The last two weekends were all about Magic. It might well be the future of Magic for those not questing and not currently qualified for the Pro Tour.
Two weekends ago, my girlfriend asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday. “Well, if I want to be honest,” I said, “I want to have people over for an
online Pro Tour Qualifier.” She gave a pretty big laugh at that, but she understands what the Pro Tour means to me. I wrote a little bit about my
disappointment at my Honolulu finish in my article Hawaii Black-Blues, and getting invited back to the next Pro Tour was very important to me. The quest for the Pro Tour no longer
includes the blue envelope it once did, but even without that tangible marker of success, the quest is still an intensely important one for many of us.
I invited a few people over, and altogether, four of us played, though a variety of friends, girlfriends, and wives popped in for food and drink all day
that Saturday, with pauses for quiet during intense games. Socially speaking, it was a great time, and by the end of Saturday, one of us was qualified for
the Sunday final PTQ event. It wasn’t me.
This last weekend, there were a pair of Preliminary PTQs within an hour of me, one on Saturday, one on Sunday. I thought about attending them both, but
real life got in the way of attending one, and so this last Sunday, I made the trek to my very first PPTQ. There were 25 people in total, and I cruised to
a 3-0-2 Top 8 before a quick exit in the first round of the draft. And then it was the hour drive home.
Reflecting on the last two weekends, I came to realize that this was the new normal. Overall, I’m not sure how I feel about that.
The Old Problem
The previous system of PTQs (which still exists simultaneously with the current system, at least for one last season) had begun to have problems along the
edges of the system. There were sometimes events that were much larger than the organizers were prepared to handle.
At times, the store themselves didn’t even realize that they weren’t equipped to handle their turnout. I recall one store owner, their venue
filled beyond bursting, saying in response to another player’s complaints, “Well, it gets this busy on our Yu-Gi-Oh nights. It’s fine.”
The comparison made me laugh; it was so full of misunderstanding and disregard for the players.
Looking around the room that day, I saw players that had driven four or five hours for the event. I’d driven a little more than two. We were going to be in
that room for eight or nine rounds of Swiss, and it was going to be a tight four matches to a table. The event was physically miserable, and one veteran
player I know, a father, said that it had ended his desire to go to a PTQ again. He’d been playing in PTQs since the mid-’90s. The physical discomfort just
killed that last little spark of his planeswalker.
Conversely, another PTQ held by another store had the opposite problem. Inexperienced at running organized play at a larger scale, their attendance was a
huge disappointment to them. They only barely managed to have enough people for the seventh round of Swiss, and while the event was well-run, the store
lost a lot of money when the venue and prize support was taken into account.
A lot of this range in experience came out of the shift to store-based PTQs, an idea modeled on the shift to store-based Prereleases. At this point, though
I greatly miss the huge Prerelease excitement, I can say that it seems very likely that store-based Prereleases were a good idea for growing Magic. I
didn’t really see any evidence that store-based PTQs were doing the same thing.
What I saw was a lot of events being run recreating the mistakes that had been made by tournament organizers (and solved!) ten years or more earlier. Many
of the best-run events, run by store-owners who cared about player experience, quickly corrected course. But for a lot of stores, their PTQ was their first
shot at this, and they didn’t seem to have the resources to handle things, whether it was just the occasional incredible attendance that well overshot
their expectations, or whether it was simple logistics.
The idea of the PPTQ actually makes a decent amount of sense. Events can be scaled down to the size that a store can handle. The largest wildly
huge events won’t have such a small chance of a payoff. In theory, if you have the talent, you should be able to win a small PPTQ, qualify for the regional
PTQ, and if it is large enough, be one of four or even eight people who qualify. As it is described on the official Wizards page, the idea
sounds like it might even be reasonable, though any change to a system will of course result in some people coming out ahead from the status quo and others
behind.
The changes to online PTQs are, in many ways, a similar situation. Online PTQs were unwieldy in their operation, and the crashes that sometimes
(oftentimes?) occurred were devastating. When online PTQs were broken down into smaller chunks, one of the great things about this was that it contained
the experience into more manageable moments, and if a technical glitch did happen, not only were there likely less people on the servers, there
would certainly be less of a mess to clean up. Conversely, some people only have time on their schedule for a single event. Again, every change has its
winners and losers.
