The official release date for Future Sight is on May 4th, 2007. The worldwide prerelease tournaments are on Saturday, April 21st and Sunday, April 22nd. Official previews started on MagictheGathering.com on Monday, April 9th. Several magazines have gotten previews as well, including Inquest and Scrye magazines of the United States, plus Lotus Noir and Mana Rouge magazines of France. Between these official sources of previews, there have been approximately two-dozen cards spoiled.
On MTGSalvation.com, 105 out of the 180 cards from Future Sight have been spoiled.
I’m not here today to discuss the legality or ethics of spoilers. I’m not a lawyer, so I know nothing of the former. As per the latter, plenty of other writers have already poked at that hornet’s nest. Today’s article is about how spoilers affect me, personally, on three levels – as a player, as the General Manager for StarCityGames.com, and as a writer for both MTG.com and for StarCityGames.com who has been tasked with writing official preview articles.
Since I’ve been playing Magic for longer than I’ve been selling it or writing about it, let’s start there. I remember back to Pro Tour: Los Angeles (the first one, back in the mid-90’s), when I was working for Neutral Ground. The first Pro Tour: Los Angeles happened to coincide with the prerelease for Alliances, and unlike these days, there were no spoilers. Brian David-Marshal recruited me to help obtain a full set of Alliances – both so we could have a set to give away as a tournament prize as a draw for Neutral Ground, and to get a full spoiler that would be first gathered by Neutral Ground.
We got a few players we knew to donate their cards from their prerelease flights, but that left us with nowhere near a complete set of cards. By the time I lost out at the Pro Tour, I believe Brian had collected about 120 cards from the set. Finishing the set was complicated by three matters:
We had no clue how many cards were in the set. Nobody at Wizards would tell us the total size of the set, only that we didn’t have all the cards yet.
Color-coded rarity symbols weren’t introduced until Exodus, so we didn’t know which cards were Commons, Uncommons, or Rares. Well, I take that back – we quickly discovered that all of the Commons had two artworks. Uncommons and Rares, who knew?
There were only a limited number of cards at Los Angeles, and unlike today, a flight was one big tournament. There might only be a half-dozen of any given rare out there to trade for, and we needed one of each!
Brian handed me a stack of Mana Crypts, and told me to trade a Crypt for each card we needed. I went through dozens of Mana Crypts that day (back then, they were flooding the market and were worth about $7-$10 each), trading for hits such as Soldevi Digger, Phantasmal Sphere, and Chaos Harlequin. In the end, we had 198 cards and we were told that we were still not at a complete set. At this point, we figured that there were probably 200 cards, and we were two short – but the day was ending, the Pro Tour was finishing up, and almost all of the attendees were headed home.
By complete coincidence, Hogan Long (a long time Neutral Ground regular and friend of mine) and I stumbled on Mark Rosewater. Mark was gathering up Pro Tour regulars who had not been able to play with Alliances because of their finish in LA (such as Pro Tour Winner “Hammer” Reigner, Mike Long, and Mark Justice) to play in one final eight-man Alliances booster draft.
Hogan and I were delighted to play in that tournament, and the finals ended up coming down to Mike Long and I. We agreed to just take off (it was around 1am), but first I asked to see Mike’s deck. He had what turned out to be the last card in the set that we needed: Varchild’s War Riders. After much pleading, Mike finally agreed to trade us the card for a stack of good cards. It wasn’t that Mike much cared about the War Riders – he knew that we wanted it, and was determined to milk every drop of blood out of the stone that was our complete set.
Nowadays, the hype machine is in full swing and there is no way to really go into a prerelease tournament with a virgin experience. Even if you avoid the official sites, the magazines, the players in your area talking excitedly about new cards, you’ll still be hit by dozens (if not hundreds) of players at the prerelease itself talking about the new cards before they are even given product.
And there is a definitely excitement as a player to see the new cards. Now, I can’t speak for other people, but I love seeing spoilers. I check every available source I can to find out about the new cards as soon as possible, and then I roll them around my brain. I message Pete Hoefling, Chris Woltereck, Evan Erwin, Bennie Smith, Zvi Mowshowitz, Ted Knutson and others to bounce thoughts, ideas and, sometimes disbelief (both good and bad) about the new cards. As a player, I love the opportunities that are presented by new cards. As a fan of design, I love seeing the new ideas that come through with a new set release – especially so with Future Sight if you’ve been following that set being spoiled at all.
I once asked Bennie Smith, “what’s your favorite Magic set?” His answer? “The newest set – I’m always so excited to get to play around with new cards!” I can understand the need for a hype machine and a control over the release of intellectually copywritten information, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad spoiler, if it’s accurate. The only time a spoiler is bad is if the set being spoiled is bad (think Saviors of Kamigawa). Otherwise, the quality of the product speaks for itself (think Ravnica Block, Time Spiral).
