That sounds pretty cool too.

I think all of the card games with random pulls are a bit of a ripoff.

The RPG crowd is the lead in pirating or flat out making their own rules and barely spending money. They just need rules and dice. You need a small group, and there really aren’t tournaments so you can play it however you want.

Table top war gaming in the middle is being filled with indy 3d printed miniatures and home made rules that can take over local scenes pretty easily. 40k still dominates the space, only because most people act like its the only game (it is by far the most common already) and you can buy the minis from most any hobby store. The tournaments are huge, and sometimes the biggest tournaments even dictate the rules just as much as the game seller and most people want to play “tournament legal” armies only.

MTG and other card games are the only thing keeping most hobby stores alive and prints money. it is entirely on for whatever reason, people just want to buy another booster. It is as bad as gambling if not worse, you don’t even know what you are buying. It should be even easier to pirate and print your own resources to play card games but somehow it is a huge money maker because as always, people flock to the largest group of gamers in their space.

Indy RPG and Skirmish tabletop games make boat loads of money for small groups of people and it is easy for them to run circles around larger game manufacturers. Things like 40k and MTG where there is such a huge following of people who might not necessarily care and just want to go to massive tournaments it is much harder to challenge those established followings.

They are specifically claiming that they were unaware and it happened due to the artist using the built-in AI aids in Photoshop, which is against their policy.

I actually trust WotC on this depite despising basically every other decision over the past year that they have made. They have repeatedly made their stance on not wanting AI content clear but individual designers and artists are easily equipped to just ignore that and only get caught when they don’t clean up the obvious AI errors afterwards. WotC need to be fair better at internally vetting their art and I recon they are with card art or art that is making its way to books, but art from marketing and other adjacent areas is slipping through the cracks.

Initially denying the art being AI generated is actually probably the biggest tell that they didn’t intend it. If they make a policy against it and get obviously caught, it’s totally illogical to deny it and damage their reputation further, but if they trust the artist initially, then they have grounds to deny it until they vet it or the artist owns up, which is probably what happened here.

Hasbro on the other hand only care about one thing, the line going up to their investors can cum. Currently the only reason that WotC has such a strong anti AI content policy is because the heart of their content is about design, from their artists to game designer, and many of the people who hold these roles are beloved voices in the community and if their jobs are at risk, they’ll be loud and clear about it, and we need to hear them and support them when Hasbro try to encoach on this policy, and make it clear that any cost-cutting from AI generated content will cause enough outcry and boycotting that their stock price goes down.

Yes, it makes no sense to do this on purpose. If they convince their customer base, that handmade is better, they can keep down hobbyists and indie devs. With an image as a “premium brand” one can also charge higher prices, though that may be beside the point in that business.

Now is the perfect time for these artists and players to collectively shift to a new card game. Blackjack and hookers optional.