a new Japan-inspired plane for the tropes they wanted to explore rather than return to Kamigawa. However, the pitch was good enough that marketing and development thought it was worth the risk to go back to that well.
  • It's mentioned in a Streets of New Capenna preview article that originally the follow-up to Innistrad: Crimson Vow was going to be another two-set arc, this time set on Jace's home plane of Vryn.
  • For Streets of New Capenna, the Brokers were originally pitched as straight-up Corrupt Cops, since being the White-centered faction they had to use law to do crime. By that point, however, controversies regarding police brutality in the United States, such as the killings of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, convinced Wizards that this wouldn't be a smart idea, which is why the Brokers became a corrupt law firm instead.
  • Key art for March of the Machine indicated the possibility of cross-planar team-ups between legendary creatures, with one particular piece of art showing characters from Ravnica, Kaladesh, Kamigawa, and Kaldheim, among several other planes, launching an attack on Phyrexia simultaneously. While cross-planar team-ups were considered at some point in the set's development, they were ultimately dropped.
  • Also in March of the Machine, there was going to be a Battle card based on Rabiah, the infamous plane from the Arabian Nights expansion. The card ultimately became Invasion of Eldraine, as documented here.
  • While The One Ring is an Artifact of Doom in Lord of the Rings, its Magic implementation in the form of "the ring tempts you" has no downside — neither for you nor for your Ring-bearer. They indeed tried to avert Gameplay and Story Segregation by giving it negative effects, but it made people not want to use the mechanic.
  • Orginally in Wilds of Eldraine Kellan was set up to be an expy of Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk, however at some point they decided to have him be one of the main characters for the Omenpath Arc and changed his story, instead making the Ravnican Troyan be the Jack expy.
  • Outlaws of Thunder Junction was originally planned to have an epilogue set akin to March of the Machine: Aftermath, and the cards had already been designed...and then Aftermath turned out to be an incredible flop—Mark Rosewater even calling the set "hated" by most of the players. Because it was too late to scrap the mini-set entirely, instead the cards were incorporated into the main set, taking the place of specific reprint cards in the regular boosters.
• Working Title: Every set has a codename that the designers and developers use before the final name is decided, a list of which can be seen here.
  • Beginning with Mercadian Masques, each three-set expansion block got a three-word phrase; for example, Ravnica, Guildpact, and Dissension were "Control", "Alt", and "Delete," respectively. With the advent of two-set blocks, the phrases evolved: the three blocks codenamed "Blood", "Sweat", and "Tears" were split up, with "Blood" and "Sweat" composing one block, and the next block codenamed "Tears" and "Fears". These sets would become Battle for Zendikar, Oath of the Gatewatch, Shadows over Innistrad, and Eldritch Moon respectively.
  • Following War of the Spark, the codenames went through an alphabetical list named after sports - Throne of Eldraine was "Archery", Theros: Beyond Death was "Baseball", and so on. This is planned to last up to the 2026 spring set, currently known as "Ziplining".
  • Other sets also get codenames, though usually unrelated to each other due to not following a set schedule like the expansions do. Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms was "Zebra", Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate was Pentagon, and Unfinity was "Umbrella".

---