Magic: The Gathering,GO TEAM MS!

[PeregrineV]

Don't get the point of counterfeiting when you can print proxies of any card.

Um. Some people play in tournaments.

If you mean some people play in professional tournaments, then if it truly becomes a concern then there will be an inspection of each of and every card at each tournament.

And if someone wins a tournament with counterfeit cards, does that reduce the strength of their play?

Just saying, do you want to be the best because your the best, or you have the best cards money can buy?

(counterfeiting is bad.)

[bv310]

Don't get the point of counterfeiting when you can print proxies of any card.

Um. Some people play in tournaments.

If you mean some people play in professional tournaments, then if it truly becomes a concern then there will be an inspection of each of and every card at each tournament.

And if someone wins a tournament with counterfeit cards, does that reduce the strength of their play?

Just saying, do you want to be the best because your the best, or you have the best cards money can buy?

(counterfeiting is bad.)

So you're just talking out of your ass then? Do you know how many players play in an average tournament?

[Thestatusquo]

tbf i'd welcome a secondary market crash on the principle that I hate the high dollar entry point into certain formats

I get the points made against it that certain retailers couldn't survive if the secondary market crashed, and it's a valid point. But perhaps it's a good thing.

Its not that certain retailers wouldn't survive. The game itself wouldn't survive. The whole reason magic exists is because it is profitable. The moment it stops being profitable (which it surely will once the cards it prints start being made by someone else for 10x less) then it will no longer exist.

What the author says is true. You can always play magic with your proxies. At your kitchen table. But you could always do that anyway. In a world of counterfeiting, thats the only thing you can do.

[Thestatusquo]

Don't get the point of counterfeiting when you can print proxies of any card.

Um. Some people play in tournaments.

If you mean some people play in professional tournaments, then if it truly becomes a concern then there will be an inspection of each of and every card at each tournament.

And if someone wins a tournament with counterfeit cards, does that reduce the strength of their play?

Just saying, do you want to be the best because your the best, or you have the best cards money can buy?

(counterfeiting is bad.)

LOL.

Heres an example. Recently I went to a grand prix in DC. There were some pros there, but most of the reason to go to grand prix is because they are massive magic parties, and also pretty much the highest competitive level you can play legacy at.

At this tournament there were 1700 players. That's almost 130 THOUSAND cards to check. Even if you spent only 1 minute on each card thats over 2000 man hours of time. If you made each player mail his deck to the tournament site in advance and hired 50 people it would still take a week worth of time to check every card. And Legacy GPs are way smaller than modern or standard GPs. Like what? That is one of the most laughably idiotic things I've ever heard.

The mere fact that you say "professional tournaments" shows you dont have any clue what you're talking about, since the pro tour makes up such a small percentage of magic tournaments that its laughable to even talk about it. Even at the average PTQ or SCG open the amount of time it would take to check every card is just so laughably ridiculous that I can't even think about what a logistical nightmare it would be. And these aren't like minor tournaments, these are tournaments that have thousands of dollars worth of prizes.

Furthermore, pretty much the main barometer of skill is deck construction and card choices. Magic is a game of meta decisions. To say something like "would you rather be good because you are good or because your cards are good." misses the point on such a massive level that I can't even begin to tell you how stupid a statement it is. Like, it would just take too much time for me to walk across the massive chasm of ignorance that such a statement requires. If you played Owen Turtenwald with the same exact deck he was playing he would probably beat you at least 70% of the time, if not more. If you each designed your own decks he would probably beat you around 80-90% of the time. The best players in the world are the best players in the world because they understand why cards are good in a given meta, construct decks that utilize those cards the best, then out play you in the actual game as well. There's a reason Owen won 2 1500+ player tournaments in a row in completely different formats.

Dear god.

[NabakovNabakov]

To be fair, I sympathize with the point (which I think was missed) that it generally costs money to build a good deck, and two people with equal skill in deckmaking but different budgets could easily end up mismatched at a tournament. In an ideal competitive environment that focused only on the game, this would not be the case.

Granted, this can lead to some interesting constrained optimization: 'what's the best I can do for $20?' or my preferred mode 'what's the best I can do with the cards I already own?' But if that's really what you want, play Limited (like me!). For tournaments, the fact still remains that people with fewer constraints on their production set are more likely to have access to the (locally) optimal deck.

