Wizards of the Coast has announced a new spinoff to their wildly popular trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. The new game, titled “Gathering: The Magic,” aims to implement lootbox mechanics to player’s interpersonal relationships by packaging one moderately cool friend with fourteen distinctly subpar ones.
“We’ve had so much success selling cardboard for way more than it’s worth,” said Wizards’ spokesperson, Ingrid Salvador. “If we can get stupid rich by monetizing the magic, why can’t we do the same with the gathering? You might be thinking, ‘I can make my own friends’ but we all know that’s absolutely not true.”
The spinoff’s mechanics are simple. Each “Friend Pack” comes with fifteen random friends, each with their own unique personality traits, skills, and mildly irritating habits. However, only one of them is the kind of friend you’d actually want to hang out with.
“We’ve got the friend who always brings snacks but never cleans up, the one who’s always 20 minutes late, the over-competitive one, and of course, the one who’s just kind of there,” continued Salvador. “Sometimes players will pull a mythic friend who is just way cooler than they’ll ever be. Imparting severe levels of inadequacy in our players is a Wizards of the Coast tradition we aim to maintain.”
The community’s reaction has been mixed. Some players are excited about the prospect of instantly expanding their social circle, while others maintain a socially apprehensive stance over meeting new people.
“Do I trade them? Do I sideboard them for certain social events? What do we even do together?” said long-time player, Sam Levingston. “I get anxiety answering an unrecognized phone number, so opening up a friend pack knowing most of them are going to ask to borrow money or shit I’ll never get back is unnerving. Though my therapist said I do need meaningful adult relationships so what choice do I have?”
The idea came about when focus groups began to realize the joy they were experiencing playing commander was actually unrelated to the game, rather from socializing with others in reality. Worried players could soon discover they don’t need to pour dollars into a never-ending treadmill of cardboard-packaged hits of dopamine, the team at Wizards created Gathering: The Magic to ensure revenue keeps flowing just in case.