I feel like the people who got to watch the original star wars movies.
I have the occasional gripe... like one too many catch phrases,or too many attempts to get cheers out of the audience... but
They really went all in on this one. What an event.
The site will be shutting down but the staff of Salvation are working on a new site to be released prior to the shut down. We will have more info closer to the release and I will personally make posts in this community for those interested in following to the new site.
I appreciate you (and the rest of the MTGS team). It's really nice that you are all working on a replacement to this forum that all of us out here hold very near and dear. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
Hey all, I haven’t been the most active on here lately, but I still wanted to share an event I’m hosting next Saturday 8/24 in Worcester, MA. It’s a memorial Magic tournament for a friend who passed a few years ago. I think a few of you are in the area, so it’s be awesome if you could make it. Even if you can’t, feel free to share it around. Thanks! Details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/364590500827485/?ti=icl
Not sure if it's even allowed to discuss stuff like that here, but while browsing Legends cards on Scryfall I could possibly use for my old school Battlebox I noticed that the card Imprison got a special treatment so you could only see it after going past a 'snowflake wall' where you have to agree that it's ok to show you art that depicts racism. At first I thought this was just Scryfall being oversensitive, but it turned out it was a decision by WotC and it's the same on almost all other Magic related sites. Most major sites like Card Kingdom or TCGPlayer even refuse to sell cards that are deemed racist or cultural insensitive by WotC.
After looking up reasons I found out that Imprison - which just shows a black guy who is imprisoned in a rather uncomfortable way, but which has no signs of racism at all unless you think a black guy who is imprisoned is automatially racist just because the person is black and not white or some kind of alien - isn't even the only card that was banned. Apart from the obvious card (Invoke Prejudice) there are ridiculous cards like Pradesh Gypsies, Stone-Throwing Devils or Crusade on the list as well. The funniest (or scariest) of them all is probably Cleanse, which was removed because...it is mass removal that removes black creatures. They just can't be serious.
I mean, what the hell? To me this feels like a new kind of fascism. It's not much different from the idea of degenerate art they had 80 years ago. Sure, they have reasons. But they had reasons that made just as much sense back then as well. Personally I was scared when I saw this. How do you feel about it?
Oh, and if it's not allowed to discuss this (for whatever reasons, you never know these days...) please remove.
PS The only good thing about it is that I own a few copies of most of these cards and the price increased quite a lot, so hey.
PPS Imprison art was done by Christopher Rush. I'm willing to take any Black Lotus you don't want in your collection anymore because it was painted by a racist. And of course because it has the word 'black' in it and you need to sacrifice it, which is obviously racism in its purest form. Also take Alpha Lightning Bolts.
PPPS It's even more funny that they blur/hide a card like Pradesh Gypsies even though it doesn't show anything offensive and was only banned for its name, which you already know and which you can still see and read if you look the card up.
Small anecdote:
I have a custom-card cube project, and one of my issues is that I have to not reuse names that magic already took. I recently named a card imprison, thought it sounded familiar, and looked for it on scryfall. Scryfall didn't actually show me that the card existed at all, and for a little while I thought I was in the clear. All that to say, scryfall should probably prompt people when their searches bring up "questionable" material, because people may actually want to know something about magic's history.
In any case
I also found imprison to be the most silly of all the cultural bans. It can't even be determined that it's a black person in the picture seeing as how africans don't have a monopoly on brownness. And even if it was... I mean... so? I would only care if magic habitually depicted one race as being morally inferior over and over, which I don't think is remotely the case.
The only thing keeping me from caring even more than "ugh, oversensitivity continues to annoy me" is that it only has affected trash tier cards that have no impact on anyone. They avoided everyone's toes.
But this feeling like people can't understand what a homophone is and that people may equivocate these two meanings of the words black and white is really frustrating to me. I don't like that everyone has to be concerned with and kowtow to the beliefs of those who may complain the loudest. As if someone's mom reads the cards and says "Destroy target BLACK creature? Heavens no!" and then files a formal complaint devoid of all context.
