{"id":901,"date":"2020-03-30T03:24:51","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T03:24:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.usmtgproxy.com\/?page_id=901"},"modified":"2020-03-30T03:24:51","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T03:24:51","slug":"magic-the-gathering-is-getting-some-big-changes","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.usmtgproxy.com\/magic-the-gathering-is-getting-some-big-changes\/","title":{"rendered":"Magic: The Gathering Is Getting Some Big Changes"},"content":{"rendered":"

As\u00a0Magic: The Gathering<\/em>\u00a0approaches its 25th anniversary,\u00a0<\/em>head designer Mark Rosewater is perched at a crucial point between past and future. The game\u2019s next set of cards will reprise\u00a0Magic<\/em>\u2019s classic\u00a0Dominaria<\/em>\u00a0setting, with the game\u2019s original creator Richard Garfield tag-teaming design with Rosewater. But while it looks back, it will also look forward, making a tweak that some players have demanded for years: Changing the player\u2019s pronoun to the gender-neutral \u201cthey\u201d on all future cards.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe recognized that language changes with time and there\u2019s been a shift in desire to move to \u2018they,\u2019\u201d Rosewater said via phone to\u00a0Kotaku<\/em>\u00a0today about the expansion, which will release April 27. \u201cIt\u2019s something we\u2019ve wanted to do, but there are a lot of technicalities with\u00a0Magic<\/em>. It wasn\u2019t as easy as flipping a switch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dominaria<\/em>\u2019s release notes\u00a0leaked\u00a0<\/a>yesterday, much to Rosewater\u2019s chagrin. A lot of fans didn\u2019t mind; they\u2019re thrilled to hear about\u00a0Dominaria<\/em>\u2019s nostalgia factor, and especially Garfield\u2019s role in the cards\u2019 design. As Rosewater tells it, he called up Garfield after fans had heard the game\u2019s creator express interest in coming back to\u00a0Magic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew we were doing the return to\u00a0Dominaria<\/em>\u00a0for our anniversary,\u201d Rosewater said. \u201cIf ever there was a perfect set for Richard to be on, this was it. So, I said, \u2018Richard, I have a set for you to be on.\u2019 He said, \u2018I\u2019m on!\u2019 And I said, \u2018Wait, wait, let you tell you about it first!\u2019 And he said. \u2018I\u2019m on anyway!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Dominaria\u00a0<\/em>has incorporated lots of different ideas over the years\u2014ice, mutants, post-apocalyptica\u2014so Rosewater\u2019s team thought hard about how to refine everything into one, overarching ethos. \u201cDominaria is a world of history,\u201d he said. \u201cFamous people were here, famous objects. We wanted to play with the idea that famous things were happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Garfield had a big hand in\u00a0Dominaria<\/em>\u2019s new mechanic, Saga cards. They\u2019re enchantments that stack with \u201clore counters\u201d and trigger \u201cchapter\u201d abilities on each card. They\u2019re meant to rehash stories from\u00a0Magic<\/em>\u2019s lore. Fittingly,\u00a0Dominaria<\/em>\u2019s second big feature is that every\u00a0Dominaria\u00a0<\/em>pack will contain a Legendary creature card. Since the theme of\u00a0Dominaria\u00a0<\/em>is blasts from the past players will get a hint of that each pack. The set\u2019s overarching mechanics will accommodate the influx of Legendaries, tying together the set\u2019s theme and special cards.<\/p>\n

Dominaria<\/em>\u00a0is aiming to be crowd-pleasing, and the set\u2019s shift in gender pronouns is no different in that regard \u201cIf you go back to 1993, when\u00a0Magic\u00a0<\/em>was first started, the idea of using \u2018He or she\u2019 was actually not normal. The default in 1993 was to just use \u2018he,\u2019\u201d Rosewater explained. Now, 25 years later,\u00a0Dominaria\u00a0<\/em>release notes read, \u201cMagic has adopted \u2018they\u2019 as the preferred third-person-singular pronoun for a player, replacing \u2018he or she.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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The change came out of a discussion Rosewater has fostered on his personal Tumblr and on Twitter for years. Just last month, he sparked another hot\u00a0debate<\/a>\u00a0among fans. Back in 2014 and 2015, Rosewater himself had\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0that the first-person \u201cthey\u201d pronoun was too ambiguous to put on every card. \u201cThe problem with using singular they is that we have no word to mean plural they other than \u2018they,\u2019\u201d he wrote at the time. \u201cWhile inclusivity is very important to us, it is not the number one function…. The number one function is clarity. We\u2019re a game. You have to understand what cards do.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the change wasn\u2019t as simple as, as Rosewater put it, \u201cflipping a switch.\u201d But, especially in the wake of the Chicago Manual of Style\u2019s\u00a02017 entry<\/a>\u00a0giving the all-clear to the singular \u201cthey,\u201d Wizards decided to go through the difficult process of making the change. Rosewater\u2019s team had to examine\u00a0Magic<\/em>\u2019s 18,000 cards to make the changeover, which will be visible in\u00a0Dominaria<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Rosewater credits\u00a0Magic<\/em>\u2019s fandom for finally instigating the change: \u201cIt was the audience that started us down the path,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As\u00a0Magic: The Gathering\u00a0approaches its 25th anniversary,\u00a0head designer Mark Rosewater is perched at a crucial point between past and future. The game\u2019s next set of cards will reprise\u00a0Magic\u2019s classic\u00a0Dominaria\u00a0setting, with the game\u2019s original creator Richard Garfield tag-teaming design with Rosewater. But while it looks back, it will also look forward, making a tweak that some players … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.usmtgproxy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.usmtgproxy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.usmtgproxy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.usmtgproxy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.usmtgproxy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.usmtgproxy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.usmtgproxy.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}