I didn’t eat pizza for over three years.
My cholesterol is high, and as I’m culturally Catholic, I thought total abstinence from red meat and dairy was the primary way to reduce it. From May of 2022 to October of 2025, no cheese, milk, beef, or pork passed my lips. I got my stats down a bit, but nowhere near what I had hoped for, and as I’m raising a toddler, I eventually started eating her quesadilla leavings and pizza crusts out of guilt instead of dumping them in the garbage. That first slice of honest-to-god pizza, the one she pointed to at a pizza parlor and then said “Dad, I’m not hungry” when it slid off the paddle and onto the scalloped paper plate, was the second best slice I’ve ever had*.
*Rome, pizza ai frutti di mare, 2006. I dream about it, twenty years later.
There’s a real antihumanist hubris in giving up pizza, an ancient and perfect food. The first recorded use of the word “pizza” is from a reference in a document from the Byzantine Empire in CE 997. The etymology is uncertain, but it may be an evolution of “pitta,” meaning a round flat bread, or from the Italian “pinza,” meaning to stamp or flatten, or from the proto-German “bizzo,” meaning a bite or a snack. Piling vegetables and meat on a flatbread dates back long before the 10th century, obviously—references to pizza-like dishes of flatbreads spread with cooked toppings are seen throughout antiquity—but the pizza as we think of it, as a leavened wheat dough that’s been spun or pressed flat, spread with tomato sauce, and topped with cheese, forcemeats, and vegetables, and then baked in a very hot enclosed oven, originated in Naples, Italy in the 18-19th century. I don’t want to be more specific than that, as the history of pizza and the superiority of various styles, toppings, and crust types is contentious and combative. Historically, pizza has been a proletarian food, but it’s also an ideal gamer food: it can be consumed with one hand, is easily split amongst a play group, and the delivery model means a minimal amount of time needs to be spent preparing or plating the dish.
Until now, pizza hasn’t been featured within the canon of Magic, but we could certainly speculate on which Magic planes have invented pizza. Ravnica is guaranteed, as all the ingredients are present, from the tomatoes in Krovod Haunch to the mushrooms the Golgari grow in their corpse-gardens, and Ravnica has an active street-food culture at the Tin Street market. There’s no doubt in my mind that Lorwyn’s Kithkin have perfected a rustic kind of pizza with springjack chevre or, for the more discerning customer or possibly less discerning customer, Changeling cheese. I imagine Elspeth, even in archangel form, still misses Therosian pizza and that New Capenna and Kamigawa most likely have a fiery pizza perfect for Demons and Oni. What is certain, with the launch of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is that New York-style pizza as we know it—a cheap and omnipresent city food that we can have delivered to our door, foldable and customizable with savory toppings—has become part of Magic. We can now run Bagel and Schmear alongside Guac and Marshmallow Pizza and Nutrient Block in our Hobbit deck. How this affects the magic of Magic has been a contentious topic over the last few weeks among the cognoscenti of Magic social media and, to put all the cards on the table, within my own thoughts.
Toppings on the Pizza
I was a Real Ghostbusters kid and not a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles kid–I have only the most glancing familiarity with the franchise, although I definitely had some of the action figures, as I was drawn to grotesque maximalism early in life. I do not resent the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set in the same way that I never resented people enjoying pizza during my pizza-less months or people enjoying drinks around me during my periodic bouts of sobriety. What I resent is having my favorite hobby—Magic—being adulterated with not just other hobbies, but other aesthetic models, and then being told that it makes the game better and that I should be grateful. Right now, at this point in cultural development, as we labor under financialization and consolidatory capitalism, we’re told that the most important thing a work of art or a franchise can be is universally popular and worthy of being integrated into other popular art forms. It’s the large language model debate in cultural microcosm.
I’m sure Large Language Models have utility in specialized fields—I’m sure that, with proper oversight, they can comb through massive amounts of data and identify trends at a level that outpaces human ability. But building out the American economy on the promise of them reshaping language and culture is shortsighted, quixotic, and fraudulent. It’s especially fraudulent when the technology is being sold as an exploration of self and creativity at the consumer level. The pitch for consumer-level LLM technology—by which I mean, platforms like ChatGPT and Claude that can generate text, images, and video based on prompts provided by a lay audience—is that it can effortlessly create any content you’d like. The argument is that, like computer generated imagery in movies and Photoshop before it, LLM technology is a new tool that is going to be fully integrated into all creative and occupational production models so you might as well get comfortable with it now. I refuse to get comfortable with it and so I do not use “AI” in any way (other than the pseudo-hidden ways we all do, based on the speed with which Google, Microsoft, and other corporations have adapted the technology into the programs we’ve been using for decades now). But we’re told that LLM technology can turn anyone into an artist, that our workflow will be streamlined, and that everyone is using it already, so why don’t you opt in now before you’re forced to adopt it?
