United WotC workers prepare to defend Wizards of the Coast’s first ever union
“We're not being heard, we're not being taken seriously or treated with respect.”
United Wizards of the Coast, a new union composed of Magic: The Gathering Arena workers, are still hoping to be voluntarily recognized by Wizards of the Coast and parent company, Hasbro. The toy giant has until May 1 to choose the path of least resistance, as laid out by a letter of demands from the CWA-represented union. As Rascal previously wrote, United WotC wants clearer policies guiding generative AI adoption, more protections against layoffs and crunch cycles, and an end to return-to-office mandates revealed roughly one year ago.
After being reached for comment, a Wizards of the Coast representative today supplied the following statement:
“We have received the filing and are reviewing it carefully. Our employees are the lifeblood of what makes us great, and we are committed to fostering a workplace where every person feels heard, valued, and supported. We believe we have a strong connection with everyone at Wizards of the Coast and that direct relationship with our employees is essential to how we work together to capture the imagination of our fans and players, inspiring a lifetime love of our games. We appreciate hearing about the needs and interests of our employees through this filing, and will respond through the appropriate process.”
Classic anti-union phrases such as “direct relationship” and “appropriate process” don’t inspire confidence that WotC is considering anything but a battle of attrition all the way to the ballot box. Claims of a “strong connection” with the aggrieved employees specifically contradicts the situation described to Rascal on a call with Rogue Kessler, a digital product manager on the Arena team and a United WotC representative. They said Arena workers and management had previously a “very healthy culture” where pressing issues were routinely and openly discussed, but that relationship has deteriorated beginning in 2025.
Your voice really matters right now. If you would like show your support, join us in requesting that Wizards and Hasbro voluntarily recognize our union by signing our petition at cwa.org/uwotcletter
— United Wizards of the Coast - CWA (@uwotc-official.bsky.social) April 27, 2026 at 8:33 PM
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“The tenor of those conversations have gotten a lot more one-sided, a lot more our way or the highway,” Kessler said. “And that's pushed a lot of us into union organizing because we don't feel like we have another valid mechanism for redress. We're not being heard, we're not being taken seriously or treated with respect when we want to talk about these issues that are important to us that affect our lives and our livelihood.”
Kessler maintained a high opinion of Arena’s leadership — and a hope that opinion will sustain — while claiming that pressure from Hasbro on the entire team has unduly stressed that relationship. MTG and Arena have enjoyed unalloyed success that translated into record profits for their executive owners but only pressure, stress, and precarity for those creating the game. “Where's the gratitude for what we've done?” Kessler asked.
While the union believes all of their demands to be more than reasonable, Kessler claimed discussing generative AI policies will be “tough” due to differing opinions on the team. Kessler is personally against generative AI because it steals both work and jobs from artists, but they don’t agree with CEO Chris Cocks’ stated team-based implementation. Workers are currently “hearing mixed messaging on this from leadership”, promising individual control even as it pushes generative AI into ever more workflows.
“A lot of our concerns revolve around not having broad guidelines from the company about how these tools can and can't be used. Which leads to a lot of siloing and segmentation where one team might have a very healthy relationship with these tools with reasonable, soft guidelines, but the next team over might not have any of those rules. It might be the Wild West. More than anything else, what we are seeking is the adoption of company-wide boundaries for how AI will be used in each [department] so that we don’t have to wonder what’s actually going to happen.”
Other demands seek to strengthen worker protections not from impending threats but unavoidable realities, such as cyclical crunch. While not as prevalent as elsewhere in the video game industry, Kessler said Arena’s healthy anti-crunch culture is tenuously maintained from within teams. “It's a soft, cultural pushback against crunch that is not consistent from team to team. Different people have different experiences with crunch at this company,” they said. “We have heard horror stories about people sleeping under desks at the office or putting in 80 hour weeks to ship a product on a very aggressive timetable.”
When we discussed our issues around lack of promotions, around our concerns about RTO, about our issues with AI; we were met with words like "we can't do anything about it" or "if you don't feel like we are providing you what you need you should probably look at moving to other companies."
— Valentine Powell (@valentineirl.bsky.social) April 29, 2026 at 10:01 PM
The worry with any policy or promise of avoiding layoffs is that a change in leadership — within Arena or Wizards of the Coast more broadly — will erase their assumed safety. Kessler said Arena’s quality, performance metrics, and financial success speak for the team’s strength, and they don’t want to see that torpedoed by forcing remote workers to relocate to Seattle or stress about their side projects being swallowed by Hasbro and WotC’s legal overreach — the union is targeting one such policy that claims ownership of creative work made by staff during non-work hours.
The days that followed United WotC’s announcement were marked by a flood of positivity and support from the MTG playerbase from all angles. Spirits remain high on the team, Kessler said, despite the lack of word from their bosses. Like any union, it started by talking: “Ninety percent of union organizing is just having conversations with your coworkers,” they said. “If you are a social person like me and like to yap, start talking to your coworkers about your working conditions, because I bet they have some opinions. And I bet you can find consensus between what they care about and what you care about.”
So far, union foment is concentrated on the Arena team, though Kessler says everyone under the WotC umbrella shares a deeply enmeshed company culture. “All of us would love to see the unionization effort expand to more parts of the company,” they said. “We know that our coworkers in other parts of the company — paper Magic, D&D, all of the teams at Wizards — coworkers have issues that they care about. And I think a lot of them are seeing our example now that we're public and wondering what they can accomplish. Whatever happens, whatever other groups decide to follow in our example, we are calling on the company to take the high road, remain neutral, and treat any of those groups equitably — as we hope that they treat us equitably.”
United Wizards of the Coast is prepared for an NLRB-scheduled election, touting 80% support for unionization within the Arena team. That means a vote is all but assured, barring union-busting activity and retaliatory action from WotC and Hasbro. Past filings show the two companies have used lawyers and experts from Fisher Phillips, a firm that isn’t exactly flying pro-union colors. It was only 2023 when WotC sent Pinkertons, private cops and investigators, to a YouTube creator’s house who had mistakenly purchased cards from an unreleased MTG set. The potential for an ugly fight between now and the six weeks until a secret ballot election is significant. But the union members are keeping their eyes locked on what they have to gain from their struggle.
“We talk a lot about the things we want to see change or the bad things that we're hoping to prevent. That part gets a lot of attention, and it should,” Kessler said. “So many of the things that make Wizards a wonderful place to work at have started to erode. What a lot of this effort is about is taking the things that are good and putting them in writing. Get the company to commit that these things won't change next year, or next month, when a different boss is in charge. Let's get these things in a contract so that we know that we can rely on them five years from now.”
