Wizards Of The Coast Sends Pinkerton Agency To Person That Bought Unreleased ‘Magic’ Cards In Error

Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the company behind both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic The Gathering has been on our pages recently and not for good reasons. Most recently, the company kicked up a completely unnecessary shitstorm for itself by changing the OGL license under which it released D&D Fifth Edition in such a way that it essentially kneecapped the wider community’s ability to create off of the base content, as the community had for years and years. The public response to that change was almost universally negative.

But if that was bad, imagine what the response will be to WotC sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after a YouTuber who revealed a bunch of Magic The Gathering cards he bought, all because a distributor sent him unreleased cards by mistake.

As you would expect in a story about Magic cards being revealed on YouTube, our story begins in the 1800s. That’s when The Pinkerton Agency was chiefly used as a private police force by union busters, acting as a private police force for various government entities looking to tamp down labor issues and to break strikes. We last talked about them when the Pinkertons, which still somehow exist today, sued Take 2 Interactive over the agency’s appearance in Red Dead Redemption 2.

In this case, the Pinkertons went after YouTuber oldschoolmtg, otherwise known as Dan Cannon, for the crime of unboxing Magic cards he had bought legitimately, but which were unreleased cards under embargo sent to him in error.

Over the past week or so, a YouTuber known as oldschoolmtg has been uploading videos of himself opening packs of the new, unreleased Magic: The Gathering set: March of the Machine: The Aftermath. He uploaded three videos, which were widely shared on Reddit and MTG communities, even making headlines on IGN and other sites. He alleged to have 22 boxes, and uploaded multiple videos last week. It’s estimated that oldschoolmtg leaked about 75% of the entire set, or about 36 of the set’s 50 cards. The set is scheduled to be released in just a few weeks on May 12, with “official” reveals set to begin at the start of the month.

And then on Sunday, April 23, oldschoolmtg uploaded a video titled “The Aftermath of The Aftermath … Everything Is Gone!” He described how Pinkerton agents allegedly showed up at his door that morning, demanding the return of the Magic cards. According to his YouTube video, the Pinkertons allegedly asked oldschoolmtg to turn over the “stolen product”—which is, in this case, Magic cards. They collected the cards, the boxes they came in, and even foil that the booster sets are wrapped in. He stated that the agents counted the cards to make sure they retrieved all of them. In the video, oldschoolmtg said that the agents also mentioned “jail time” while they were speaking to him and his wife. The agents gave oldschoolmtg a name and number at Wizards of the Coast, allegedly told him to delete the videos he posted onto YouTube, and left.

You can imagine this must have been a harrowing experience, particularly considering this man never had any intention of doing anything wrong. Here’s what appears to have happened: the unreleased cards he got are part of an expansion pack for a card set that was originally released earlier this month. Those base cards are no longer under embargo. The cards he revealed, similarly named, very much are. In other words, the person he bought them from sent him cards from the wrong set.

Whoever’s fault that is, it most certainly wasn’t Cannon’s. Several publications have been reaching out not just to him, but to WotC. Lest you think that all of this Pinkerton talk is wild speculation, I will note here that in all of the company’s public response to all of this, not once have I seen the company say it did not send the Pinkerton’s to this man’s home. And the company can apologize all it likes, but if that apology doesn’t also come with a promise to never use the agency again, then it’s nothing more than empty words. Especially given the full context of how the Pinkerton’s behaved.

“[The Pinkerton agents] cited several statutes about copyright infringement and some other things threatening 1-10 years in jail and up to $200,000 in fines if I failed to cooperate,” Dan Cannon told Kotaku over an email. “They also said if I didn’t hand over the product, they would call the county sheriff and detain us until they arrived to arrest us and search my house for the product and that they would most likely force us to show receipts for every magic card in the house (which is literally over a million cards).”

If the Pinkertons claimed that they were going to account for over a million cards, that’s really diligent of them. It’s little wonder that corporations have relied on them to responsibly bust unions and to surveil workers. Kotaku reached out to Pinkerton to ask whether or not this procedure is typical of their investigations, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

So yeah, strong-arming stormtroopers that are almost entirely full of shit. And here’s the really fun question: given that these cards were bought in good faith, are we all 100% sure that what WotC did using the Pinkertons isn’t theft of property on some level?

Either way, it would be about time to see Wizards do some actual damage control here, preferably in the form of an apology and, again, a promise to never use the Pinkertons again. Because this is absolutely ridiculous.