This is not an article about M11. I am going to discuss the recent actions taken by Wizards of the Coast.
First, I want to do a little rant about Extended, but before I do I would like to note that I am aware of the fact that the pros are not the target audience for Magic: the Gathering. I know that we are not where they make their money. I do think they could be a little more subtle about their disregard for the pro community in the decision-making process, but I understand why things are the way they are.
I just want to talk about Extended as a professional format. Even if it was only played for competitive purposes, it was extremely good at being played for competitive purposes. What I mean is, the Extended tournaments were consistently the most skill intensive tournaments on the circuit. Look at the results of the Extended tournaments in recent history and see how the top of the standings match up to those of a similar tournament of another format. From what I’ve seen, the evidence is pretty telling.
The biggest qualm I have about the way that the pro tour is set up, however, is that we always have brand new formats. Magic isn’t all about just immediately breaking the format. It’s also about fine-tuning against known metagames and finding focused hate decks for the top tiers and so on. All of those skills are lost when every single pro tour is a brand new format.
Plus, due to the lag in time between when a set is released and becomes legal, and when it is available for use on Magic Online causes a lot of stress as well. Since every pro tour is right after a set comes out, there is no testing online which greatly affects not only the overall quality of the decks, but especially damages the ability for someone to compete on their own. I have never been on an official team or worked with a group, and a large part of that is due to geography. The fact that something as primitive as where I live can have such a large impact on my ability to compete in the age we live in today is baffling.
So would getting the sets online faster fix the problem? Only partially. The fact that there are no other major tournaments of a format before the PT itself is also a problem because it makes for an ill-defined metagame. Obviously the whole point of this set-up is to promote the new set and the blossoming metagame on the biggest stage available to endorse the product to the public. The problem is that the pros are being thrown to the fire in order to do it.
Take GerryT, for example. When the metagame and card pool are a known quantity, he has a knack for breaking it wide open. His record of success on the Grand Prix circuit is partially due to this skill. Sadly, the way the tour is set up now, that particularly deckbuilding mastery will never be relevant for any pro tour.
To go back to the topic of time constraints, with very limited time of knowing the format and it being unavailable online, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to refine a metagame, build a deck, learn it inside and out, tweak it, and repeat the process with every deck until you can tell what is best. If you take all of that into account and then on top of that add in that you have to learn a draft format as well, and the players have their work cut out for them.
These absurd time demands go to show how vital a working community is to tournament success. I guess that means I should try and find a team. Or I could just take up a portion of an article to complain about it. I am going to be working with some people for Amsterdam though, so we’ll see how that goes. I just wish there could be a little variety in the pro tours.
Don’t get me wrong; Wizards has done some wonderful things for the pro community. The player parties have been quite good since the Kyoto debacle, and all of the tournament sites have been top-notch. I just wish it wasn’t so impossible to feel prepared for a tournament, especially without having to work with a group.
As for Mystical Tutor’s banning, I don’t really care about the specific card. People ask me about how I feel about it, or what I think about M11, and so on. Sometimes I respond with cryptic answers and semi-riddles. Other times I will feign interest and give shallow responses while actually thinking about what would happen if a car made of diamond drove very fast into a wall made of diamond. So what do I think about Mystical Tutor getting banned? I don’t care. It was a Legacy Magic card. Now it isn’t.
I think Reanimator and ANT were the best decks, but were not overwhelmingly dominant, and in fact were very underplayed and didn’t put up nearly the results that I feel they should have been putting up all along. So why the banning if it wasn’t really a problem? Because Wizards hates combo. It’s not good for what they think their target audience is to go to FNM and get turn 2’d. I understand that. But those people aren’t playing Legacy.
The reasoning put forth by Wizards of the Coast for the banning of Mystical Tutor is ridiculous. The decision was quite arbitrary and rooted in their dislike for combo decks. There is a wonderful article on this very website written by Christopher Coppola, that you can find here, which outlines the many flaws in their decision-making process. The idea that they took the decks into the tournament practice room online to decide whether or not to ban it is the biggest joke I have heard in quite a while. Doesn’t a major company with real decisions to make do a little more research than playing some practice games against bad players with joke decks, then make an arbitrary decision based off of the results of their tiny sample size?
Apparently not.
What they should have done was look at all of the results of all of the Legacy tournaments that have occurred for the past year and realized that those decks were not any more overpowered than anything else and were held in check by many bad matchups in the metagame, which is obviously the case to anyone paying attention to the format. If, after the GP, the results were weighted heavily towards Mystical Tutor decks (which would be conflicting to the results of the last GP), then they could make a decision regarding the health of the format.
