Prologue:

I was nineteen years old and hanging out in my buddy Jeff’s freshman dorm room at the University of Pennsylvania, birthplace of Magic: The Gathering. Jeff was my best friend since about age nine and—a year younger—had followed me to Penn (perhaps more importantly for you, Jeff steered me to buy three packs of Magic instead of three packs of Spellfire one fateful afternoon in 1994 at Mr. Cards & Comics in Lyndhurst, OH). Jeff would eventually graduate with a double degree from Penn’s engineering school (where “the computer” had been invented fifty or sixty years earlier) and the peerless Wharton School, where he graduated in finance or some such.

Me?

I was an absolutely superb English major (THE English major, I liked to say, for all that mattered); I also liked to scribble voluptuous err… heroic superheroes.

In contrast to someone like Jeff—who even then was clearly going to be some kind of huge private equity success upon graduation—I had no idea what I was going to do with my life two or three years down the road. I mean, I was an English major. I was constantly staving off assaults from my old man about spending DI on an education given I had no conceivable prospects, but luckily—at least at that point—I made all A’s.

Anyway, there was a wrinkled up copy of The Duelist or Scrye in the corner of Jeff’s dorm room, next to his binder of legends from Legends. I leafed through it, learning about cards I had never seen before (for example unplayables like Necropotence), before espying an ad in the back.

There was going to be a million-dollar Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour!

Hmmm… I thought to myself. I guess I’ll do that.

Jeff (who not only was much more industrious than I was but studied math, engineering, finance… you know, numbers) thought I was crazy, or should at least figure out something more productive to do with my education.

I had never played in a Magic tournament at that point, and managed to miss the first Pro Tour despite the fact that a handful of our local gaming club went (that is, phone-called their ways in). But, as I had no prospects, I figured “professional Magic player” was as good a path as anything else. Anyway, it seemed a lot closer to my grasp than my actual dream job of comic book writer.

All I had to do was win more-or-less every PT to make $100,000 a year. That seemed at the time like more money than I was ever going to make doing anything else.

Did I mention I was an English major?

At that point I had very little understanding of expectation or how to apply the math I learned in calculus class in real-life situations (interestingly, I had always been quantitative when it didn’t have to do with anything). Perhaps, I just had no interest in those things. Or perhaps I had just slipped on a label like a yellow raincoat, a word like “liberal,” “conservative,” “depressed,” “artsy,” “feminist,” “gamer,” or “geek” … a pre-made and internally-consistent identity of “English major.” It never dawned on me at that point that math could make you better at Magic, or that “business” (I didn’t know what the difference between marketing and management was) could be fun.

Anyway, winning tournaments was pretty easy, I found, in those pre-The Dojo days. Under the wing of local store friend Worth Wollpert, I took down my third-ever PTQ (opposite Erik Lauer in a Necro mirror) and all I had to do was convince my mommy that paying for my plane ticket to Dallas, TX was a good investment.

After all, I was going to win every PT, every year, and I had to start!

A PTQ winner, I was about to embark on the great adventure of my future—nay present—profession: Professional Magic Player, and all the riches that career promised.

/ End Prologue.

The nineteen-year-old version of me clearly had a dream.

He obviously didn’t envision the way my life was really going to go with Magic, instead focusing on qualifying for—and then winning “all”—the Pro Tours.

I said already I wasn’t so good—at that point—at the old “expectation”. My notions of what a PT qualification was worth were basically imagined explosions of molten gold showering down on my black cards. I expected to be interviewed by the local paper and showered in the nubile bodies of co-eds in hipster glasses.

Surely I was better than the guy who won the first PT with a 62-card deck!

But… What is the expectation for a new player—or any player—trying their luck at the Pro Tour? The recent completion of the one and only Planeswalker Points-driven Pro Tour puts this question into an interesting light; and honestly, I can’t believe no one has done an article like this before *.

Separately, there has been probably too much talk about the motivations and not-belonging of Planeswalker Point grinders… But are they really that bad?

It’s only been 16 years! I decided to check that out.

