Gendering Magic: Men, Women and Eldrazi of Magic: the Gathering

This paper examines how masculinity and femininity are represented in Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game whose player base is predominantly male. Rather than focusing on player demographics or community harassment, the authors turn to the game's own content, asking how gender stereotypes are encoded in card visuals, flavor text, abilities, creature types, and color identities. The work is framed by Pratt's archetypal theory of female roles (maiden, mother, grandmother versus the witch) and Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power, which together emphasize power relations central to the game's theme of competing magicians.

The analysis uses content analysis on four expansion sets chosen to span the game's history: Limited Edition Alpha (1993), Urza's Saga (1998), Ravnica: City of Guilds (2005), and Oath of the Gatewatch (2016). Together these sets contain 1,135 cards, drawn from a card library of more than 13,000. The authors operationalize variables for gender, role, and alignment, supplemented by official card metadata. The study is situated against the broader gaming industry, where representations of women have been criticized as objectifying, and against the influence of earlier fantasy sources such as Dungeons & Dragons.

The authors hypothesize that representations of masculinity will display more heterogeneous roles and archetypes, whereas femininity will be polarized into two extremes: passive, positive figures such as priestesses, mothers, caretakers, and angels, and negative figures such as witches and sorceresses. The paper also anticipates that the introduction of gender-less Eldrazi creatures in 2010 represents a notable challenge to traditional fantasy gender tropes, a development the analysis is designed to test across the selected sets.