An Online Prerelease. It is a first — even if the online Alara Reborn “Prerelease” is happening a weeks after Reborn is being played in sanctioned constructed matches offline. It is also, according to the forum trolls, a disaster which no one will attend. It will destroy Constructed Magic, the singles market, and the Championship series. It is a conspiracy, an Epic marketing fail, and the cause of swine flu. It will also destroy this week’s column, because I am going to spend most of it laughing at the forum posts.
The Prerelease Basics
I’m going to quote the announcement pretty much in its entirety. Makes it easier to point out where the forum trolls have got it completely wrong.
Alara Reborn Prerelease Swiss Sealed Flights
DURATION: Friday May 15 5:00 pm PST— Saturday May 16, 9:00 pm PST. Each Alara Reborn Prerelease Sealed Swiss Flight will accommodate 16 players. These 4-round events will be run “on demand” — as soon as 1 event fills, another will open for sign-up.
LOCATION: These Swiss events will take place in the “Sealed Swiss Queues” room.
PRODUCT: 3 Shards of Alara boosters and 3 Alara Reborn boosters
ADMISSION: 30 Tix (all product will be supplied).
PRIZE SUPPORT: Prizes are based on the total match points at the end of the tournament. Each match win awards 3 points and each loss awards 0 points.
12 points = 10 Boosters
9 points = 4 Boosters
6 points = 1 Booster
All players who participate in a 16-Player Prerelease Swiss Sealed Flight will get a prerelease Dragon Broodmother promo card. All players who earn 9 or more points will also receive a premium foil version of the prerelease Dragon Broodmother promo card as well. In addition the winner of a 16-player Swiss Sealed flight will earn 1 QP for Season II of the 2009 Magic Online Championship Series.
In effect, Wizards wants to match the paper prereleases. In some respects, this does. In others, it does not.
Our local paper prereleases also ran pods. The paper prereleases were $25.00, used the same product mix and offered prizes of 12 packs for a winner, 6 packs for 3-0 or 3-1 and 1 pack for going 2-2. Of course, our pod had more than 16 players, and the prize payout came to slightly about 2 packs per player.
Several forum posters are/were irate about the prize payout. In one respect they were justified — the initial post had a typo that understated the number of packs someone going 4-0 would win. Still, even after the number was corrected, posts like this kept appearing.
The cost vs. prize support is horrendous. Hell, the 8-man sealed queues, which require one fewer win at each level, pay out 9-5-2 currently. They’re cheaper to enter, easier to achieve each prize level, and pay out nearly the same prizes. … The only reason I’m considering playing in one would be for the promo card. … These pre-release events are just a huge rip-off.
The prize support is not astounding — it is a pool of 2 packs per player, plus the prerelease foils. That is — technically — what the paper prereleases were supposed to pay out. Of course, paper prereleases can’t expect every pod to fill with the exact number of players. (Online, Wizards can just hold it open until it hits 16, then open another one.) In real life, the Tournament Organizer (TO) has to estimate attendance and structure the prizes so that the right amount of product would be distributed, assuming that number hits. Paper TOs also have to structure thier prize support to prevent things like collusion — that is why the difference between prizes for 4-0 and 3-0 are evenly divisible, etc., and most TOs round up to make the numbers work. All that means that the TOs usually pay out more than 2 packs per player, and the difference comes directly out of their profits.
The price of the online event — 30 Tix — was roughly equivalent to what Wizards recommended that the TOs charge for prereleases. (Ignoring taxes, which most TOs eat, but which Wizards charges on Tix sales.) A lot of TOs were worried about the bad economy, so they cut their prices below $30. If your prerelease was cheaper than $30.00 per player, thank your TO.
Equally importantly, Wizards does not want to make Online cheaper than paper. It is already more convenient than paper (no travel involved, etc.), so Wizard’s policy is to charge full price, so as not to undercut their paper product. Paper is much, much bigger than online, after all. That’s just the way it is. Online, packs cost the full $3.99. In stores, we get a box discount. Online, prereleases cost 30 Tix. In paper, it may be less.
Moneygrab. Money+Grab. Meaning an undignified or unprincipled acquisition of a large sum of money with little effort. Money meaning cash and grab meaning they’re gonna grab your money from you.
This was a response to a snarky post of mine (see below.) The poster was complaining that Wizards was just doing this to rip off the players.
