A Non-Exhaustive List of WotC Fuckups

/ PRODUCTS & MARKETING /
30th Anniversary Edition:
 - A literal acam product, marketed as premium and at huge cost.

Lies about Universes Beyond and its format legality within the game:
 - Outright statement that no Universes Beyond will be Standard legal: "Correct. It’s not occurring in Magic’s multiverse." / "There are no current plans to make Universes Beyond canon." - Mark Rosewater
 - Magic's Voyages to Universes Beyond, Feb 25, 2021: "That said, Universes Beyond cards will not be Standard legal. We strive to make Magic cards that are widely useful, but Universes Beyond will be above and, well, beyond our normal Standard releases. So nothing much is changing with our normal cadence of releases for Standard. This is purely a cool thing we're doing in addition to all the other cool things we're already doing."

Play Boosters:
 - Either a transparent scam to engineer a price increase of of Draft Boosters, or a total blunder dividing packs across multiple products resulting in a desperate scramble to fix the mistake. Both possibilities are terrible. One indicates active malice and exploitative intent toward players, the other total incompetence.
 - Instead of simply reversing their mistake, they opted to reinvent the wheel and spew out a product that's just a more complicated, more expensive, less playable Draft Booster.
 - Ruins limited. Multiple rares per pack vastly increases the frequency of game-breaking high rarity bombs intended for Commander and eternal formats. Reduction in number of commons has forced the removal of simple utility cards from the entire design process.

Secret Lair Ultimate Edition:
 - Five fetchlands requiring ridiculous investment to acquire.
 - Showcases WotC's policy of exploiting reprint equity while denying it exists.
 - Sold in a comically gigantic box, which probably cost more to produce than the cards themselves.

Lost Legends in Dominaria United lies:
 - WotC suddenly “finding” a warehouse full of an old set containing Tabernacle but then conveniently removing “problematic” cards from the set.

Nexus of Fate Box Topper:
 - Staple card printed as a promo Box Topper, resulting in limited supply.

Pinkerton Assaults:
 - WotC's bad allocation tracking resulted in product (March of the Machine: Aftermath, instead of regular March of the Machine) being sent to YouTuber "oldschoolmtg" early.
 - WotC hires corporate blackmail thugs, the Pinkertons, to assault the recipient of the product they themselves sent out, and steal it from him via thuggish coercion.

Injections of Newspeak:
 - Kindred replacing Tribal
 - Totem Armor changed to Umbra Armor

Banning of "Culturally insensitive" cards:
 - Seven cards chosen for game-wide bannings due to being culturally insensitive. Most of them were ridiculous.
 - Effectively introduces bans to Vintage, where there should be none (Except Lurrus).

Aetherdrift booster box pack count reduction (Not-so-stealth price increase):
 - Pack number in booster boxes reduced from 36 to 30. Price not reduced to reflect getting less product.
 - 36 packs meant two boxes cleanly got you three drafts with 8-man pods (Or, one large draft with three 8-man pods)
 - New count means two boxes provide 2.5 drafts, and three boxes provide 3.75, breaking draft math. Potentially motivated by scamming people into buying more boxes ala digital currency/microtransaction value differences.

Serialized Pringles Reveal:
 - In the Collector's Edition Serialized Premium Foil GinJin-Gitaxias reveal on live stream, the card was already curled.

/ DESIGN & BALANCE /
Companion:
 - Disingenuous false apologies while defending the mechanic; "Trust me in ten years players will be mad about the latest thing and nostalgic about companions." - Mark Rosewater
 - Lurrus: The first card banned in Vintage for power level reasons.
 - A mechanic so broken, the entire thing had to be erratad. Still received widespread bans across all formats post-Errata.

FIRE Design:
 - A legacy as tainted as can be.
 - Introductory article lied about its power creep being restricted to lower rarities.
 - Consistent yearly bans in multiple formats since its introduction.

Scheduling bans according to investor demands:
 - Changing to quarterly ban schedules, to align with investor interests, at the cost of being able to respond to problem cards in a timely manner.
 - Frequently ignores problem cards anyway, leaving formats in a state of broken disarray for a minimum of three months to the next opportunity.