They also could have consulted some Legacy specialists or polled the Legacy community. They could have done comprehensive testing inside of their own staff using the FFL and R+D to streamline and test Legacy and run multiple mock tournaments rotating decks and practicing with them and use that information to see what was going on. The reason I state this as an option is because this is basically the same as letting the GP happen, but instead they do it themselves and make a decision before the GP. The people in charge of making the decision had multiple options for figuring out the best course of action.
Instead, they made a rash decision based on unreliable data in a tiny sample size based on their own personal biases. You can see Aaron Forsythe‘s personal bias in his interview on The Magic Show here.
The part that pertains to this discussion starts around 5:30, if you want to follow along.
Aaron Forsythe said, “For me, Magic is a game of exploration and change, and it’s funny how many people I meet that aren’t interested in either of those things. They just want to latch onto a deck and iterate it until it is perfect, and they’re happy to play that deck for the rest of their life, for the next, you know, year and a half, as long as none of the cards rotate out, and I just dislike that and have no interest in doing that myself.”
That soundbite is an aside on Forsythe’s thought processes about how technology affects deckbuilding, which in and of itself shows an outdated mindset and an overall lack of understanding, but that’s beside the point. The point I am trying to make here is that Mr. Forsythe’s comments make me feel like he wants Magic to conform to his point of view of how the game works.
Personally, I am constantly changing decks. I never know what I’m playing for a tournament until the morning of said tournament, and I can’t be found dead playing the same deck a week later online than what I was playing the week before. All of this means that I strongly understand his point of view, but that doesn’t mean that I disregard that opposite. I understand where the people who play one deck are coming from. I respect the desire to achieve mastery of one deck, or a deep appreciation for the gameplan of one particular archetype. I can relate to these viewpoints on some level, and the fact that Forsythe seems to wave them off in the interview gives me pause about whether or not he can understand and respect the opposing viewpoint, because those people are part of his target audience as well and it is senseless to force them to conform with his views.
So why am I bringing all of this up in the conversation about Legacy? Because a vast majority of dedicated Legacy players are exactly the type of deck-builders that Mr. Forsythe disregards in his interview; they fall in love with a deck and play it for years and years, adapting it to different metagames and mastering every aspect of playing that particular deck. So disregarding that stance on deckbuilding is largely disregarding the Legacy community as a whole. That is why I think it is almost insulting to Legacy players that Mystical Tutor got banned, and here is why:
It seems that Aaron Forsythe, Tom LaPille, and everyone else involved in Mystical Tutor’s banning don’t trust the Legacy community and have little faith in their competitive abilities.
If Mystical Tutor were broken, tournament results would show it. They don’t, so that must mean that the only reason that they can justify saying it is broken is by saying that they don’t believe the Legacy community has the capability to realize how broken it is. They have little faith in their competitive abilities, for if they did, they would recognize that the free market, as it were, showed that Mystical Tutor was not broken.
As for not trusting the Legacy community, that is because they don’t think that the players could figure out how to beat the brokenness that is Mystical Tutor. If Mystical Tutor decks were a real problem, they would become extremely hated by sideboard options, maindeck hate, and designated hate decks. When that starts happening, and the Mystical Tutor decks are still winning a decent amount, then you can start considering a banning. Until that point, pulling the trigger that early shows a decisive lack of faith in the competitive Legacy deckbuilding community.
Tom LaPille is the man who wrote the article explaining the reasoning behind banning Mystical Tutor, and while Christopher already did a great job of debunking pretty much everything that was said, I had a few more things I wanted to add. First of all, I don’t like the sentiment that tutors are bad for the game because they make degenerate things happen too consistently. On the contrary, I believe that very consistency is good for the game. Without some form of consistency in card selection and tutoring, games degenerate into “your draw versus my draw” too quickly. Tutoring and card selection cards have the ability to make games about maximizing your cards, executing a game plan, and decision-making rather than what 13 cards you have against what 14 cards I have. Seeing more cards through Ponder-like effects and tutors also gives players an exorbitant amount of additional decisions, which is good for the game. All of these things make skill matter more and more, which makes striving for mastery a much more enticing incentive.
