Gonna take a longer time with this thread, but inspired by both @ReclusiveWizard and a text from @G3RRYT: 100 opinions on Magic.

Starting off with a fucking zinger:

1. Old status based OP systems were run by pros who broke floor rules via social norms around concessions.

1b. Like, yes, you can make a system where it’s best if everyone concedes in spots with highly differential outcome leverage, but also the people who systematize those concessions are flat out cheating.

2. Magic is never going to be a good game to stream because you have to understand it way too well to know when something cool happens. Contrast to LoL where I don’t need to understand anything to know that the clip of Faker annihilating that dude is awesome.

3. Magic’s move to digital will be horrible for it in the long run because it is a huge incumbent on paper and in LGSes and not at all in the top tier online.

4. So much of what makes Magic good is the people and if you don’t see them that much, the game and the digital grind isn’t good enough to replace it.

5. The reason that Magic has survived so long is because formats provide variety and relief from bad experiences. Part of what saves bad standard formats is access to limited, legacy, etc.

6. This is part of what’s so insane about the live ops on Arena to me: why cut people off from variety if they don’t want to play vs Oko or Secretkeeper? From a digital games perspective, retention & engagement >>>> $$$, so just let people play more and eventually they spend.

7. It’s also why Cube is so popular: people want variety! Let people experience variety (of cards, play styles, etc) and the experience gets better and people stick around longer.

8. This is also why I think Leg/Vint are worth saving on their own: they’re contexts where spells/artifacts are best. Other formats can be for creatures, synergies, etc, but different people like different things.

9. But the restricted list will strangle those formats to death. They’re basically asset class holding vehicles at this point. Mtgfinance is just a natural reaction to the asset-ification of those cards.

10. Part of the problem with killing broader paper OP structures is that I don’t think WOTC is good at quantifying how valuable viral growth has been. I doubt their game grows on digital without the word of mouth it has grown on for decades.

11. From an IP perspective, though, I think their 2007 move toward planeswalkers, from a brand perspective, was genius. Making magic a storytelling brand was absolutely right and they did great work in that space.

12. Some of the only time I’ve ever been engaged - really engaged - in magic lore is when Alison and Yichao and Kelly were telling the story. It was sublime. Recent changes...less so.

Stepping away. Reminder for later: SCG, tournament structures, website analytics, DTC, singles, elder systems, personalities.

13. Picking back up with another lukewarm take: many of the people who claim to hate mana would hate the game a lot more with that variance gone. They would lose a lot more. The game is well-designed to give shmoes a fighting chance of running pros over. Losing that would be bad.

14. Mana system consistency also means that you have to put the variance somewhere else, thus RNGstone complaints. Gotta have variance somewhere, otherwise you have a skill game that’s fun for very few.

15. Also, in general, lands and color balancing is a fun deck building exercise for many, and it’s part of what impacts format context. How open vs narrow you can go on colors is a huge part of what defines formats.

16. Back to macro: I don’t think any website is any good at measuring the value of a given writer writing for their website. They probably all measure hits and maybe clicks, but I would bet a lot that SCG can’t tell me which of their writers causes people to spend the most.

17. Which is nuts, because while article hits obviously matter, maybe Commander articles are really good at selling singles! Maybe Standard articles are really good at selling boxes but only in specific times of the year! I doubt content managers are at max sophistication.

18. Speaking of selling shit: I’m surprised it took WOTC this long to get into the secondary market game. For a place that hands out promos for doing things, they never seemed to have a really clear $ to value idea of what they were trying to accomplish.

19. Actually, scratch that, my bewilderment is in their shifting goals: they succeeded in getting people to go to events. Now they’re doing that less and getting people to go to their storefront more, which tells an ominous story about LGS support.

20. One thing that always struck me as a missing role in the marketplace: a play space that doesn’t sell much Magic stuff. Just get people to pay you a cover for playing and figure out how to make the numbers work, sell food, and make it a good experience to be there.

21. Like, a lot of LGSes have been/are going to get Amazon’d by these distribution models, so leaning into being a community space seems smart.

22. Shifting tracks: blue is obviously the best color for much of Magic’s history because it flatters the core audience’s sensibilities. Very smart, cerebral, thinking circles around the other person.

23. I think there’s some truth in the claim that the explosion of data causes formats to get solved faster, but also 2019 was puuuuushed and it doesn’t take a brain genius to look at Oko and realize it’s good.

24. Back to the IP stuff: I don’t think that WOTC/the MTG IP is on a competitive level with Warcraft, LoL, etc right now, but I think a lot of how that shakes out moving forward will hinge on their MMO execution. Good luck to that team, genuinely.

25. I also dunno about the Netflix stuff - the Warcraft movie was just for the fans, whereas Marvel’s CU drew in people who couldn’t tell Iron Man from War Machine when they started watching. How well it grows the IP is worth paying attention to.

