The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese (1562). Kozilek by Jaime Jones.

As you probably know, Wizards of the Coast took the unprecedented step last week of banning seven cards that they felt had racist depictions and apologized for ever printing them in the first place. You can read their news release here.

While Invoke Prejudice has what can easily be seen as Klansmen in the artwork, they also banned Cleanse, Stone-Throwing Devils, Pradesh Gypsies, Jihad, Imprison and Crusade. They have replaced these cards in Gatherer with a message reading "We have removed this card image from our database due to its racist depiction, text, or combination thereof. Racism in any form is unacceptable and has no place in our games nor anywhere."

I applaud this decision.

Black lives matter.

Today's column is one that I've literally been bouncing around in my head for over a year.

Back when I interviewed Michael Rapp in 2019 for a set of columns, I remember discussing the idea with him. I had written a column called "The Case for Banning Cyclonic Rift" in 2017 and Invoke Prejudice was the next card that came to mind for the same treatment.

I didn't wind up writing the column. I struggled with the feeling that my audience might not be big enough to make a difference. I struggled with the fear of the column possibly being rejected by CoolStuffInc for touching on a hot-button issue in an increasingly divided America. I also struggled with the implicit understanding that my columns here are both to share my thoughts about Commander and also to help a retail outlet push product.

Today I'm going to do my best to wrap my brain around the decision to ban these seven cards, focusing specifically on Invoke Prejudice.

There are arguments both for and against the ban. I come out firmly on the side of banning these cards. I won't pretend to try to keep you in suspense as to where I stand, but I think there's a lot to learn from looking at this issue in depth.

Thoughts on Banning Cards

Before I dive into arguments, it's worth covering a few bases first. Not everyone is as entrenched in Commander as I've been over the past few years, so let's make sure we're all on the same page.

Wizards of the Coast handles pretty much every major format of Magic except Commander. There is a Commander Rules Committee that manages Commander and they recently created an Advisory Group to help make sure they have input from outside of their small group. Commander is a global phenomenon and it makes sense to seek input from as many places as possible.

Commander as a format has its own banlist, but the Rules Committee has also chosen to ban all cards that refer to the ante mechanic, all cards with the Conspiracy card type and all cards that Wizards has removed from Constructed formats. These newly banned cards would fall into that final category. If they're not legal in Magic, they're not legal in Commander.

The Rules Committee does not need to do a thing to allow this ban to also affect Commander, though I fully expect a statement on the matter to come out and it may have been posted by the time this column goes up.

These cards aren't being banned because of their power level so there's no need to go into a discussion on how some powerful cards are OK and some powerful cards are worth banning. I have my own thoughts on this topic and while I think I understand how the RC makes its decisions, that's a matter for another day.

The Case Against

Since we're not discussing power levels, and since I don't actually have a problem with banning these cards, I'm going to have to do a little work here. I think there are some cogent and reasonable arguments for having these cards remain playable that don't include the tone-deaf and insulting phrase "All Lives Matter."

Nearly every great story has heroes and villains.

There are protagonists and antagonists, and many would argue that there's no more repugnant symbol in America than the Klu Klux Klan. The art on Invoke Prejudice might be explained away as medieval religious fanatics in Penitent robes, but such an explanation would be disingenuous at best. The art was created by an American artist well understood to have an ugly worldview. It's very hard not to see this card as a reference to the Klu Klux Klan.

If every story needs a villain, and Magic is a game in which on some level we act out grand struggles between heroes and villains, one could argue that we should be able to have our bad guys be racist bad guys. It's just a game after all, and if you like fighting against racism you ought to be able to embrace the chance to blow up this enchantment. We should all be running more removal.

My point is just that antagonists are supposed to be vile, hateful, and horrible and the worse they are, the more compelling the story will be of how they are eventually overcome.

This argument potentially holds some merit, but most of us aren't imagining long, dramatic stories when we sit down to play a game. We're playing a game. If your weekly Commander game has you mentally creating some epic story as you play, more power to you. That's great, but it's also not normal and, even if it were, Wizards still gets to decide if they've made cards that are so repugnant they have no place in the stories we're playing out on our gaming tables.

The other argument I can conjure up against banning these cards is the "slippery slope" argument.