(Btw, stone throwing devils requires a lot of backstory and a lot of baggage to understand. The *only* instances I can find of anyone referring to it as a slur are from wizards and maro. But apparently a case can be made that it's some bastardization of a religious ceremony, combined with wordplay, something something. I don't think of religious beliefs as being somehow worthy of any coddling, but seeing as how the company renamed kiora last second to avoid upsetting an obscure religious group iirc, it's not out of their usual pattern of behavior. That being said, I could easily imagine another timeline where the dozen or so people who still believe in Norse mythology picketed Thor's inclusion in the Marvel movies and successfully got him removed due to insensitivity. It's not so dissimilar as to be unthinkable, but I would not be happy.)
As a Norwegian, this seems exagerated to me. I looked up the card, and I couldn't realy tell the ethnicity of the person depicted.
Not related to magic, but Netflix removed the Community episode about D&D because one of the characters dressed up as a Drow... Never heard about the term "black facing" (?) before this. The people whom made this decision can't possibly know what a drow is, nor have seen the episode. The episode was about tolerance and caring about other people. One of the best episodes from the show...
Firstly, remember that those actions have not been demanded by anyone (with the exception of axing Invoke Prejudice for a variety of reasons) and they are just companies making symbolic gestures based on their own ideas about what would be appropriate. Remember not to equate what they elect to do with the demands of the movements which prompt such actions. It's not any kind of 'new fascism' since it's not being imposed; it's just panicked attempts to try and garner sympathy with symbolic gestures, some of which are a positive if a minor one.
Secondly, being European, I can tell that 'gypsy' is absolutely a slur for the Roma people. It's not ridiculous just because you do not understand the reasoning. Some of those choices are arguable, for sure. But with Cleanse, for example, it's not just about 'destroy all black creatures' but also that in the context of the name of the card. You may have heard of something called 'ethnic cleansing'.
Thirdly, this topic has gotten basically every single thread where it comes up locked. Please be sensitive about how you're addressing it instead of jumping to hyperbole like calling the actions WotC has take of its own accord a 'new fascism'.
Firstly, remember that those actions have not been demanded by anyone (with the exception of axing Invoke Prejudice for a variety of reasons) and they are just companies making symbolic gestures based on their own ideas about what would be appropriate. Remember not to equate what they elect to do with the demands of the movements which prompt such actions. It's not any kind of 'new fascism' since it's not being imposed; it's just panicked attempts to try and garner sympathy with symbolic gestures, some of which are a positive if a minor one.
Sure, it is certainly a coincidence that WotC does this now. It's a bit naive to believe that this kind of action wasn't imposed by anyone when it's obvious that this was the case, at least indirectly. There are many examples where companies didn't comply with the pc activist Internet crowd and were ripped apart on social media for it. What WotC did is not 'a panicked attempt to try and garner sympathy' (who does panic to garner sympathy anyway?), it's a panicked attempt to avoid being the target of a witch hunt by social media activists that would most likely follow if they would leave even the tiniest room to interpret any of their cards the wrong way.
Secondly, being European, I can tell that 'gypsy' is absolutely a slur for the Roma people. It's not ridiculous just because you do not understand the reasoning. Some of those choices are arguable, for sure. But with Cleanse, for example, it's not just about 'destroy all black creatures' but also that in the context of the name of the card. You may have heard of something called 'ethnic cleansing'.
I'm European as well and I can tell you that the word gypsy may be a controverse word, but it's definitely not a racial slur. I was born in a town where a rather large population (still a minority, but more than in other parts of my country) of Roma lives and they want to be called gypsies, they even put it on their tombstones and they're proud about it. Just because some pc people want to make you believe this is the same as the n word doesn't make it true. It's not even the same as calling native Americans Indians, simply because gypsy is how these people named themselves a few hundred years ago already - it was not a name made up by other people. There are just as many people who'd be offended if you said that 'gypsy' is an insult as there are people who do think 'gypsy' is an insult. You don't need to put that word on a Magic card, but it's certainly nothing banworthy and nothing that needs to be removed after 26 years. Even more so if you look at the art of the card that depicts romanticized, idealized versions of gypsies - certainly nothing a gypsy should be offended by.
