A woman wrote to our ministry recently to ask for advice about a family member who was very much into the game, Magic: The Gathering.

I would shut down the playing of this game as soon as possible. As you’ll read later in this post, it has caused problems in children who just want to have fun and don’t realize how harmful it can be to play a game that requires you to play the role of a sorcerer who uses magic powers to slay your enemies. Let’s face it, children receive their first indoctrination into the occult through games such as this, Ouija boards, and ther occult-based video and card games. So it can never be harmless to let kids play with these games.

Thanks to the excellent research of Marcia Montenegro and her blog, Christian Answers to the New Age (one of my favorite sources for information about the occult and New Age), I can report that this game was created in 1993 by a mathematician and Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast named Richard Garfield. Sold by Wizards of the Coast, it is a trading card game using cards that are linked to five different kinds of magic (as in sorcery, not tricks) which are labeled as “red, blue, green, white or black.” Players, who represent sorcerers, use the cards to destroy their opponent before their opponent destroys them, mostly through the use of spells, enchantments and fantasy creatures such as Chaos, Orb, Bad Moon and Animate Dead.

“Like Dungeons & Dragons, the famed role-playing game, Magic is a challenging game that calls for intricate strategy and shrewd plays,” Montenegro writes. “However, that strategy is worked out within the dark context of the occult.”

She goes on to posit another type of game – called Pusher – in which players pretend to be dealers rather than sorcerers. “Each player is a drug dealer trying to win by selling the most drugs and getting rid of the competition. The game could be made complex by introducing challenges from the law, prison, gangs, impure products, etc. So, how comfortable would you be playing Pusher? Would the message against drugs and the role of pretending to sell drugs seem hypocritical to you? Sorcery is no less dangerous and no more moral than drugs; in fact, there is a long-time connection between the two.”

The fact that this game has caused problems in children is well documented. In this blog, I document the case of a suit against the Pound Ridge Elementary School in Pound Ridge, NY in 1995 in which teachers were using the game in their math class. Parents found out about it when their children began to have nightmares about the game. They ended up having to sue to put a stop to it (and other occult-based “learning tools” the teachers were using.)

Remember, both the Bible (Deuteronomy 18) and the Catechism (No. 2117) explicitly condemn sorcery, calling those who practice it “an abomination” to the Lord.

I can only wonder why on earth anyone would want to “pretend” to be someone that God has labeled an “abomination”?