Local Racist Hospitalized After Zhalfir Announcement
Boston, Massachusetts — At 6:45 PM on Friday, July 17th, local racist Buck Carson was taken to Beth Israel following what doctors suspect may have been a heart attack. Sources close to Carson say that his potential heart attack was quite possibly caused by viewing Friday’s Magic: The Gathering announcement and its upcoming in-universe sets for 2027.
“He had just texted me about Kamigawa: Titanbreach, and how much he loved the Godzilla movies,” says John Wilbur, an acquaintance of Carson’s who sometimes plays Commander with him at their local game store. “It’s always a bit of a coin toss, when Buck sees the new sets–sometimes he’s just happy, but every now and again, he goes off on a tangent. I was actually kinda wondering what he was gonna say about Zhalfir, so, when he didn’t text me at all, I sorta started to wonder if he was okay, or if something had happened.”
It was Carson’s sudden lack of responses that motivated Wilbur to check on him, and, eventually and unwittingly, save Carson’s life.
“I never would have imagined it would cause him actual, physical harm,” Wilbur told us. “Like, he’s always been the kinda guy that can get way too serious about this silly cardboard game, but I just don’t think anyone expected this.”
This is not the first time that Carson has had an extreme reaction to aspects of a Magic: The Gathering set, say sources from his local game store.
“I remember he was a little weird about some cards in a couple of sets as they were coming out,” says the store’s Token Girl, Cynthia Mendez. “When we were all playing the Lord of the Rings prerelease, I pulled a copy of Aragorn, and every time I would say, like, ‘tap three for Aragorn,’ he would go ‘black Aragorn.’ Like he was correcting me.”
Mendez says that Carson often ‘corrects’ her, even when she is correct and he is not, but normally that is about things like rulings or effects. But he was quite insistent on saying “black Aragorn,” even though Aragorn is described as having dark skin in the original novels, which the Lord of the Rings set was generally more adapted from than the films. She says she found it needlessly confusing, as no printings of the character Aragorn have black mana in their color identity.
“He needlessly made it about race,” she said.
“I’m honestly not surprised–dude’s always been like this,” says another player, Jackson Kane. “I remember when Kaldheim came out and he went on this little tangent about how the fact that there were black elves was, like, ‘SJW pandering.’ And I had to look at him and be like, ‘bruh. They’re elves.’ And he tried to say some shit about Norse mythology and I was just so pissed off I had to leave the room–I’ve got too much store credit to get banned for decking him.”
Mendez and Kane both generally try to distance themselves from Carson due to a series of negative interactions with him. Though not all regular attendees at the store have such an opinion.
“He’s all right,” says local white guy Levi Smith. “He can be a lot at times, for sure, but it’s just a fuckin’ card game, y’know? I don’t get why people can get so mad about it. We’re all just talking, we’re all just trying to have fun. Sure, he doesn’t like the black Kaldheim elves, or black Aragorn, and he talks over Cynthia all the time and said that one thing about her tits, and he has a Trump bumper sticker on his car, and he works for ICE, and he very regularly and very insistently yells his political opinions at every opportunity. We’re all just playing a game, y’know? We’re all just trying to have fun. This should be a safe place from politics. Magic is a totally apolitical game. Sorry, what was it that caused his heart attack again? Oh, what the–”
Smith then ended our interview early, and went to go post on r/freemagic, where he and Carson are both regular contributors.