[Thestatusquo]

That point is pretty easily outweighed by the fact that the game wouldnt exist if it werent for the secondary market.

[NabakovNabakov]

The game wouldn't exist in its current form, but it certainly wouldn't go away. Worst case scenario: Wizards goes belly up, and the game freezes at 20 years worth of cards. Best case: the development work that is currently done by a few hundred professionals gets spread over a few thousand hobbyists, organized on open-source principles. The main challenge will not be developing new and interesting cards (or even balanced sets and mechanics) but getting everyone to accept and adhere to the new regime.

[Thestatusquo]

And you could play it at your kitchen table all you wanted. With shitty untested card designs and opponents who think that "checking every card at 'professional tournaments'" is a reasonable solution to the problem of counterfeiting.

There would be no dealers. Those companies make their money off of card sales. There would be no magic shops. Those places make no money off of tournaments. They make their money off of the secondary market. There would be no local game store tournaments because the game stores would fold. There would be no major tournaments. The major tournaments are supported either by wizards/hasbro who would obviously not invest money into magic anymore, or by companies like Star City Games who only run those tournaments because they help them sell cards. The whole reason I play magic would be completely gone.

If you want to play at your kitchen table with proxies then go ahead. No one is stopping you. No one has ever been stopping you. But anyone who says that a crash of the secondary market would be a good thing because the game is too expensive is an idiot. The status quo is so much better and more vibrant than that apocolypse you just described.

[NabakovNabakov]

Ain't nobody selling pawns at chess tournaments. Ain't nobody selling vowels at spelling bees. There are probably people selling balls at football games, but that's beside the point. If you want to compete, you can compete. If you want to organize a tournament, all you need is some space and some flyers, and maybe a sponsor (Mountain Dew?). You're probably not going to sell out convention centers on the regular, but there will always be people who care about the game and want to play it with you, just like there were before Star City Games came along. Hell, all you people who like putting cash on the line could even organize your own high-stakes events.

I dunno, maybe you leave the game when the secondary market crashes because there are fewer tournaments, but I have plenty of friends who would get (back) into Magic if it were cheaper and easier to get high-quality proxies/counterfeits, and as someone who likes playing Magic with friends much more than in tournaments, I have to be selfish and say that maybe a crash in the secondary market isn't that bad. The one thing that holds me back is the potential damage to the future of the game.

[Fate]

at first I was with shea because reasonable or w/e.... but Nabakov has definitely swung me.


Magic will DEFINITELKY change if theres a coutnerfeit market and cards are worth the paper they are printed on..... but will it be the END? No. I think the game is far too developed and entrenched. Maybe it will hugely downside because 90% of people were in it just so they could have something of value out of the game they play

but magic won't die. the people who truly love the game will make it work like he says, I believe.

[Thestatusquo]

90% of tournaments would be gone, but w/e.

[bv310]

Yeah, when was the last chess tournament you saw that topped 1800 people?

[Thestatusquo]

Well, chess is kind of an anomaly. It's probably literally the only game outside of poker that no one is making money producing that has the kind of tournament numbers magic does.

[Fate]

90% of tournaments are a scam anyway...

like theres' no way you disagree that PTQs are a huge trap, right?

[bv310]

Before responding, could you clarify how you mean that?

[Shanba]

Only in the sense that going to the cinema is a scam. You're paying for entertainment!

[Fate]

I mean EV wise... $25 for a tournament that only "pays out" to first place is just too much to justify.

Game stores can still host the cash tournaments or whatever if they have enough of a base (I think if EVERYONE can play WHATEVER deck they want literally, then tournament attendance like that might even increase)

[Thestatusquo]

I think for players who are not particularly good PTQs are probably not a particularly good way of spending your time.

I know plenty of players who have qualified through them, though.

You also have to keep in mind that you and I have a vastly different temporal perspective. The popularity of magic on this scale is a relatively recent thing. PTQs didn't use to be 200 people when I first started going to them. 70-100 was much more common. The first PTQ I ever attended was 45 players. Furthermore, back when I started playing we had ELO ratings and ratings qualifications to the pro tour. That meant if you went to a bunch of PTQs and did generally well at them, you could grind up to a 1850-1900 rating and get in in some parts of the world (it was always harder in the US just because there are so many people here relatively speaking who play magic compared to the rest of the world.)

