Ever since Jordan Peele gave us Get Out, there’s been a trend in pop culture entertainment that upsets the shit outta me—everything (and oh my Lord, do I mean everything) is centered on Black Pain. It feels like the only shows or movies that prominently feature Black people involved in fantastical or heroic shit has to feature Black Pain: HBO’s Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, Amazon’s Them, Netflix’s new movie Two Distant Strangers, even The Falcon and The Winter Soldier couldn’t resist making a “Black guy getting unjustly harassed by the cops” reference (even if it is quickly subverted). Y’all, I gotta say (again) I’m tired of it, and desperate for something in which there are hella Black people doing weird, awesome, heroic, and magical shit, without needing to deal with the baggage of racism. In my search for such a thing, I’ve hit upon an unlikely ally: Magic: The Gathering.
I love stories and lore. I especially love the stories for the kind of games nobody plays for the story— games like Battlefield, Call of Duty, Overwatch, and, obviously, Magic: The Gathering. I am also extremely attracted to high fantasy. Big robes, big spells, elves and wizards—I eat that shit up with a spoon and ask for seconds. And if it’s Black people in big robes, casting big spells, or featured as elves or wizards, it’s a big “hell yes” for me. But as you can imagine, there hasn’t been very much intersection between Black and high fantasy in pop culture. There are a plethora of books to be sure, like the Binti trilogy and the Earthsea novels, but whenever it’s high fantasy in TV, movies, or video games, Black people either get left out entirely or are seen but barely heard.
Magic: The Gathering manages to combine my three favorite things into one: esoteric lore, Black and Brown people just vibing, and a whole lotta magic. I’ve been having a great time going back and reading the stories for past card sets on Magic: The Gathering’s website.
I really liked the Return to Dominaria set from 2018. Dominaria’s overall story is kinda ho-hum. Basically there are a few separate plot threads about a magical skyship, a cabal of demons, and assembling a crack team of individuals to take on an impending threat. But contained within that larger story is a much smaller one featuring one of Magic’s coolest Black characters, Teferi.
...Fantasy stories can hold a mirror to our reality and speak truth to power—that’s what was so powerful about Get Out. It can be cathartic—there’s an episode in Lovecraft Country in which a Black woman takes a potion that makes her white and uses it to get a job she’s coveted but could never get because of her Blackness. But the most powerful episode of that series was “I Am”, when the show left all its “racism morality play but make it cthulhu horror” premise behind to follow one Black woman’s journey from fantasy world to fantasy world. Magic: The Gathering’s story is literally built on that premise, and I’m glad its creators, at times, use that story to say that sometimes it’s okay to just leave the bullshit behind.