Here were my assumptions going in:

1. If you divide the performance of PT participants up by invitation criteria, “professionals” (invited by performance on Pro Tours, Pro Levels, being Player of the Year or a Hall of Famer) would do the best (though I wasn’t sure by how much); after them I assumed ratings-based invitees would be next strongest, as a ratings-based invitation requires some level of competence beyond a one- or two-day period; then event-qualifications (PTQs and GPS), with GP qualifiers probably doing better than PTQ winners (but I figured they would be pretty much the same). Last of all would be Planeswalker Points grinders, who have no talent prerequisite beyond the ability to push through frustration (something every other group has to have in some capacity, save maybe the luckiest of the GP/PTQ crowd)… but get to play on the PT anyway.
2. In cases where a player qualified on more than one criterion, I counted him according to his most impressive criteria; for example there was a PT I looked at where Shuuhei Nakamura qualified on four different Grand Prixs… But I still counted him as a “professional” instead of a GP Grinder (he had more than one professional qualification as well).
3. I did a secondary cut for all the PTs I looked at by filtering for “Pro Tour Hall of Fame” (you know, players like Jon Finkel or Kai Budde); rather than look at players who qualified because they were in the Hall of Fame, instead I treated them as regular-old professionals, but filtered later for any of 29 individuals who is currently in the Hall of Fame. So when (SPOILERS) we get to Kai’s Rebels Chicago, there are 6/8 Hall of Famers in the Top 8 even though there would be no Hall of Fame for years.
4. The only metric I really measured was the only one that matters—the Ben Rubin school of who’s best. If you don’t know what that is, I am not going to tell you… But it won’t take you long to figure out.
5. No matter what the numbers say, talented players can come from any pool. In one legendary Pro Tour, future Hall of Famers Gabriel Nassif and Jelger Wiegersma were “merely” PTQ-qualified. Gab, though, finished in the money (I don’t think he ever fell off).

Pro Tour Dark Ascension

Pro Tour Dark Ascension was fairly massive, with 446 participants. Of these, the invitations broke down thusly:

1. 181 PTQ winners
2. 130 Pro players
3. 89 PWP grinders
4. 45 Grand Prix qualifiers
5. … and my Special man, Dave Williams

Unsurprisingly, Pro players led macro groups with an average earning of $1,208 per player.

PTQ winners followed up with $287 per player, then PWP grinders came in at $213 per player; I was pretty surprised at this, actually, but their relatively small number was bolstered by the likes of Gerry Thompson and Carlos Romao. GP qualifiers finished last at only $122 per player; as a caveat, there were lots of Pro players who also fell under the GP umbrella but got pulled out of their cohort.

I made the claim on Twitter that “Hall of Fame players are just better” and they really proved that was true with PT Dark Ascension. The average member of the Pro Tour Hall of Fame pulled down $9,643!

Put another way, a Pro player is worth more than five times the value of a PWP grinder, and a Hall of Famer is worth eight times a regular Pro.

(at least at Pro Tour Dark Ascension)

So if you only compare PWP grinders against legit Pros, yeah, PWP grinders pretty much blow. But lots of people were clamoring for the opportunity to let local competent players spike one of the weekly GPs, and it’s not like those guys are breaking the bank… The average PWP grinder was actually almost 2x as good as a GP equivalent at this PT. The largest group—the PTQ players—was actually the second best in terms of per-player earnings… Though it’s not like many outside the actual Pro club is paying for his travel costs with the actual Pro Tour.

Well that’s a huge sample size!

Not.

If we only look at Pro Tour Dark Ascension—though it is our only opportunity to examine the PWP grinder—we might get a skewed perspective (“might”). I decided to dial it back just one PT. After all, I remembered that Jonny and Martell finished in the Top 16! And Estratti is supposed to be super good now… He won Philadelphia! And I wanted to see if I was right on ratings invites!

Pro Tour Philadelphia 2011

This Pro Tour featured 420 participants, with the following breakdown:

1. 226 PTQ winners
2. 121 Pros
3. 32 from GPs
4. 32 Ratings-based invites (they’re twins!)
5. 6 Mystery invites (guys I couldn’t place… maybe LCQ or optional Pro level exercises?)
6. 3 “Special” invites

Earnings went like this:

1. Pro – $1,144 per player
2. Ratings – $450 per player
3. PTQ – $311 per player
4. Special – $210 per player
5. GP – $193 per player
6. Mystery – $150 per player

Wow! That was pretty interesting. Pro earnings are steady PT-over-PT, a little down with PTQ winners a little up.

My suspicion that ratings players would do better than PTQ players seemed on, though it’s not like we have anything really conclusive here. GP guys are 0-for-2 against their more numerous PTQ counterparts (and I don’t think we can really count either special or mystery qualifications).

Hall of Fame performance was atrocious though (for them) at only $664 per player. Finkel and Kibler both finished in the Top 16 (a prelude to their Honolulu perhaps) but this was a PT of fourteen Hall of Fame participants, and 11 of them finished out of the money. My guess? A fluke. I doubt very much we will see many PTs where the “average Pro” outperforms the “average Hall of Famer” on per-player earnings.

I was pretty interested in how Pro versus Ratings versus especially PTQ would shake out going long. I knew that we only had two PTs, but both the Pro and PTQ money seemed steady.

I decided to dial it back another year to PT Amsterdam. That was another PT where Kibler did well, and I had a soft spot in my imagination for the triumph (or near-triumph) of Kai.

