When Jesper Myrfors posted a short “for the record” post on Facebook shortly before Halloween, he didn’t expect it to go viral. He certainly didn’t expect a screenshot of it to blow up on the r/magicTCG subreddit to the tune of 2,600 upvotes.
“There have been rumors…” the post begins, before confirming what some Magic: The Gathering players had quietly debated for decades.
“The Dark was 100% a commentary on the evils and hypocrisy of bigoted right-wing Christians,” Myrfors wrote. “White in The Dark glorifies ignorance, mob mentality, and violence against those who are different.”
While plenty of exceptions exist, each of the five mana colors represented in Magic leans into archetypal themes. Green represents growth and nature, black is the coven of vampires and other undead creatures, and white is where you find angels, peace, and light. Yet The Dark compromises that identity.
Released in August 1994, The Dark consists of only 119 cards — a very small expansion, about one-third the size of Legends, which preceded it. The set twists traditionally virtuous white cards to depict scenes of dogmatic violence and religious zealotry.
While it’s plain to see in the art and game design of the cards, this is still a revelation 30 years in the making, not because Myrfors had changed his story, but because he’d finally decided to tell it publicly. In a recent phone call with Polygon, the originalMagicart director said he was motivated by the lingering aftereffects of theSatanic Panicsurrounding Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy products of the ‘80s and early ‘90s.
“When I was about 15, my friends’ parents told me I couldn’t hang out with them anymore because they thought I was into Satanism,” Myrfors recalled of his early days playing D&D. “At that age, that really hurts. You’re too young to defend yourself.”
Born in 1964, Myrfors came of age roughly at the height of America’s Satanic Panic, a time when televangelists and self-proclaimed “ex-occultists” accused games like D&D of promoting devil worship. Among them is Stephen Dollins of the Prophecy Club, a figure that on more than one occasion referenced the circular design of Magic’s card backs as “proof” of hidden pentagrams.
“He pointed to the mana circle on the back, and what ‘they’ did,” Myrfors said. “But for the record, there is no ‘they.’ I was 100% in charge of the look and feel of that game. Anything I said went.”Though Dollins didn’t become prominent in the space until later in the ‘90s with his indictments of the Pokémon trading card game, Harry Potter, and the Tooth Fairy, Myrfors considers his brand of religious extremism as the main reason he made The Dark. Myfors is still stung by the hypocrisy, because it’s something he dealt with for his entire adolescence and young adulthood.
“All of that kind of bubbled up in me,” he said. “And when I went to write The Dark, I thought, ‘You know what, I’m gonna poke back at them.’”
Poking Back
The early Magic team hadn’t planned for The Dark at all.
“Legends had just been finished,” Myrfors said. “We didn’t have another set on the horizon. Magic was selling faster than we’d ever imagined, and there was kind of an internal panic. I saw that little gap and thought, ‘If I can present them with a finished set, they’ll probably accept it because the clock is ticking.’”
He immediately got to work, designing and art-directing a smaller expansion with 119 unique cards before anyone else at Wizards of the Coast even knew it was coming. When the team finally saw it, they were relieved, and more than a little intrigued.
“These aren’t stupid people,” he said. “I’m sure they could tell what the direction of the set was. But all of them had lived through the Satanic Panic too. We’d all been victims of those false accusations, so I think everyone appreciated it on some level.”
The Dark would become the game’s fourth-ever expansion, and it’s one that leans heavily on a sinister and oftentimes violent atmosphere — especially with the 19 white cards. Everything from art, title, effects, and flavor text lean into compromising preconceived notions about the white identity. Though “The Dark” is literally a reference to the Dark Ages, it more broadly explores religious extremism throughout history.
“I was getting really tired of the judgmental, holier-than-thou attitude coming from a lot of conservative so-called Christians,” Myrfors said. “The set gave me room to show what that has looked like in history: witch trials, angry mobs, the Inquisition, intolerance, dogma, anti-science. Ugly, ugly sections of history that these people would rather ignore.”
Ugly Sections of History
The card art tells its own story: a blood-eyed martyr, a screaming preacher, a faceless witch hunter framed by firelight. Each image turned Magic’s color of virtue into a warning about zealotry.
