by Ryan Dirks
Hasbro Entertainment is a gaming powerhouse. The brand is known for its classic games, like Monopoly, Life, Clue, Connect4, Twister, and Jenga. Surprisingly, the most valuable Hasbro product is not a board game, but a card game. Magic: The Gathering is referred to by players as Magic. Magic is a trading card game developed in the late nineties and has since grown into a brand generating almost one billion dollars a year (Hasbro 2022). Trading card games are different from traditional games because of how you acquire the play materials. In trading card games, players collect cards and build a deck which they use to compete against other players. You cannot purchase specific cards from stores, instead, you buy randomized packs of cards and are expected to trade with other players to collect the cards you want. This creates a need to interact with other players to build an effective deck. This need to trade combined with a desire to play the game would create the modern LGS, or local game store.
Your deck is the collection of cards that you play with during a game. During Magic, players will draw cards from their decks in hopes of defeating their opponents. Players can play a multitude of different decks which makes TCGs inherently more personal than traditional one on one board games like chess or checkers, in which both players get the same pieces. This leaves decks as both tools of victory and self-expression. As Magic: The Gathering gained popularity, Local Game Stores (LGSs) also became popular gathering places for players to trade, play, compete, and socialize with others who shared their interest in the game. This social aspect was particularly important for the game's target audience, which typically comprised individuals with strong nerdy inclinations, who may have had smaller social circles and weaker soft skills (Falcão et al.). To support the burgeoning community, the game's creators, Wizards of the Coast (acquired by Hasbro in 1999), launched the Duelists' Convocation Network, which provided standardized rules for hosting tournaments and gameplay.
In 1996, a professional league for Magic: The Gathering was established, which allowed skilled players to qualify for a world championship and potentially win substantial amounts of prize money. This further established the game as a competitive pursuit, and aspiring players were attracted to the possibility of reaching elevated levels of play. These factors, including competitive support, sanctioned play, and social opportunities, contributed to Magic's massive success but also contributed to a male-dominated fanbase. Local game stores were designed to cater to the male player base, and consequently, have been less accessible to female players.
The first barrier to entry for Magic players is its preexisting demographic makeup, which can make female players feel less comfortable approaching the game. Nerd spaces, including local game stores, are often male dominated (Falcão et al.), creating a cycle where women do not get involved in Magic because other women are not involved. Because female players are already underrepresented, I will be exploring barriers to entry that may affect them disproportionately.
One such challenge is the focus on competition, which is a major aspect of Magic gameplay. However, research has shown that men and women differ in their emotional responses to competition. According to the article Gender Differences in Emotional Responses to Cooperative and Competitive Game Play, men experience higher positive emotional responses when playing competitive games, while women experience no significant difference between competitive and cooperative play (Kivikangas 4). Despite this, the emphasis on competition can create a hurdle for female players, who may feel less motivated to compete if they perceive the game as too difficult.
In the article “No one likes to lose: The effect of game difficulty on competency, flow, and enjoyment,” Mike Schmierbach notes that individuals playing a harder game may feel less competent and derive less enjoyment (109). This is particularly relevant for one-on-one games like Magic, where win rates are split between both players. As better players achieve higher win rates, it can create a barrier for less experienced players, particularly those who are new to the game or may already feel underrepresented. This can inadvertently make the game space harder to approach for potential female players.
Another issue facing Magic players' enjoyment is the inherent chance involved in the game. In most formats (a format is a ruleset that determines minor changes in gameplay but mostly dictates card legality) a deck has at least sixty cards, all competitive players will not exceed that number, even though they can. This is because having more cards lowers the odds you draw the right card at the right time, so decks are built around the best sixty cards. But it is not 60 different cards, they can have four of each normal card (called a spell card), and unlimited basic land cards, which are needed to play other cards but do nothing on their own and typically account for a third of the deck. So, if you stick to 4 of each card, you will have a 1/15 chance of drawing the card which is much better than 1/60. Now while that is four times better, it still leaves the chance that you lose due to poor draws.
Magic has mitigation for luck-based losses, you can mulligan in competitive play, which allows you to redraw your hand if it is not good for an in-game penalty of one less card in hand. The mulligan rule is, however, limited in its scope to the beginning of the game, and there is nothing to do for unfortunate draws in the late game. One such thing is the act of repeatedly drawing those basic land cards, rather than other useful cards. One could compare Magic to poker in this way, where skilled players frequently perform better but are not immune from isolated losses due to luck. In the article “This is just so unfair!” Jussi Palomäki found more experienced players of poker were better able to separate and accept bad luck as part of the overall strategy, whereas less experienced players were much more likely to be thrown off mentally, a mental state called “tilt” (3).
