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  • Worked in tech for a long time before I got to WOTC. Went through a lot of layoffs and short term executive decisions that invariably leave anyone without preferred stock out to dry. Wish I had a union then. Glad to have one now.

    Edit: Words are my own. I am not a rep of WOTC or Hasbro.

    by d4mi3n
  • Did you not know what you were getting into? Most folks I know in Seattle have pretty commonly talked about wotc being an absolutely abysmal company to work for going all the way back to the early 00s.

    The only reason to be there was for the love and the buying access/perks. That access & perks are long gone.

    Had a friend whose dream job was to work on D&D. He's got a fairly high profile in the TTRPG space and developed one major product/book release for D&D. The experience spun him out of Hasbro and the TTRPG industry entirely.

    by busterarm
  • Pinkertons inbound
    by protocolture
  • (People might not know the inside joke here, namely that WotC has in the past sent the actual Pinkertons after some people suspected of leaking unreleased cards)
    by cscheid
  • Congrats to the Arena team
    by petarb
  • Any time you have a chance to unionize¹, do so.

    ¹ That's union-ize, not un-ionize.

    by CapitalistCartr
  • Hopefully they can push back against some of these collabs. I have yet to meet someone who is thrilled with playing a deck with Post Malone, TMNT, or The Walking Dead in it. The best you get is indifference.
    by Avicebron
  • I don't think current WOTC actually cares if people play MTG at all, only if they continue buying cards. It has become a collectible more than a game
    by bluefirebrand
  • The average duration that anyone is actively playing a TCG is something like 2 years. There’s also way more players than ever. Most of the new players never engage in online community around their game.

    So you may not hear a lot of excitement but that’s still the minority opinion. Universes Beyond sell like gangbusters.

    I remember multiple players at my local’s prerelease for TMNT saying that was the most fun they’d had playing a prerelease in years. And none of these things have really sunk in the secondary market after they’ve gone out of print.

    Heck my Warhammer 40K collector commander decks are up several hundred percent post release. And I’ve made a small fortune buying up all the things the online MTG community seems to hate…

    by busterarm
  • It's painfully obvious these decisions were not made by people who play Magic
    by cloudking
  • As a counter-point, I was hanging out with my brother the other day, who has recently gotten into Magic the Gathering, and he was specifically talking about the TMNT collab as something he thought was neat (I wasn't aware of that specific collab until he mentioned it). I suspect that the collabs are actually making WotC a decent amount of money, because people who do not share your specific tastes are buying them.
    by JuniperMesos
  • Same here: I own (literally) 50 Commander decks ... and I stopped playing 100% as soon as Transformers and My Little Ponies became cards.

    Magic will either become "generic TCG that's unrecognizable to the original" or it's going to pay a very painful long-term cost for their short-term gains.

    by hungryhobbit
  • Final Fantasy, LOTR, Avatar, are some of the best selling sets in the history of Magic. As much as I don't like some of the spiderslop, there is no real argument against printing more of it. The Hobbit set is going to be a complete blowout success.
    by FanaHOVA
  • yeah. scrolling this expansion list, you can see 2018 was really the last _block_ as we knew them: few sets labeled under a theme an author might write a book about

    also shortly after we see new sets stopped getting their own wiki articles

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Magic:_The_Gathering_s...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Magic:_The_Gathering_n...

    by grimgrin
  • I completely lost interest in Magic when they started churning out all the licensed crossovers. It feels like they really jumped the shark compared to how they used to be - they used to seemingly care deeply about the lore, gameplay, structure of releases etc whereas now it all just feels like a cash grab.
    by p1necone
  • Anytime this comes up, it's worth pointing out how deeply weird US unionization is compared to the broader world.

    There is now a union ... just for Wizards of the Coast employees. UWOTC-CWA now has a monopoly on negotiating for WotC employees. Dues flow up to the CWA, but members don't necessarily get the benefit of bargaining industry-wide. There is also no choice within WotC for what union represents you.

    It's still a deeply flawed relationship, especially compared to what a median European enjoys. It's not a simple "US companies bad - EU companies good" - the NLRA is in desperate need of reform by Congress and political actors across the US have stymied progress.

    by legitster
  • > the NLRA is in desperate need of reform by Congress and political actors across the US have stymied progress.

    To be clear, even leaving aside the current DC fiasco, Congress as a whole, and the Republican Party most especially, actively want the situation to be this bad or much, much worse.

    by danaris
  • It’s not “deeply weird” but was intentionally legislated to prevent labor from obtaining similar sectorial bargaining power and political influence as they had in Europe. Some entertainment industry unions had already achieved similar stature pre-WWII and were grandfathered in, but the US learned their lesson here and explicitly sought to atomize at the workplace level.
    by bugglebeetle
  • I’m familiar with sectoral bargaining in the abstract but wasn’t aware European workers had the ability to choose which union represented them in negotiations. How does that work in practice?
    by derektank