On a fall day in 2019, a lucrative bit of backroom dealing kicked off with a typo-ridden message on the chat app Discord. Two players of the strategy card game Magic: The Gathering were about to engage in a little insider trading.
“Hey mate, I just got some game changing news, but i kinda dont want to put it in the discord yet. I want just a day to get ahead of the field,” wrote one of the men, BaconShuffel. “Its litterally gona change…… everything.”
BaconShuffel, real name Craig Chapman, was sidling up to entrepreneur James Chillcott with some inside information that, if handled properly, would position them and the people in their network to reap thousands of dollars. Chapman was firing off messages in excited little fragments punctuated by smiley face emojis while Chillcott responded in more a more measured prose, which appeared adjacent to an icon of a hairgelled man in a business suit making a Zoolander mouthshape. Chapman was hunched over his PC in his suburban Ireland home office and surrounded by piled-high white boxes of Magic cards, sorted and stacked. These things had made him money, and lots of it. Here was an opportunity for more.
“Lol ok,” wrote Chillcott. “Hit me.”
“They are announcing a new paper competitive format,” Chapman messaged. He was talking about Magic’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast. “Its name is Pioneer.”
