IF and I do mean IF the leak regarding the Marvel cards soon to arrive in MtG is true, I find it problematic.

Note: There are two kinds of types for creatures: racial and class. I’m mostly going to be talking about racial below.

So, this is the image.

The part I want you to look at is the typeline on Wolverine. It’s Mutant Berserker Hero. Each of the other ones gets to be a human (although for some reason Iron Man is not an artificer). Not Wolverine.

So, why is this a problem?

Remember the first X-Man movie? It starts with Magneto before he is Magneto in a concentration camp reacting to the death of his family by lashing out with his power. There’s two things we learn here: Magneto is different from us, but also he is very much like us. The point of the scene is to underline his humanity.

And this has been the point of X-Men since their inception in the 60s. They were a stand in for racial minorities, LGBTQ+ folk, people with disabilities and so on. They were people who couldn’t participate in society fully, because they were different, but they still longed to be part of humanity. Well, not the evil ones, but the good ones.

And they made sure we knew who was the evil ones, as the major nemesis of X-Men was indeed the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (later just Brotherhood of Mutants, although that’s not a very inclusive name, especially considering Mystique was their leader for a very long time). Their stance was that mutants are not humans, but the next step in the evolution instead.

So, if you take the stance that a mutant is not human, you are literally taking the stance that was believed to be evil by the original authors. And again, they weren’t even shy about it.

Sure, you could also argue that in MtG humans are the default, as zombies are just zombies if they were humans while alive, but they can also be something else.

However, there have previously been human mutants. In fact, in-universe there are only two creatures that have only mutant as a racial type (Biomancer's Familiar and Simic Manipulator). Everything else is a mutation of something, so the general belief expressed here is that mutants are still members of whatever racial type they belong to, which makes the exclusion of Wolverine’s humanity that much worse.

If this ever comes up, they will defend this by pointing at the limitations of the typeline, but they’ve always found ways of getting around those problems before. Considering their bad history with minorities, they probably just didn’t feel they needed to.

(Note: When introduced, Wolverine was, in fact, a mutated wolverine, not a mutated human. I don’t think this is canon anymore, but still, in that case he should have been a Wolverine Mutant Berserker Hero instead, although I wouldn’t want him to be Berserker either, but that’s not a hill I’m interested in even fighting on.)