And your explanation for Cleanse is exactly what I'm talking about and why I say it's utterly ridiculous. If the word cleanse is bad because it's also used in the term 'ethnical cleansing' and if destroying black creatures, which are vampires, zombies and demons in Magic and not people with African origin or black skin color, isn't ok anymore then nothing is. And yes, that is absolutely true for the combination of these words because they have nothing at all to do with real life or racism and that is very obvious to anyone with the smallest grain of common sense left. Everything on this card makes 100% sense, the word cleanse is perfect to describe a white card that sweeps away all the foul, evil black creatures on the battlefield. If you see racism on this card then you see racism everywhere.
Then of course you have a card like Crusade. Who the hell would be offended by that? You have to be completely insane to be offended by a historic event that happened almost 1000 years ago.
Oh, and I also had to look up why Stone-Throwing Devils is offensive and of course it is just as ridiculous. It's in the same vein of 'I really, really want to find racism or cultural insensivity here when no one with common sense would see any of that' like Cleanse. I'm absolutely sure that 99.99999% of people who would see this card wouldn't see anything offensive on it or in its name if you showed it to them without any comment.
As a non-european, I find the mixed reviews on the word gypsy to be pretty interesting. It seems like somewhere in the ballpark of a 50/50 split. Which is probably enough for a multinational company to care.
I often wonder what threshold is the right threshold to warrant caring about a word. Well, for me to think other people are closer to justified for caring about a word. I personally would never care unless the intention was obviously negative.
The most successful american sports team of all time has the "distinction" of having the name that at least one person describes as a slur: The Yankees. Yankee is apparently used as a true derogatory term by some people in the american south, and I know someone who thinks we should change the name. That person.. is my sister.
We, uh, don't always get along.
As much as these bans were basically entirely pandering, not wanting to be associated with any potential negative press is pretty fair (even if the cards are 25 years old). Companies will, understandably so, go out of their way to avoid public outrage (as unlikely as it might seem), and saying that they shouldn't is kind of silly.
Crusade and Jihad having the triple combo of suggestive name and art in combination with the text makes them incredibly easy to see as racist in addition to referencing historical events that can be and are given racist connotations. Cathars' Crusade only has the name as suggestive, and iirc it's supposed to be an event from Innistrad rather than a historical reference (I would be incredibly surprised if anyone I know (Canadian) even casually knows about this specific crusade, and as far as I can tell it didn't have race connotations).
EDIT: I should clarify: Jihad and Crusade shouldn't have racist connotations but are sometimes given some regardless.
In practice all this does is make it harder to find Crusade for niche commander decks, so it's not really something to care about.
It didn't have race connotations (as far as I can tell), but it did single out a religious group. And, to be accurate in the most petty way, jihad also shouldn't have racial connotations but religious ones.
In america and probably everywhere else, we automatically stereotype muslims as being arabs, but obviously that isn't exactly true.
But then we have to get into a muddy pit of
"how much does perception matter compared to actual reality" and
"why should discrimination or extermination of races be seen as different than extermination of religious ideals" and
"should we care about religions at all? and if so, when? if they're dead? How long ago did it have to die before it's irrelevant?" and
"what counts as a valid group identity? Could we have a card that references flat earthers? What about some cult?" and
"how many people do you need before they are worth caring about?"
If I was a CEO, I'd get removed by my board because I almost don't care at all for any of this. I say "unless it seems obvious that someone meant to degrade someone over something they were born with, or are likely trying to incite something over those same qualities, I give it a pass".
That line includes invoke prejudice and that's it from this batch. The line for me is somewhere waaaay over there.