If today's unacceptable bad guy is a racist and we can't have that in our game, what will the next step be? Will we eventually have a game where no depictions of violence are accepted in any way? Will creatures not be killed and the idea of having a graveyard will be unthinkable? Will Ghostly Prison be illegal and cards that lock down or somehow incarcerate a creature be unacceptable? Will the desire to be "politically correct" eventually suck all the flavor and character out of our game entirely?

I find slippery slope arguments to be pretty distasteful, but it's not common for them to gain traction among lazy thinkers and those interested in fighting against change.

Will there be a time where Americans look back in shame at having been the nation with the greatest incarceration rates in the world and cards with prisons and shackles in their artwork are considered offensive? I don't know that anyone can predict how our culture will shift over the coming generations, but I could see that happening eventually. I might even suggest that it should, but these kinds of changes happen so slowly that it's a bit more like a tectonic plate shifting than someone sliding down a "slippery slope."

That's what I've been able to come up with. Magic is "just a game," every story needs to be able to have truly villainous villains, and if these cards should be banned, what's next?

They're not empty arguments. Magic is a game, to be sure. Our fictitious struggles on the gaming table can benefit from having the worst of the worst as our antagonists. Today's unacceptable cards are racist, but it's worth thinking about what tomorrow's unacceptable cards will be.

The Case For

Magic is more than just a game.

Magic is a community.

Commander is a game that brings people together across the globe to pitch their decks, their minds and their wits against each other in games that are often about winning and losing but are just as often about trying to create a fun and memorable gaming experience. While you often push hard to try to win a game, many players also find themselves making suboptimal plays in an effort to help a player who has fallen behind or make for a more enjoyable game for everyone, even if it means hurting their own chances to win the game.

The game is called Magic: the Gathering.

Gathering is every bit as important as Magic, and refers to the players, not the cards or the decks. We are at our best when we create a welcoming environment for players to come together to smash our Commander decks against each other for fun, with no extra stresses or pressures on us from outside of the game.

Racism is a very real, and very powerful stress on many members of the community. No person of color should ever have to feel the added stress of having to stare down racism when trying to participate in a Commander game. For the record, the same holds true for sexism and other forms of bigotry. Hate and prejudice have no place in our community.

Let me paint a picture for you.

A person of color goes to a local game store to play Commander. It could be anywhere. They get into a game with someone who turns out to be prejudiced. Maybe the bigot has a confederate flag tattoo or patch on their jacket. Maybe they quietly drop a slur. Maybe it's just crystal clear that this player has no use for another person of color becoming a regular in "their" game store.

Our fictional person of color is looking to play a fun game of Commander. The bigot plays a Mono-Blue deck and proceeds to counter everything this player tries to play and tops it all off by playing Invoke Prejudice, leaning forwards and sneering "What are you going to do about it, boy?" Maybe his friends find this hilarious.

No game rules were broken, though it's obvious to all that the spirit of the format was nowhere to be found in our imaginary strawman game story.

There is literally no other card in the history of the game of that I can think of that could be used as a psychological weapon to hurt another player in quite the way that Invoke Prejudice can be used.

It seems to some of you like an outlandish bit of creative writing on my part, but people of color have been telling us for literally decades about police abuse and brutality and it took the age of cellphone videos for many of us to believe they weren't exaggerating.

I have a hard time believing that my basic scenario - including the card Invoke Prejudice - hasn't happened at some point in time.

With the banning of Invoke Prejudice, Wizards of the Coast has taken a step towards trying to make sure it never happens again.

Wizards of the Coast knows there are bigots and racists among their player base. They also know that those bigots and racists make people of color feel unwelcome. Banning these seven cards is a way to push back against those players and make it crystal clear that prejudice has no place in our game or in our community. Those cards, and players that would hold those cards up as emblems representing a white supremacist worldview, have no place in Magic: The Gathering.

Your Seven Cards

When our culture shifts and things that were acceptable to previous generations become unacceptable, we are seeing people reclaiming power that they didn't realize they had.

Americans and people across the world have watched video after video of black men and women being murdered in the streets by the very people who are supposed to protect and serve them. We have watched the power of police unions and conservative politicians work to minimize the ability for justice to be served in case after case. Many of us have felt powerless to do much of anything.

