Greetings Mr. Rosewater, may I ask why Spike is portrayed as a female, when only about 1% of professional players are girls, it's not honest to make people feel included in a representation of a player base they don't belong.
Spike is a psychographic of players who use the game as a means to prove something, often to themselves, sometimes to others. My best guess is that about 25% of the players are Spikes. Spikes are way more than just high end professional players.
Magic currently has somewhere around 12 million active players and the female percentage is somewhere between 25% and 35% (in total play including digital - they are a smaller percentage of people playing in organized play - not because they are uncompetitive but because the environment is often not welcoming).
Let’s assume the low end with 25%. That means there are somewhere around 750,000 female Spikes.
In Unglued, we made Timmy a male. In Unhinged, Johnny was a male. We were finishing out a cycle of which none of which so far had been female, so we decided, hey let’s have some female representation in the cycle rather than none.
Diversity and representation is something we take very seriously. Interestingly, I’ve gotten a lot more notes from people happy to see Spike portrayed as the card as a woman than upset by it.
So, all in all, I’m glad we did it and would do it again in a heartbeat if I had to make the decision again.
Thank you thank you! As a girl who loves to play magic and has played for many years, this kind of thing makes a big difference. I don't play professionally and I don't even go to organized games very often, not because I don't want to, but because of these exact kinds of comments. Playing magic really does put me in a sexist environment more than almost any other activity. It's unpleasant and exhausting.