Rip off? No. To make money — of course. They damn well better!
Seriously — I hope they make a killing on these events. WotC is a business. It exists to make money. That’s exactly what businesses are supposed to do, and why people invest in them. Unless a business continues to make money, it won’t stay in business.
If Wizards goes out of business, I will have to find a new hobby. I don’t want to do that – I like this hobby.
Strangely enough, I actually believe in paying for what I get. I’m not wildly happy with paying, but WotC is charging a fair price. Unlike a ton of games companies that have charged too much or too little, WotC is continuing to stay in business and produce a quality product. Their marketing people are pretty good at calling things correctly. Wizards makes a few bobbles here and there (e.g. Homelands), but there haven’t been any “New Coke” or “The Hummer is our Future” types of marketing blunders.
Of course, the proof will be in the playing. If just two prerelease events fire on Friday and Saturday, then it is pretty clear that Wizards has overpriced / undersold this. If 300 fire, the price might prove a bit low. Time will tell.
A number of commenters had additional problems with calling this a prerelease. Here’s the generic / distilled to the essence version: “This is NOT a prerelease, although it would have been if they had actually done this two weeks ago.” Eventually, I had had enough of that, especially the really vehement comments, and that resulted in my snarky response:
Prerelease. Pre + release. Meaning before the release. Pre is a suffix meaning beforehand. Release means, in this context, the day product available for purchase. That’s Monday. These events happen the Friday and Saturday before the release date.
My point was that the cards will be available to everyone when the packs go on sale in the online store (Monday, ant noon PDT.) These tournaments let you play with them a couple days beforehand — before they go on sale. That’s the definition of a prerelease. Sure, there are some differences between paper and online play — like lack of face to face interaction, not smelling the funk that a room full of Magic players for hours creates, etc., but those are generic differences between online and paper play. Those differences are not caused by, nor related to, a prerelease.
A few commenters had some strange ideas about what paper prereleases are like. Here’s one example.
This isn’t the same as a paper pre-release. For one thing, the cards are already known! A big draw of the pre-releases is to play with cards that nobody (outside of WotC and their testers) has seen or played with yet. That’s hardly the case here since the cards have been available in paper for about a month by the time these happen.
I like this one. Maybe, for a very few people, the contents of the new set are still a mystery at the time of the prerelease. That is pretty darn rare. MTGSalvation generally has the complete spoiler a week or more ahead of time. Even the artwork for most of the cards is known. As for people playing with them — I have proxied cards as soon as I have heard them spoiled, and tried them in decks. If prereleases really were the event where all was a mystery, then all was suddenly revealed, I could see the argument. However, the real world simply isn’t like that.
I’m not saying that having a first chance to get new cards physically in your hands isn’t a huge part of the prerelease — it is. However, the online prereleases will be a first chance to get your mouse on the real digital cards (as opposed to the ones we borrowed during the beta test). Sure, it is not exactly the same, but it is not so different as to be not a prerelease.
Here’s another comment on the prize structure / price ratio.
Never EVER post that a 50% prize cut is “fair” or “good” in any way.
NEVER.
Okay?
The poster was comparing the prize support for regular sealed events with the prerelease. Under that comparison, the prizes are, indeed reduced. On the other hand, right now in-print packs are typically selling for 3-4 Tix each, and are widely available. The rares and uncommons you open in a Limited event today are also fairly cheap. That will not be true of the packs you win or the cards you open at these prereleases. For the first couple of days, all Reborn cards and packs will be at a huge premium. If you sell off what you open, it will take a bad card pool and a miserable record not to recoup at least a good portion of that $30.00 entry fee.
Besides, this is not a typical tournament. It is a prerelease — a special form of Limited tournament. It commands a premium. It’s like the “limited edition” package on a commuter car — you pay extra for some special paint, and for the exclusivity. Underneath, of course, it’s the same engine and body.
My local lawn tractor dealer offered a special Green Bay Packers tractor offer. Same machine, same set-up, painted in the team colors and logos, for a lot more money. Same dif.
A number of commentators wanted Wizards to prerelease the digital cards on the same day that that the paper cards are released. That is simply not going to happen. Online cards require programming, and that programming requires testing. The beta process for Reborn began with the paper prerelease. It requires some time for all us beta testers to try all the weird interactions we can think of, and to try the cards in different situations. You cannot release the set without beta testing — the result is often game-affecting bugs, which often cause players to lose drafts. At that point, Wizards generally provides credits, which cut into its profits. That’s bad all around — bad for the players who got bugged, bad for tournament attendance, and bad for Wizards.