I was experienced in every iteration of PTQs that had existed. Now, after the last two weekends, I’ve stuck my toe into the waters of the newest path.
Magic Online PPTQs
First of all, I have to say, I do believe that Magic Online keeps getting better. This seems undeniably true.
With how Magic Online used to be, there were controlling decks that I simply couldn’t playtest for fear that the game would lag out. I still remember a
moment almost two years ago where I was testing a deck I’d built with Jackie Lee as co-pilot and when I dropped a land she said, “Oh, that was a mistake.”
“What do you mean it was a mistake? I have Sphinx’s Revelation in hand. I’ll draw more land if I want bluff fodder.”
“You have more permanents. You’re going to start lagging more.”
And she was right.
Mind you, I had a brand new laptop.
Lag doesn’t happen like that anymore. But there are still plenty of other problems that crop up. As Chapin said of it this week, “It is offensive to me, settling for this.” Amen,
brother.
Specifically for the PPTQ (as I’m calling the pre-qualifying events) though, really what we’re doing is just talking about Magic Online at large. I do
think my gathering of Magic players in my home for the event says a lot about what things could be like, as opposed to what they are
like.
Everyone that showed up to my house to play had Pro Tour experience. Most of us were fairly regular users of Magic Online. A few people showed up just to
watch and hang out. Overall, the experience, despite my not making it out of the preliminary rounds, was fun.
But it was fun because of the camaraderie. There were a lot of moments where people were just frustrated. Our least experienced online
player seemed the most frustrated, but he was far from alone. And it was always interface issues.
It wasn’t just interface though. In one situation I was forced to decide between trying to double-queue such that my deck registration period for a new
event overlapped my match. As the clock ticked down, I was agonizing about it; my current event deck I knew would struggle to get the match record it
needed to qualify me for the PTQ on Sunday, but it might be able to. However, if I double-queued, it seemed likely I’d time out in my match or misregister
my pool. In the end, it did come down to interface in that I was “fortunate” that I had a misclick that lost me a match (in attempting to open a window
larger so I could see all of the cards in it, I clicked on a card I didn’t intend to and couldn’t “unclick” it).
While several of us soldiered on, other people were playing Standard and Modern, playtesting in person, but also watching our events. Everyone seemed to
have a good time, but I think my friend Matt Severa summed it up best: “I wouldn’t play in something like this unless it was in a group like you have
today. A part of what makes Magic fun is hanging out with people.” There were lots of nods. Mostly, we agreed that grinding it out alone would have been a
far less fun experience for all of us.
Even then, in some ways we were lucky that this was a Limited event. I’d tried to do a similar event for Constructed quite a while ago, and it was an
incredibly frustrating experience just trying to help each other put together decks. While Limited holds its own frustrations (our group was mixed if
building Sealed decks was better in person or online; my vote was that it is better in person), Constructed requires you to have the cards at ready. Even
coordinating in person to facilitate things didn’t do all that much to help.
I could go on and on, but so could anyone when it comes to the problems of Magic Online. In a way, we’re all just stuck. If we were interested in something
other than the Pro Tour and the elite competition it provides, we could just play some other game, be it Hearthstone or Hex or what have you. But for me
and those like me, Magic is the only game in town. For my day job, I work for a company in the gaming industry, and I hardly play anything these days that
isn’t Magic. I love the game, and I love the Pro Tour. There won’t be a substitute for me. And so if I want to play Magic Online competitively, me and
everyone else in my boat is basically stuck.
When a web-based game like Kingdom of Loathing has a better auction/trading system (not to mention all of
the games out there that don’t have a stranglehold on their audience like Magic does), something is wrong. I appreciate the small improvements
that have been happening, but ultimately it feels like the tiniest beginning steps walking up the stairs in the Empire State Building when with the right
approach one could just get in the elevator.
Getting to the Pro Tour through online PTQs is an option I’m glad exists. But it is impossible to separate this experience from the very real problems of
the program itself. Hell, even determining when the PTQ and PPTQ were being held required Google because navigating to it via the Wizards of the
Coast website was a maze. The problems that seem to come from all aspects of the digital side of Wizards needed to be solved years ago, and yet we all
still are in the position to just sigh and suck it up. If you were to ask me when I expect this situation to change, I’d put it at somewhere around 2018,
but given their track record I’m not sure that is giving them enough time.
