Magic: The Gathering has finally come clean about one of the bigger stains on its legacy. Veteran head designer Mark Rosewater recently apologized for the misogynistic treatment of a low-level pro player in the ’90s that he immortalized as a printed card called Ghazbán Ogress. “I have had a hand in creating thousands of Magic cards over the years, and Ghazban Ogress is the one I most regret making,” he wrote in a new blog post.
Ghazbán Ogress was a parody of an existing card called Ghazbán Ogre, but its real inspiration was a woman named Catherine Nicoloff, an aspiring pro player who also dated several different top players in the ’90s Magic: The Gathering competitive scene. Part of the 1998 Unglued side-expansion, which was designed entirely by Rosewater, the card’s description read, “When Ghazban Ogress comes into play, the player who has won the most Magic games that day gains control of it.” It essentially took slut shaming that was happening in private and immortalized it in print.
This darker chapter in the card game’s history was explored in a recent video on the The Tranquil Domain YouTube channel in which Nicoloff was interviewed about it for the first time. “I just wanted to be one of the guys at the time,” she said. “That was the biggest compliment you could get is if you were one of the guys and man, when people say guys don’t gossip, boy are they lying. So, the attention was mixed, but you were always being watched. I could not go anywhere without being watched. If I went to lunch with a friend, there would be a rumor the next day that I was seen with so-and-so and I was dating him, even if I wasn’t, even if it was nothing more than a lunch where we were talking about decks or cards or draft strategy or whatever.”
I laughed at and shared that joke at the time, when I was a teenager, and it certainly can’t have made women feel welcome in the community. I think one of the worst habits that Magic embedded in me was choosing my social circle based largely on peoples’ perceived skill.
— Brian Kibler (@bmkibler) May 20, 2021
Nicoloff said Rosewater took her aside during one event to give her a heads-up that the Ghazbán Ogress card would be coming out. “Mark Rosewater wielded enormous power over the game and continues to do so,” she said. “I was just, you know, a a small-time wannabe pro player. So, at that moment, it this is going to sound melodramatic, but it just kind of broke me a little because I had thought Mark was a friend. I thought he was trying to be humorous, but [that] he had the best interests of the players at heart. And now I’d been handed this tiger by the tail, and I had to either ride it or get eaten by it. That was what Mark gave to me.”
She ended up signing some other people’s copies of the card while also trying to collect as many of them as possible to keep it from spreading. Nicoloff reckons she has two binder pages full of Ghazbán Ogress now. It wasn’t until a viral post about the incident four years ago by Magic player Brian Kibler that she wanted to correct the record about what a gross thing it was. “I admit I still felt just a little bit angry and a little bit hurt by the whole thing because this was like an elephant in the room and nobody had ever apologized to me.”
That changed after the video went live and people started asking Rosewater about it. In a post over on his blog he unequivocally apologized for it. “Let me start by stating unequivocally that it was a mistake to have ever printed the card. It is 100% my doing,” he wrote. “I designed it and put it into the set. I take full responsibility for the card’s existence. It’s important to own up to one’s mistakes and not try to justify them.”
Rosewater has since called Nicoloff to apologize 27 years later, an apology which he said she accepted. “This apology should have come decades earlier though, and for that I am also sorry,” he wrote. “Magic cards should be something that bring people together and help foster growth and connection,” he added. “It should never be used to tear people down.”