The combination of a high loss rate and chance occasionally being a determining factor can make it easy for players to get frustrated and berate their opponents, especially if they view their win as non-legitimate. This can lead to a behavior of discounting players as “lucky” or “skill-less” instead of accepting losses. The result of this is a higher standard for players trying to join their local LGS, especially for groups that are already outliers, like women. Men are more likely to accept a certain level of toxic play, compared to women (Beres et al. 1).According to the article Don’t you know that your toxic men view toxicity as a normal byproduct of play. This toxicity towards outside players can also be influenced by what deck the newcomers play.
Like all trading card games, Magic has wide variety of possible deck combinations, with different strengths and weaknesses. Local game stores (LGSs) have regular players with strong preferences on those decks. Decks that could be considered easy-to-play might get frowned upon, and given that MTG is a turn-based game, a player may be avoided if they bring a slower, “less fun” deck. There is no objective way of knowing beforehand how people feel about a particular deck or type thereof until a player introduces it, which may put a player in hot water since switching decks is not necessarily easy.
While Magic is a trading card game, obtaining different cards can be challenging due to the cost rather than the difficulty of finding them. As a result, most players purchase cards in the secondhand market, where prices can be remarkably high. For example, modern format decks can range from $400 to upwards of $2,000, and singular cards in Legacy format can exceed ten thousand. Standard format is cheaper, with top decks currently priced around $400 and some as low as $100. However, standard format rotates, meaning that only cards released in the past one and a half years are playable, necessitating regular purchases of new cards. This is a significant investment for someone who is not heavily invested in the game. If you do not know anyone willing to lend you a deck, you must be prepared to shell out some serious cash to try the game.
Another challenge to getting involved with Magic can be the stores themselves. I spoke to James Beltz, owner of Sneak Attack Games in St. Cloud. “The trouble with card shops is it costs relatively little to get started, and you can’t go out of business.” Said James. He went on, explaining that compared to other businesses, people running a card shop poorly are much less likely to go under. The only major costs are inventory, which can be mitigated if you have a larger personal collection, and labor, which you can circumvent by personally working the register. James said that even though there are nine card shops in the St. Cloud area, the only card shop to go out of business in the past ten years was shut down only after the owner passed away unexpectedly and the family could not figure out how to prepare the store's taxes. This means stores that promote or accept store behaviors that push away new and non-male players are not penalized like they would in a higher overhead business.
I also spoke to James about gender disparity in local play, and he pointed out that card shops, while popular, only account for a quarter of Magic played. “Three-fourths of players never even go to a card shop to buy, much less play. Wizards' official numbers are closer to 65 to 35 for male to female, you never see that in a card shop.” He attributes this to playgroups being cliquey which can make events intimidating. James explained that while you can certainly win favor when new to a store through exceptional skill, the only way to get that good at Magic is to already be involved in an active playgroup. With men already more demographically like other players at a game store they are inherently more likely to be seen as legitimate players.
Lastly, James said female players are unlikely to seek out other card shops if the first one they try is an unpleasant experience. This combined with the low barriers to entry and difficulty of going out of business means that poorly run game stores will always negatively impact gender ratios, regardless of the efforts of other stores in their area. I also spoke to the owner of Fan Zone in St. Cloud, Jason, who went a step further, saying: “The culture changes based on what the owners do, and a lot of us are older and stuck in our ways, and those ways, suck.”
I also took time to interview friends and acquaintances in my local gaming scene, to see if they could shed any light on the issue. As part of the interview, I would show pictures from five different card shops, starting with the view when approaching the business. The difference in male and female responses was immediately clear. While male respondents were likely to comment on signage, play space, and other merchandise when prompted for comment, female interviewees instead discussed whether they would feel safe entering the business. A general preference for high visibility from the outside was also observed in the female interviewees.
Female interviewees also were much more likely to respond to a well-designed space, whereas male respondents were more likely to be fine with things like unfinished elements, cluttered shelving, and poor lighting. Both genders preferred stores that followed preexisting retail aesthetics, the highest-rated store was more than once lauded as being bookstore-like, whereas the lowest-rated store was compared to an unfinished basement by multiple respondents.
