Back in August 1994, not long after Doom had pulled PC gaming blinking into the spotlight, Magic: The Gathering released a small expansion named The Dark. Comprising just 119 cards, the set was unique for how it upended the traditional depiction of Magic’s mana colours. Most notably, it radically reinterpreted White mana cards—normally presented as angelic and peaceful—with scenes of religious fanaticism and violence.
It has long been believed that the cards’ designs were influenced by the Satanic Panic, which Magic itself was caught up in after its release in 1993. But only recently has this been confirmed. Just before Halloween, Magic’s original art director Jesper Myrfors took to Facebook and laid out the design philosophy behind the cards, writing “The Magic: The Gathering release The Dark was 100% a commentary on the evils and hypocrisy of bigoted right wing Christians.
The most direct influence on The Dark, Myrfors explains, was Stephen Dollins, a former pro-wrestler and self-proclaimed “prophet” who has accused everything from Pokemon Cards to the Tooth Fairy as being linked to Satanism. One of Dollins’ earliest targets was Magic, where he suggested that the Mana circle on the reverse of Magic’s cards was evidence of hidden pentagrams. “He pointed to the mana circle on the back and what ‘they’ did,” Myrfors explains, with ‘they’ referring to Magic’s purportedly devil-worshipping design team. “But for the record, there is no ‘they’. I was 100% in charge of the look and feel of that game.”
As time passed, all of this “bubbled up” in Myrfors, until he eventually decided to “poke back” at the religious right. And an opportunity quickly arose. The release of Magic’s third expansion, Legends, saw the game explode in popularity, to the point where Wizards of the Coast had an “internal panic” because they lacked something to follow it up.
Hence, Myrfors quickly set about producing The Dark, confident that Wizards of the Coast would accept it because “the clock was ticking”. Not only was he right, The Dark seemed to chime with unspoken sentiments the rest of the team had. “I’m sure they could tell what the direction of the set was. But all of them had lived through the Satanic Panic too. We’d all been victims of those false accusations, so I think everyone appreciated it on some level.”
As for why Myrfors has chosen to reveal this information now, he doesn’t say explicitly. But in his original Facebook post, he writes about how he sees history repeating itself:
“The truth is that people who view themselves as virtuous and righteous can be as deadly and dangerous as any blood sacrificing devil cult when they forget the message of love that is supposed to be the foundation of their belief system,” he wrote in the original Facebook post. “We can see that replaying today with MAGA.”
Elaborating further, Myrfors says the name of the expansion pack was “a reference to the dark ages, when the church had full control of the population, when wise women and folk healers were burned as witches, education was only for the very elite and anybody who spoke up or strayed from the herd was killed in horrific ways.” He worries that “even today people are trying to bring those dark days back. I was shining a light on them with this set.”
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