United Wizards of the Coast recognized by NLRB
unitedwizardsofthecoast.com
unitedwizardsofthecoast.com
There is now a union ... just for Wizards of the Coast employees. UWOTC-CWA now has a monopoly on negotiating for WotC employees. Dues flow up to the CWA, but members don't necessarily get the benefit of bargaining industry-wide. There is also no choice within WotC for what union represents you.
It's still a deeply flawed relationship, especially compared to what a median European enjoys. It's not a simple "US companies bad - EU companies good" - the NLRA is in desperate need of reform by Congress and political actors across the US have stymied progress.
It is rare, but a workforce can even choose to move to a different union.
In a lot of countries, it's not much different than choosing a pension fund option. You join a job, you choose which union best represents you based on your industry/title/etc (if you are not already a member). If you are not happy with your current agreement, you choose a different union that promises better outcomes.
It's so much less extreme than US unionization. There's not much reason for hostility between business and unions - unions don't get these all or nothing powers like they do in the US.
Once a workplace is unionized in the US, members have no real say or transparency to the union negotiation process. The union reps do not even have to work at the facility (in many larger unions, they are professionals paid for by the union).
Elections are only union wide, not specific to the company. And there is not really any day-to-day advisory capacity. Unions reps only exist to enforce the contract as signed.
This solves a lot of problems with us unions, where they have a state sanctioned Monopoly on the workers.
The classic example is unions are going for terms that screw over junior members but there are other perverse examples. At my friend's company the Union demanded that it be forced to return to office because the larger number of field technicians we're a voting majority of the union and angry they couldn't work from home.
My understanding is German and Scandinavian unions are much more collaborative and are unlikely to force demands that bankrupt companies.
This is why unions have such a negative connotation in the US. A lot of people see municipal governments being held hostage by unions over pensions and early retirement, and union employees being so hard to fire that you end up with "rubber rooms" and end up associating unions with expensive enshittification of services.
24 states allow Union shops (workers must join the union after hire).
In theory multiple unions could strike together. Alternatively, dissenting members of a single union can keep working.
In both systems striking is the union leverage.
But that alternative of dissenting unions not striking is exactly the loss of leverage that I was talking about.
The story I always think of is the Port of Portland shutting down was because the ILWU organized a $20 million dollar slowdown to punish the operator. The operator ended up pulling out of the city never to return, costing all the ILWU workers their jobs, as well as the city of Portland a few million a year in taxes.
The reason for the $20 million dollar slow down? The ILWU wanted to take two jobs away on the site from the IBEW!
Take the NHS; it will have to deal with ten plus separate unions - https://nhsunions.org/#about – of which the biggest powers are the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing, but the cleaners are GMB or Unite and they're huge pan-working-class institutions.
Education has to deal with the NEU, the NASUWT, and the NAHT, each of which has a different political slant. Some unions in the UK have been historically rather centrist in their politics (a good example of that is Prospect, https://prospect.org.uk/about/, which is a roll-up of a number of scientific and finance unions), some are firebreathing communists, but all of them work across employers.
There's also no such thing as a closed shop in the UK – because there are much stronger worker protections, there's less of a need for one.
(I was, at one time, in a majority-UCU workplace; https://www.ucu.org.uk.)
To be clear, even leaving aside the current DC fiasco, Congress as a whole, and the Republican Party most especially, actively want the situation to be this bad or much, much worse.
Not to mention that it's the Arena workers, they are downstream of the card design process.
It's also probably worth pointing out that Lego was nearing bankruptcy and was saved by a ton of licensing (and Ninjago, to be fair). Fortunately, they've used that income stream to still consistently put out a lot of high quality first party sets. Hopefully WotC doesn't lose sight...
Magic will either become "generic TCG that's unrecognizable to the original" or it's going to pay a very painful long-term cost for their short-term gains.
The MLP cards aren’t legal in any format and Transformers, legal in commander yes, was a very small set.
You can’t deny the popularity of the Final fantasy set. Selling that well indicates a desire.
I don’t think the small secret lair releases deserve the hate.
Wizards is still committed to making in-universe sets. The first novel in years was just published with the release of strixhaven. Every in-universe set has come with a short-story/novella length addition on the official site.
FWIW, I don’t love the marvel collab and I don’t think it fits at all. But I’m sure someone does.
I think criticism should be focused on the actual design and mechanics of sets rather than the IP. Since Wizards is committed to both their own and others. The latest Marvel set for example enables way more infinite combos in standard and is an example power creep gone bad.
Note to writers: yes, adding multi dimension shenanigans keeps your options open, but remember that limitation breeds creativity.
People are trying to rationalize their behavior based on their hurt feelings
also shortly after we see new sets stopped getting their own wiki articles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Magic:_The_Gathering_s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Magic:_The_Gathering_n...
cool, was only familiar with predh, which scryfall also filters on
https://scryfall.com/search?q=f%3Apredh+is%3Acommander&uniqu...
There's quite a few new cEDH staples from UB sets as well.
The sets also increase the number of legal cards you have to purchase to keep up with the meta.
So you may not hear a lot of excitement but that’s still the minority opinion. Universes Beyond sell like gangbusters.
I remember multiple players at my local’s prerelease for TMNT saying that was the most fun they’d had playing a prerelease in years. And none of these things have really sunk in the secondary market after they’ve gone out of print.
Heck my Warhammer 40K collector commander decks are up several hundred percent post release. And I’ve made a small fortune buying up all the things the online MTG community seems to hate…
¹ That's union-ize, not un-ionize.
Edit: Words are my own. I am not a rep of WOTC or Hasbro.
The only reason to be there was for the love and the buying access/perks. That access & perks are long gone.
Had a friend whose dream job was to work on D&D. He's got a fairly high profile in the TTRPG space and developed one major product/book release for D&D. The experience spun him out of Hasbro and the TTRPG industry entirely.