In much the same way, we’re currently being told that Universes Beyond is how Magic draws in and retains players and that the game is healthier than ever before, especially in player growth—and, Wizards asks us, don’t we want more people playing Magic? Isn’t the ultimate goal for the game increased popularity and lasting cultural relevance? Personally, no, I don’t buy this. It’s a sick mindset—growth for the sake of growth without passion behind it. That’s the prerogative of the tapeworm, birthrate obsessives, and the archcapitalist.
Always Refine the Recipe
The beauty and the paradox of Magic is that it can’t be exclusively driven by passion. Some cards have to be Open Fire or Ember Shot, and I truly think that’s inspiring. The worst card is the culmination of a series of defined creative choices—now, some of those choices are “well, we needed to replace a potentially-busted Mythic Rare with one we didn’t have time to test, so we created Archangel’s Light as a ‘big numbers’ card that absolutely, positively couldn’t be broken,” but even that is a defined choice. I’ve written things of which I’m not proud. I’ve published fewer than I’ve written, but there have been mistakes or misapprehensions in pieces I’ve published here on Hipsters and elsewhere. Creating something and sending it out into the world means accepting a certain risk—or even guaranteed rate—of failure. We’re lucky that Magic is genuinely a game of high caliber in both aesthetic and ludic value, but it does mean that the exceptions to that mean are more shocking.
More than anything else, the response to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been a lesson in the Procrustean cruelty of subjectivity. We can’t agree on whether a Magic set is good because we can’t agree on what set of criteria are fair grounds to judge it, because when we judge Magic, we’re judging art–the art of the card design, the art of the layout and graphic design, and yes, the art of the art. Magic’s art is incredibly varied. It tracks through over three decades of fantasy and science fiction art, bouncing back and forth in influence and chasing the trend from Conanesque thick-thewed barbarians to League of Legends-style purple-haired steampunk mages. Over thirty years of Magic, our decks have contained Robert Bliss’s priapic paintings, Arnie Swekel’s xXxtreme tongues-out beasts, and Phil Foglio’s cheeked-up Goblins. A deck in 1994 might have direct references to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Seven Voyages of Sindbad, and Albert Einstein. Now, we have several decades worth of iconic British actors, a zombified Walton Goggins, and BD Wong with his back turned. That previous sentence is a statement of fact; how you feel about it and about the trajectory of Magic is up to you.
Similarly, Magic’s shift in artistic palette is notable, but the ramifications are open to interpretation. Is Svetlin Velinov’s Anger a better work of art than John Avon’s? Avon is an incredibly talented painter, and I have no doubt that his version of Anger is exactly what he envisioned. The textures of it are superb and the composition legible—the figure is both spotlit and centered by the background rock formation and the pillars. But what’s with that figure? Is Naomi Baker’s Flash a more successful artistic translation of the card than David Ho’s? Absolutely: it helps imply the play pattern of the card with the swirling bear-cloud, while the blurry yellows and greens contrast with the grays of the startled figures in the foreground and give us context and scale. Ho’s work is both too flat and too busy, and, to be perfectly frank, the distorted facial features of the figure on the left make me uncomfortable. But I have seen Baker’s version called “soulless” because it is less stylized.
I have my preferences, like anyone else. I like traditional painting, and I like dark palettes and horror, and I like hyperstylized forms. My favorite arts tend towards Mark Tedin’s Mindstab Thrull or Kekai Kotaki’s Victimizeor Adam Rex’s Gravespawn Sovereign. I think Pig Hands’ Valgavoth, Terror Eater is possibly the most beautiful Magic card ever printed. I don’t have an aversion to whimsy or cuteness, but my preferred brand of whimsy is Urborg Scavengers and Mutable Explorer. I like storybook-style art, and my favorite Magic artists are Adam Rex, DiTerlizzi, Kathleen Neely, Annie Stegg, and Omar Rayyan. I truly love that Magic has, in recent years, begun including artists from beyond the realm of speculative realism and the traditional art world through Secret Lairs and showcase cards—the inclusion of Phoebe Wahl, Ryan Riller, Brian Chippendale, and Masahiro Ito, among others, gives a cultural cache beyond the normal Magic/D&D sphere, and has introduced me to new favorites and given me cards I can share with my daughter. I’m genuinely grateful for the trajectory Magic art has taken and grateful people like our own Donny Caltrider exist to properly showcase the absurdly accomplished and diverse group of artists Magic has cultivated.
If this trend has to be balanced out by attracting Marvel and Amazon’s audiences, the last vestiges of the monoculture, I get it.
I don’t love it, but I get it.
