Join The Club
Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, has a problem—no, not its cancelled video games. Its workers would like to unionise, and I'm just starting to get the sense that it really doesn't want that to happen. Just a smidge. A tiny inkling.
Late last month, WoTC employees from the Magic: The Gathering Arena team announced their intention to form a union, giving the company until May 1 to recognise it voluntarily. Neither Hasbro nor Wizards of the Coast did so.
The motion to form a union now proceeds to a vote via the National Labor Relations Board—which would allow the union to form whether Hasbro/WoTC like it or not. In order to dissuade the union from forming, Wizards of the Coast has, workers claim, resorted to daily emails and scare tactics.
"Since the announcement of our union," reads the site linked above, "Wizards of the Coast has hired Fisher Phillips (a union avoidance firm), and chosen to engage in a daily union-avoidance campaign with emails sent to the Arena team intent on spreading misinformation and sowing fear among employees."
Those daily emails have now escalated to physical letters, per several WoTC employees on Bluesky: "For two weeks, arena folks have been getting daily anti-union emails from the company fearmongering about how scary unions are," writes Xib Vaine, a producer on MTG Arena. "Now, they're sending letters to our homes."
The National Labor Relations Act states that employees are not allowed to "threaten employees with adverse consequences" for union action, nor are they allowed to "promise employees benefits if they reject the union". The letter is somewhat neutrally worded to skirt around these guidelines.
"If employees choose union representation, the CWA will serve as the employees' representative in collective bargaining with the Company," reads the letter. "That process typically involves negotiating over wages, benefits, scheduling, and other terms and conditions of employment.
"All the benefits and perks you currently enjoy would be on the bargaining table for both parties to negotiate, based on what's most important to them. That means you could end up with more, the same or less than you have now."
The letter continues to, per its legal obligations, state that "Wizards of the Coast would continue to work directly with employees on workplace matters, just as it does today, with a much greater degree of flexibility than a typically rigid union contract," before following that up with the whammy of:
"There is no single right answer for everyone—this is a personal decision that each of you will make. Our future is stronger when we work together. We believe your voice is strongest when it is heard directly. Not through a third party."
While Wizards of the Coast isn't legally allowed to dangle a Sword of Damocles over employees' heads, the company's choice to not formally recognise the union, send daily emails to unionising employees—and escalate to physical letters—gives me just the slightest suspicion they don't want it to happen.
"The union isn't a third party, WE ARE THE UNION. This doesn't scare me. I am voting YES for #uwotc-cwa!," writes Vaine. Other prospective union members have chimed in to voice their ambivalence to the letter's implied promises: "I am voting Yes, and it’s laughable they thought this was going to convince me otherwise," adds another.
What's interesting to me is the idea that Wizards of the Coast might still be feeling the ramifications of laying off 1,000 people back in 2023. Not only in the fact that it seemingly soured their relationships with Larian, but also in that it spurred this entire union in the first place.
In an interview with Polygon earlier this month, Vaine told the site that "the thing that really kicked off the union conversations were the 2023 layoffs, where Hasbro laid off about a thousand people. Everybody I talked to couldn’t understand why Arena was hit by those layoffs. By every metric, we were succeeding."
I'm not an expert in business management, but if I were a bigwig at Hasbro right now, I'd be wondering if the best way to avoid unions is indeed to lay off over 1,000 people—some of whom were responsible for your latest successes. But at least nobody's had the Pinkertons called on them yet (the bar's on the floor).