Okay, so - the line that it is naive to believe that the decision was not made because of the protests is just a plain strawman. Of course it was done because of the protests. However, every detail involved in the choice relies on decisions made by WotC rather than anything demanded by anyone else (outside Invoke Prejudice which has been controversial for years). To then shift the blame to the protests for this happening and calling what they are doing a form of fascism requires (1) positing a hypothetical crowd which would have taken action against WotC unless these specific changes were implemented, and (2) generalising that the actual protesters and people sympathetic to their cause are in fact equivalent to this hypothetical crowd. Why am I stuck on talking about these specific changes? Because the whole discussion was started by the accusation that the specifics of what WotC implemented were unreasonable and ridiculous. Now, as far as I am concerned, those seem like they might even have been made based on some intern's 2-hour dive into Gatherer and a few execs skimming through the list to pick Invoke Prejudice and probably Jihad out as high risk cards (whether justified in the latter case or not) and then considering how to make the list extensive enough to seem like they're trying while keeping the cards involved minimally significant for anyone's collection and play experience. The majority of these cards are - as pointed out in the original message - crap people hardly even remembered existed and that no one had felt any interest in playing for a decade or so. Fixating on them now is just inane since whether they are playable or not is materially insignificant. You cannot even really make a slippery slope argument about how next they will demand/do this or that since these were picked out from among all the cards in the existing pool based on a threshold which is already being criticised for involving a stretch of the imagination. Going forward, if WotC is more mindful of their naming schemes and such, no one is still getting hurt or losing cards that could have been, unless they just really wanted one called 'Holocaust', for example.
In the case of Cleanse, I think a parallel with Mass Calcify and Saltblast is in order. If we went strictly by the wording of the card text, those would be considerably more 'unfortunate' in terms of their implications. However, the framing is very different just because of the name. Imagine, if you will, that Mass Calcify was instead called 'Purge'. Yes, it is a generic term in a vacuum but once you imagine playing it and stating 'I use Purge to destroy all non-white creatures', I should hope the thought makes you at least a little uncomfortable. If not, imagine being a person of colour when some edgelord or even just white person you don't know does that in your table, perhaps with even a hint of glee (whether from the edginess or just the triumph and relied of finding a card to answer the board state). The situation is comparable when you replace 'Purge' with 'Cleanse' and 'non-white' with 'black' - especially when anyone playing Cleanse at this point would have been doing so as a statement since the card is just not really worth playing otherwise because of its niche applicability. WotC basically just wants to ensure sufficient dissociation between the card text and the card name to minimise the chance of such unfortunate interactions in the context of their game.
When it comes to the term 'gypsy', perhaps your local community (and I assume they do indeed exist) is a special case or perhaps in your native language (since I cannot assume it is English when it comes to all of Europe), there are more positive implications to the equivalent term. However, I recommend reading this decently researched piece to get an idea of how complicated that issue is. Yes, it is not considered offensive by everyone but there are certainly people hurt by it and it appears there is less of an identification with the term over alternatives even among those who do not mind it. That imbalance is a decent reason to play it safe and avoid the term - whether there are also other uses for it or not since in the context of card names, people are only going to see the word and not the totality of the possible nuanced differences in its usage.
Imagine, if you will, that Mass Calcify was instead called 'Purge'. Yes, it is a generic term in a vacuum but once you imagine playing it and stating 'I use Purge to destroy all non-white creatures', I should hope the thought makes you at least a little uncomfortable. If not, imagine being a person of colour when some edgelord or even just white person you don't know does that in your table.
It does not make me uncomfortable. I would recognize the unfortunate overlap, but only in a humorous way. It in fact annoys me that it makes some people feel anything at all. And I don't have to imagine being a person of colour to understand why it would matter to me; I live as one, and that fact will not make it matter to me by itself. I want to be more objective than that.
That imbalance is a decent reason to play it safe and avoid the term - whether there are also other uses for it or not since in the context of card names, people are only going to see the word and not the totality of the possible nuanced differences in its usage.
I don't, at all, appreciate that the onus is on the speaker to track what all the possible interpretations of their words are, and what is the fluctuating size of the population that would care about the worst version of that word, and then ultimately be coerced to change their language regardless of intent. Especially since I think intent (especially in spoken language) is generally easy to decipher. And in the cases where it isn't easy to decipher... to bad? I guess? Innocent until proven guilty, in essence.
