This isn’t just a copyright issue, but a trademark issue - which is what really bites them in the ass, I’d say. As soon as they started talking about what this was for, they were talking about MtG and ran afoul of trademark issues. I think, if they continued, they necessarily would also have run into copyright issues as well, making them doubly screwed.
I’m not sure it’s ultimately possible. They could set up their system such that it’s generically about “collectible card games” (wink wink) and never say the names of any specific products, but I suspect, if that worked, once users started talking about MtG, the trademark issue would crop up. Plus, I don’t see how you do the NFTs of specific cards without linking to some sort of representation of that actual card. Those representations would either be something WOTC is hosting (unlikely), or some third party (now you’ve got copyright issues). If you managed to never mention the name, prevent users from mentioning the name, and link only to official WOTC resources to represent each card… I think you still have trademark issues, because by linking to WOTC files, you’ve made it explicitly clear your service can’t exist without being built directly on top of copyrighted and trademarked IP.
So yeah, I don’t see a way around it, unless you could somehow make everything so completely generic that at no point does anything reference or link to any WOTC IP, that even the card representations that the NFTs link to are abstracted such that there’s no reference to the real cards (not sure how you do that). But in that case, they wouldn’t get the interest/funding that they’re obviously getting by explicitly referencing MtG…
