Paraphrasing, Cleanse removes all black creatures, including foul beats etc
This seems to point at a bigger issue where the black creatures are considered foul?
This seems to point at a bigger issue where the black creatures are considered foul?
Demons and vampires and zombies and things like that.
The use of "Black" as a stand-in for nefarious things is its own problem, but it does not refer the the color of skin in any way in MTG.
The cards mentioned above are NOT good in play, they are only notable for their content.
Personally, I think the art for Imprison is gorgeous, but depicting violence against people of color is dehumanizing and problematic, so I understand and support the decision.
But it could be seen as tone deaf right now.
Likely in part due to J.R.R. Tolkien's influence on Western fantasy archetypes. Almost invariably, his books equate light skin with purity, civilization and goodness, and dark skin with corruption, barbarism and evil. Not to say that he was racist in the same way as H.P. Lovecraft was when writing about fish-men from Innsmouth as a thinly veiled metaphor for race-mixing, but rather that given Tolkien's Colonial British upbringing, he may have been blind to his own cultural prejudice.
Over the decades this has sort of become a trope that has seeped into a lot of fantasy and even science fiction.
While white is described as representing "morality, order, community, civilization, ..."
Are they the same, of course not, but we also can't say it has no significance either, as it does to always have those associations.