Art featured in one of the cards in Magic: The Gathering’s new expansion The Lost Caverns of Ixalan was apparently plagiarized. WotC issued an official statement regarding the issue.
Wizards of the Coast and parent company Hasbro have experienced a rocky 2023, to say the least. The company’s two prime brands Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering brought in record multi-million revenues, but were also at the center of controversies. From the OGL 1.1 scandal to the Pinkerton raid of a YouTuber’s home, WotC can’t seem to catch a break.
Now, an incident of alleged plagiarism has arisen, adding to the list of critical misses WotC rolled this year. According to the official statement of Wizards of the Coast posted on the company’s official website:
Such misuse of art is expressly prohibited by our artist guidelines and does not reflect the values of Wizards of the Coast. As such, we will be suspending any future work with David Sondered until further notice.”
The card in question is the ‘Wayfarer’s Bauble’, which is a reprint of an older MTG card from the Fifth Dawn set, featuring new art from David Sondered. However, while the foreground character may be Sondered’s own work, the background appears copied from another artist’s work, with the only difference being it is slightly blurry and reversed from its original depiction.
Lorenzo Lanfranconi, the artist whose work was apparently copied and pasted onto the Wayfarer’s Bauble card, notified Wizards of the Coast about the plagiarized content via social media.
@wizards_magic just want to let you know one of you artists stole one of my paintings to paste it as it is in the background of their illustration.
I don't even want to know the reason behind this. It's so stupid that deserve a prize. LOL pic.twitter.com/hxfxaGKGTj— Lorenzo Lanfranconi (@L_Lanfranconi) November 18, 2023
In a later update by Lanfranconi, he mentions that he has communicated with both Sondered and WotC. On his official X (formerly Twitter) account, Lanfranconi states “I’ll don’t do nothing more than sharing this image and to me, if this was the only case this happened, it’s ok. He also added that it’s “weird situation and a stupid mistake”.
However, some Magic: The Gathering fans and critics expressed their opinion that Lanfranconi should not dismiss the incident so easily. Some reactors on Reddit have even stated the artist should pursue legal action in order to receive proper compensation and to prevent this from happening in the future.
Sondered himself is unavailable for comment, and he has since deactivated his X account amidst the controversy. But some MTG fans following his posts noted that Sondered admitted he usually copied and painted over reference art.
This seems like another situation that paints Wizards of the Coast’s production and quality assurance in a bad light. Earlier this year, WotC was also under fire for using images generated by artificial intelligence (A.I.) in the Dungeons & Dragons product, Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants. The AI-generated images were produced by Ilya Shkipin and fans took notice, criticizing WotC’s art department for the lackluster quality control and letting unethical art theft slip into their product.
It should be noted that this is not the first time allegations of art plagiarism in Wizards of the Coast’s products have been raised. Back in 2021, artist Jason Felix’s work on the ‘Crux of Fate’ card for the Strixhaven set was accused of being directly copied with only slight modifications from the fan art of Kitt Lapeña (@omgscarypet on X). This was proven to be true and WotC suspended further collaborations with Felix.
https://twitter.com/omgscarypet/status/1376180852070174725
But after two years, it seems WotC still needs to work on the quality control of its art department. Regardless, what do you think of this new plagiarism issue surrounding Wizards of the Coast? Should the original artist let bygones be bygones or should they pursue legal options? Will this controversy prevent further plagiarism in Magic: The Gathering and D&D products in the future?
