Last week, Wizards of the Coast sent private security company Pinkerton after a leaker of its next Magic: The Gathering set, March of the Machine: The Aftermath. The leaker alleges they were confronted by armed guards who made his family cry and threatened him with jail time.
Even if Wizards then stated to the leaker its belief he didn’t commit any crimes in attaining the Aftermath boxes, and promised him compensation for confiscating his Aftermath cards, as he claims, there’s one thing that really should go without saying: this is easily the worst thing Wizards of the Coast has ever done.
Last week, while he was still showing off cards and cracking Aftermath packs, I was heavily critical of the leaker, and all of that still applies. I think revealing the entire set before launch was a selfish, ultimately pointless move. However, none of that really matters now, does it? Regardless of the leaker or his motives, a private company sent armed guards to his house to reclaim a product it apparently didn’t even think he illegally obtained.
At this point, the fact that Aftermath cards were leaked at all is so insignificant in this story it’d be laughable to bring them up - we might dislike leakers and spoilers, but intimidation and threats from the company itself cannot be endorsed.
The fact that Wizards confirmed in a short email to me that Pinkerton “is part of their investigation”, is part of the problem.
You may have heard of it as The Pinkertons, the outlaw-wrangling lawmen of BioShock Infinite or Red Dead Redemption 2, but it’s not just a historical relic. Pinkertons are often associated with violence and intimidation. There has been a long history of the Pinkertons being employed for union-busting and spying on workers, with clients as recent as Amazon and Starbucks.
If this was Random Lawyer & Partners with a warrant, this story would have been far less interesting. Instead, sending in the big guns like Pinkerton to reclaim your cards is a statement. A display of force meant to discourage other leakers, less they also have armed guards turn up at their door. If it’s just a coincidence that Wizards is using a famously intimidatory law-firm, then somebody somewhere at Wizards needs to take a good, long look at what kind of message that sends out.
Wizards could have ridden this out. It could have taken the loss, made a cute little comment when it came to the official reveal season, and carried on regardless – just like it did when it accidentally put Phyrexia: All Will Be One cards in Dominaria Remastered packs. It could have investigated where things went so wrong in its supply chain that product leaked a month in advance, and it should have done it without hiring private police.
It could even have made use of YouTube’s copyright system to take the videos down, or even sent a cease-and-desist. These would have been bad moves for Wizards that caused some bad PR, but it wouldn’t have involved armed guards, and everyone would’ve still been arguing over whether the leaker was shitty for leaking the cards in the first place.
Wizards has done a lot of wrong things in the past. Just in the last year, it took backlash over Magic’s $1,000 30th Anniversary Edition boxes, and its attempt to change Dungeons & Dragons’ Open Gaming License caught the ire of the entire tabletop roleplaying community. You could also point at product fatigue, Universes Beyond, and countless other things to criticise Wizards of the Coast, and you’d be bang on the money.
But this is easily the worst thing it’s done, and it isn’t even close. This wasn’t changing a game for the worse, it wasn’t over-releasing product or putting Eleven from Stranger Things on a card. It was an act of violence against a YouTuber who, at the time, had less than 2,000 subscribers. This will have no impact on the game in the future, bar maybe some supply line adjustments to stop such a leak from happening again. Something that should have been addressed properly after the Phyrexia issue.
Wizards just handed those who argue leaking a whole set of cards two weeks early is journalism, or even good anticapitalist praxis, one hell of a good reason to do more of it in the future. It’s always going to be shitty to reveal cards ahead of time, but the argument that it’s “sticking it to the man” just got a lot more credence than it had this time last week, thanks to Wizards’ actions.
The most insignificant point in all this is that Aftermath itself is now marred by this whole situation. What was meant to be the dramatic conclusion to a years-long story arc is now forever going to be known as the set Wizards set the Pinkertons on someone for.
This year had been much better for Magic than the second half of 2022. We’d had fewer Secret Lair releases, all three sets we’ve had so far were fantastic, and there was real excitement about Lord of the Rings and Wilds of Eldraine. But this entire debacle has put a black mark on both Aftermath and Wizards of the Coast as a whole, and it needs to do some major work – starting with a full statement on the events of the last week – if it wants to win back some of that good faith.
More importantly than just positive PR, it needs to stop hiring the Pinkertons over cards.