At some point, in between the mounting number of set releases and supplementary products, Magic: The Gathering decided it needed a cuddly mascot. The game’s history is full of little critters, but for year they escaped the exploitative hand of brand-wide merchandizing. Fblthp, the wayward cycloptic tyke, has managed to stick around and for years was the closest thing to a plush-ready mascot that WOTC had. Tinybones is a close second, though his skeletal frame makes him difficult to picture plastered across a lunchbox or a pencil case.

The list of mascotable creatures with multiple cards runs short after that. Not that Wizards is afraid to juice a character’s appearances if they gain traction within the community — or, in some cases, if the are other extenuating factors to have them featured across multiple sets — but it’s difficult to grow a following for a one-off creature. These sorts of creatures contained to a specific plane, think the pests on Arcavios, have become an adorable mainstay in art design, but rarely do they feel like an angle for a new plus at the next Magic Con.

Call it the divine tonal balance of the Blind Eternities. The grim high fantasy of set design in the late 90s and early aughts was often deemed by players as the natural evolution for a trading card enthusiast beyond Pokémon. I know it was one of the elements that drew me to my first theme deck, ninth edition’s Dead Again.

The star of my Pokémon collection was Mr. Mime, Magic had Nightmare.

Marketing departments across the globe no doubt groan when players wonder these less-than merchandisable thoughts.

Does Magic need a universally appealing mascot?

In spite of their iconic status, we never reached quite to those heights with Shivan Dragon or Serra Angel. Powercreep and time come for us all, though they have lingered in the minds of players for generations. Of course, tying your brand to a run-of-the-mill creature comes with a bevy of problems:

How long will they be relevant? What if they get banned? What if they never catch on in a competitively viable build? What are the ethics behind purposely juicing a character for the sake of selling breakfast cereal?

Roping a creature into the legendary supertype provides a solve in some ways, design mistakes often live on in Commander, though the field has become unbelievably crowded in a post-UB design space. Legendary and iconic used to feel synonymous even if there were a handful of workarounds in practice. In 2025, a whopping 479 legendary creatures were released. It’s become impossible to separate the signal mascot from the noise.

I remember the thrill of a planeswalker. Breaking the card frame, back when such an act meant something, and often warping the gameplay environment; they may be the single best case for a representative for Magic. Especially with the rise of the Gatewatch and the proliferation of characters bound to a spark. Why settle for one icon when you can have a whole team. Players could riffle through the options and select the one who best aligns with their sensibilities. We have Gideon for the jocks, Liliana for the goths, and Jace for the shoegaze listeners amongst us. With the whispers of an adaptation constantly swirling around, it feels like WOTC should have done everything in their power to cement these characters as the pantheon of Magic represents; but with the rise of Commander came the fall of the Gatewatch.

This is nothing a seasoned player doesn’t already know. Planeswalkers, with few exceptions, underwhelm in Magic’s most popular format. They’re taken out too quickly and rarely used by a healthy chunk of the player base. It’s interesting that, of the short list of beloved planeswalkers, most have never received an iteration that “can be your commander.” Instead, Wizards has opted for the more narratively interesting flipwalker. Were flipwalkers then the answer to the mascot problem? No, at least not for now. They remain one of my favourite design sensibilities in Magic, but Wizards decided to go to a more reliable well to draw out their latest attempt at a mascot. When in doubt, bring out an adorable critter.

I remember the first time I gazed upon an illustration of the orange gremlin. Outlaws of Thunder Junction fell squarely in the ‘wait and see’ tier of sets in 2024. Magic’s spin on Mickey’s House of Villain meets The Wild Bunch held no appeal for me. Even so, I couldn’t escape the rising ire invoke by the toothy grin of the solution to Jace and Vraska’s domestic strife.

Players more impassioned than myself limbered up their fingers for a treatise on how this bargain-bin Furby heralded the end of their beloved context between duelling planeswalkers. Aside from thinking his exile effect was clever and casting cost reasonable, I was indifferent toward WOTC’s latest try at a mascot. It felt like a cribbing of design sensibilities from other digital games rather than Wizards leading the way, and the years since have not been kind to Loot — odd, due to the story coalescing around his adoptive father.

This runs counter to vocal parts of the community, who often keep their pearls within clutching distance, but I’ve grown fond of the hyperdontic teddy bear. His inclusion in the overarching story still rings discordant, but I would rather WOTC commit to his place in the Blind Eternities rather than peddling back to try again in a few years time. This is where Magic has struggled, making a mascot by half-measure.

Whatever unseen metrics they have for a character’s popularity has created a cycling of constantly shifting characters and a diffusion of focus among the truly baffling number of named characters that have appeared in the game’s history. Does this mean Loot needs to be where they stay the course? No, but his place in Magic is indicative of where the game’s narrative is and where it can go. I would much prefer reintroducing planeswalkers as the fulcrum of the multiverse, but I want Wizards to indicate to players they have an invested interest in the greater narrative.

I honestly believe that the narratives of individual sets have reached a high watermark with recent releases. Duskmourn, Lorwyn Eclipsed and Secrets of Strixhaven each had a well-written — albeit sometimes short — exploration of their respective worlds, which were shored up by some remarkable side stories to bring the stories out the margins. Edge of Eternities is the pinnacle of storytelling in a game that often contends with its lore being parcelled out across cards, with no guarantee that any one player will have the motivation to read them in sequence. The pieces are there; they simply need to arrange them into a cohesive whole.

So where does Loot fit in this appeal for a revitalization of Magic’s story? He could be at the centre or disregarded as another misbegotten attempt to create a marketable face for Magic. There has been a deluge of new players — according to Wizards — finding the game, and my own anecdotal experiences reinforces this notion. Many of these players are coming to the game from other beloved series and there is an opportunity for Magic to engender the same affection if they can bring a story on the level or Avatar or a Final Fantasy — disclaimer, I’ve never seen the Last Airbender, and this is not a high bar to clear depending on the FF game in question.

We are on the eve of Magic Con Vegas, Reality Fracture is a good way away, but it will be the culmination of the past several years of storytelling. The post-Phyrexian arc has been ungainly and often disjointed, but there is a chance for a stronger narrative push going forward in the wake of whatever Reality Fracture might be. The swings with Kellan, desparking and the Omenpaths may bring a jolt of excitement to Magic story that will bring it through future sets, or they may turn tabula rasa to corral the multiverse to a more approachable scale. Who knows if Loot will be discarded or if he’ll end up being the key to everything.