For the last several years, Magic: The Gathering owners Wizards Of The Coast have gotten pretty into the idea of blending pop-culture imagery and references into the meat of the long-running collectible card game. Some of these collaborations—mostly filtered through the company’s Secret Lair branding—have made a certain kind of sense within the wider aesthetics of M:TG. Card sets based around Baldur’s Gate, and even the Final Fantasy games, don’t look that out of place unless you know the specific references they’re making: Weird creatures, guys and gals with swords, etc. Sometimes, though, Wizards just likes to kind of go for it, which is how you get announcements like one today, in which the card company revealed that you will soon be able to field a deck featuring multiple instances of The Office‘s Dwight Schrute.
As with many of the Secret Lair “Drops,” the six Dwight cards—officially branded Secret Lair X The Office: Dwight’s Destiny— are all re-skins of existing Magic cards. Our apologies, for instance, to Baral, Chief Of Compliance, who has now been rebranded as “Dwight, Assistant (to the) King.” The upshot is that you will soon be able to take your pictures of a shirtless, overall-wearing Rainn Wilson down to your local game shop and force the people playing Magic there to at least ostensibly take them seriously.
Amazingly, the Office collaboration has some competition for being the weirdest of todays Secret Lair drops, which got rolled out at MagicCon in Atlanta. Wizards Of The Coast also rolled out a Jaws-set, for instance (fine, sharks are scary), two based around Iron Maiden (a little silly, but the band does love its skeleton imagery), and, uh, three based around ’90s nostalgia mine Furby—which don’t seem to exist for any reason beyond both brands being owned by Hasbro. (That being said, we are not made of stone, and do have a certain susceptibility to the set referencing the “Furby Oddboddies” meme, which sees the little mongrels blended with horrifying monsters.) And while all of this does carry the same basic flavor you get when a fast food chain announces it’s found a new way to infuse Mountain Dew into its meat or whatever—i.e., products that seem more designed to generate headlines than actual enthusiasm—far be it from us to tell people not to roll into the shop with a full Dwight-and-Furby-based deck in a couple of months.
