Upcoming Magic: The Gathering set Aetherdrift could easily have been titled ‘Return to Kaladesh’, as the multiplanar race kicks off on the Indian-inspired plane of aether and filigree marvels. However, it would now need to be ‘Return to Avishkar’, as Wizards of the Coast announced on Tuesday it is changing the name of this plane.
The reason for the swap is pretty simple: Wizards of the Coast found out that kala, the first part of the MTG plane’s name, is a racial slur in a particular dialect of Hindi.
It seems it comes down to a problem of pronunciation. According to an article published on the Magic website on December 10, the word ‘kala’ (kah-Lah) means tomorrow, and for the Kaladesh MTG set, it was combined with ‘desh’ meaning home or country, to create a portmanteau that conveyed the plane’s themes of invention and progress. Unfortunately, that’s not how anyone has been saying Kaladesh, and kala (KAH-lah) is a derogatory Hindi term, meaning black.
So Wizards of the Coast has gone back to the drawing board, consulted with its cultural consultants, and come up with Avishkar, derived from a Hindi word for invention.
However, this is not a simple retcon. In a potentially smart move which seems to have helped quash the pushback from those who tend to have a kneejerk response to this kind of thing, Wizards has written the name change into Magic’s lore.
When last we saw Kaladesh, it was in the middle of a political battle against a corrupt Consulate. Now, after a successful revolution, a new government has taken over, and it has changed the name of the plane. Just as Istanbul was once Constantinople, so Kaladesh is now Avishkar.
Obviously, some denizens of the internet have steam coming out of their ears about this because some people seek any excuse to get mad, but overall the change seems to have been well-received. It’s been far less controversial, in fact, than the very concept of a racing set, which some are arguing doesn’t strike the right tone for Magic.
For more news, check out our page on MTG Aetherdrift, or take a look at our MTG release schedule guide to see everything else coming in 2025.
Source: Wargamer
