Valve Changes "Crack the Whip" Card to Avoid Sounding Racist

There’s a lot of reasons not to be excited for Valve’s new card game, Artifact, which looks to be a comfortable mix of Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone. But the game made headlines over the weekend when some people noticed some… unusual wording in a card, that lead to some thankfully immediate changes.

Here’s the skinny: to raise hype for the game, Valve has been periodically showing off certain cards on Twitter and talking about what they do and how they can be used. One such card recently shown was called “Crack the Whip”, and the picture revealed a blue-skinned armadillo-lizard thing whipping a bunch of other blue-scaled lizard things.

Seems all well and fine. But then we get to the card description:

"Modify a black hero with 'After you play a black card, give this hero and its allied neighbors +2 Attack this round'."

Now, like Magic: The Gathering, each type of card and hero is given a color: red, green, blue, and black. So this by no means was intended to sound like a racial thing. And I’m willing to bet that whoever wrote it was so caught up in the game that they didn’t even think twice about it. But fans did. And when they pointed out that this might come off as a little bit terrible, Valve was shockingly quick to say that the card would be renamed to “Coordinated Assault”, which solved the problem pretty much instantly.

Which is commendable, but also, not that impressive, considering it’s really easy to change the name of a card for a game that’s never been released yet. And given that there’s likely a genuine lack of malice afoot, I think it’s more appropriate to call this a goof than a controversy.

But still, it’s interesting, and… I guess funny? Let’s say it’s funny.