The beta process will always delay be a problem for Online play. Tempesteye summed it up.
It’s unfortunate but that’s the way it’s always going to be. Why?
Well, if online beta testing started a month before the paper release, so that the prerelease/release events could be held concurrently, the entire set would be spoiled within hours of the beta starting.
This happened with MED2.
We are never, ever, going to see a beta start until after a sets paper prerelease.
The background: Masters Edition II was made available to a limited number of beta testers, before the contents were known as a trial. All the beta testers were told that the information in the set was strictly confidential, that revealing any of it was grounds for account suspension, etc. It didn’t matter — MTGSalvation had the complete MEDII list, from two different sources, within hours of it being available to the beta testers. The meaning was pretty clear — if something goes to online beta, it will not remain confidential.
That means that beta testers will never get product data until it is released via the paper prerelease.
Forum commenters have some weird ideas about keeping sets secret.
What I said at the time is that WOTC really needs to decide how they are going to be giving out information about new cards, and what is actually so important about keeping the information hidden for that long when anyone following the rumor mill is going to have information for the entire set many days before the spoiler goes up the day before the paper prerelease. There is no such thing as even footing at the prerelease, and there never will be. If people want to be surprised at the prerelease, I am in full support of that. It means staying out of the forums where other people are talking about it
Wizards has talked about this a lot. Wizards believes that having sets known well before the prerelease dissipates the excitement about the set launch, and hurts sales. They have seen it happen, and they have access to all the data. I’ll believe them — both because they say so and because they have paid to protect those secrets.
Here’s another take on what the prerelease means.
Also, now that we have a “pre-release” doesn’t this completely blow the argument regarding why they wait until the following Friday to launch drafts and events out the window? The one that said “We want a few days to test things on live in case we missed something in beta”…?
At this point, it becomes clear that argument was a lie, and that WotC only waits so they can make extra money off the early pack-crackers. And this only takes that a step further.
Yes, Wizards generally does leave a window between the date that a set goes on sale in the online store and the date when players can start drafting and/or playing sealed events with the cards. Having bugged cards interfering with for-pay play means refunds, and that is really bad. Wizards tries very hard to avoid that.
However, this set has very little chance of those problems occurring. All of Alara has been, from a judging perspective, pretty boring. Unlike past sets, the mechanics are pretty straight-forward, and judge calls are pretty scarce. Most of the interactions and complexity come in building Limited pools / drafting the color combinations. The mechanics themselves are fun, but not challenging from a rules standpoint. That also means the mechanics are easy to code. The result was that the beta-testers were finding next to no bugs in the last week or so. Since the beta was, effectively, done, Wizards could risk a prerelease. Personally, I doubt this could have happened with a set like Time Spiral, but I would expect it with M10.
The simple conclusion — the set was ready for prime time early, so Wizards found a way to release it early. Of course, that set off other commenters.
What it makes me wonder really is why they just don’t sell the sets on Friday if indeed they are actually ready on Friday. What they need to do is find a way to have the online release closer to paper, not dress up the time difference between paper and online releases.
Of course, Wizards had advertised the release date for Alara Reborn online a couple months ago. (It was on the weekend special PE calendar.) Wizards couldn’t really change that at the last minute. (Otherwise the forum trolls would scream — but it would also affect other plans, and might create some legal headaches.) The result — Wizards came up with a creative alternative. The release events occur on schedule. The prerelease happens earlier.
Actually, what I just said was already said better by Hamtastic, in response to the “it’s a lie” post I quoted above:
I’m sure it has absolutely nothing to do with them getting better at developing card sets. And also nothing to do with each beta having less and less issues at the start of it.
One year ago, I would have laughed at them trying this, because I would have expected so many bugs to slip through that first week. After the last 12 months of beta testing I’m much more confident in them releasing a set with fewer bugs, and faster than before. And for the record, I do still expect there to be bugs, there are always bugs, but I also expect that they will be minor and not limited effecting bugs (unless they break something that was working somehow).
But if you’ve paid attention to the last 24 months of releases you’d probably note that generally many, many fewer bugs are released with each new set. There was a time that each new set brought a lot of bugs that stayed around forever. Lately though, the bugs are fewer and usually far less severe when they do appear.
