Brazilian MTG fans are spamming Wizards of the Coast social media accounts over the company’s unpopular decision to stop making Portuguese language cards. Along with images of Portuguese copies of the Greed MTG card – a twist on a form of protest against Wizards that’s become pretty common by now – these fans are also using something much cheekier.
They’re bombarding the accounts with a NSFW image of retired Brazilian football player Marcos André Batista dos Santos, best known by the nickname Vampeta (vampire-devil).
It’s an act of protest known as “Vampetaço”, posting a nude image of Vampeta (shot decades ago for G Magazine) to voice your displeasure. It’s a recent trend in Brazil that seems to have begun around 2020, and has since been used by social media users to target everything from neo-Nazis, to esports players, to zoos, to Israeli officials.
Wizards announced it was stopping production of Portuguese cards as well as Chinese (Simplified) cards in February of this year. The last set to use Portuguese will be Modern Horizons 3 and the last set to use Chinese will be Bloomburrow. After this, the main languages you’ll still find Magic cards in will be English, Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.
Wizards explained in the announcement article that, while it strives to make Magic: The Gathering accessible to all, “we’ve also had to confront rising costs and shifts in global demand, even as Magic continues to grow.”
This comes just a couple of years after the company dropped Russian and Traditional Chinese from its list of languages, but the backlash this time appears to have been much stronger.
As popular Magic YouTuber Spice8Rack pointed out on Twitter last month, it wasn’t long ago that Wizards produced a bunch of promo cards for Streets of New Capenna, designed to celebrate the many different languages Magic: The Gathering supported. Since then, almost half of those languages have been dropped.
It seems like the last languages to go will be English and Japanese, as right now Wizards has plans (starting from Bloomburrow) to only produce promo packs in these two tongues.
Once these are gone too, we assume, it’ll just be symbols and little pictograms left to communicate Magic’s rules, after which there’ll just be blank, clean cards, the way nature intended.
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