The remote tabletop Magic service SpellTable announced today that it was joining Wizards of the Coast.
“I’m very excited to announce that SpellTable and I have joined Wizards of the Coast,” said the site’s creator, Jonathan Rowny. “Since we began this project we’ve definitely felt the love and passion of this community. In discussions with Wizards of the Coast we realized that our goals were perfectly aligned: to make playing paper Magic remotely as fun and easy as possible.”
“We couldn’t really imagine a better home for SpellTable to continue to grow,” Rowny continued. “The considerable resources and relationships provided by being part of Wizards of the Coast will allow us to continually improve the experience. We also hope to leverage this opportunity to better support local game stores with features and benefits to keep your local communities thriving through this difficult time.”
A game of Commander being played on SpellTable.
SpellTable launched in April as the COVID-19 pandemic was taking hold in the United States. To help contain the disease’s spread, cities and states across the country implemented stay at home orders, which forced many local games stores to close their doors and prevented groups of players from gathering to play Magic. SpellTable stepped in to provide a way for Commander players to form four-player pods and play tabletop games of Commander using their webcam.
It proved extremely popular and continued to add features over the next four months. It also helped enable events like ChannelFireball’s CommandFest Online in June, which used SpellTable as to play its matches. That event proved to be such a success that ChannelFireball and SpellTable are holding a second CommandFest Online this weekend, from August 22-23.
Today’s announcement didn’t include any specific plans or details about how the service would be integrated into Wizards. We reached out to SpellTable for this article but didn’t hear back before publication.