thalugor asked: So if everyone else throws their games from a bridge so do you? Your answers in some regards are disappointing.

One of the things I’m doing with this blog is be honest with you all. I’m trying to make Magic as awesome a game as I can because I have great pride in my work and I love the game. But it’s also a business.

One of the reasons Magic is so awesome is because we sell a lot cards. I am afforded resources unheard of by most game designers. For example, I now have a year of predesign and a year of design. Two years! That is absolutely unheard of.

How do we sell cards? By giving players what they want. Maybe it upsets you that humans like looking at attractive people but they do. That said, we try hard not to cater to the lowest common denominator. For example, there are a lot of ugly tropes in fantasy many of which of horribly degrading to women. We avoid those because we are trying to be the better game.

We do work hard to make advances and do better than games that came before us, but we’re not going to change the world over night. Change happens slowly and I am proud that we are a force pushing in the right direction.

It’s hard sometimes because everyone wants to point out what you aren’t doing rather than what you are doing. We can’t take on every fight so we pick and choose our battles. Fighting the fight against showing pretty people is not a battle we’re choosing to take on right now because as I said above it digs pretty deep into the human psyche (aka it’s a really hard fight to win).

I am proud that Magic is on the forefront of our industry in pushing boundaries. And yes, obviously there are more advances to make, but you have to give us time. Societal change is not a speedy thing but a slow plodding course. We are trying our hardest to do good and move the world to a better place, but as a business we don’t have the luxury of just throwing caution to the wind.