I just don't recognize an argument that says a listener can supersede a speaker in defining the words a speaker is using (without evidence to show that the speaker is likely being deceptive about their intent). And it doesn't help that I find the obscure rabbit holes that this can lead to to be extremely tedious (like my yankee example from before).
I don't mean to come across as incendiary, but as a "PoC" who doesn't agree with many standard PC positions, I find myself all the time feeling compelled to speak up whenever anyone says something like "If not, imagine being a person of colour". As if my objectivity/position (or anyone else's) would necessarily be different in a different body.
//
From Wizards' perspective, I understand trying to avoid being caught up in the firestorm currently going on or in any future ones. They could have some rational position that said X card that they banned should be allowed to exist, but that rational position doesn't help their shareholders make money. I get that this would be the unfortunate reality of things, and can respect someone choosing money over an argument they feel isn't worth having.
It's fine to point that out; I was mostly addressing Phitt with the example, though I will admit I made the assumption based on their rhetoric that they would be unlikely to be a Person of Colour.
Do note, however, that the 'speaker' in that instance is WotC. On a related note, I was considering earlier how interesting it is that people who claim that the changes they elected to make to their game are wrong since that was a statement made on part of WotC which may not be literal speech in the usual sense but certainly constitutes an expression of the values they want to project as a company. It is fine to criticise, of course - and that applies in both directions - but a decent amount of the time, the feel that gets conveyed is that those complaining are making the claim that WotC should not make such statements which is a form of attempted silencing in that respect (not censorship; the two are distinct). It is, to say the least, hypocritical, given the (usual) alleged reasons for said reactions involving how freedom of speech is being limited by public pressure.
I was mostly addressing Phitt with the example, though I will admit I made the assumption based on their rhetoric that they would be unlikely to be a Person of Colour.
It's this assumption that I don't like. I wish people would meet someone on their argument alone, without assuming anything unconfirmed.
And does that change anything in terms of the arguments involved? At no point did I say 'you don't get it because X which I assume about you' (i.e. an ad hominem fallacy). It was a thought experiment - for the purposes of one, whether a person is in fact a person of colour or not has little bearing outside how directly it ends up corresponding to their experience. But it was also not a thought experiment on just taking the perspective of a PoC but being one in a situation like the one being described and also how the motivation would be to minimise chances for interactions of the kind being described. The argument does not hinge on such matters either way but it acts as a reminder of how some demographics being subjected to such situations would be more vulnerable to being made relevantly uncomfortable by them (i.e. reducing their engagement with the game and consumption of related products since WotC mainly cares for its bottom line). Let's say I did not mention said detail as part of the scenario. That risks distancing whoever is conceiving the situation from the relevant factors, which is not a failure of the argument as such since the points would still stand but it would be ineffective in practice if they missed the point as a result.
I suppose then that my contention is petty-ish, since you could sidestep it by merely having written "if you aren't an X, imagine blah blah blah".
I was probably bringing in some of my history with the subject on you, where people will post extremely dismissive things like "You clearly aren't X, or else you wouldn't say that". You at least didn't lead with that, even if you had that underlying assumption
Didn't want to spam the Unfinity thread, but after the recent discussion I thought it was worth pointing out that Unfinity does have Legacy (and constructed pauper) playable cards and even one that uses stickers (____ Goblin). So much for 'cards were designed to not have any impact in eternal formats'...truly disgusting.
I have the occasional gripe... like one too many catch phrases,or too many attempts to get cheers out of the audience... but
They really went all in on this one. What an event.
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After looking up reasons I found out that Imprison - which just shows a black guy who is imprisoned in a rather uncomfortable way, but which has no signs of racism at all unless you think a black guy who is imprisoned is automatially racist just because the person is black and not white or some kind of alien - isn't even the only card that was banned. Apart from the obvious card (Invoke Prejudice) there are ridiculous cards like Pradesh Gypsies, Stone-Throwing Devils or Crusade on the list as well. The funniest (or scariest) of them all is probably Cleanse, which was removed because...it is mass removal that removes black creatures. They just can't be serious.
