It may still be March 31st in the Western Hemisphere, but the official Japanese Magic: The Gathering website has ushered in April Fools’ Day with an incredible gag. Since midnight Japanese time, the MTG-JP site has been completely redesigned to look like a classic homepage from the 1990s.
This joke quickly blew up on social media.
Navigate to the site for the first time and you’ll be greeted with an ominous auto-scrolling message. According to the scroller, it had been three years since the webpage was last redesigned. It goes on to explain that the Japanese site administrators had received daily feedback from Magic players either praising or criticizing the modern site’s look.
This barrage of feedback apparently led them to question whether they were actually providing the best experience to fans. After taking a long, hard look at themselves, the site managers decided to redesign the official Japanese Magic website for April 1st.
The April Fools’ Day site has it all, complete with an awful color scheme of cyan, lime, and gray, a counter for the number of visitors to the site, animated links, a custom cursor of the Planeswalker symbol, and badly laid out MTG graphics.
You can even change the site’s background by clicking on the colorful orbs at the top right corner of the main page. Hilariously, the redesigned site also features a preview card from Strixhaven: School of Mages. We recommend you check out what happens when you hover over the grainy card image on the page.
April Fools’ Magic
This isn’t the first time that Magic: The Gathering has participated in April Fools’ Day festivities. In 2020, Wizards of the Coast announced a gag Secret Lair called “Secret Lair Drop Series: Wizards of the Coast Presents: After Great Deliberation, We Have Compiled and Remastered the Greatest Magic: The Gathering Cards of All Time, Ever!”
This set featured full-art versions of frankly some of the worst Magic cards ever printed. The Secret Lair came with copies of Storm Crow, Squire, Mudhole, and Goblin Snowman.
And lest you thought this Secret Lair drop was completely fictitious: Wizards of the Coast also announced that they would be distributing real copies of this set to Wizards Play Network stores!
This Japanese Magic site redesign was a great and harmless way for MTG to commemorate the first day of April. Well, maybe this writer’s eyes and sensibilities were harmed.