Perhaps the most famous example from the set is Preacher, with cartoonish art from Quinton Hoover of an angry preacher snarling at a pulpit. It’s a 1/1 white creature that costs one colorless and two white mana. Tapping it allows its owner to gain control of a target creature of an opponent’s choice until Preacher is untapped — an overt kind of brainwash via bullying. Preacher also doesn’t untap unless its controller allows it. In terms of today’s color pie and each color’s role, for a white card to steal an opponent’s creature is unheard of.
There’s also Fire and Brimstone, a pure white card that feels more like a red/black, dealing 4 damage to a target player and to the caster. The art from Jeff A. Menges shows what looks like a monk surrounded by bodies while a fire rages in the background.
The art on Holy Light is one of the most unsettling pieces in The Dark. Drew Tucker paints a nude, blurred humanoid figure recoiling from a blast of light. The card gives all non-white creatures -1/-1 until end of turn, essentially destroying all weak non-white creatures. (Many of the sets non-white creatures only have 1 toughness.) “Bathed in hallowed light, the infidels looked upon the impurities of their souls and despaired,” reads the flavor text. Few cards in the history of Magic overtly depict a kind of mechanical racism like this.
The Dark’s lore involves a literal Crusade against goblins, as confirmed in the Tivadar’s Crusade card: a three-mana white sorcery that literally just destroys all goblins. Art from Dennis Detwiller depicts a goblin bound to a wooden frame in a pose evoking a crucifixion. Even seemingly innocent and virtuous cards like Knights of Thorn hint at racism against goblins. It has protection from red, and the flavor text quote is from Tivadar himself.
Various bits of subtext sprinkled throughout flavor text in the set also describe the exploits of Vervamon the Elder, a sage and scholar who is ultimately burned at the stake by the Church of Tal under suspicion of being a sorcerer.
“It is only fitting that one such as I should die in the pursuit of knowledge,” Vervamon says in the flavor text for Martyr’s Cry, a white card that exiles all white creatures from the game and depicts him being burned alive. Yet again, a bizarre effect for a white card.
More broadly, the rest of the set’s colors are used to showcase generally spooky stuff. There’s a Banshee, Frankenstein’s Monster, zombies, and other monstrous terrors. Even green cards like Scavenger Folk depict a human that looks mad, delirious, and terrifying.
Why Say Something Now?
More than 30 years after The Dark was released, Myrfors is less angry than reflective about the Satanic Panic and its lingering influence, but he sees a similar bigoted dogmatism running rampant today. Which is one of the major reasons why he decided to speak out now after so long.
For Myrfors, The Dark was never a broad attack on faith in general. It was a lament about how faith gets weaponized throughout history. “Some of the best people I know follow the teachings of Christ,” he said. “But people who preach division and hate and othering make the world a worse place.”
Myrfors still sees similar modern echoes of the same moral panic that inspired The Dark, of people claiming righteousness while silencing others.
“The truth is that people who view themselves as virtuous and righteous can be as deadly and dangerous as any blood-sacrificing devil cult when they forget the message of love that is supposed to be the foundation of their belief system,” Myrfors wrote in the original Facebook post. “We can see that replaying today with MAGA.”
If the real world parallels to everything showcased in The Dark reveal anything, it’s that history repeats itself: religion gets weaponized with an agenda. Part of what has irked Myrfors all these years is the bitter irony of people like Stephen Dollins preaching righteousness to demonize games like Magic: The Gathering. Showcasing evil is not the same as supporting it, he argues.
“The evil in Magic is there to be defeated,” he said. “You can’t have monster hunters without monsters.”
Demonizing a game and the people who play it becomes its own kind of othering, another ironic part of all this that totally misses the point of Magic.
“I think the proudest I have been is when people come up to me at shows and say, I didn’t have anything in common with my father, or my sibling, until we started playing Magic together, that it brought us closer, and now we understand each other,” Myrfors said. “That to me is amazing: that I worked on a game that had that kind of impact on people’s lives.”
For all the renewed attention around The Dark, his life today looks quieter — and more colorful. Myrfors takes commissions for paintings, and he’s recently published two fantasy-inspired coloring books, Fantasy, Fantastications, and Fanfare and Misunderstood Manifestations, both available on Amazon. They’re filled with intricate linework drawn from the same imagination that helped define Magic’s earliest years, just without the angry mobs.
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