so organised play is a bit of a joke now isn't it

[Philip Dickinson]

my favourite line:

Nationals provide a good opportunity for many players around the world to experience a large-scale Magic tournament and earn high amounts of Planeswalker Points in a single event

wow! excellent! more planeswalker points, which are dumb in and of themselves.

 

can anyone find any upside to any of the OP changes made this year?

[Simon Baldwin]

Gary Lynch said:

I understand that perhaps casual players bring in more money than the pros and grinders but why would you want to cut off an entire part of your customer base?

If they reduce the benifit to being a pro people will stop doing it. Less pros means less magic content online, meaning less interest from players. If there wasnt a constant stream of articles about decks people probably wouldnt try and keep up with the best deck and therefore would buy less cards.

 

If they were trying to aim changes mainly for casual players, they wouldn't be worrying too much about less pro articles about decks as I wouldn't have thought the average casual player would care too much about super powerful decks. 

Gary Lynch said:

I dont know about you guys but one of the big draws to magic was the articles about the pros and their experiences. 

 

My main draw is that it is a fun game to play...

 

 

Regarding the rest of the changes, the one I remember being opposed to the most was the attitude of "things are going OK tournament wise in the US, the rest of the world can sort yourselves out if you want tournaments". Great way to show they actually support and care about anything outside the US...

[Gary Lynch]

Simon, that was my point. They dont care about sites with articles by pros and how much interest this brings to the game.

 

I get that yes its a fun game, but the point people are making is you dont travel the country (or to ther countries) spending a lot of money on a fun game. You tend to do that at home or at a friends house.

If Magic just becomes a game for fun then I guarantee that a lot of people will spend way less on it.

[Ben Titmarsh]

This sucks.  I'm not one of those players who's in the upper echelons of competitive play in the UK, let alone the World, but this is just one more thing in a long line of bad decisions that put me off even trying to get there.   I guess i'm going to be looking elsewhere for my competitive fix from now on...

 

rm -rf "Competitive Magic"

apt-get install poker-stars

 

[Gary Lynch]

Yeah, i can see a big increase in the number of magic players turning to poker or spending more time playing it.

 

Thinking about it, if i had spent the last 10 years playing poker instead of playing magic but limited myself to the same budget I would probably be a pretty good low limit player. At least good enough to break even and thats more than can be said for magic.

 

Downside is that poker is no where near as much fun :(

Ben Titmarsh said:

apt-get install poker-stars

 

[Dan Barrett]

I very much agree with this.  It seems there's a real risk that Magic will become "just a game" rather than "an all-encompassing obsession" for many of us now, which will inevitably lead to lesstime and money being spent on it. Like, what tournament would you be willing to shell out for £30 standard cards now?!

Gary Lynch said:

Simon, that was my point. They dont care about sites with articles by pros and how much interest this brings to the game.

 

I get that yes its a fun game, but the point people are making is you dont travel the country (or to ther countries) spending a lot of money on a fun game. You tend to do that at home or at a friends house.

If Magic just becomes a game for fun then I guarantee that a lot of people will spend way less on it.

[Glenn Goldsworthy]

I honestly never thought I would say this but I completely agree with Gary here, I have the same feeling as Pete on this aswell that I have played this a very long time and there is just no reason to carry on plowing money in.  From the announcement about nats makes it sound like there won't be cash (for the pride of winning nats my arse or load of PWP what a jip), the GP's next year don't excite me much either, will prob rock up to some limited PTQ's but that's it for me.  I will obv still be about for some cube and shenanigans

toodles

[Peter Dun]

just a thought @DanB: why has noone on SCG written an article about these changes... just on CFB

[Rich Hughes]

Im not going to stop playing or anything like that, but these just seem like terrible decisions announced terribly.

 

i did think this bit of the Q&A was quite telling:

"WPN premium tournaments (such as the StarCityGames.com Opens) are open to every region, and we hope that more organizations will be encouraged to run these types of tournaments. If players are interested, they should talk to their stores!"

 

so, the SCG opens are doing well, so why do wizards need to carry on paying for the pro tour? lets let someone else take over and pick up the bill

[Dan Barrett]

Not sure. If anyone was going to cover in detail though, Sadin would ask one of the Pro guys to do it though.

Peter Dun said:

just a thought @DanB: why has noone on SCG written an article about these changes... just on CFB

[Glenn Goldsworthy]

@Dan - but you have a different perspective as in how this affects a non-pro.

I'm not to sure how a large money tourny (mostly due to me not knowing gambling regulations) would work in the UK but I do know that if there was good money at stake then people would travel from around euorpe.

[Peter Dun]

@Glenn: Didn't mean that. These announcements HUGELY benefit SCG and the SCG Open Series so I was wondering if there was a deliberate blackout :P

[Glenn Goldsworthy]

no I agree it really does benefit them but it does open a door if someone wants to wander through it and start running these type of tourny in europe maybe the UK then it is possible, not sure about the legal side and any other stuff, cost+effort vs reward but might be worth a look for some of the game stores looking to make a national name for themselves