Pro Tour Amsterdam 2010

1. 457 participants—even bigger than Pro Tour Dark Ascension, or “more dead money” (maybe).
2. 243 PTQ winners, led by the adorable Thomas Ma and the mighty Terry Soh. PTQ winners averaged $172 per player.
3. 65 Mystery qualifications – Kind of a lot… My guess is a combination of LCQ and one-of qualification activations for the most part. Mystery players earned an average of $201.
4. 63 Professional players – That number really had me thinking about the mystery players. Professionals (these 63) earned an average of $2,205, with Hall of Famers earning an average (again lower) of $2,043. If we assume most of the mystery players are actually lower tier Pros (putting us at 128 Pros for sake of argument), the Pro average (with a much more consistent number of total Pros relative to the last two PTs we looked at) drops to an—again very consistent—number of $1,187.
5. 42 Ratings invitations, averaging $532 per player.
6. 40 GP qualifications; this will be the biggest number we look at of the PTs we look at… Kind of embarrassing that there were more players whose secret origins we don’t know than GP guys. This group earned an average of $259 per player.
7. 4 Special qualifications, which averaged $1,125 per player (all earned by Noah Boeken).

So…

1. Hall of Fame – $2,043
2. Special – $1,125
3. [assumed total] Pros – $1,187
4. Ratings – $532
5. GP – $259
6. PTQ – $172

Here we see a reversal of GP and PTQ performance, but once you assume all the mystery guys are Pros, an incredibly consistent level of performance there. Once again, ratings-based invites outperform guys who placed in one non-Professional tournament to qualify.

Slicing up all this data actually takes forever.

I decided to look at just one more Pro Tour, mostly because I really wanted to jack the numbers in favor of the HoF. Actually I didn’t even think of that second slice until I was halfway through the article. The Pro Tour had to be Kai’s Rebels Chicago, in a Top 8 that featured not just Kai, but Jon and Kibler and a handful of additional Hall of Famers. The second weakest resume of the Top 8 was one of the only triple-crown Champions in Magic (and the other one being Jay Elarar).

Pro Tour Chicago 2000

1. Only 332 participants.
2. Weird fact – No one who “only” qualified via GP played in this tournament. I double-checked. Every GP-qualified player was also a Pro or something else.
3. 154 PTQ winners, averaging $211
4. 99 Pro, averaging $1248
5. 52 Rating, averaging $814
6. 27 Mystery, averaging $107

If we apply the previous section’s stricture to mystery players, the Pro average drops to $1003 (but to be fair, the prize pool was about $30,000 less than in the other three PTs we looked at so far); Hall of Fame predictably kicked butt in this PT, with an average of $4386 due to Kai’s win + taking up 75% of the Top 8.

Here’s what I took away from this exercise:

1. Pro performance over the years is remarkably consistent. We are talking about samples from 2000 to 2012, with PT sizes varying considerably and prize pools expanding by less than the first place check in order to accommodate 100 or so additional participants. Doesn’t matter, because the Pros take up a consistent number of the money slots; the average Professional Magic Player will finish in the top 1/3, you know, where all the money is.
2. PWP grinders are “not that bad” when compared to PTQ winners. As a chunk of amateur players, their performance is not too far off from PTQ and GP tournament-spikers.
3. That said, PWP grinders (and for that matter PTQ and GP beneficiaries) are vastly inferior to guys who got their invitations via rating. Vastly and consistently. Ratings-based invitees might not be quite Pro level (let’s say they earn at half the rate, more-or-less)… But ratings guys perform at a superior rate relative to [other] amateurs. If Planeswalker Points are meant to replace ratings-based invites, they do so at the expense of a pretty clearly more skilled group.

Interlude:

In 2004, with the release of Champions of Kamigawa, I made the first of the mighty tapout Blue decks of the Star City era… for States.

Steve Sadin said he would get me cards for the tournament… But didn’t. I sat on the sidelines that year, though the deck—which tapped down artifacts, sided in March of the Machines, and finished with Keiga, the Tide Star—had a decent set of finishes elsewhere (like Australia).

I knew from tens of hours playing against myself on Apprentice that I was ridiculously +EV against the only two decks I cared about—Tooth and Nail and Affinity—and cashed in basically all the wife points for a remarkably -EV decision (Bella was a newborn at this point, and I was a different person).

I jammed a bunch of vacation days and got a last minute flight to Columbus, OH… to play in an LCQ.

That is how much fire and confidence I had.

I had made Top 8 in the last two PTQs I had played in (one of which was Extended) and I had two decks I liked (one of which was Affinity).

