GamesCard GameMagic: The GatheringRepublican vice prez candidate JD Vance nurses a secret passion for Magic: The Gathering, says his wifeWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesCard GameMagic: The GatheringRepublican vice prez candidate JD Vance nurses a secret passion for Magic: The Gathering, says his wifeWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Drew Hallowell/Getty Images)
There’s another reason, though, which is that politicians are nearly universally kind of awkward and off-putting, and if they go about associating themselves with your brand then chances are the general public will start thinkingyour thingis awkward and off-putting too. Quelle horreur.
Can America afford a Second Lady who doesn’t appreciate themyriad glaring and important differencesbetween Pokémon and Magic? I leave that to voters to decide. But the potential vice prez’s wife wasn’t just making things up. Indy100 astutely notes that JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy also described his secret love for the game. “I could never tell my dad that I played a nerdy collectible card game called Magic,” wrote Vance, “because I feared he’d think the cards were satanic.” Indeed, apparently the kids at Vance’s church youth group “often spoke of Magic and its evil influence on young christians.”
Vance, a 40-year-old millennial, would have grown up in parallel with Magic, which debuted in 1993. The earliest editions of Magic featured pentagrams on cards like Unholy Strength and Demonic Tutor, but WotC began removing them around 1995. Why? In large part because the company had seen Dungeons and Dragons publisher TSR—which WotC would later buy—swept into the Satanic panic in the ’80s, when parents thought games like D&D were recruiting their children into Satanic cults.
D&D’s devils and demons had set parents like Vance’s on the warpath, and WotC wanted to avoid that controversy, so it began nixing the pentagrams and monsters like"demons" instead became “horrors.”
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That doesn’t seem to have assuaged Vance’s father, though. Perhaps the effects of that upbringing linger, and that’s why we’re hearing about Vance’s passion for Magic from his wife rather than the man himself. Honestly? I find that a bit sad. Better to live in a world where people can be themselves unashamedly than have to contort to societal expectations they don’t really fit.
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