Magic: The Gathering C/D

xp yeah i have to assume that is what will end up happening? its been a bit since i read the new plans, are there invitational events worked in that aren't just based on the top 32 performers or whatever?

my other concern is the modern format getting the legs cut off it, it was really picking up in popularity and its entire purpose was to have a sustainable non rotating format and a lot of people felt comfortable investing in a deck for it because of that, and now it suddenly doesn't seem to have a place in the ecosystem

kinda just saw scg evolving into the modern-show

i haven't paid attn to scg lately, are they running a lot of modern?

yeah quite a bit

im actually interested to see what the inevitable arena 'classic' format looks like down the line if they really don't plan on adding old sets. modern's gotten a little too critical mass-y, i always liked the extended cardpool size more

As of this last weekend, SCG finally started doing time shifted matches, which fills a bunch of dead time. I suspect they will move away from Modern a bit in the future, but they embraced it pretty hard last year.

The Magic world has done a miserable job of promoting women competitors, and making women feel welcome in general. It's pretty embarrassing and awful.

<i>anyone have deep thoughts about deep thoughts about wizards slow strangle of gps?</i>

it certainly feels like someone on the business side of wizards did the math on how much it costs to run organized play and started questioning if the roi was really there for gps and pts. i think there are ways to run gps that make sense but like, pay $100,000 for a huge tournament for a few thousand people to play is just a weird use of money and has never seemed to really drive engagement. i imagine there is also belief that in the markets where its profitable smaller tournament series can and will take the place of gps

have they cut money for GPs in ways besides coverage? I felt like the move to make GPs into Magicfests - conventions rather than tournaments - was smart. I love going to GPs for the so-many-players experience but rarely watch them at home. (though part of that is maybe self-fulfilling, due to the fact that the GP coverage has never been great.) I much prefer they go big on coverage for a few tournaments like PTs or Magic World Championship where the player caliber is higher

I don't think they've cut money but at least some value was tied to the prestige of the event, which is tied to the coverage. kinda seems like the plan is to make them 'big ptqs'.

I agree that spending $100k per GP always seemed like it was burning money, though some of the returns on that are a little abstract. NJ was my first MF and unsurprisingly didn't seem much different from any previous GP. I think to really convert it into 'not a GP' you probably need some bigger marquee side-events. but thinking about it more - I haven't seen this specific point brought up yet - killing GP coverage doesn't just save them money, it helps de-emphasize the GP aspect of the MF.

they cut the prize pool both by having fewer gps and by creating the tiered prize pool structure (although that one is pretty negligible its like $15K less in prizes this quarter) and losing the equity that pro points gave is a long-term savings for them, although they are still paying those out atm.

moving from a single tournament model to a sort of convention model in which a bunch of events including one or two more prestigious tournaments take place makes a lot of sense & is obviously the direction they are moving. i wrote an article about this a few months ago before a bunch of the op changes had been announced but it also is in tune with how they seem to want to position playing "tabletop" magic, as a sort of social & creative experience rather than a purely competitive one.

This is all just really weird to witness - like I'm personally fine with it but it's totally surreal that it's all happening so fast, I think of Wizards as this super conservative company and they've just kinda gone wildly all-in very quickly.

they're not super conservative with organized play, they changed the pro play qualification structure constantly throughout this decade

wizards def are here to wring every dollar they can from the game. the big change in direction seems less wild to me, and rather calculated and market optimized. i'm pretty curious about the business aspects of it. making MTG a legit e-sport is probably worth $$$.

wish i had more time for Magic these days. i've gone from a pretty steady limited player to not having played a single draft of the new set :/

yeah i went from doing like 10-20 drafts every set, or even more for ones that i particularly liked, to 'maybe i'll try it once'

they're not super conservative with organized play, they changed the pro play qualification structure constantly throughout this decade

yeah but PTs and GPs have been the core of competitive magic since the dawn of competitive play.

in any case I think that this: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/and-mtg-arena-2019-01-31 is the real eye opener. like the future of competitive magic isn't just 'not the pro tour', it's also maybe 'not the same rules as paper magic'.

this announcement is pretty discouraging for a few reasons but i think it does tie in to what i was saying upthread - i dont know how good the roi on the old model of organized play was & it feels like things really are moving in a different direction.

magic has been my primary non-work activity for like three years, its been a sorta weird few months thinking about what i want to do w/ it, how much i still want to play &c &c

yeah I didn't have a lot of time to play this year but was planning on going to a bunch of gps this year and and now my plans seem really hazy.

i havent been to a gp in a while due to non-magic reasons but would still hit up modern ones in the northeast i guess. i don't really play enough to justify keeping up with standard anymore even though it's historically been my favorite format

Dude from my LGS just took down SCG Dallas with mono blue.

