Brazilian Magic Players Protest Wizards With Vampetaço & Greed

Josh Nelson • March 23, 2024

News

On February 23rd, Wizards of the Coast cut Portuguese and Simplified Chinese from their list of languages for paper Magic. We covered their announcement a day later. However, the story did not end simply with this announcement. In the days following this news, Brazilian Magic players flooded Wizards' Twitter posts with replies, some of which left little to the imagination. Most notably, Vampeta.

Colloquially, "Vampetaço" is the term for the act of protest that the Brazilian players have engaged in. Vampetaço is an instance of trolling in protest. Specifically, it is the deliberate act of sharing the nudes of Brazilian soccer star Marcos André Batista dos Santos, also known as Vampeta. Brazilian protestors engage in "vamping" to cancel the trolled party. In recent years, other efforts to engage in protest via Vampetaço include:

  • Halting an initiative by Brazilian former state deputy Douglas Garcia to ask Twitter users to leak a list of anti-fascists to his email (June 2020)
  • Trolling known neo-Nazi and Burzum vocalist Varg Vikernes for his statements that he hates Brazil and that Brazilians were, in Vikernes' eyes, inferior (August 2020)
  • Vamping the Israeli government after Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu denounced Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or "Lula", as "persona non grata" for comparing their actions in Gaza to the Holocaust (February 2024)

Unfortunately, Vampetaço has also been used for trolling in a non-protest context, albeit very rarely. In July 2023, a hacker got ahold of the Instagram of the São Paulo Zoo and posted Vampetaço. Thankfully, the São Paulo Zoo reversed this particular trolling attempt within a matter of minutes.

What is Vampetaço, anyway?

The question of what exactly Vampetaço means still lingers. For context, in January 1999, Vampeta agreed to do a nude photoshoot with G Magazine, Brazil's premier openly gay magazine. According to Vampeta himself, he did this to save Cinema Rio Branco, one of Brazil's oldest cinemas. Vampeta received 80,000 Brazilian Real (or roughly $16,077 US Dollars) for his participation and went on to save the Rio Branco with it. Vampeta's nudes featured the first-ever erection shown in G Magazine.

Vampetaço is, essentially, sharing nudes, censored or otherwise, of the retired footballer and pundit known as Vampeta, on social media. Vampetaço is often considered a form of harassment and Wizards of the Coast has blocked most people posting the Vampeta pictures from their Twitter page.

However, this has given the protesting players a reason to use other memes as fuel in their protests. These include the Brazilian flag and Portuguese renders of the card Greed. For context, Magic players have used Greed extensively as a means of memetic protest in the past, including after the 30th Anniversary Edition was announced. Even some players who utilized cards in Simplified Chinese got in on this. That said, Wizards blocked many people on Twitter who used the Portuguese-language Greed to iterate their point.

 

It is understandable why Wizards of the Coast would suppress nude pictures of Vampeta from their social media. Nude images of soccer players don't really fit with the Hasbro brand identity, regardless of how funny the Brazilian player base might find the Vampeta meme. However, Greed may be another story. 

A Response From Brazilian Content Creator Fazendo Nerdice

We reached out to Fazendo Nerdice for his commentary on this story. Fazendo Nerdice is one of Brazil's foremost content creators dealing in trading card games. He explained the details of this story to us in a brief written interview, citing hopelessness and a need to be heard among the Brazilian player base as reasons for the Vampeta memes:

  • "What do Magic players hope to achieve by sending them to Twitter? Absolutely nothing. There is nothing to be achieved. The objective is only to be heard. Wizards has been ignoring Brazil more and more each year, and this is kind of a way to say "try ignoring this"." - Fazendo Nerdice

Fazendo later expressed his own disdain for Wizards of the Coast's actions in cutting Portuguese-language cards from their releases:

  • "Personally, I think this is the straw that broke the camels' back. My channel is nine years old, I've spent most of this time mocking the naysayers saying that Magic is dying. In the last three years, Wizards fired all Brazilian staff, closed all Brazilian offices, canceled all events, cut all marketing, nearly doubled prices, cut support to stores and distributors, and now they're surprised we're not purchasing enough product?

    Enfranchised players can and will play in English, but even people who've been playing for longer than Magic has ever been in Portuguese are tired of feeling like we're doing Wizards a favor by spending our hard earned money with them!" - Fazendo Nerdice

The backlash towards Wizards of the Coast by way of the Brazilian Magic players continues to grow. We will provide updates as they come.

Josh Nelson

Josh Nelson

Josh Nelson wears many hats. They are a music journalist when not writing gaming news. Beyond this, they're a scholar of the Sweeney Todd urban legend, a fan of monster-taming RPGs, and a filthy Aristocrats player. Josh has been playing Magic since 2001 and attributes their tenure to nostalgia, effort, and "aesthetic".