For most of the Magic-playing world, last weekend was all about Regionals. For a few of us unlucky ones who could not attend, we had the Alara Reborn prerelease on MTGO.
The Outcome:
The player response was surprising. I expected a few events to fire — but my best guess was somewhere between 75 and 150. We blew that out of the water. Ten minutes before the events opened, we had 450+ players in the room. Wizards opened 4 parallel queues, and they all were filling very quickly. I heard that over 80 fired in the first hour — and maybe in the first half hour.
The queues did not crash. The queues filled, and cut to deck construction quickly. They paired round 1 matches quickly. Game play proceeded without any noticeable lag. Just one event flipped a bit and decided it was a draft, not sealed, and hung. Wizards took it down quickly, and everyone had their Tix back in 15 minutes or so.
For online, that’s simply amazing. A prerelease with no problems. Way to go, Wizards!
We had 315 prerelease events fire between 5pm PDT Friday and 11pm (or a bit later) Saturday. These were 16 player events. Some players played in multiple events, but that still means that somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 unique players participated. At 30 Tix per event, that’s over 150,000 Tix.
Wizards paid out a pretty fair number of prize packs as well — despite the fact that the prizes for the prerelease were well below the typical prize structure for online play. The normal release 16-player sealed events will pay 15 packs to the winner, 10 packs for a 3-1 record, and 2 packs to anyone at 2-2. The Prerelease payout was just 10 / 6 /1. The release events will cost 6 packs plus 2 Tix — or $25.94. The prerelease cost $30.00.
A lot of players screamed about the negative ROI. On the other hand, a lot of the players in these types of events don’t really expect to win a lot. For players that think 2-2 is a good day, the difference between the release and prerelease prizes is only one pack.
For me, the purpose was entertainment, not return. A couple thousand other players apparently felt the event was worth the price. They played. Maybe they ended up disappointed, maybe not. In that respect, it is like going to a movie. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s Ishtar. And sometimes it’s going to be bad, you know it is going to be bad, and you go anyway. I once paid money to sit in a theater to watch Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Short of converting the $5.00 to pennies and stuffing them up my nose, I can’t think of a worse way to waste the money. Gawd, that movie was awful.
My Events:
Not a lot to say, since this format is gone for paper players. I played in 2.5 events. In the first, I had a moderate deck that had to stretch to four colors to find 12 playable creatures. When the mana worked, it won. The mana worked half the time. The rounds were blisteringly quick.
I entered my second event really early Saturday morning. The rounds were not blisteringly quick — in fact, they were so slow that I ended up with a conflict. I ended up conceding round 3, heading out on an errand, and returning for round 4 — which I also had to concede. The deck was Esper, and only mildly good. I won round 2 because my opponent’s mana crashed.
I entered a third event late Saturday night. My deck was Naya splashing Black for Terminate and Slave of Bolas, which seems like the best possible combination. I had removal, good creatures, and mana fixers. I won that one. I have heard that a lot of other people also had great success with that shard, splashing those particular cards.
I enjoyed the prerelease events, especially the third. However, the prereleases had some impacts on other types of players. The impact on those players is less benign.
Impact on Constructed Players:
Magic Online has an interesting policy. Card legality — which cards are legal in which formats — are written into the program. Wizards makes updates to the program during Wednesday downtimes, and they typically update the legality file the week before the cards go on sale in the store. That is typically on Monday. As a result, the cards are legal in all Constructed events for several days before the set is even on sale.
Normally, of course, this only matters for reprints. In this set, Meddling Mage and Terminate were in print, so people could start playing them in Standard, etc., on Wednesday. For the rest of the set, the cards were legal, but totally unavailable until Monday at noon, Pacific time. At that point, dealers and other would buy packs, crack them, and start selling singles. Really dedicated Constructed players could buy the singles and play them in a Constructed event an hour later (if they could click fast enough to get the cards and get thier decks built in that time).
With the prerelease, those hard-core Constructed players were quite concerned that they would not be able to get the cards — especially if only a few events fired. On pack Mondays, dealers have bought thousands and thousands of packs, and stocked their online store with dozens of copies of everything. Getting cards has not been hard. However, had only a dozen events fired, getting a playset of rares could have been difficult.
This was a big issue, because the prerelease put new cards into the card pool on Friday night and early Saturday, meaning that all of the Constructed events might have been affected if card availability was an issue.
Wizards dodged a bullet here. The big decks, going into Regionals weekend, looked to be GW Overrun, and BW Tokens, and BW Kithkin. For the most part, the new cards were commons (like Qasali Pridemage) or uncommons (like Zealous Inquisition, Anathemancer, and maybe Behemoth Sledge.) I decided to watch Zealous Inquisition and, on occasion, Maelstrom Pulse over the course of the weekend. I figured those were the most critical cards. (I should have watched Dauntless Escort as well, but I forgot about it. Since it was in a precon in paper, it is not a big money card, and I didn’t think about its inclusion in most GW builds.)