I really hope I’m wrong.
“Paper” PPTQs
At this point, I’ve only gone to one of these events, and to be honest, I did have a very good time.
However, I felt very lucky that one of the people who was in attendance at the event, Mike, was also someone that typically ran the Magic at the store. The
event was Sealed, and the owner was planning on having the Top 8 draft be M15–thankfully, he was talked out of this, but I imagine if we hadn’t had Mike
there, we would have had an M15 draft.
I don’t know I blame the store owner for this at all. From what I gather, there hasn’t been a great deal of direction to stores about what the specifics
are for running these events. They’ve been given some formats to choose from, and they need to announce what they’ll be ahead of time, but “Sealed” was the
format listed on the official Wizards website for this event. Given the owner’s idea about how this was going to go, I imagine he wasn’t really given a
great deal of direction.
Speaking of direction, there is also the concept of “directions.”
Here is the top Google hit for Preliminary PTQ
(I encourage you to click on the link).
This does not give one a very good feeling.
Going a few links down in the Google search will give you the correct link.
Unfortunately for me, it didn’t include the correct address for the store.
Standing outside of the empty storefront, another person wandered by and happened to see my Simic pin I wear on my jacket. They also couldn’t find the
store. I was about to look it up again online when one of the judges running the event drove by, saw me, and told me where to go. Google would have gotten
me there if I’d checked Google first, but silly me, I checked the official website.
My only other minor complaint was that during the Top 8 draft, there really wasn’t any culture in the store that understood that the results of the draft
were important to us. Finding a clear seat in the crowded store to build my deck after the draft was difficult, unless I wanted to build it seated directly
across from an opponent.
While this may sound like a lot of negatives, really though, as I said before I had a good time. The judges that the store employed were experienced; these
days, I think this is just generally going to be the case. I’m fortunate enough to live in the Midwest, and the judging staff in this area has been built
up for years by Steve Port, Alan Hochman, Mike Guptil, and many others. In addition, the Open Series circuit has also been building up the skills of judges
basically everywhere. I know that stores were directed to have an appropriate level of judge to run an event, and that was certainly the case at the event
I played in.
There really was a bit of an air of “sharks” in the room. Several of us who came to the store came with a mission to win, and of the eight or nine in the
room (about a third) who were dedicated tournament players with the goal to win the event, only one or two didn’t make the Top 8. Even so, the
least experienced player in the Top 8 still had a great day, fighting his way to the finals, playing the role, at least for the day, of Local Hero.
From the standpoint of the aspirational model of Magic, I think this is great for the game. I know that one of the things that got me hooked on tournament
Magic was having my heart handed to me on a platter by an opponent who simply wildly outclassed me. Once you get someone hooked on tournament
Magic, it is likely that you have them for life, even if life makes them take a break now and again.
I know my friend Bryan Ramirez tells me that he’s actually a big fan of the structure of the PPTQ leading into a Regional PTQ because of how his life works
now. He is a father and it is easier to sell his wife on the idea of traveling to a closer, shorter local event for a portion of the day, and then if he
happens to win a PPTQ, knowing that she’ll be very accepting of him playing in a Regional PTQ because it was something he had to earn. For people in his
boat, that makes a lot of sense to me.
But beyond that, there are going to be “guppies” (non-sharks) that qualify for the Regional PTQ and decide to attend. The experience that they have seems
likely to me to light that spark in them, and in doing so have them build up their community. If you want to go to battle in this game, even if it
is only a single friend that you can have to hone your skills with, you’re going to get more people more invested in the game. And that is good for Magic.
As Magic players, that is good for us.
So, yes, there are going to be some kinks that need to get worked out in this PPTQ system, but I think that they will be. I’m hoping that the weekday PPTQs
(yes, there are some) will disappear, that Wizards and stores will better communicate with each other so that the particular experiences of players will be
as good as they can be, and that as stores get more experience they’ll really start delivering a quality event.
Unlike the online experience, I actually have a lot of hope for this to change quickly. There will certainly be some growing pains, but I expect they’ll be
dealt with.
As for me, this coming weekend I have a regular PTQ to attend. I might be missing Pro Tour Fate Reforged, but I intend to be at the next one after
that.