Be not afraid, said Wizards of the Coast, after Magic: The Gathering content creators shared jokes, complaints, and 'I'm in danger' memes in reaction to a recent Magic audience survey on the latest Spider-Man set.
Wizards regularly releases these public surveys to poll its audience on each MTG set release, but the one on October 15 had a rather unusual question.
Alongside asks about the set's uniqueness and probing into the reader's relationship with Spiderman came: To what degree did negative influencer commentary impact your perception of Magic: The Gathering/Marvel's Spiderman before the set released?
It's an unusual line of questioning for Wizards, and strangely worded too, especially since the survey taker was asked to rate the impact from a one (greatly worsened my perception) to a five (greatly improved my perception). Only a complete contrarian would say that negative commentary improved their perception of anything, so this question was bound to generate a bunch of 1-3 answers.
This drummed up a fair bit of controversy from creators, who understandably felt they were being blamed for negative attitudes towards the set. Regular fans spoke out against it too, with one top rated Twitter comment calling it "extremely distasteful".
On Bluesky, Magic's senior communications manager Blake Rasmussen agreed that this "was not a good question". He reassured that "We don't, and won't punish creators for having negative opinions, even very negative," adding that Wizards of the Coast's history of working with creators of varying opinions speaks to that.
He apologized for the way the question was phrased, and said the focus on negative commentary was "unusual and not great", giving the opposite impressions WotC wants to about how it values Magic creators.
Rasmussen predicted that some sort of error may have been made and promised that it would be talked about internally.
Check out the Magic: The Gathering release schedule, or come join the conversation on the Wargamer Discord - how are you feeling about ATLA?