America imprisons a higher percentage of its own population than any other country in the world. The words "Land of the Free," once used to inspire pride, now come across as bitterly ironic to anyone paying attention to such things. A disproportionate number of our prisoners are people of color, most are required to work, and there is a reasonable debate to be had on whether or not we are still a nation that allows for the continuation of slavery.

The men and women who work at Wizards of the Coast, like the rest of us, have been watching history unfold.

They have watched people marching in the streets at a time where COVID-19 has forced us to engage in social distancing and radically change the way we go about our lives. Many of them likely have children and elderly relatives and have to decide whether marching in the streets for racial justice is a reasonable decision to make when they could well be exposing themselves to both a highly contagious pandemic and the real likelihood of being brutalized by a tired, angry and frightened police force.

Some of them have surely taken to the streets. Some haven't, but would dearly like to do something to help with the cause. Some would probably like to, but are exhausted by what feels like an unending string of protests, none of which seem to make a big enough difference to change much of anything.

I'd guess that some of them feel powerless in the face of a rigged electoral system, a conservative party willing to steal supreme court seats, gerrymandered voting districts, and a government that serves corporate power and its own self-interests over those of their constituents.

I certainly do.

Banning these seven cards is about the leaders at Wizards of the Coast reclaiming their power to make a difference in the small part of the world that they have influence over.

Showing minorities in card art and including them in the story of Magic isn't enough.

Making policies around racism, discrimination and harassment isn't enough.

By banning these seven cards, Wizards of the Coast has reminded us all that we can affect change even through the smallest, most seemingly insignificant action.

They took some power away from players who are racist by saying that they can't legally use those cards in sanctioned games any longer. There are probably players who just thought of them as weird old cards, but with millions of Magic players across the globe, there were surely players who were using these cards as badges of honor and ways to show pride in a racist, white supremacist identity.

Bigots have officially been served notice.

The "Gathering" must include everyone and if you would shut someone out because of the color of their skin, you simply aren't welcome here.

Banning seven cards won't by itself change the world, but in a way, it can.

You can remove seven people with bigoted worldviews, or who are willing to support bigoted politicians, from your social circle. You can boycott seven companies who have helped to fund racist politicians. You can even cut off contact from seven racist relatives that hold bigoted worldviews. You'll do well to communicate why you're doing what you're doing, but don't let that stop you from doing it. Your "seven cards" won't be Magic cards, but they can help to change the world.

You are not powerless.

You might not be able to take to the streets. You might not be able to change the world with a word, an action, a banning, or a well-written article, but you have power and you should use it. Make the world a better place by making your little corner of the world a better place. Serve notice to the bigots in your family or in your social circle. Don't just let things slide.

Stand up.

Say something.

Ban seven cards.

It might not be easy, but few things worth doing ever are.

Final Thoughts

To some extent I regret not writing this column a year ago when I was first bandying about the idea of writing The Case for Banning Invoke Prejudice, but it wouldn't have been the same column if I had written it back then.

I still don't know how much "reach" I have, but I owed it to myself to write this out.

I owed it to CoolStuffInc.com to give them my best work and my most passionately held thoughts. I owed it to my next-door neighbors, who are awesome people, great neighbors, and happen to be black. I owed it to my boss, my HR Director, and a slew of my coworkers at my day job (not CSI), who are fantastic, smart, great to work with, and are people of color. I owed it to the handful of non-white players who have played at NexGen Comics over the years. I also owed it to you, because if I'm not sharing my truth with you, I probably should step aside and let someone else write on this platform, in this particular slot.

In southern New Hampshire we happen to have a player base that skews toward straight, white, male Magic players (not unlike most New England stores, I imagine) and I'm always really happy to see folks come through the door who might fall into a different demographic. I love people, I love variety, and I firmly believe that a healthy community is one in which pretty much anyone can come in and feel welcomed and accepted (with the possible exception of Stax players).

That's all I've got for you today. Next Monday I should be back with a decklist of some sort and will probably leave my soapbox at home. I just needed to get this one off my chest - I hope you got something out of it, or at least got a chuckle out of my Stax comment at the end.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!