I mean, what the hell? To me this feels like a new kind of fascism. It's not much different from the idea of degenerate art they had 80 years ago. Sure, they have reasons. But they had reasons that made just as much sense back then as well. Personally I was scared when I saw this. How do you feel about it?
Oh, and if it's not allowed to discuss this (for whatever reasons, you never know these days...) please remove.
PS The only good thing about it is that I own a few copies of most of these cards and the price increased quite a lot, so hey.
PPS Imprison art was done by Christopher Rush. I'm willing to take any Black Lotus you don't want in your collection anymore because it was painted by a racist. And of course because it has the word 'black' in it and you need to sacrifice it, which is obviously racism in its purest form. Also take Alpha Lightning Bolts.
PPPS It's even more funny that they blur/hide a card like Pradesh Gypsies even though it doesn't show anything offensive and was only banned for its name, which you already know and which you can still see and read if you look the card up.
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I have a custom-card cube project, and one of my issues is that I have to not reuse names that magic already took. I recently named a card imprison, thought it sounded familiar, and looked for it on scryfall. Scryfall didn't actually show me that the card existed at all, and for a little while I thought I was in the clear. All that to say, scryfall should probably prompt people when their searches bring up "questionable" material, because people may actually want to know something about magic's history.
In any case
I also found imprison to be the most silly of all the cultural bans. It can't even be determined that it's a black person in the picture seeing as how africans don't have a monopoly on brownness. And even if it was... I mean... so? I would only care if magic habitually depicted one race as being morally inferior over and over, which I don't think is remotely the case.
The only thing keeping me from caring even more than "ugh, oversensitivity continues to annoy me" is that it only has affected trash tier cards that have no impact on anyone. They avoided everyone's toes.
But this feeling like people can't understand what a homophone is and that people may equivocate these two meanings of the words black and white is really frustrating to me. I don't like that everyone has to be concerned with and kowtow to the beliefs of those who may complain the loudest. As if someone's mom reads the cards and says "Destroy target BLACK creature? Heavens no!" and then files a formal complaint devoid of all context.
I wonder if Crovax, ascendant evincar was on their short list.
(Btw, stone throwing devils requires a lot of backstory and a lot of baggage to understand. The *only* instances I can find of anyone referring to it as a slur are from wizards and maro. But apparently a case can be made that it's some bastardization of a religious ceremony, combined with wordplay, something something. I don't think of religious beliefs as being somehow worthy of any coddling, but seeing as how the company renamed kiora last second to avoid upsetting an obscure religious group iirc, it's not out of their usual pattern of behavior. That being said, I could easily imagine another timeline where the dozen or so people who still believe in Norse mythology picketed Thor's inclusion in the Marvel movies and successfully got him removed due to insensitivity. It's not so dissimilar as to be unthinkable, but I would not be happy.)
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Not related to magic, but Netflix removed the Community episode about D&D because one of the characters dressed up as a Drow... Never heard about the term "black facing" (?) before this. The people whom made this decision can't possibly know what a drow is, nor have seen the episode. The episode was about tolerance and caring about other people. One of the best episodes from the show...
Secondly, being European, I can tell that 'gypsy' is absolutely a slur for the Roma people. It's not ridiculous just because you do not understand the reasoning. Some of those choices are arguable, for sure. But with Cleanse, for example, it's not just about 'destroy all black creatures' but also that in the context of the name of the card. You may have heard of something called 'ethnic cleansing'.
Thirdly, this topic has gotten basically every single thread where it comes up locked. Please be sensitive about how you're addressing it instead of jumping to hyperbole like calling the actions WotC has take of its own accord a 'new fascism'.
Sure, it is certainly a coincidence that WotC does this now. It's a bit naive to believe that this kind of action wasn't imposed by anyone when it's obvious that this was the case, at least indirectly. There are many examples where companies didn't comply with the pc activist Internet crowd and were ripped apart on social media for it. What WotC did is not 'a panicked attempt to try and garner sympathy' (who does panic to garner sympathy anyway?), it's a panicked attempt to avoid being the target of a witch hunt by social media activists that would most likely follow if they would leave even the tiniest room to interpret any of their cards the wrong way.