By far the most disturbing part of this whole ordeal comes towards the end of the Forsythe interview on The Magic Show. The question is about what their stance is on combo decks, and here is his answer:
“Combo decks, for us, they’re a great spectacle when they show up. You know, Open the Vaults [with] Time Sieve wins Finnish Nationals and everyone talks about it. Seismic Swans wins a Grand Prix, everyone talks about it. Or Niels Viaene made the top eight with another, different Open the Vaults deck with Filigree Angels in it. Those are great, and we want combo to be like that where they get to prey on an unsuspecting metagame. Like, you found something and people aren’t ready to fight you on that axis. They have all their Wraths and Paths and Bolts, and instead you’re doing this thing and suddenly, no one’s ready to beat you and it’s a great story and you deserve to win when you come up with those kinds of things. But then it should be like ‘oh, I just need to put Relic of Progenitus in my sideboard and I can’t lose to that anymore’ because the problem is with combo, a lot of players, it is not at all how they envision Magic, and they build their decks and they want to interact with you in a certain way, and I don’t want to say we’re catering to the lowest common denominator, but as people kind of come up through the ranks, they kind of expect Magic to be about the same as they climb through. It shouldn’t be like, ‘once you get to this level, attacking is dumb. This is how you really win at Magic.’ You know, that’s just bad for us. I think creature-based metagames are the way to go. I think most people enjoy it… It should have a place, it should surprise people, it should win tournaments. It should not be like a pillar in the metagame where ‘your deck’s not ready to beat combo so you’re going to lose all the time.’ That just should not be the case.”
Whew, that was a long quote. I was probably better off just editing that part into a video and embedding it rather than typing it all out, but there you go. Now, I understand where he is coming from and a lot of his points make sense. Where my mental disconnect here is, why does everything have to be the same? For example, having a combo deck in Legacy is not discouraging kitchen-counter-players from becoming FNMers. All it is doing is keeping Legacy diverse rather than having it be exactly what Standard is.
The dynamics of a format are reliant on certain things to keep it healthy, and this stance doesn’t allow for that. In that dreamworld, Magic would just be midrange decks trying to out-midrange each other, and we draw closer to that with each newly printed set.
Time for another “don’t get me wrong” paragraph:
Don’t get me wrong; I have the utmost respect for the guys are R+D. I have met many of them and they are all very intelligent people. It is my dream job to work with them one day, as it is for pretty much everyone else. I just disagree with a lot of the reasoning they are giving for their decisions. I think that they may have become out of touch with the competitive community. In my opinion, they are emphasizing many of the wrong things in order to sell the product. I know who they are targeting and why they are doing what they are doing, but I feel that there are many demographics they are overlooking and/or neglecting. I also feel that there are market points to be made that are freerolls on their main target audiences that they are not capitalizing on.
In short, it is not the actual banning of Mystical Tutor that I care about. It makes no difference to me; it’s just a Magic card after all. It is the decision-making process and line of reasoning behind the banning that worries me, as I don’t like where it leads. And please, don’t take this as another “OMG MAGIC IS DEAD!” thing, because those are all nonsense and always have been.
Anyway, my article writing process involves around 4-8 files rotting in a folder on my desktop. Eventually I get around to finishing one and publishing it, but usually I just start a new one about whatever I feel like talking about that week. Right now I have 7 articles that are either ideas that need fleshing out, or works that are just not fully completed. I’m going to let you in on what they are, partially to make a point about my love for game design and Magic R+D, and partially to measure interest to see what I should consider working on.
– Commentary on power creep and how the game has changed over the years.
– Unsolicited advice to R+D.
– An article about racing and combat.
– The next edition of the theory of stock mana.
– A piece where I talk about how everyone is terrible at Magic, how horrible almost all articles are, and insult the reader a lot.
– An obscure, content-free tournament report that is a bit of an artistic piece.
– The article I am planning on publishing next week, so I’m not going to talk about it here.
I also plan on doing a couple more videos at some point in the near future.
So those are all what you might see down the road. Maybe you won’t though. Who knows? Not me. Or you. Or anybody. But it might happen. I can tell one thing, though: I’m not going to write a set review for M11 or talk about my musings or thoughts or discussions or anything of that sort. You’ve seen it a million times before, you don’t learn anything new from it, and it’s all mere speculation and baseless assumptions, for the time being anyway. We don’t even know the whole set and you want me to tell you what new decks are going to exist?
Please.
P.S. I also think that it is possible that Wizards thought that Mystical would be too powerful with cards that are coming out soon, such as Time Reversal. The problem with this possibility is that A) they didn’t give this as a reason for the banning, and B) I don’t think that anything they could print would be better than Ad Nauseam at what Mystical wants to do in Legacy.