Lies and deflection about Eldrane's terrible balance that required bans in almost every format:
 - When asked his thoughts about year of Standard in which Eldraine dominated, resulting in more Standard bannings than any other previous year, Mark Rosewater stated: "Magic had its best year in its twenty-seven year history" and "I think it's one of the by-products of the Pandemic and social media being a bit more toxic than normal."
 - When asked what "best" means, Mark replied with a single-word post: "Sales."
 - This is extremely flagrant and disingenuous, both ignoring the trashfire state the game was in, and referencing the very pandemic that drove a huge amount of Magic sales via disposable stimulus money at the same time.

/ ART /
Ousting of classic artists for political reasons;
 - Terese Nielsen wrongly accused of transphobia via misenterpretation of her statements, and her Twitter account following verboten people and podcasts. Barred from doing future art for the game.
 - Seb McKinnon accused of being anti-vax, posted support for Canadian trucker protests. Nils Hamm supported him. WotC ended working relationships with both.

Donato Giancola art theft:
 - Plagiarized and stole the art of Donato Giancola, one of most respected living fantasy artists, without crediting him, for the card Trouble in Pairs.
 - Additionally, used Giancola art of Iron Man in their internal style guides for their Universes Beyond: Marvel set, without permission from or payment to Giancola. Giancola explicitly rejected requests for its use beforehand.
 - Giancola has added Wizards of the Coast to his personal list of corporate exploitative practices, which he shares with other artists as an example of warning signs to avoid in the industry.

Boris Vallejo art theft:
 - Trouble in Pairs also stole art from Boris Vallejo.

Lorenzo Lanfranconi art theft:
 - New Wayfarer's Bauble for "The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Commander" product features stolen art from Lorenzo Lanfranconi.

Off-model characters (Race swaps of characters from classic literature, bizarre mastectomies of female characters, etc):
 - Vandalizing Lord of the Rings. Black Aragorn, Eowyn, Galadrial, pale-skinned Haradrim, etc. plus blatant lies about the motives behind race-swapping beloved characters with well-established and clearly describec visual characteristics. (From article "Creating the Look of The Lord of the Rings, Tales of Middle-earth" May 29, 2023: "These decisions were made consciously and with great care, reverence, and love for The Lord of the Rings.")
 - Black Mina Harker.
 - Radha, Kemba, Glissa, Chandra total breast removal. Reductions for many other characters.
 - Daretti, Krenko and other assorted Goblin rhinoplasties.
 - Mirrodin Troll rhinoplasties for March of the Machine.
 - Kayla bin-Kroog is suddenly black.
 - Rakshasas suddenly stop being cats.

Murders at Karlov Manor AI promo art:
 - Promotional art for Retro Frame Shocklands used AI art. (Confirmed by artist admission.)
 - Several artists, most notably Dave Rapoza, have ended working relationships with Wizards of the Coast for this and other non-Magic uses of AI art.
 - Others, like Jason Rainville, have publically stated distaste with these decisions.

Assorted plagiarism and art theft:
 - The Prismatic Bridge Secret Lair by GodMachine features traced Nicol Bolas the Arisen.
 - Crux of Fate Strixhaven Mystical Archive bonus sheet by Jason Felix traced from DeviantArt fanart.
 - Face of Nissa, Worldwaker art by Peter Mohrbacher for Magic 2015 directly traced South African rap duo Die Antwoord's Yolandi Visser, from promotional photograph for the duo's 2010 single "Enter the Ninja"
 - Souvenir Snatcher art by Kev Walker for Commander 2020 directly traced from photo by Kaeli Swift.
 - Esika's Chariot art by Raoul Vitale for Kaldheim very closely referenced photo originally posted on on now-defunct, unknown Swedish site "sannafjallet.se", popularized through Tumblr in 2014. Not an exact trace, can be forgiven.

/ QUALITY CONTROL /
Midnight Hunt Commander Precon product code errors:
 - Commander precons in Midnight Hunt were all given the same product code.
 - Because of this, if you bought one online, you would just be sent a random one instead of the one you ordered, unless the seller noticed the error personally.