I'm European as well and I can tell you that the word gypsy may be a controverse word, but it's definitely not a racial slur. I was born in a town where a rather large population (still a minority, but more than in other parts of my country) of Roma lives and they want to be called gypsies, they even put it on their tombstones and they're proud about it. Just because some pc people want to make you believe this is the same as the n word doesn't make it true. It's not even the same as calling native Americans Indians, simply because gypsy is how these people named themselves a few hundred years ago already - it was not a name made up by other people. There are just as many people who'd be offended if you said that 'gypsy' is an insult as there are people who do think 'gypsy' is an insult. You don't need to put that word on a Magic card, but it's certainly nothing banworthy and nothing that needs to be removed after 26 years. Even more so if you look at the art of the card that depicts romanticized, idealized versions of gypsies - certainly nothing a gypsy should be offended by.
And your explanation for Cleanse is exactly what I'm talking about and why I say it's utterly ridiculous. If the word cleanse is bad because it's also used in the term 'ethnical cleansing' and if destroying black creatures, which are vampires, zombies and demons in Magic and not people with African origin or black skin color, isn't ok anymore then nothing is. And yes, that is absolutely true for the combination of these words because they have nothing at all to do with real life or racism and that is very obvious to anyone with the smallest grain of common sense left. Everything on this card makes 100% sense, the word cleanse is perfect to describe a white card that sweeps away all the foul, evil black creatures on the battlefield. If you see racism on this card then you see racism everywhere.
Then of course you have a card like Crusade. Who the hell would be offended by that? You have to be completely insane to be offended by a historic event that happened almost 1000 years ago.
Oh, and I also had to look up why Stone-Throwing Devils is offensive and of course it is just as ridiculous. It's in the same vein of 'I really, really want to find racism or cultural insensivity here when no one with common sense would see any of that' like Cleanse. I'm absolutely sure that 99.99999% of people who would see this card wouldn't see anything offensive on it or in its name if you showed it to them without any comment.
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I often wonder what threshold is the right threshold to warrant caring about a word. Well, for me to think other people are closer to justified for caring about a word. I personally would never care unless the intention was obviously negative.
The most successful american sports team of all time has the "distinction" of having the name that at least one person describes as a slur: The Yankees. Yankee is apparently used as a true derogatory term by some people in the american south, and I know someone who thinks we should change the name. That person.. is my sister.
We, uh, don't always get along.
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Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
Crusade and Jihad having the triple combo of suggestive name and art in combination with the text makes them incredibly easy to see as racist in addition to referencing historical events that can be and are given racist connotations. Cathars' Crusade only has the name as suggestive, and iirc it's supposed to be an event from Innistrad rather than a historical reference (I would be incredibly surprised if anyone I know (Canadian) even casually knows about this specific crusade, and as far as I can tell it didn't have race connotations).
EDIT: I should clarify: Jihad and Crusade shouldn't have racist connotations but are sometimes given some regardless.
In practice all this does is make it harder to find Crusade for niche commander decks, so it's not really something to care about.
In america and probably everywhere else, we automatically stereotype muslims as being arabs, but obviously that isn't exactly true.
But then we have to get into a muddy pit of
"how much does perception matter compared to actual reality" and
"why should discrimination or extermination of races be seen as different than extermination of religious ideals" and
"should we care about religions at all? and if so, when? if they're dead? How long ago did it have to die before it's irrelevant?" and
"what counts as a valid group identity? Could we have a card that references flat earthers? What about some cult?" and
"how many people do you need before they are worth caring about?"
If I was a CEO, I'd get removed by my board because I almost don't care at all for any of this. I say "unless it seems obvious that someone meant to degrade someone over something they were born with, or are likely trying to incite something over those same qualities, I give it a pass".
