Magic head designer affirms game’s diversity efforts: It ‘means something to people’

Earlier this February, a Magic: The Gathering player on Tumblr asked the collectible card game’s head designer, Mark Rosewater… well, it’s more of a comment than a question: “I want to speak out against the whole push towards DEI. I feel that ever since you made the push to make identity the forefront of a character it has hurt the stories you tell.” Rosewater responded with a lengthy, elegant reply, but one line hit hard: “The narrative that a gain for someone else is an attack on you is just not true.”

The back-and-forth comes at time when President Donald Trump and his advisor Elon Musk are taking direct aim at government programs supporting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as well the broader consideration of underrepresented communities in corporate America. But as Trump has weaponized and demonized the phrase “DEI,” so too have some Magic players on Tumblr, apparently. Rosewater made his feelings about the game’s inclusionary art and storytelling clear in his rebuttal. 

If the response sounded like one guy’s opinion, Rosewater was happy to clarify at this month’s 2025 MagicCon in Chicago that these efforts continue to be very much part of the grander creative Magic: The Gathering methodology. During a roundtable interview addressing his recent Tumblr post, the designer affirmed why it has been — and why it will remain — important for the team at Wizards of the Coast to foster diverse representation in the game. Here is Rosewater’s answer in full (edited and condensed for clarity).

Magic is an amazing game. I think the best game ever made. And I want as many people as possible to play Magic. I think Magic is very approachable from a game standpoint, but […] one of the cool things about Magic is that Magic is what you want it to be. If I go play Monopoly, well, Monopoly is Monopoly or Scrabble is Scrabble, it is what it is. But in Magic, we have over 28,000 cards. You choose what your deck is and your deck gets to be a reflection of you in a way that few other games really can match. I mean, D&D is the only other game I can think of that really has that amount of customizability to your experience.

Part of it is: I want to play elves! I want to play goblins! Part of it is: What elements of gameplay do I want? But part of it also is: Hey, I want to express who I am and what I am. And one of the things that’s so important is who you are as a person, the things you represent — you want to see that. Today, we made a reference to Alesha [who is a transgender woman in the fiction of Magic]. That was a really powerful character. There were a lot of people that just don’t see themselves represented in games. And the amount of mail I get… I mean, it’s so important to people. I talk to people constantly and it really, really means something to people. 

The thing I was just trying to explain is, it’s very easy when all your life you’ve seen yourself in everything you’ve ever done. Maybe you just don’t understand that’s important because you’ve never not had it. You’ve never experienced not having it. And so that is why this has been true from Wizards from way, way, way back. I mean, we were saying “he or she” on cards when no one even talked about stuff like that. 

And so from the very beginning, we’ve wanted to be a game that is representative of all. That has always been important to us. And even now, I mean the reason I answered on the blog is I felt like if ever there’s a time just to hear that again, now’s the time. Sadly the world is not as reflective of that as it should be and that we care about it. I wanted to make sure that no matter what is happening, we still care about that. 

During the roundtable, Magic: The Gathering principal product architect Athena Froehlich piggybacked off Rosewater’s comments, speaking of her own experience as a fan who became invested enough to pursue a job with Wizards. 

From playing the Portal starter decks and seeing the word “she” in the text next to dark-skinned ghost hunter Kaya Cassir, Froehlich says initiatives to broaden the experiences captured in MTG cards, at a “time period when games weren’t as inclusive and you were told all the time that this isn’t for you,” put her on the path of fandom.

“I think representation is super easy to dismiss as being unimportant, but when you’re looking to cosplay a character and you can see yourself in that character and then put the costume on and go to an event and engage with fans, that is super meaningful.”

While rumors have swirled in “anti-woke” corners of the internet that Wizards of the Coast recently cut back on inclusivity efforts for Magic: The Gathering, the claims don’t seem represented by the game’s staff or in Wizards’ own corporate messaging. As of publication, the WotC website continues to bolster a DEI page, in which the company states that it is “committed to creating a diverse and inclusive culture that values, respects and empowers employees to be their authentic selves and bring their best ideas forward.”