12 to 24 months ago, a pre-release would have been a disaster of bug related compensation requests. Nowadays? I don’t think it will be. But if something big slips through, those players essentially get free events and free new cards.
It’s all a big conspiracy, after all.
Some commenters were just upset that the cards were not made available for sale / play / draft the instant the last bug was fixed. They seemed to think that the paper world was somehow different.
What isn’t fine is the extra delay (which exists, no matter how you spin it) … They don’t really do [that] in paper (once again, no matter how you spin it, they just don’t)
The same delay exists in paper. Really. I ran my Prerelease on Sunday. On the Thursday beforehand, to drum up interest, I took the packet of prerelease foils and a display of Reborn Intro packs to the store and waved them around – still sealed. I told everyone they could get these cards, at this store, in just three days. After all, I had all the product – the booster packs, the intro packs, etc. – all in my house, all ready to go, several days before the prerelease. I just could not break the seals until the prerelease date.
The same sort of delay, in paper and online.
Some posters had a different set of issues. They were concerned that the cards people opened in the prerelease would be available for play in Constructed events immediately. Well, yes. They are. As a Wizards rep pointed out.
As a point of clarification, when a new set is released in Magic Online the cards become legal for use as soon as they are available to the public. For the majority of new cards, this means that they are only available after the product goes on sale. When a new set contains reprinted cards, however, those reprinted cards are legal in Constructed immediately after the downtime that adds the new set.
For instance, Terminate and Meddling Mage will actually be legal in the appropriate Constructed events starting Wednesday, May 13th. This is not new behavior and has been the case for all sets released in Magic Online since we relaunched last year.
The rest of Alara Reborn will become legal after the first Pre-Release event finishes, since this will be the first time the rest of those cards have been available to the public online.
I hope that helps clear up some confusion. Have fun.
Yes, some Reborn cards will be available through the prerelease, but not through the store or other venues, Saturday and Sunday. The forum response:
Time for a conspiracy theory:
– Somebody did a lengthy analysis of the qualifiers in MOCS season 1, and found that on average these folks did not need to pay (WOTC) any more than they were before to qualify. They did in fact need to play more, but prizes won along the way covered most of the cost for most of the qualifying players.
– With the season #2 championship requiring ARB cards to maximize success, this is WOTC’s way to ensure that the qualifying players will pay more.
A few posters pointed out that this was simply the way it has always been. Here’s a response to that, and it provides some more details.
If this were some random Tuesday-to-Friday time period with nothing of significance going on, I’d probably tend to agree with you.
But weekends are when people aren’t working. In some cases, it’s the only time they get to play tournament Constructed at all. For them, it might as well be a whole week for all intents and purposes.
Weekends are when we see tournament Constructed play at its peak, which means more people will be negatively affected by this than if it had happened during the week. We also have the Weekend Premier events going on that week, and the results of those events do factor in to what cards will or won’t be banned 3 weeks from now. Those who have the opportunity to participate on Friday (while others have to work or have other things to do) or shovel out cash on the hyper-inflated secondary market will have a huge advantage over those who didn’t have the opportunity to get the cards.
And of course, there’s also the MOCS. Those who crack (or pay for) the playable rares of the set will have a huge advantage over those who don’t.
There’s a lot to respond to here, so I’ll take some in order.
First, the fact that it is a weekend. Well, sure. Weekends are indeed the best time for the most people. That’s why all large events of all kinds, from PTQs to Prereleases to Grand Prix to Pro Tours, happen on weekends. That may have an impact — it did on the weekend of the paper prerelease. I spent that weekend playing prereleases, instead of playing Constructed online. It is called a tradeoff.
The deeper point the poster was making is that the Constructed events on the weekend could be affected. The players with access to the cards would “have a huge advantage” over other players. Well, let’s look at that.
First of all, as people have repeatedly “reminded” me, this is a collectible card game. People with more money have always been able to buy wins in Constructed formats. In Vintage / Legacy / Classic, having Force of Will and the duals means your deck will be much better than a deck without those cards. The same thing was true of past Constructed events — the players with Tarmogoyfs or Figures of Destiny tended to beat those without them. The same will be true at Regionals, where lack of access to some of the best Reborn rares will influence the deck choices of some teams.