Bake with Love
This is what we do, as players: we’re passionate. I’m not excusing abusive or confrontational comments or behaviors, because that’s inexcusable. I’m defending the art of criticism, of exploring what is possible and what is desirable within a body of work. To catalyze people into thinking about what they consume with their limited dollars and lifespans and how they consume it. People see criticism as an attack on their sensibilities or their artistic validity, when it’s an expression of passion. Art makes us feel, and sometimes art makes us feel frustrated. Magic’s art can be–and always has been, as I’ve implied–frustrating. Carly Mazur has illustrated seven cards for Magic, and I think her work runs the gamut from off-putting (Social Climber) to exceptional (Harmonize, Radha, Coalition Warlord). People celebrated Margaret Organ-Keane’s return in Lorwyn Eclipsed, and I find her work hit or miss—even within the same set. I think Sygg’s Command is beautiful, and Kinsbaile Aspirant is, to be charitable, charmingly retro. Some players—and, at one point, executive-level WotC employees—find Rebecca Guay’s art to be a poor fit for Magic; some players think Steve Argyle should paint every card. The beauty of Magic is that different facets of it resonate with different people, but you’re still guaranteed to find something that still connects solidly with you.
I wouldn’t be playing this game still if I didn’t feel it had something to offer me, and it absolutely does. Sometimes it offers me something unexpected but welcome, as in Edge of Eternities, and sometimes it offers me something unappealing that doesn’t land with me, as in Marvel’s Spider-Man and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These two were never going to land with me–I don’t enjoy comic books or their offshoots and I especially do not like Marvel movies. The few I’ve seen, I have not enjoyed, and I have philosophical and aesthetic objections to their whole deal. I don’t volunteer that information, as culturally, I’m in the wrong here. I keep my silence when people tell me they like Marvel movies (this is character growth compared to my twenties), but I do fully resent being told I should like them or be excited to see the latest Marvel content. Therein lies part of my current frustration with Magic’s direction: the Infinity Gauntlet of Damocles is poised above us, and, knowing it’s coming, I’m trying to soak up as much Magic as I can.
Here’s the thing about Magic: Wizards of the Coast could print a set called The Failures of Rob Bockman, with every card themed around a traumatic event from my past, and I would still show up to the Prerelease. I love this game. I may hate casting Action News Crew from an aesthetic and narratorial perspective, but it feels incredible to Channel it in the actual game. There is now a card—and a perfectly playable card that will see years of inclusion in Blue-based artifact Commander decks at the very least—called ”Does Machines”. As someone who has only the most fleeting familiarity with the TMNT franchise, but a deep and abiding love for the world of Magic: the Gathering, I don’t appreciate that. “I Channel Boseiju to destroy your Does Machines” isn’t a sentence I want to utter, and yet, our world makes me say sentences all the time I don’t want to say. One of the costs of living is constantly saying shit like “Okay, we’ll circle back after the fourth quarter and revisit our marketing strategy” and “The Department of War just announced they have launched Operation Epic Fury” and “Do you pay the one?”
I don’t want to come off as harsh or defeatist here. I may intend to engage with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles less than most Magic sets, but the things I like from the set, I like very much. Super Shredder is a riff on Khabal Ghoul or Bloodstained Paladin, a type of card I appreciate, while Casey Jones, Vigilante is an elegant and deeply Red card. Mondo Gecko is part Wild Mongrel and part Ophidian, and interacts terrifically well with one of my favorite cards from Lorwyn Eclipsed: Tam, Mindful First-Year. It may have one of the absolute worst pieces of flavor text in Magic’s history, and the art unfortunately features Magic’s first appearance of Gatorade, but it’s distinctly a Magic card underneath the TMNT veneer (and, luckily, the showcase “sewer frame” version even strips away those offending aspects). If you scrape the cheese and incongruous toppings off an anchovy-and-blue-cheese-and-pecan pizza, there’s still a palatable flatbread smeared with seasoned tomato sauce under there. By that metric, we have to consider the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set a success—it doesn’t just replicate the TMNT experience through references, but through actual engagement with the set.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise in most of its forms is brashly neon, cheerfully obnoxious, and saturated in a toy corporation’s executive board’s conception of 1980’s surfer lingo. If Magic’s version is the same, they succeeded in their goals. Even if you, like me, don’t like the TMNT aspect of the set—the silly self-seriousness of The Last Ronin, the “harsh realm”-hoax-level deployment of surfer slang, the preponderance of pizza—it still is mutated Magic, and Magic is one of the best games humankind has developed. That has long been my goal in writing: to remind us all, including myself, that Magic is good, and worth preserving. Likewise, I’m reminding myself that sometimes, you have to give up pizza for a while for that next slice to hit sublimely, and sometimes, you have to smile while you pretend to eat a bite for the commercial.
Rob Bockman (he/him) is a native of South Carolina who has been playing Magic: the Gathering since Tempest block. A writer of fiction and stage plays, he loves the emergent comedy of Magic and the drama of high-level play. He’s been a Golgari player since before that had an official name and is never happier than when he’s able to say “Overgrown Tomb into Thoughtseize,” no matter the format.