26. Fucking off of IP stuff and getting back to the shit I really understand: organized play incentives and elder systems.

I’m pretty sure that no one knows how much a modern-day card is worth if organized play systems continue to decline.

27. And it didn’t have to be like this, but the marketing and brand teams really obviously think that magic as esport is more valuable than magic as grassroots game, just based on whether they’re allocating budget. I disagree with those priorities, to be polite.

28. Cards - their physical business - are valuable because they are useful and collectible. Some more than others, obviously. Let’s set aside collectible stuff for a moment. Utility is about whether you can actually play with the card, typically in tournaments.

29. So the less you can play in physical events that you care about, the less valuable the cards are to you. Almost tautologically true, right? But it means that OP is floating a lot of card values, and thus selling a lot of boxes.

30. And why do people care about tournaments? Presumably they like playing, but also they care about what they get for winning - both social and tangible rewards. Let’s break those out a bit.

31. People find value in being famous. Again, obvious. But one of many things that stuff like GP coverage did was let casual players have a dream of saying “hey mom and friends, I’m on TV!” And that had value.

32. People play GPs for lots of other reasons too - chance of playing a pro, chance for local bragging rights, outside chance at doing well, etc. But the incentive framework has to exist to create and sustain those aspirations, and a lot of the last few years undercut those.

33. All this to say: I think magic esports is a loser in a number of ways compared to older versions of OP. I get why (pushes players to higher margin play venues, functions as UA for Arena, aspiration structure for Arena), but I think the long term incentives still favor IRL.

34. Shifting topics: collector’s boosters! Overall, these are great, since you don’t create the problem of, say, ZEN or Amonkhet where the cool shit tanks the value of every other card. Tons of cards never see the light of day bc dealers open packs for lottery tickets. Not great.

35. Another good effect: foil and collectible hunters pay more of their money to WOTC relative to what the secondary market commands, WOTC prints less regular product, other stuff retains value better.

36. This is good down the line because players have cards worth anything and because Masters sets are easier to make because the market can still create price signals around what rares to reprint.

37. This is getting me into a pet issue of mine: I miss old Extended (rotating). One thing that rotating formats have going for them is that they provide durable on-ramps through playing standard for years.

38. One beef I have with nonrotating formats is that the best stuff probably isn’t coming back. You have to go get it at full cost, rather than picking it up by building a standard collection every year. See: tron, storm, Jund, Mox Opal, etc in modern.

39. This presents standard players with a dead end: you can play standard for ages and never “get anywhere”. Your horizons never open up beyond standard. Pioneer is supposed to address this, but we’ll be in the same problem space in 5 years.

40. It gets back to what makes Magic good: variety and choice. If you guaranteed five years of playability on standard cards, people would probably stay invested, even when the standard format isn’t great. Instead, there’s a chasm between standard and modern (or legacy).

41. This is part and parcel of what I don’t understand about the historic thing. Arena had a great chance to add variety and likely lift retention and they instead killed it because they were scared it would hurt queue times and not sell packs.

42. Looking back on the launch of HS, it was always risible to me that WOTC said that “Hearthstone isn’t a competitor [to Magic]”. Can only imagine how many internal fights got lost by the “make the UI and tech stack not shit” side before HS arrived.

43. It has seemed fairly straightforward to me that WOTC sees opportunity in cutting out LGSes and distributors as middlemen in their enterprise. DTC products are a symptom, not a cause of this. https://twitter.com/Chosler88/status/1206474562596212736?s=20

44. Again, this comes at the cost of encouraging in store OP and likely crushing a number of partners, but what leverage do LGSes have? Honestly curious. Seems like a bad spot to be in for them.

45. I don’t see LGSes as “entitled” to promo support, WOTC can distribute product however they want. Probably after years of FTV getting distributed for MSRP and secondary marketing for 5x, they decided to cut themselves in a bit more. Not surprised.

46. Forgot to finish this thought. Basic idea here is that if you give out more stuff as a reward, it should be valuable to people. Hard to keep that wheel spinning if paper tournaments are slowly dying/losing appeal. https://twitter.com/drewlevin/status/1206426800902963200?s=20

47. Also, from a social capital perspective, probably better to spread out prestige across hundreds in many countries than dozens in few. Makes it easier to see the aspiration as achievable if you know someone high up on the ladder personally. Few know an MPLer.

48. One thing that never struck me as right about WOTC’s approach to personality driven esports is how narrow it goes and how professionalized the pitch is. Your target market is median, what, a college student? Sell them fame, not a job.

49. It’s not like people really care THAT much who their favorite grinder is. Like, speaking as someone who used to be one: I’m deeply replaceable as a Magic personality. Also, relatedly, I can be socially successful without being the A#1 grinder in the world!

