This was in their initial letter:

Layoff Protections: Employees currently live in fear of suddenly losing their jobs, with no warning and through no fault of their own. We have the opportunity to create strong layoff protections so that we can feel secure in creating long-term careers here at WOTC.

Remote Work Protections: Leadership is instituting a mandatory RTO, forcing numerous remote employees across the US to work from a physical office or be forced to resign. This painful choice is splitting our employees between their homes, communities, and the jobs they love. Based on company profits, we have demonstrated the ability to meet and exceed our product goals without the in office structure; workers should be able to continue working in the way that is best for them.

Generative AI Protections: Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees. WOTC lacks a robust AI policy, leaving opportunities for abuse and communicating a level of disrespect for artists and other creatives. We want to establish clear guidelines around AI, emphasizing worker protections.

Sustainable Workload: Employees’ experiences with “crunch” (intense, mandatory unpaid overtime) to meet deadlines vary widely by team and project, with some teams crunching on a regular basis just to get planned work out the door. Increasing workload without matching headcount has led to many workers having unacceptable experiences with crunch. We need to take better care of our employees by enacting strong protections around workload expectations.

Defined Career Progression: Many workers at WOTC feel like they are prevented from advancing in their role, either because opportunities for advancement are sparse or because requirements and opportunities are poorly defined. Employees’ roles should be clearly defined, and they should be able to grow their careers through meaningful raises, role changes, and promotions.

Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.

We are Stewards of Magic: Our employees and players care about doing the right thing with, and for, the games we make. Short term, profit-driven decisions may be lucrative, but we want to focus on partnerships and products that grow our games sustainably, that inspire us as employees, that excite players, and continue to foster WOTC’s positive reputation.

All very reasonable demands imo

Looks like a Mountain to me

Absolutely gorgeous, I particularly love that Mountain and Island!

I remember facing her down a lot in Standard for sure! Always hurt to have her drop and wipe out a creature, leaving me to figure out how to deal with her before she starts accruing value/incremental damage

I’m interested in seeing how she fares in today’s Standard. Certainly there are plenty of Izzet decks that could play her, but the question is will they want to?

This is an alternate Echoverse Chandra, created from Jace’s attempt to recreate the Multiverse. In this new reality, Chandra’s father was never killed by the Consulate and she joined it with him

Just caught up with this, lots of cool tidbits about Reality Fracture:

• Tam is an artificial person created by Jace to be his spy in the regular Multiverse
• Tam’s card includes an unnamed mechanic that represents Jace in his role of The Theorist, that they’ve described as “really crazy”
• Reality Fracture is described as “Planar Chaos”-like but will NOT break the color pie
• Hexhaven features 5 ally-colored schools that mirrors the enemy color schools because people kept asking for more Strixhaven schools
• There will only be a single Commander deck for Reality Fracture

100% the money came with a big legal document attached to it saying “Don’t take any legal action against us or give us any bad publicity”

It’s such a weird situation. Like on one hand, these kinds of things don’t happen as a mistake. You can’t accidentally Photoshop another artist’s work and submit it as your own. But at the same time, it seems weird that an accomplished artist would submit such an obvious hack job. With the last time we saw plagiarism (Jason Felix and Crux of Fate) it was with a relatively unknown fanartist, but this is literally the previous art for the same card, which was massively relevant in basically every format it’s legal in. There’s no way someone wouldn’t notice, which makes it even stranger that the art directors did not.

Just a terrible situation, and while I don’t think there’s any excuse for this, there’s still a lot of questions on how this ended up ever going to print in the first place

Card art is done entirely freelance with the exception of a small set of concept artists/directors/graphic designers they have on staff IIRC

Disappointed but not surprised

Tl;dr: The MTG Arena team is organizing for better working conditions

A 6/6 with no other positive abilities does not do much right now. Heck LCI had a 6/6 for 3 mana that sees no play

Yes, all regular boosters contain 1 Instant or Sorcery card from the Mystical Archive, at the above pull rates. If you check the Spoilers community you can see the current revealed cards under [SOA] (whereas the main set is [SOS])

I’m surprised, I didn’t think we’d ever see a new pox given how much they avoid resource denial these days. I guess they’re okay with it at 5 (heavily restricted) mana

Dang, was hoping for repeatable land ramp or maybe some big 3/3 or 4/4 tokens. Wish this had at least given trample until end of turn

RIP Blex, gone but not forgotten

Entering can grab any creature card in a graveyard and gives haste, which is a significant upgrade.

But in recent years they’ve been shortcutting “Look at the top X for something, and put the rest in your graveyard” into just “Mill X and put something among them into your hand/field”

With the Frizz? No way!

Mark Rosewater noted it as a positive for Draft in his State of Design article, but that may have been only for less-experienced drafters. Was it disliked among more competitive drafters?

Yeah, it’s pretty epic