During the PAX East weekend in Boston, Massachusetts, two things happened in the Wizards of the Coast community: The first is that a new cinematic trailer themed around the upcoming War of the Spark digital card expansion pack for Magic: The Gathering was released, and the second is that a prominent player within the Magic TCG community was hit with accusations of alleged #MeToo tier misconduct.
So let’s start with the trailer because it’s the less ridiculous of the two. It’s a cinematic featuring a hot magic chick named Liliana Vess commanding an army of the Eternals as they ascend tower to fight Nicol Bolas, an elder dragon tyrant that once had control over Vess. In a fit of rage and defiance, Vess uses her last remaining powers to defy Bolas’ coercion and fight back. You can check it out below.
The trailer is slickly done, featuring a remix of Linkin Park’s “It Doesn’t Even Matter”, which seemed dearthly apropos.
Obviously the cinematic doesn’t really convey how Magic: The Gathering plays out, much like how all those awesome in-house cinematics from Blizzard don’t really reflect the actual gameplay for World of Warcraft. But that’s neither here nor there.
The upcoming expansion is due to drop for Magic: The Gathering starting May 3rd, 2019 next month, just after Greg Weisman’s novel, Ravnica: War of the Spark, releases on April 23rd, 2019.
The news has been tag-teamed with some silly news that was picked up by the good folks over on Kotaku In Action. In a report published on March 29th, 2019 by Kotaku, it detailed various unsubstantiated and fact-free claims about player Owen Turtenwald, who allegedly made advancements toward female players within the Magic: The Gathering community by offering them tutorship in exchange for their companionship.
There were also whispers from community members shared with Kotaku who claimed that they’ve seen screenshots from some people who have described Turtenwald as being “harassy”. Kotaku quoted from someone who had been in “complex relationship” with Turtenwald, where they explained…
“’A lot of women in the community have warned other women about Owen,’ [Mary] Louke told Kotaku via phone on Thursday. Louke says that she has had a complex relationship with Turtenwald. It was briefly romantic, she said, but after that ended, he continually made her feel uncomfortable both physically and verbally at hang-outs in real life and over text messages. She says he asked her for nudes, persistently messaged her while drunk after she stopped responding, and once said that her looks distracted him during a tournament.”
Kotaku noted that Turtenwald had been removed from the weekend tournament taking place during the PAX East convention, which had a prize pool of $1 million.
The official Magic e-sports Twitter account had previously acknowledged that the longtime veteran player, Turtenwald, had been removed from the tournament, but didn’t say why.
Owen Turtenwald will not be participating in the Mythic Invitational and we are replacing him with Brian David-Marshall.
— Magic Esports (@MagicEsports) March 27, 2019
So far the allegations are about as flimsy as a female rap performer’s dress on the red carpet at the Grammy Awards. Nevertheless, companies like Wizards of the Coast never shied away from pulling the trigger of a half-cocked gun.
They previously severed ties with Boogie2988, one of their biggest influencers and content promoters, all because he was friends with Jeremy Hambly from TheQuartering.
If you’re unfamiliar with the fallout between the Wizards of the Coast and TheQuartering, there was a really, really in-depth and thorough editorial by Lou Colagiovanni that was published on Niche Gamer back on December 28th, 2017, which covered how and why they permanently banned TheQuartering from their community. Colagiovanni followed up that report with another in-depth article that was published on January 8th, 2018, where he compiled information gathered by TheQuartering that revealed that some judges on the Magic: The Gathering judging panel were pedophiles.
Unfortunately if you attempt to follow the links to the original articles, they return 404 page errors.
Nevertheless, the company has never been short on controversies, whether they’ve been big or small. In this particular case, the whole #MeToo thing doesn’t appear to hold much weight, but that might change in the future if the accusers can manage to do what they haven’t been able to do in the Vic Mignogna case: provide legitimate evidence.
(Thanks for the news tip USMC03Vet and Ebicentre)
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