Lead designer Mark Rosewater highlights Magic’s commitment to enhancing diversity within the team.

Magic is an amazing game. I think the best game ever made. And I want as many people as possible to play Magic. I think Magic is very approachable from a game standpoint, but […] one of the cool things about Magic is that Magic is what you want it to be. If I go play Monopoly, well, Monopoly is Monopoly or Scrabble is Scrabble, it is what it is. But in Magic, we have over 28,000 cards. You choose what your deck is and your deck gets to be a reflection of you in a way that few other games really can match. I mean, D&D is the only other game I can think of that really has that amount of customizability to your experience.

Part of it is: I want to play elves! I want to play goblins! Part of it is: What elements of gameplay do I want? But part of it also is: Hey, I want to express who I am and what I am. And one of the things that’s so important is who you are as a person, the things you represent — you want to see that. Today, we made a reference to Alesha [who is a transgender woman in the fiction of Magic]. That was a really powerful character. There were a lot of people that just don’t see themselves represented in games. And the amount of mail I get… I mean, it’s so important to people. I talk to people constantly and it really, really means something to people.

The thing I was just trying to explain is, it’s very easy when all your life you’ve seen yourself in everything you’ve ever done. Maybe you just don’t understand that’s important because you’ve never not had it. You’ve never experienced not having it. And so that is why this has been true from Wizards from way, way, way back. I mean, we were saying “he or she” on cards when no one even talked about stuff like that.

And so from the very beginning, we’ve wanted to be a game that is representative of all. That has always been important to us. And even now, I mean the reason I answered on the blog is I felt like if ever there’s a time just to hear that again, now’s the time. Sadly the world is not as reflective of that as it should be and that we care about it. I wanted to make sure that no matter what is happening, we still care about that.