Magic: The CONTINUING Hypocrisy

Ahh, a scene I remember far too damn well... Professional Magic: The Gathering...

No, I was never a professional player.  My one crowning "achievement" on the tables was a Top-8 at the Northern California State Championships when Sneak Attack was still legal in Standard and overrunning you with powerful green creatures was the main metagame...

But I also remember another thing about it:  Wizards of the Coast, long now a division of Hasbro, has been overly protective of compromising players (cheaters, abusive players, etc./so forth), going back to the very inception of said Pro Tour.  I remember the Internet discussions surrounding the Hovi/Mills debacle in one of the first official professional tournaments.

I remember trying to become a judge, and told my judging style to get players to stop cheating would actually kill competitive Magic in Milwaukee, WI.  I was actually told this by the head judge of a Pro Tour Qualifier I worked under -- and, no, I didn't trust the other players and was going to take it by the book.  That meant if a kid brought an illegal card to a Constructed tournament, he can learn his lesson by being DQ'd from said tournament.  And if the Head Judge has a problem with that, refund his entry fee for that tournament.

So that makes today's news rather disconcerting, and rather alarming.

If not the best Magic player this decade, he's in the top three or so, but Owen Turtenwald has been disqualified and removed from professional Magic's first $1,000,000 tournament by Wizards of the Coast.

It's why that you should start asking questions any millisecond now, up to and including the highest realms of whatever it's called these days -- I think it used to be the Department of Competitive Play or whatever it was.

Turtenwald, in 2011, did the unthinkable.  He won seven consecutive Grand Prix tournaments (kind of a semi-hybrid between a Pro Tour Qualifier (which it was, in essence) and an actual Pro Tour event) and was the Player of the Year.  He duplicated the award five years later.  He was a two-time US National Champion.

It is believed that Turtenwald, who makes hundreds of thousands a year, between sponsorships, Twitch streaming, and professional tournaments, was the biggest sexual harasser on the circuit, and had been for MANY MANY YEARS.

According to the Kotaku article on Wednesday's disqualification:

The only shred of evidence that fans had to go on for a reason behind Turtenwald’s removal from the event was a tweet from a Magic player named Mary Louke. “Very pleased with this news,” it read. “If you don’t know why… then you don’t know the best secret kept in Magic.”

Louke is one of three people who told Kotaku that Turtenwald has exhibited a pattern of predatory behavior toward female Magic players that spans several years. Screenshots shared with Kotaku showed that, Turtenwald continued pursuing these women sexually and romantically even after they stopped responding or turned him down.

Basically, it's the standard story -- I help you advance in the game, you give me sex.

Here's the problem, and why people need to be asking questions of just about everybody feasible:

1. There was a late-2017 article at the Niche Gamer website called "Magic: The Manic Hypocrisy", and sexual harassment of female players was a common theme in the article.  The article has since been removed.
2. That tournament I referenced above?  Let me continue the anecdote for you to give you more of an idea as to why I think there's more here:  Two Chicago-area professional players forfeited their places in a Pro Tour event to be played that same weekend (One stating directly:  "I want no part of 'Pro Tour: Cursed Scroll'." -- a single card which effectively defined the metagame of that Pro Tournament format at that time.).  Those two players were later found to be manipulating the ratings system used as one form of advancement in the sport and both were suspended for a period of time.  (So do I think that Head Judge was eventually dirty?  Yep.)
3. This was the highest-profile Magic player out there, one of it's biggest streamers, etc.
4. It was such an open secret in the high-level (especially female) community that he was like this.  (Effectively, sexual harassment from his mere presence in many events.

So why do I think questions need to be asked all the way up?

• How many top-level WotC employees/judges protected this guy because he was either the best player in the game or close for a decade?

and

• Do we now have rape to add to the charges here?