Google Rolls Back Feature Allowing Players To Use AI-Generated Lands
Planet Earth, Milky Way — On Friday, July 31st, Google ‘rolled back’ its new and highly controversial feature that was allowing players who play Magic on digital clients to make and play with their own custom, AI-generated lands.
“It was probably the dumbest fucking idea they’ve had in a hot minute,” says Arena grinder Tom Thomason. “The AI has absolutely no sense of game design or balance or anything. Who in the world sat there thinking that anyone would have a balanced experience playing against some clanker-loving loser who made a land that enters untapped and taps for 30?”
Indeed, the balance issues were almost immediately raised, to the point that one would argue that Google and its employees not only *must have* known about them, but they are so obvious that, given an unclear alternative motivation for the creation of the tool in the first place, many players immediately wondered if such rules abuses were Google’s intention from the start.
“That *has* to be the explanation,” says game balance enjoyer and commentator Paige Booth. “Like, okay–letting people just pencil in whatever they want on the card and say it’s real is literally such an obvious ploy that the original Magic designers made Un-Set cards referencing it like a decade ago. We all saw Sharpie Cubes being made back in like 2024, and at least those required people to only omit text from existing cards. Letting people just make *whatever land they want*? Literally your first idea is to make a land that taps for infinity. Why the fuck would they make this unless it was on purpose?”
“Lands don’t just tap for mana, either, remember,” says local doomscroller and least fun guy at parties (who still gets invited to parties) Adam Mason. “There’s a reason that Commander players hate The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale. You can actually make lands say and do whatever the hell you want, so while, yes, the first thing people do is make a land that taps for infinity, the *second* thing you make is a land that deals 500 damage divided however you choose among any number of target players. Or a land that says you win the game when you play it. Or a land that says your opponent has to give you twenty dollars and kiss you on the mouth. It’s really just a no-rules clusterfuck, and the *only* thing preventing people from abusing it more is that it has to be done with AI, and that shit sucks ass and is expensive as hell.”
And, indeed, as has often been the case with new tools using generative artificial intelligence (a term that this writer decries but is forced to use given how the technologies are being marketed), not everyone is just having fun breaking the rules to win the game. As is typically representative of the body of people who still, in 2026, feel a great amount of usefulness exists in having images generated by “AI,” many players are instead using the tool to create false and misleading images or even political propaganda.
“Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?” – actual real post from user @henkvaness on X, the Everything App(™). Henk’s non-X writing can be found here.
“Yeah, okay, you got us, lmao,” wrote one Google executive when confronted with this, the most transparently bad fucking idea in the world. “We were just kinda fucking around, looking for ways to burn the truly criminal amount of money that we have and are absolutely refusing to give back to the community.” That same executive continued, “I mean, yeah, okay, fine, I guess this was a really fucking obviously bad idea from minute 1. Our hope was that with all the other insane fucking evil happening in the world all the time, we could slip this one by you and let a bunch of other transparently evil shitheads use this tool to do a lot of transparent evil. But okay, fair enough, this one was a little too obvious. We’ll make sure to, ah, ‘roll it back’ for now, and then wait until all of you liberal cucks who care about stupid shit like ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ are distracted with some other atrocity and sneak it back into our featurebase again. You know. Because we’re evil.”
*Disclosures:
Google, a company which retired the phase “Don’t be evil” as its corporate motto, pays the ad revenue for Commander’s Herald.*