During most of the weekend, Zealous Inquisition was available from dealers for about $2. The price would vary — bots tended to buy for 1 Tix and sell for anything up to 5, but you could generally find them for around 2-3 Tix each. Maelstrom Pulse was generally being offered for around 20-30 Tix or so. It is pushing 30 now, even though the packs are now in the stores.
Overall, it appeared that the cards were available to players that wanted them. They may not have been cheap, but the prices did not go nuts. A number of players did discuss playing against new cards in the online events, especially the Vanguard Standard PE on Sunday. On many cases, though, the cards being mentioned were commons.
What I do not know is whether the attendance in the events on Saturday and Sunday took a big hit. Did players stay away? I just don’t have the data to answer that. If Constructed play did take a big hit, however, that would offset a lot of the profit Wizards got from the prerelease.
When Should Cards Become Legal for Constructed?
If the prerelease did have a negative impact on Constructed, Wizards has a problem. The prereleases were really popular. If the right combination of events makes one possible again, then Wizards needs to decide what it will do about legality. This was a minor issue now. It will be a big issue in fall, when sets rotate.
Constructed players have called for not making the cards Constructed legal until the in store release, or later. After all, in the paper world, the cards are not legal for sanctioned Constructed play until they are on sale to the public. (In the past, it was a week after that.)
Of course, paper play is different from online play. In paper, you can play unsanctioned matches against friends anytime, without any formal approval from Wizards. If you have the cards, or even proxies of the cards, you can start playing Standard matches with them as soon as the cards are spoiled. Online, however, players need to match up with other players using the program — finding an opponent in the casual play rooms, or by entering a tournament. If a card is not yet legal in Standard, the only way to get a “Standard” game using that card is to play an anything goes format called “freeform,” and advertise the game as “new Standard” or something like that. Many players ignore such messages, so you could find yourself playing against almost anything.
Having just one legality does create a problem. When does Wizards include the new cards in the format? So far, they have included the cards in constructed formats before the cards are on sale, so that the instant the first buyer cracks a pack and adds that card to his/her deck, that deck is legal in all relevant formats.
One possible option would be to have two legality lists for the week the cards are going on sale. That week would also include the prerelease, if there was one. The list would update the previous Wednesday, during the downtime, and introduce both “Old Standard” and “New Standard.” New Standard would have the new cards, old Standard would not. Sanctioned Constructed events would use the old Standard list. Casual play and playtesting could use the new list.
Of course, you would also need old and new Block lists, and old and new Extended lists, and Classic, and 100 Card Singleton, and Standard with Vanguard, and Kaleidoscope, and… You get the idea. That is a lot of programming for a short period, and the lists are bound to have a couple of bugs. I am not convinced that that is worth it.
If we can’t do new lists, then when should the legalities change? Some players call for the legality to change when the cards go on sale in the store. That would be possible, but that would require a downtime on Monday morning — and would also require Wizards to put the game into “no pay” mode hours earlier. This would cancel all drafting and Constructed queues on that morning, and any Premier or Daily Events running that morning. That would also be a steep price to pay.
The next option would be to update the legality of the set during the Wednesday downtime two days after the cards went on sale in the store. That would mean two days additional days in which players could not play their new cards in sanctioned matches, and not even in casual games and matches outside of the widely-shunned Freeform format. That also seems bad.
Wizards seems to face five possible options, and none seems good.
1) What we did this time — with the possible decline in attendance on the weekend PEs & DEs.
2) Add an additional downtime Monday morning, and make them legal then.
3) Cancel all future Prerelease events.
4) Make cards legal as of the Wednesday downtime following the in store availability.
5) Create two separate legality lists — with both “Old Standard” and “New Standard.”
I know which I prefer, but I don’t have all the evidence, and it is not my money at stake.
Effect on the Dealers:
Another set of people were also affected by the prerelease: the dealers. In the past, large scale dealers have bought a couple thousand packs immediately, cracked them all, and started selling singles. During the first week or so after the release, the prices are artificially high, so the dealers can make money on the packs they have cracked. Later on, the average return from a cracked pack falls below cost, so dealers survive by buying and selling singles.
With the prerelease, a lot of the initial sales were made by players, selling off the cards they cracked. The dealers couldn’t get in on the initial sales, so they didn’t get a lot of the first day profits that they would normally see. As a result a number of dealers stated that they were buying fewer packs day 1. That will hurt Wizards returns. It will also hurt the profitability of those dealers. Hopefully, the harm will not be long-term.
I’m sure Wizards is going to look very closely at the sales figures for the first few days and weeks following the prerelease. Sure, the prerelease brought in $150,000 or so on Friday and Saturday. The question is whether that is additional profit, or if it is offset by reduced sales to dealers, and a reduction in attendance at the normal release events.
Even if the impact on Wizards’ bottom line is positive, Wizards may still need to do something to help out the dealers. Dealers are the main source of singles, and without ready access to singles, Constructed tends to die. If this hurt dealers too much, then this might be the time to introduce a dealer discount. For example, Wizards could provide established dealers with a discount of 10% whenever they buy 1,000 packs at a time. That is not a huge discount, but it could help.
Just my $0.02.
PRJ
“one million words” on MTGO