Now this feeds directly into my job as General Manager for StarCityGames.com. As General Manager, I love spoilers! Spoilers help drive sales – you can see preorders on the newest set start to jump as soon as cards begin getting spoiled. Moreover, spoilers help me get a jump on the market. For instance, a handful of Time Spiral Timeshifted cards were offered for sale on eBay weeks before the prerelease tournament. This was the first spoiling of the Timeshifted concept, and among the cards was Shadowmage Infiltrator.
I had three steps that day. First, I read everything I could on Salvation and looked at the auction itself, and determined that this was either the best hoax ever, or an honest-to-god legitimate leak. All indications pointed towards leak – the mix of cards included were off-the-wall (Sengir Autocrat, Consecrate Land, Mindless Automation, and Fire Whip were among the cards pictured), and the logos on the cards versus the old-style frames were just too well designed and executed to be fakes.
The next thing I did was notify a couple of key parties at Wizards of the Coast of the existence of this auction. I like getting spoiler information as much as the next guy, but having Time Spiral cards up on eBay a month-and-a-half before the Time Spiral prerelease was an indication that we were probably dealing in stolen or misappropriated goods, that were attempting to be sold for a profit on eBay. There’s a huge difference between people on MTGSalvation.com getting excited about sharing information with the community in an attempt to spread the joy, and some guy stealing a box of cards from a warehouse and trying to profit from it – and please note that I have no clue how the guy obtained the cards, or what ever became of the cards after the auction was yanked.
The last thing I did was buy out every Shadowmage Infiltrator I could get my hands on from eBay, buy out several of our competitors, and then raise our buy and sell prices on Shadowmage Infiltrator. Unlike the other cards pictured in that auction, the Infiltrator was a darling of Standard the first time around and commanded prices double of its (at the time) current value. As the person in charge of buying and selling cards for StarCityGames.com, this early spoiling allowed me to get a jump on the market, and to speculate against future growth. This is why we now have, if you look, around 200 Odyssey Shadowmage Infiltrators. We had significantly more six months ago.
As a writer who has done official Sneak Previews for both MagicTheGathering.com and StarCityGames.com, I hate spoiled cards with the passion of a thousand suns. Oh my god, there is no worse feeling in the world than being allotted a specific card to sneak preview for a specific reason, putting weeks worth of thought and effort into the article, only to have some idiot on MTGSalvation.com ruin your entire article with a simple, no-effort post of “Hey, here’s a card I just got messaged! Have a great day!”
I mean, what the hell? I mean, between Hydrokinesis, Hunter, and other current (and former) spoilers on MTGSalvation.com, you guys have written jack and **** about the cards you are spoiling. You just throw out the card (HERE IT IS!), and do nothing to sell the card to the audience. There’s a minimal amount of strategy (if you can call “Gee, that’s great for Sligh!” strategy talk), no fanfare, just a grab for attention on that thread. The way they present cards aren’t always in the best interest of the game (sometimes those people say “Man, these cards aren’t good!” in their spoiler posts) including incorrectly spoiled cards.
One particular incident made me want to put my fist through my computer screen. Mark Rosewater had contacted us about having Jamie Wakefield preview Timbermare since Timbermare incorporated a tribute to the recently departed Marilyn Wakefield. The article was set to go live on Monday, January 8th. On Friday the 5th, moderator Urzassedatives “spoiled” Timbermare on MTGSalvation.com. I put “spoiled” in quotes because he got the card wrong! He listed it with a mana cost of G5 (mirroring Thundermare) instead of G3 (as printed on the card, and a cost which makes the card much, much better).
The Wakefield preview article was not only a preview of the card, but an opportunity for Jamie to have a special moment with the community. Not only had Urzassedatives stolen thunder from that moment with no care for those it might affect (and do any of the guys who spoil cards on Salvation care how their spoilers affect anyone other than themselves and their site?), but he’d already dampened enthusiasm for the card by spoiling it incorrectly!
As you can see, I’m of two minds about spoiler information. As a player and as the General Manager of StarCityGames.com, I’m all for them – the sooner the better. Get me a 10th Edition spoiler, somebody! On the other hand, as a writer and as someone who wants to see the game be portrayed in a fair and positive light, I wish unofficial spoilers did not exist. The people writing those spoilers do not always have the best interest of the game at heart, often spoil cards incorrectly (a missing word here or there makes a huge difference, such as when Dichotomancy was spoiled without the word “tapped,” or Timbermare being spoiled with mana cost of G5, or Spectral Lynx being listed as a for-sure Timeshifted card in Time Spiral), and ruin the excitement of articles from people who put a hell of a lot more effort into spoiling a card then hitting cut, paste and submit.
Ben Bleiweiss
Who can be reached at [email protected] and who welcomes forum or private discussion on this topic!