Persistent Zero-Day Erratas:
 - Alrund, God of the Cosmos (Alrund's last ability now specifies “all cards revealed this way” in particular.)
 - Ambassador Blorpityblorpboop (Blorpityblorpboop's second ability was completely reworded to specify that it totals power and toughness each separately)
 - Bloodvial Purveyor (Bloodvial Purveyor's last ability now specifies “until end of turn.”)
 - Canoptek Wraith (Specifying the two lands you fetch must both share the same name with the land you control.)
 - Captain Rex Nebula (Reworded to clarify that everything lasts until end of turn.)
 - Delina, Wild Mage (The last ability makes rolling again optional, to prevent possible arbitrarily long loops.)
 - Dynaheir, Invoker Adept (The second ability now specifies it won't respond to mana abilities.)
 - Henzie "Toolbox" Torre (Rules of the game changed to avoid having to errata it. Still counts.)
 - Hostage Taker (Reworded to not flicker itself, thus not instantly ending the game in a draw if it was the only legal target for its own ability.)
 - Invasion of Vryn (The back face now lets you choose new targets for the copy.)
 - Invert // Invent (Invert now specifies until end of turn.)
 - Marath, Will of the Wild (X can't be zero. The only pre-nuBorder example.)
 - Neera, Wild Mage (Now explains what to do with revealed cards that weren't cast, instead of leaving them in limbo.)
 - Triumph of Saint Katherine (You can no longer steal your opponent's cards by putting them into your deck.)
 - Pit Automaton (Can no longer copy mana abilities.)
 - Zevlor, Elturel Exile (Specified that the spell must only be targetting players.)

Eco Friendly Shit Stink Ink:
 - Briefly swapped to "environmentally friendly" ink for some printings of Eldritch Moon. It smelled like chemical waste and feces.

Secret Lair card quality and shipping delays:
 - A persistent issue to this day. Too frequent to recount all the instances.

/ LORE /
All of it:
 - Yes, the whole thing.

/ EDH-RELATED /
Overtuning:
 - Made for commander cards that are so overloaded they're Vintage-level power.
 - Command Tower is a land with instant 5c fix for no drawback.
 - The Fierce Guardianship cycle.
 - This power bloat homogenizes what ought to be a diverse, singleton format.

"Powerful White Cards":
 - Promising to print powerful white cards for the format in Commander Legends
 - Zero powerful white cards present.
 - Archelos, Lagoon Mystic is in the white color pie space, but printed in Sultai colors because the designer thought it would be "cool and fun to use this effect with black cards"

Made-For-Commander cards being banned in the format they were specifically designed for:
 - Hullbreacher
 - Jewelled Lotus: WotC used packs of Commander Masters and Ixilan Collectors as a draw to sell MagicCon Festival in a Box right before banning the chase cards from both sets. They also knew that Jeweled Lotus was getting banned when they were printing commander Masters.
 - Dockside Extortionist

/ YE OLDE (Irrelevant to the modern era, but still noteworthy) /
Lied about the design space of Mythic Rares:
 - "Mythics will never be a list of tournament staples" - Mark Rosewater
 - Explicit statement that mana dorks, lands and utility cards etc. would never at mythic. Then, Lotus Cobra etc.

New Phyrexia Godbook Scandal:
 - Lied about giving pro players early leaks.

Firing Brady Dummermouth:
 - Triumph of Ferocity scandal, printed Triumph of Ferocity with Garruk standing on a pile of bodies. Evil woman choked bad, mass murder good.

Dominaria BaB Promo:
 - Changed a 25 year old policy over promos, after Nalanthi Dragon and Mana Crypt caused an uproar with the Dominaria buy-a-box promo.

From the Vault reserved list controversy:
 - Reprinting Mox Diamond in FTV: Relics resulted in policy changes to the Reserved List, which previously allowed RL cards to be printed in non-randomized promotional products.

Invasion eBay Leak
 - Wizards mistakenly sent out cards during Invasion, resulting in leaks. Sought out the FBI for a fraud investigation, only for the FBI to find out it was WotC's mistake.

/ ADDITIONAL MINOR FUCKUPS /
 - Koma, Cosmos Serpent "Horrors From Across the Planes" Secret Lair printed reading "At the beginning of your upkeep..." rather than "At the beginning of each upkeep..."
 - Circular Logic "Deceptive Divination" Secret Lair printed as Sorcery type rather than Instant.
 - Unfinished version of art used on Secret Lair Seraph Sanctuary for Secret Lair Artist Series: Alayna Danner.
 - Aetherdrift Special Guest "Skysovereign, Consul Flagship" art by Imiri Sakabashira wrongly credited to Kogado Studio.
 - Assorted unconfirmed AI art controversies.