That line includes invoke prejudice and that's it from this batch. The line for me is somewhere waaaay over there.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
In the case of Cleanse, I think a parallel with Mass Calcify and Saltblast is in order. If we went strictly by the wording of the card text, those would be considerably more 'unfortunate' in terms of their implications. However, the framing is very different just because of the name. Imagine, if you will, that Mass Calcify was instead called 'Purge'. Yes, it is a generic term in a vacuum but once you imagine playing it and stating 'I use Purge to destroy all non-white creatures', I should hope the thought makes you at least a little uncomfortable. If not, imagine being a person of colour when some edgelord or even just white person you don't know does that in your table, perhaps with even a hint of glee (whether from the edginess or just the triumph and relied of finding a card to answer the board state). The situation is comparable when you replace 'Purge' with 'Cleanse' and 'non-white' with 'black' - especially when anyone playing Cleanse at this point would have been doing so as a statement since the card is just not really worth playing otherwise because of its niche applicability. WotC basically just wants to ensure sufficient dissociation between the card text and the card name to minimise the chance of such unfortunate interactions in the context of their game.
When it comes to the term 'gypsy', perhaps your local community (and I assume they do indeed exist) is a special case or perhaps in your native language (since I cannot assume it is English when it comes to all of Europe), there are more positive implications to the equivalent term. However, I recommend reading this decently researched piece to get an idea of how complicated that issue is. Yes, it is not considered offensive by everyone but there are certainly people hurt by it and it appears there is less of an identification with the term over alternatives even among those who do not mind it. That imbalance is a decent reason to play it safe and avoid the term - whether there are also other uses for it or not since in the context of card names, people are only going to see the word and not the totality of the possible nuanced differences in its usage.
It does not make me uncomfortable. I would recognize the unfortunate overlap, but only in a humorous way. It in fact annoys me that it makes some people feel anything at all. And I don't have to imagine being a person of colour to understand why it would matter to me; I live as one, and that fact will not make it matter to me by itself. I want to be more objective than that.
I don't, at all, appreciate that the onus is on the speaker to track what all the possible interpretations of their words are, and what is the fluctuating size of the population that would care about the worst version of that word, and then ultimately be coerced to change their language regardless of intent. Especially since I think intent (especially in spoken language) is generally easy to decipher. And in the cases where it isn't easy to decipher... to bad? I guess? Innocent until proven guilty, in essence.
I just don't recognize an argument that says a listener can supersede a speaker in defining the words a speaker is using (without evidence to show that the speaker is likely being deceptive about their intent). And it doesn't help that I find the obscure rabbit holes that this can lead to to be extremely tedious (like my yankee example from before).
I don't mean to come across as incendiary, but as a "PoC" who doesn't agree with many standard PC positions, I find myself all the time feeling compelled to speak up whenever anyone says something like "If not, imagine being a person of colour". As if my objectivity/position (or anyone else's) would necessarily be different in a different body.
//
From Wizards' perspective, I understand trying to avoid being caught up in the firestorm currently going on or in any future ones. They could have some rational position that said X card that they banned should be allowed to exist, but that rational position doesn't help their shareholders make money. I get that this would be the unfortunate reality of things, and can respect someone choosing money over an argument they feel isn't worth having.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
Do note, however, that the 'speaker' in that instance is WotC. On a related note, I was considering earlier how interesting it is that people who claim that the changes they elected to make to their game are wrong since that was a statement made on part of WotC which may not be literal speech in the usual sense but certainly constitutes an expression of the values they want to project as a company. It is fine to criticise, of course - and that applies in both directions - but a decent amount of the time, the feel that gets conveyed is that those complaining are making the claim that WotC should not make such statements which is a form of attempted silencing in that respect (not censorship; the two are distinct). It is, to say the least, hypocritical, given the (usual) alleged reasons for said reactions involving how freedom of speech is being limited by public pressure.
It's this assumption that I don't like. I wish people would meet someone on their argument alone, without assuming anything unconfirmed.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
I was probably bringing in some of my history with the subject on you, where people will post extremely dismissive things like "You clearly aren't X, or else you wouldn't say that". You at least didn't lead with that, even if you had that underlying assumption
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
My Old School Battlebox
My Premodern Battlebox
Draft it on Cubetutor here, and CubeCobra here.
Treasure Cruise did nothing wrong.