Kaya, Ghost Assassin and Doing Inclusivity Right

Ahoy, planeswalkers!

I have a post about a recent LGS event I played with my 8Rack deck simmering that will be up in the next couple days, but I just had to write about the early Conspiracy spoiler that dropped yesterday and the character’s first couple appearances in Magic Story (even if Jess Stirba at Hipsters of the Coast beat me to the punch with a post very similar to the one I’ve been drafting).

So, let’s meet Magic’s newest planeswalker, Kaya, Ghost Assassin:

Mechanically, this is a cool card.  The first ability lets her temporarily remove an annoying creature, free one of your creatures from a pacifism effect, set up to re-trigger a powerful enter-the-battlefield effect, or refresh her loyalty after using some of her other abilities; the second is a little unexciting but lets you win through a stalled board state; the third gives you card advantage and works really well with the multiplayer draft focus of Conspiracy (and should translate well to popular multiplayer formats like commander).

But her appearances in Magic Story these last couple weeks take her to another level.  Kaya is awesome; in her first story she gets hired for a ghost-hunt where there’s more going on than there seems at first, and in the next she assassinates King Brago.  She’s a character who I am excited to see show up again in a major set.  She has some similarities to my favorite member of the Gatewatch, Chandra–cocky, plays by her own rules, opposes tyranny, tries to do what is right; I kind of want to see the two of them become BFFs.

I also think it’s important that Wizards of the Coast is continuing to diversify the face of Magic (with Kaya, Arlinn Kord, and Saheeli Rai, this will be three new female planeswalkers this year, two of them people of color).  This is something I worry about a great deal in my real life as a wannabe-scholar in the humanities; it’s very important to show students that there is a place for their voices when you design and teach a class, and a class where the overwhelming majority of the writers studied are white dudes does not deliver that message.

What takes Kaya over the top for me is how Wizards went about creating Kaya to avoid stereotype.  Kelly Digges, who is a white man, wanted to create this character but wanted to make sure he did it right, so he got Wizards to hire a consultant who could bring a black woman’s perspective to the character’s genesis.  You can read Digges’s commentary on the collaboration here and Kaya’s co-creator Monique Jones’s notes on creating the character here.

I love Magic for so many reasons (the stories, the challenges of deck-building, the elegant design of the gameplay), but one of them is how many positive interactions I’ve had since picking the game back up.  Once in a while my opponent gets tilted, and it happens to me too (a draft deck gone awry is known to have this effect on me), but by and large when I play, I sit down opposite another person, there’s a baseline of respect as we play out our match and then, frequently, talk about our decks or the match or squeeze in a game or two more waiting for the round to end.  I also know that I am a white dude playing in LGS communities that are heavily white and overwhelmingly male; I can look around and see that I fit in.  This sort of signaling from Wizards, that there is a place for more people at the table… It’s not going to change things overnight, but I certainly think it helps.

Wizards has been experimenting intriguingly with using supplemental products to set things up for the four big sets (see Nahiri’s leap from Commander 2014 to Shadows Over Innistrad), and both Kelly and Monique hint at Kaya having a deep backstory that is being held back for now.  I strongly suspect they are testing her to show up in a standard set in a year or two; I’ll certainly be rooting to see more of her.