How to Get More Women into Magic The Gathering
It's not K-Pop stars.
Every time I go to a sealed Magic event I'm one of the only girls there. At the prerelease for Edge I was the only girl playing. I say girls, I'm a 40 year old Hagraven. The rest of the players are 20-50 year old dudes.
Before the event started there were a handful of Commander pods cleaning up for the day. Each one had 1-2 women playing in it. Groups of buddies who just play each other in a non competitive casual format. Some of them played while the sealed event was going on, which I thought was interesting.
Yes, sealed tournaments are difficult. You need to know all the cards, how to build a deck from a sealed pool. How to draft. How to do the mana curve. All that. I typically end up in the bottom end of the rankings because our shop does 3 rounds no matter how many people enter. They just don't have the time to do 7 rounds for 25+ ppl.
There are always the same handful of dudes who know every card before it comes out, what exactly to build, play, and end up winning every time. I often end up playing someone who is just starting back with the game or very new to standard. The last game I played a guy who had only played Commander and ended up building a deck for serious card draw. He had 15 lands out by turn 5. I had 4-5 creatures out by then and the game was over.
If that guy wanted to he could look at his deck as a learning experience and figure out what he could do to make a better one and play with his buddies outside of a Commander setting. But more than likely he will look at it as "standard is too hard" and stick to the communal group play of Commander. And that's fine.
Given this context, is it any surprise that most of the women I see playing magic are playing Commander? With their close friends? With the cards they think are fun and go well together? From the set from the TV show or movie or game they like? Playing cards and having fun?
I sell singles on tcgplayer and ebay. You wanna know how many buyers have traditionally female names? (It's all I personally have to go by and I'm sure there is overlap with gender neutral names.) Out of over 1000 orders, I probably have 45 and the majority of those are for Pokemon and Lorcana.
Logically, looking at the very shallow data set I've personally come across, one would think that in order to not only encourage women to play magic but retain the women who do play magic - more UB flavored Commander sets would be the way to go. And if Wizards wants to make more money and grow the game that's probably the right way to go for every player regardless of gender.
But, we're talking about increasing the number of women in the game so I'm gonna have to fly as close to the sun on this and then dip before the wax starts to look wet.
It's not the theme of cards. It's not the difficulty of the game. It's not Universes Beyond. There are plenty of things that women typically like that would draw them to the game.
There are over 400 vampire cards in Magic. My roommate in college did nothing but mono black vampire decks. That was 400% her thing and that was in 2004. There are over 100 werewolves too if you wanna go all out. They just came out with an entire set with nothing but non stop dragons.
Don't want scary stuff or monsters? I've got two sets for you: Wilds of Eldraine and Bloomburrow. Eldraine is fairy tales and magical Arthurian kingdom flavored. Bloomburrow is dead ass nothing but little woodland creatures with swords and magic. everyone loves Bloomburrow
A chunk of the Planeswalkers are women: Nissa, Chandra, Elspeth, Nahiri, Liliana, Kiora, Narset, Vivien, Huatli, Kaya, Saheeli, Arlinn, Jaya, Jeska, Aminatou, Vraska, Estrid, Mu Yanling, Kasmina, Tamiyo. These aren't D rank characters either. Liliana and Chandra are on everything.
Oh hey did you know that there is a squirrel version of Liliana in Bloomburrow? It's amazing. And she is over $200. everyone loves Bloomburrow
Just saying, there are plenty of characters, themes, and artwork within Magic's own IP that would typically attract women players. Magic used to be a lot darker of a game and most of us who played way back when were some flavor of goth at the time. It was dark and edgy and blah blah vampires blah blah demons blah blah. That's no longer the case, but I think that stigma lingers.
Most of us want Magic to look like "the old Magic" that we used to play. That's not conductive to having Sonic the Hedgehog and Doctor Who characters at the table. Essentially it's gone the way of Hot Topic, what was once a dark and edgy thing is now a place to get anime t-shirts. It's been 30 years, the game obviously had to change to keep up with the market as far as design and theme goes. Hot Topic isn't everyone's cup of tea no matter what year it is.
But how do we get the fellow gals to play Magic?
Well, you ask them.
If they try it out and it's not fun for them, move on.
You can't force folks who wouldn't want to play D&D to even attempt a card game where you play spells and bury goblins in a graveyard. You also can't change a game by trying to comb the spiders out of its hair to appeal to people who just aren't into dark fantasy.