I think the way we currently qualify people to the pro tour needs a massive overhaul. 10 hour tournaments where X-1-1 doesn't make it into top 8 are just miserable. I don't know what the solution is, but my issues are with implementation, I have no issues with them on an existential level.

[hasdgfas]

I mean EV wise... $25 for a tournament that only "pays out" to first place is just too much to justify.

I don't think this is a very good argument. You're paying for fun, you're paying for the experience. You're not paying because you have a good chance of qualifying.

[Thestatusquo]

I do know this though: I think using EV calculations for the invite are wrong. If we're not considering the two boxes to box and a half that top 8 competitors usually get, or the 16 packs that usually pays down to the top 16 (I've even seen a store pay 9 packs down to top 32 and 5 down to 64, though I'll admit thats uncommon) not "prizes" for the sake of EV, then I think you're undervaluing the worth of the trip which is not entirely tangibly monetary for the people who seek it.

If you are including those things, then I'd say the EV is just about correct in terms of price-payout.

At least if you don't go to one at a shitty store. There are a lot of shitty stores out there. I've learned which ones to avoid for the most part.

[Fate]

I mean I get the experience part...but like shea said isn't it a miserable experience to play for 10 hours in a smelly room with no breaks (if you are playing a slow deck for example)?

good competitive magic doesn't need to be as taxing on soul in my opinion... if people enjoy that and aren't solely just chaing the carrot all the power to them...


Even if you are good shea, and I dont want to bring this argument back but there still is variance. You can top 8 every ptq if youre real good but can you always win everyone? What if someone playing the high risk high payout deck (5-color goodstuff or somethin) just gets there? It just seems more frustrating than its worth

[Thestatusquo]

Maybe it is to you, but that seems like a decision you have to make personally. For me, its not. I will play on the pro tour at some point during my life. I will make that happen or I will be very disappointed in myself.

If someone gets more enjoyment out of playing EDH at their kitchen table, then sure, I can respect that. It is, however, not even a little bit fun to me. That person has always been free to make proxies or hell, even make his own new cards if he wants. I'm in the process of making an all-foil high quality proxy cube, because that is casual play. But at the point where proxies start to become indistinguishable to the cards they're ostensibly copying, we have a problem, because the structure of the entire competitive aspect will be gone, and the competitive aspect is why I play the game.

[Nuwen]

I think what Fate is getting at is prize EV currently doesn't support a professional game; the current model is more or less lottery payout for a high initial buy-in. Of course fodder will always attend tournaments 'for the experience,' but I think a lucrative pro circuit would generate tons more revenue than it would cost to maintain.

Other Esports have proven that broadly-distributed prize support creates a positive feedback system of more tournament interest [individual] -> more tournament coverage [advertisements] -> more prize support -> more tournament interest [corp-level]. Right now, the tournament circuit sponsorship is dominated by companies who make their money from tournament entry/accessories/card resale - that's not a good economic model for a pro sport.

I've always been surprised with the amateur-ish quality of "Pro" magic content, because there's a TON of corp-level profit to be made even on simple stuff like concessions. At GP Charlotte, we witnessed a man pay $100 for a sandwich to be delivered to his table so he wouldn't have to stop playing. Sure, some venues have concessions restrictions but I think tournament hosts could be priming ALL of MtG's tournament economy by partnering with food franchises. And that's just one example.

But as long as the current model of per-individual interest -> prize pool // host profit engine is the only thing powering tournament-level economy, it'll remain anemic. I think this is because sponsors assume consumers are always more interested in PLAYING Magic firsthand vs. watching it being played (which is why hosts think they'll make the most money from players themselves), which isn't accurate - video archive view #s have proved that tournament coverage could enjoy viewership comparable other Esports.

tl;dr generate more revenue from NOT-PLAYERS, pay more to players, watch ecosystem boom and expand exponentially

[Fate]

I think what Nuwen is trying to say is Wizards makes a gross fucking amount of money off magic and is a super corporation and if that gets toned down than its better for the world at large yo

[Nuwen]

That's not what I said at all?