yeah the blue deck seems strong

so, magic

Feeling kind of burned out lately

yeah I've been burnt out since ixalan but still follow from a distance

I've actually been playing a ton more, thanks to Arena. Love how fast drafting and playing goes, and I'm surprised how invested in the ranking system I am (just shy of platinum right now, so still a ways off from the top). Ravnica Allegiance is also one of the better draft sets in recent memory, though the bots consistently underdraft gates and gate payoffs

I don't play constructed at all unless I run out of currency for drafts, and hope not to put any real money into the game. Right now, I kind of like that if I run out of currency, I have to wait for quests - kind of a built-in control on my play time

I am new to it and am so obsessed right now. I play with a friend at lunch every day, and after the kids go to bed, I just build decks, that is my leisure activity. playing mono red today, I don't have a lot of faith in this deck as I don't have a high enough number of the right cards to make it do what I want it to do but the play is so fun to me and I have been working so fuckin hard these past few years, I really can't overstate how much good it's doing me to have this thing that's new to me that I'm getting very incrementally better at & will probably never be better than average at but which allows me to just be a guy playing a fun game & occasionally pulling a rabbit out of the hat & winning 17-0 before getting his ass handed to him by a Sharktocrab again

Yeah Sharktocrab is my bane

Cool to see you in this thread, JCLC, hope you stick around. I was wondering if you played the game at all after I saw that tie-in that was discussed upthread

good shit

JCLC if you have any free time this weekend, you should check out the mythic championship going on on right now: https://www.twitch.tv/magic

it's the biggest event in competitive magic

One of my hometown buddies made the top 8 of the MC, which made me more invested than usual, but I thought that was one of the best top 8s to watch in recent memory. five different decks, few non-games. the finals was especially good, and the winner played superbly

yeah i ended up watching the replay when i got home last night & i think this was the best played and most exciting top 8 to watch since shota played out of his mind to win pt kaladesh. this top 8 was also just incredibly solid, a real testament i think to what a skillful format this is

Agreed, some incredible next level plays happening, great stuff

got my ass handed to me by a friend yesterday over lunch -- after building two decks that were actual winners (one a dinosaur-heavy monster, the other mill/removal which is the style of play that suits me best), I got careless.. watched the Mythic thing all weekend, just really enjoying a new whole thing to be into.

i guess this set was inevitable with the marvel-ization of the game's story that they started several years ago, but i hate it and hope they've gotten it all out of their system here so we can go back to adventuring in the fall

hasn't MaRo spent the last 10 years insisting they'll never do a Planeswalker themed block

He really needed to find out just how shitty and unplayable a planeswalker could be.

Gf and I were having a great time looking up the Unstable cards last night, so wacky and creative.

Would it be a dumb idea to buy some to make decks out of, just to play against each other? If not, it looks like there are some 'cubes' on ebay, and complete sets, what's the move?

haha this might not be the best place to ask tbh

ha, is that because you guys are serious tournament ppl? Or, like, don't keep up anymore?

I love how those un-sets are basically just excuses to make neat concept cards that they wouldn't dare to in real Magic. I wonder how much of that set is made up of rejected stuff the Rules Manager killed. the Augment-Host stuff is really cool.

Plainswalkers ruined Magic for me and I had been playing since 1993. Just so dumb and overpowered, which has totally warped the game.

I miss the old days of playing for ante. THAT was pressure.

dunno about the un-sets since stores don't crack massive amounts of those to sell singles to tournament players, but most sets you can buy bulk commons/uncommons cheap which is a lot more economical than booster packs if you just want some cards to play with and don't care about the rares

Haha PBKR, have played with the new set? Now more planeswalkers than ever!

Yeah, we bought one of those paired Planeswalkers pre-built deck sets (our only foray into modern MtG), and were not super into that mechanic. I don't think we ever had a game where they both came out, so whoever got theirs out first basically won.

xp

they work out fine in competitive play where decks are streamlined, but tend to be runaway one-card win conditions in casual play

I haven’t played much in years and when I do it’s mostly a cube with limited infinity/type 4 rules (no lands/infinite mana/one spell per turn).

That's a good idea, ciderpress xp

my issue with the Planeswalker mechanic is that they treated it like a big and important development in the game that had to be popular, so they decided to make them stupidly overpowered to ensure people would play with them. the original 5 planeswalkers felt balanced to me but they went overboard really quick, especially since so many of them have a self-defense mechanism built in. sometimes it kinda reminds me of the old days where you'd face off against a Circle of Protection that completely ruined your game.

I still play Cube every now and then (mostly online) and it is pretty obnoxious how most games just become a battle of the Planeswalkers. they have an advantage built in since they don't have "summoning sickness" and there are so few ways to directly deal with one.

I feel like the uncommon planeswalkers in war of the spark are actually fantastic designs - they’re powerful enchantments that you can kill - which solves the normal issue of ‘enchantments are too hard to interact with’