Goodbye World

Goodbye World, it's been nice knowing you! No, this is not my official termination of this blog (my first post ever was called "Hello World") but it could be. Twitter has been on fire recently, and facebook has been blowing up too. The sky is falling, and the Mayans are mocking us from the grave. Wait, this is 2011, not 2012, never mind....

But in all seriousness in the slew of WotC announcements over the course of this past year, this most recent one is the most terrifying, and for the first time in many many years, magic could legitimately be over as we know it. For reference, the announcement is here.

I have never been the chicken little type, and I don't even want to come across that way in this article, but there are serious concerns to think about. There have been MANY articles written up about why these changes suck, so I'm not going to discuss that (nor am I professional enough to explain it in any detail), so instead I will explain why you should care, and how it will affect you.

A great resource that I used for writing this is this video from Channel Fireball (skip to 27:00) where they explain fairly thoroughly the cascading effects of the Pro Tour to Magic as a whole. Everything that they say there now can potentially be no longer true, which is completely mind boggling!

One in particular that everyone should care about is how singles prices can be affected. If you watch earlier in that same video (4:30) they talk about chronicles and how it almost destroyed magic. Why? It put the secondary market in shambles. In a similar way, without the Pro Tour the secondary market would be in shambles. If you read any of my financial articles (or frankly any financial article) the prices are all based on decks that are doing well. There are very few cards that have a value because of their rarity, and those are really just Antiquities and Legends (Antiquities Hurkyl's Recall is 10 compared to every other version being 1). Every other card holds value BECAUSE of it's play value. How do we know if a card has any play value? Well.... what deck just won the last Pro Tour? Without the Pro Tour, we would lose significant financial stability and accuracy in the secondary market.

Without the Pro Tour, we wouldn't have sites and writers like Channel Fireball, Star City Games, and Blackborder. Sure, we may still have sites that talk about how much fun they have playing magic, like my blog, but we would quickly lose input from the experts as they now have no reason to constantly invest so much time and energy. Without the Pro Tour to make money from, then they would be spending countless hours experimenting and testing for.... a kitchen table game. Why would they invest so much energy and time to produce an article if that is where it all stops? Sure, they may get paid for the article, but why would anyone read it? Without the Pro Tour, we lose all of competitive magic. It's like if we took MLB out of baseball; how competitive can you really be if you are consciously aware that there is NOWHERE bigger or better to go with it? People would stop reading articles because the PT dream would be gone, which leaves us with.... Star City Games Open series.... $3,500 first place prize vs $40,000? Not quite the same....

Now let's say you don't even care about those first two points; you don't read articles and couldn't care less if the most valuable card you opened in 10 packs of Innistrad was Grimoire of the Dead (it's a mythic, and thats all that matters!) then consider this: without the Pro Tour, Magic could completely curl up and cease to exist. Man.... that's bold..... Here's my reasoning: Wizards of the Coast is a business. They only care about their bottom line and whether or not they're making money, just like any other business. How do they make money? Selling boxes of product to retailers and GPs - as far as I know that's it. I am pretty sure PT entry is free (which is why it can be considered the PROmotional Tour). GPs are cool and all, but when you have 1 tournament every week somewhere on the entire planet, you are immediately preventing 90% of the world from going to it, and it's not too special either because there's one every week. Compare this to the Pro Tour which is VERY special, which immediately makes anyone who is graced with the opportunity to go willing to make any adjustments possible to enable themselves to go. Actually, GPs can be simply promotional events too when they're in less populated areas and have low attendance. I can imagine the cost of renting the building and the payouts makes their profit margin slim to none:

GP Santiago (located in South America)
Entry fee: $50
Participants: 737
Gross: $36,850
Prize Payout: $30,000 total

So basically, WotC earned $6,850 before accounting for renting the site, which I don't have data on. AKA not that much. 798 players were at GP Hiroshima, so WotC would have made an extra $3,000 on the weekend, which is a little more defendable. But what's the difference? Santiago is in South America where there isn't a large player base and Hiroshima is in Japan which has been huge for magic for a long time. If it is not profitable to have events in those smaller countries, then there's little reason to host events there unless if WotC feels the loss is worth the advertising. This could mean that Magic loses it's world stage and retreats back to just USA-Japan-Europe (GP Pittsburg had 1435 players). Don't even get me into how the lack of Pro Points and Pro Players club will completely sever people from going to international GPS.... This can only have negative effects for the game.

So that was a long winded explanation as to why GPs aren't the cash cow, which leaves us with selling boxes of product. The reason that people buy new cards is to get the cards they need to build their decks, and to draft. I only draft for fun, but I know a lot of people will draft to practice for higher level events like SCG Draft opens and GP drafts. Without competitive magic, there will be less drive from players to invest so much money into packs (if they only buy singles, they are still supporting buying packs because the packs provide the singles stock). This will insanely reduce the amount of money that WotC makes off magic to the point of ----- i don't want to go there -----. "

Now I realize that this may have come over as a little intense, and I want to say up front that I am NOT a chicken little type person crying that the sky is falling whenever anything happens (I for one loves DFCs the moment they came out), however if things get worse, they can go REALLY worse. Here's the facts we have right now:

No Magic Player's Rewards (old news, but still relevent)
No Worlds
No Pro Player's Club
No Pro Points
More GPs are being scheduled every year
GPs and PTs are happening the same weekend in the same place (PT Paris)
PWPs reward more play as opposed to high level play

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say WotC is trying to remove the Pro Tour and have it replaced by GPs and a myriad of smaller events. I for one am VERY opposed to this change. If you agree, there is a petition you can sign to get your voice heard. I truly hope this change is reversed, because the system seems so good right now, I really have no clue why things need to be changed....

That's all I have for today, until next time, Stay Classy!

Ryan Lackie
Ryan.Lackie92@gmail.com
@ThingsILack