The question is how significantly will this impact be, and how many matches will actually be impacted? That will also tell us how big the impact on the MOCS — the Magic Online Championship Series — will be.
Looking at the Premier Event schedule, I see two Premier events scheduled for the period between the prerelease events starting and the packs going on sale in the store. These are the Champions of Kamigawa Championship on Sunday, and the Standard with Vanguard PE on Sunday. The first is a Limited event, so Reborn cards will have no effect. The other event is a Vanguard event, and Vanguard is so rarely played that I have no idea whether the new cards will have any effect. Let’s move on to formats I’m more familiar with.
As I write this, the schedule for the weekend’s daily events is not yet up. The past weekend offered us, between the 5pm PDT prerelease start time and the noon PDT on-sale time, three Classic events, three Extended events, four Alara Block events and six Standard events. Presumably, at least all the late Saturday and Sunday events could be affected by the availability of the new cards. The question is, how badly?
First of all, I would point out that the best tournament advice is always to play what you know. Unless you have been doing a lot of playtesting recently, the odds of knowing a deck built around the new cards really well are a lot lower than the odds of really knowing the pre-Reborn decks that you have been playing. While people who have been playtesting really hard for U.S. Regionals might have enough new card experience, those people will be playing at U.S. Regionals this Saturday. They won’t be online, at least not until they wake up Sunday morning. On that basis, I would be slightly concerned for the Sunday events, but not the Saturday ones. Moreover, to impact the Sunday events, those experienced Regionals players will have to acquire the cards, and they will not have been around on Friday and Saturday to play in the online prereleases or trade for the cards.
The second question is whether the cards will have that much effect. If you have been playtesting for Regionals, you can answer that. If not, I would just point out that large chunks of people’s playtest gauntlets have been made up of decks that are almost unchanged from pre-Reborn. If you have premium, look at Kyle Sanchez decklists. His Kithkin, Faeries, and Red decks have nothing from Reborn. Five-Color control had Anathemancers, and that’s about it. Other decks have a few cards, and Jund Ramp has a lot of new parts. So, does this mean that we will see those decks? If so, with they have “a huge advantage?”
The forum trolls have said that the events won’t fire more than once or twice all weekend. If so, that solves the problem — two events mean a total of 32 players opening 64 Reborn packs, plus another 64 prize packs. Even if everything is opened and on the market, then maybe two copies of any given rare will be available. Even the richest Cruel Control player will have to be content with just two Anathemancers – and probably just one.
On the other hand, assume that the events are really popular and fire every ten minutes, on average, for the whole 16 hour period. That would mean that roughly 100 events fired, giving 1,600 players three packs in their sealed pool, and another 3,200 packs in prizes. That’s 8,000 packs in total, or roughly 35 playsets of every rare, and 100 playsets of every uncommon. In that case, it should not be that difficult for those players with the money to get their playsets.
Of course, the odds are that the actual number of release events firing will be between the extremes, and that only some players will be able to get the cards they want. A lot of us will play in the prerelease events, get moderately lucky and wind up with one or two copies of some of the cards we want for Constructed. That’s just the way it is. I have been playing Block Constructed and Standard for a few months with just three Ajani Vengeants and three Path to Exiles. I knew I would eventually draft the fourth (and I did, eventually), but in the meantime I simply played with a substitute. That’s the way the game works.
In short, I don’t see this as the end of the world. Some people get to play Limited with cards early, and they pay for the privilege. Some Constructed players may get their hands on some good cards, and they may get a brief advantage in one or two Constructed tourneys. It is not going to be a lot of players, and not a lot of advantage, but that’s how the game works. It’s just the nature of the prerelease.
I’m sure the forum trolls will dismiss this whole article as just me being a Wizards apologist. Whatever. Wizards saw that the beta test had ironed out the bugs early, and that they could do an online prerelease. They tried it. It’s cool that the set is ready early. It’s cool they tried something different. It’s cool that I may get to play a couple of new cards a week before the online release events. Even if a couple of people get lucky enough to have a first crack at Constructed play with the new cards, that’s the way it is. I honestly see nothing wrong with that.
It’s not something to get all worked up over in the forums.
But calling it a prerelease is an absolute joke.
I got the joke. Whenever work got too frustrating, I simply read a bit of the forum thread on the prerelease and felt a lot better. The whole thread was funny.
PRJ
“one million words” in the online prereleases on Friday.