Last night, Owen Turtenwald broke his silence on Twitch and Twitter to stream Hearthstone and reveal his participation in the Masters Tour Seoul event, five months after leaving Magic: the Gathering over sexual harassment allegations.
During his stream, Turtenwald declined to address the allegations and avoided talking about Magic. He was more more than happy to tout the virtues of Hearthstone, however, while wearing a Hearthstone t-shirt and flanked by a Hearthstone pillow and blanket.
Owen Turtenwald’s all-Hearthstone outfit and decoration.
Turtenwald was effusive in his praise for the game. “[Hearthstone] is my favorite game,” he said. “It is the most skill-intensive game I’ve ever played, that’s for damn sure.”
He only made one allusion to the allegations on stream. “I recognize that I’m getting a few keyboard bullies here in the chat,” he acknowledged as people kept asking him about the events leading to his departure from Magic. “And that’s something I used to do when I was younger, I used to harass people on the internet. But then lately, I’ve had to think, ‘What would I rather do? Harass strangers on the internet or play a game of Hearthstone?'”
Turtenwald even went on to say, “Learning to play Hearthstone actually made me a better person. Just the amount that it taught me to study statistics, data analysis, calculations, and I had to be ruthless with my self evaluation.”
As for his involvement in Hearthstone, Turtenwald said that he had downloaded the game on May 1, 2019 and had qualified for the Masters Tour Seoul event, where he placed 113 out of 328 players for $500 in prizes, and had also qualified for the upcoming Masters Tour Bucharest.
Despite his repeated praise of the game, Turtenwald did say that he wasn’t sponsored.
Turtenwald’s Hearthstone screen name is ZhangFei, which is the name of one of the members of the Peach Garden Oath, a fictional event in the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong that was turned into the card Peach Garden Oath in Magic’s Portal: Three Kingdoms expansion. Turtenwald, Reid Duke, and William Huey Jensen adopted the name as their team name in 2013.
UPDATE: Turtenwald released a statement Wednesday evening.
Allegations of Sexual Harassment
On March 27, 2019, just one day before the start of the Mythic Invitational, Wizards of the Coast announced that then-Magic Pro League member Owen Turtenwald would not be participating in the event. No other details were given other than that he would be replaced by recently-retired Pro Tour Commentator Brian David-Marshall.
It was later reported by Kotaku that Turtenwald had been accused of having “exhibited a pattern of predatory behavior toward female Magic players that spans several years.” However, Kotaku could not confirm if those accusations were the reason why Turtenwald was removed from the Mythic Invitational.
But a month later, ahead of Mythic Championship II London, Turtenwald was removed from the Magic Pro League and Mythic Championship II invite list. By then, Turtenwald had removed all mentions of Magic from his Twitter profile, deleted all of his tweets, and renamed his Twitch channel from OwenTMagic to OwenTurtenwald. He had been silent on social media and hadn’t streamed since he was disinvited from the Mythic Invitational until yesterday’s announcement about his participation in Hearthstone.
We reached out to both Owen Turtenwald and Blizzard, the maker of Hearthstone, for comment. Neither returned our messages before publication.