50. The sheer fact of visibility is enough for most people. I don’t think most people want Magic the full time job, I think they want Magic the fifteen minutes of fame. Old system did that a lot better by having lower ceiling but way broader “win” level that accommodated more.

51. Also from a bean counter perspective: if you’re paying people $60k or $80k a year to do work for you, you better be able to attribute that value. Plenty of semipros have made far less and likely done more for the game.

52. Also also, if they really wanted to lean in on personality driven esports stuff, they could have done (could do) SO much more with the people and their fan bases. It’s a failure of imagination to view success through a narrow lens of streaming and viewer stats.

53. Your best celebrities should get people to play more, not just watch them play more. There’s a million comparison referral programs across industries if you want to identify your community pillars and elevate them. I guess I am assuming that the goal is to grow playerbase.

54. But that’s also what gets me about esports in general: what’s the endgame? You don’t actually make money in your game by getting people to watch Twitch! Most people in your target market want to be famous for playing, not just casually watch.

55. It goes back to my second tweet: Magic is a bad esport. It also goes to another point: Magic has a powerful existing viral channel in its players. It doesn’t need esports to accomplish that. Get people to play with their friends. That’s how you grow a core PvP game.

56. So much of the esports stuff reeks of contextless copying of other games’ successful models without understanding key pieces of context. Every time I look for coherence in the magic esports pivot, I end up more bewildered because there isn’t a single guiding principle.

57. Even if the principle was “digital is a bigger opportunity and we need ways to grow that don’t involve costly UA”, esports would still be heinous because you should be leveraging your existing channels to grow your new one. Cross promotion is a classic tradition.

58. So yeah, I don’t think the shot callers know what they’re doing and I think they’re making trade offs that they won’t like in a year or two. That’s all I got on the esports stuff. Know what I do want to talk about more re: OP? How SCG makes markets for formats.

But first, dinner.

okay, back from dinner, probably didn't miss much in the last half year.

some interesting things happened in the last year, so gonna wrap this thread up with some shit that will probably lose me some followers!

59. Sticking to current events: COVID fucked everyone who relies on physical transactions. doubly so for places that organize events. triply so, I'd imagine, for companies that rely on physical transactions that are subsidized by the existence of in-person events. that's Magic.

60. So from an outsider's perspective, here's how I imagine WOTC to have looked since March:

1. our physical goods are fucked
2. at least we have two digital products that we can mostly run tournaments on, let's push business to those
3. our physical goods are fuuuuuuuuuuuucked

61. so if you're a businessperson inside WOTC, probably you're cutting back on anything in-store related (because they aren't open so driving people to stores is futile) and selling physical goods thru any channel but Amazon dot com is similarly pointless

62. bleak outlook, right? but wait, it gets worse! turns out those physical goods cost something to make, and those costs get paid months in advance! so not only are their 2020 sets going to sit in warehouses, they're actually in the red on them. COGS suck.

63. so from that perspective, the idea that any amount of pro tour ANYTHING is still happening is mindblowing to me. that they're still running any kind of tournaments is wild. people complaining about $2m in cuts should appreciate the mil that's left.

64. there were probably quite reasonable arguments inside WOTC to just refund every qualifier tournament, cancel 2020, take a huge hit, and hope there's a game left in 2021. this is the most player-friendly outcome that people could have possibly dreamed of.

65. (people saying that wotc should go cash-negative to fund a marketing program for sets that are a lock to not sell/return the costs of those marketing programs don't understand how marketing budgets work, which is fine, but true)

66. anyway, that's my take on the PT. this whole Austin thing is a mess, but suffice it to say that there are plenty of ways that people of good intent can make their opinions known to WOTC, but "leak their big news + thumb your nose at them on twitter" is not high on the list

67. is that banworthy? probably. wotc gets to do whatever the fuck they want, and it serves them not at all to tolerate people who fuck with them in those regards. is that a fun take for people who like to ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWAH? absolutely not, but that's not the point.

68. wotc is interested in creating symbiotic relationships with people outside the company. they want (and will reward!) people who rep them well. they do not want people who fuck with them. it's actually a very simple game to understand and play if you're interested.

69. but again, I don't think that's what most people want out of that interaction, which is fine, but they should probably not fool themselves. a lot of the last decade plus in OP is players minmaxing a marketing budget while not returning much value.

70. "I can win games" is not valuable to WOTC. "I can get people excited to play the game" is valuable to them, and the two are not the same. it's why the biggest content creators are cross-game, not dependent on a game: they bring their own audience to the interaction.

71. people got VERY close to understanding how this works back when Savjz got invites to PTs: he actually brought new people to the game. if all you've ever done is play Magic, you're probably not bringing new people to the game. if WOTC wants to expand their audience...