During these interviews, female respondents also described a social shield effect when arriving in either a group or with a guy. Store owners also reported that their events with the highest female participation normally involved those players being brought by male players. This is one of the reasons that every woman I talked to who was familiar with Magic was introduced by male players. Male players are more likely to be competitively motivated to play and male nerds specifically are likely to be more attracted to the social aspect of gaming. Magic, a game with high barriers to entry for everyone, ends up filtering women out through factors like not feeling safe in the environment. Even if a store had excellent culture inside, a female player might not get that far if the building does not seem safe or inviting.
Some, however, would argue that Magic’s gender ratio is not a side effect of being a space that catered to males, but part of an active effort to keep those spaces male dominated. In “On the Cultural Inaccessibility of Gaming” Emma Vossen coined the term “cultural inaccessibility” to describe cultural barriers to entry (3). One of the biggest issues she describes for gaming spaces is the lack of an official designation of “gamer” which allows people to police or question other people who self-identify as gamers. This can cause qualities unrelated to playing games to disqualify you from being a gamer, like political and social beliefs. For Vossen this othering leads to women being considered deviant space invaders that are intruding on the male hegemony (101).
Others would argue that the barriers described in this paper and others are flimsy if not nonexistent, or that they apply to both genders evenly. They would instead argue that the gender disparity is due to interest, it is a male-dominated game today because only men are really interested in playing Magic: The Gathering. Women are not barred from showing up for events or purchasing product, so if they have extremely low representation the issue is that of interest.
Both points are countered by the rise of Commander. Commander is the most played format in the game right now (Rosewater). Commander looks vastly different compared to other formats, for starters, it is played in groups of players called pods, pods can be any size but are typically groups of four. The decks are larger, with one hundred cards instead of sixty, you can also only have one of each card in the deck (other than basic lands), which drastically reduces consistency in play.
These two factors, the four-player pods and reduced consistency make the game far less predictable and therefore less competitive. It also causes the game to sometimes move into cooperative play, as a player gains a lead the other players are incentivized to band together against them until that person is no longer in the lead. The four-person format would also help the win rate issue. While now an even distribution gives a player a 25 percent chance of winning, a player has a 75 percent chance of not being the first to lose. Commander is also significantly cheaper to get involved in, pre-built Commander decks are playable and start at only thirty dollars, which is a much safer entry point for fresh players.
Does reducing competitiveness and cost increase female turnout? Preliminary results say yes; James Beltz of Sneak Attack Games estimated the gender parity for Commander at his store to be two to one in favor of men, compared to his estimate for the stores’ turnout for modern, which he put at somewhere between nine to one and ten to zero, also in favor of men. Staff at Paddy's Game Shoppe and Fan Zone, two other St. Cloud gaming shops, also reported significantly higher female turnout for Commander.
When barriers to inclusion are addressed female participation in Magic goes up. The popularity of Commander proves this. This is because there are no formal barriers to entry but instead a culture built around the growing male fanbase at the time of its inception. Local gaming stores are less accessible for female players because of the ways stores were designed to appeal to the male player base. Changing local game stores to be more inclusive spaces leads to more inclusive play groups.
Works Cited
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Falcão, Thiago, et al. “Conservadorismo e Masculinidade Tóxica Na Cultura Gamer: Uma Aproximação a Magic: The Gathering.” MATRIZES, vol. 15, no. 2, 2021, pp. 251–277., doi:10.11606/issn.1982-8160.v15i2p251-277.
Hasbro, 2021, pp. 2–2, 2021, Hasbro Annual Report.
Kivikangas, J. Matias, et al. “Gender Differences in Emotional Responses to Cooperative and Competitive Game Play.” PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 7, 2014, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0100318.
Palomäki, Jussi, et al. “‘This Is Just so Unfair!’: A Qualitative Analysis of Loss-Induced Emotions and Tilting in on-Line Poker.” International Gambling Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2013, pp. 255–270., doi:10.1080/14459795.2013.780631.
Rosewater, Mark. “Blogatog.” Markrosewater.tumblr.com, 2022, markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/691759590323503104/the-majority-of-magic-play-isnt-eternal-i.
Schmierbach, Mike, et al. “No One Likes to Lose.” Journal of Media Psychology, vol. 26, no. 3, 2014, pp. 105–110., doi:10.1027/1864-1105/a000120.
Vossen, Emma. “On the Cultural Inaccessibility of Gaming: Invading, Creating, and Reclaiming the Cultural Clubhouse.” UWSpace, 25 July 2018, uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/13649.