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.

pepperapb:

markrosewater:

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.

I would like to point out the statement “It’s not honest to make people feel included in a representation of a player base they don’t belong” Is exactly the attitude that Mark tackles here when he stated “

not because they are uncompetitive but because the environment is often not welcoming“.

While only one place, I will say that I know about 4 solid spikes, and 2 of them are women from my LGS. One of them used to be a Judge. It’s not a lack of desire, interest or ability, but literally attitude of other players and the level of welcoming that LGS’ have that keeps women out of the higher end play.

{edit} and the reason the one isn’t a judge any more isn’t due to a lack of ability, but (from what I understand) some personal issues that easily fall in the same “unwelcome” wheel house as above (exact details I don’t remember, nor would I share as it’s not my story, i just remember some rather negative vibes and a steering away from certain folk when I started asking about how to become a judge myself.)