You can go back in the archives and learn that I missed qualifying with an X-2 (8-2 maybe?); both the guys I lost to took the slots, unsurprisingly.

Knowing what I know now—what you know now—about the expectations of a PTQ winner, let alone an unqualified LCQ wannabe, I don’t know if I could have justified such a -EV trip.

But that same trip changed my life then, and probably my life forever.

Failing to make the PT, I ended up doing my first tour in the Sunday booth. I was probably the first writer to notice Shuuhei Nakamura and famously called him to beat Gadiel in what everyone—including the Japanese—had going the other way. I predicted Pierre Canali (a first time PTQ-winner) taking it down from 12 rounds out.

Of course I was only in position to do all these awesome things because I put myself in that spot via an ostensibly -EV decision, which ended up a “good investment” longer term.

I am living proof that you can’t reduce a trip to the PT to expectation against ROI… at least not if you count tournament stakes as the only prize. There are friends, business contacts, and future teammates to meet; fun, Fun, and more FUN to be had; memories to be made… and opportunities to knock down like Jeremy Lin buzzer-beater jump shots.

In other words, I rolled some dice.

/ End interlude.

Really, the question is, what do we want the Pro Tour to look like?

Do we want it to be composed entirely of highly skilled participants? How about the math-impaired (or uninformed) who—with no attention to ROI—buy their way into traveling and tournaments like PWP grinders me (in the above interlude). The Pros have skill covered, no problem; their performance is dizzyingly consistent over 10-12 years. That’s what lots of people say they want.

Here is a slightly different question: Do we want to have the drama and cheer for the brilliant finishes of a PT like Kibler’s Dark Ascension? I ask again: What do we want the Pro Tour to look like?

Here is a perspective you probably didn’t think to look at:

Round 1 – Bryan Eleyet, Professional (L)

Round 2 – Eric Froehlich, Professional (L)

Round 1 – Michael Bonde, GP (W)

Round 2 – Jelger Wiegersma, Professional / Hall of Fame / Top 8 (L)

Round 1 – Dorian Cuellar, PTQ (W)

Round 2 – Marcel Angelo Zafra, PWPs (W)

Those are the first two rounds as played by the three players I referenced last week as PT draft tiebreakers. The 0-2 to start was none other than Luis Scott-Vargas, who met two fellow Professional-class players in the first two rounds. Of course the one time I go out and publicly say Luis is a better PT draft pick than my favorite player of all time, he gets vastly outperformed by…

Jon Finkel, who opened up at not-particularly-auspicious 1-1. His loss was to a fellow Hall of Famer, fellow Top 8 competitor, and the Spirit Delver mirror match.

Finally PVDDR got to play against a PTQ player and a PWP grinder in his first two rounds, where he opened up 2-0.

We know now that both Jon and Paulo (and Jelger for that matter) all made Top 8. This brings me back to my question from not that long ago. What do we want the Pro Tour to look like?

Rather than get up in arms about the moral or EV drivers behind Planeswalker Points, I would suggest we simply examine how we want to approach the end goal that we envision the PT should be. What is the actual experience of the participants? How about the experience of the increasingly important audience at home? By all indications most everyone thought Pro Tour Dark Ascension was a big hit. “One of the best of all time” if not “THE best.” The coverage was great, but the storylines couldn’t be beat. The best players made Top 8 (well, not including Luis, but look at those first two pairings), and new legends were forged.

Jon will be taking wolf-blocking beats from his friends (and over-reaching strangers) forever.

LSV v. EFro might be a clash of the literal (and Primeval) Titans late on Day Two… But in the first two rounds? Somebody awesome is going to have problems. That Jon and Jelger both survived so long is a testament to the sustained value of an HoF’er’s skill. Me? I liked seeing awesome players take over. Everyone did! You probably can’ have all that was PT Dark Ascension without a PWP or two paving the way.

Epilogue:

When I got to my first PT, in my first round, my opponent opened by chatting my ear off about the possibility of ID’ing into the money. Maybe he, too, was flabbergasted by the actual “math” of the million-dollar Black Lotus Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour.

“You could probably draw, Draw, DRAW again into… I dunno… $1,000.”

Why would I have come all this way to do that?

$1,000 would cover what, my travel costs?

“I killed a $1,000 tournament in New York to play in this. Probably one of my friends will win it.”

Remember: I was going to win all the Pro Tours.

My opponent further surprised me by his choice of Elvish Archers and Yavimaya Ants in his assault on my Necropotence deck (same as Worth’s Top 16 and Pikula’s Top 4 listing); from my perspective, also an assault on good taste.

As a bright-eyed PTQ winner, my first result?

An 0-1.

/ Act drop.

LOVE
MIKE

*Apologies if you have done this kind of an article before; I didn’t read it.