The Case for Competitive Magic

Table of Contents

• It's Over/We're So Back

• Why We're Losing

• Some of that Shit was Unhealthy

• The EV of Sports

• Why We Want to Win

• The Value of Competitive Games

• Making Games Good and Fun

• Conclusion

It's Over / We're So Back

Tournament Magic is dying!

An embarrassingly bad Spiderman crossover set with a somehow even-more-awful off-brand digital release that butchered one of Magic's most universally beloved formats (8-person booster draft) is one thing.

Dramatically declining tournament attendance is another, whether driven by a stale and deeply imbalanced standard format (headlined by a broken Universes Beyond card) or a general lack of incentive to engage with the competitive system right now is another.

The digital version of the game completely failing to run functional and fair qualifiers for the highest rungs of its competitive ladder is yet another.

Clearly, something's deeply wrong. When players who have engaged loyally with your game for decades are saying things like this:

... You know things are headed in the wrong direction, even if the sales numbers are going up in the short-term. Thoughtful commentators who aren't even biased towards competitive Magic can see it!

The game itself might not be dying, but a really important part of it is. A part that many people, myself included, love.

But wait... Maybe we're back!

And look...

They're finally bringing back a Limited Pro Tour -- and in a way that's completely net-adding to the existing professional system!

Is Competitive Magic Saved?? Did it ever need to be? Is it still in danger?

Folks who have been reading my work for a while will know my general feelings about this -- Magic's "died" a million times over, and this game that we love is not going anywhere.

...but that doesn't necessarily mean I never worry about the future of competitive Magic.

Something very big is definitely happening, something that doesn't have clearly positive implications for the parts of the game that I, and most of my friends, love & have dedicated large parts of our lives to.

Today I want to talk about the case for a big and bright future for competitive Magic -- Why we love the parts of this game that pit us "against" each other to sharpen ourselves towards excellence, why they're losing out in the "competition" for Magic's soul, and what we can do about it.

As per Magic discourse tradition, we're going to start with the bad.

Why We're Losing

As competitive players will understand it, this is the "focus on what you can control" part of the equation.

Competitive Magic players hate losing. Yet it seems like we're pretty clearly losing in the marketplace of ideas right now. EDH (sorry, Commander, I'm a boomer) is the most popular Magic format by miles these days, and that doesn't seem to be changing any time soon.

Lots of Commander players have never even heard of an RCQ. It's always been true that the majority of Magic players are "kitchen table gamers" and don't engage with the tournament system, but for the first time, it seems like WOTC is primarily designing & marketing to this audience.

The difference between the first page and final page of StarCityGames's "articles" page is quite stark. Decades ago, talented thinkers and writers were paid by content outlets like SCG to produce genuinely innovative ideas about the game. Today, well, myself and others are trying a bit to live up to them -- but the majority of successful content creators are content creators before they are competitive players.

I want to be really clear here that this is in no way at all meant to denigrate the incredibly cool and difficult work these people do -- Magic content these days is entertaining, passionate, and innovative. There are still really cool theorists out there doing awesome work, but for the most part, the type of content that actually attracts attention and makes its creators money is not directly connected to success in the tournament scene and teaching others the ability to reach the highest levels of play (Sierkovitz has a full-time job as a scientist, and 17lands relies on patreon donations to keep their service running for example). Popular Magic content might be made by former PT players with a competitive history, but they're not selling you their secrets for how to make the Pro Tour, they're just playing a fun and beautiful game and letting you watch.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with this per se, but something has been lost, or crowded out, in the broader Magic ecosystem: a focus on the game as a serious intellectual sport, where the stars of the sport are producing content that inspires you to achieve what they've achieved. A young Magic player today isn't really told through the game's ecosystem "If you work really hard, you too could be on the Pro Tour some day", they're told "hey look at this really fun game - there's so many ways to play it!". Maybe they'll want to start grinding RCQs, but that desire has to come from them, it's not going to be something truly marketed to them.

Again, this is not bad, it's just different. Competitive Magic has lost its shining pedestal in the game's culture and content scene. And for those of us who love the game because it's such a good competitive game (and it really, really is), that feels like a deep and painful loss.

Is this just because of Hasbro and relentless corporate profit maximization?

That's obviously part of what's going on. There are very clearly loads of smart and passionate folks at WOTC who care deeply about the game's rich competitive history and want it to continue, but there are also higher-ups at Hasbro who see that Commander players buy more cards and that makes Line Go Up.

But if we want to be honest with ourselves, we need to take a clearer look at the game's history and culture. I actually think there are some very good reasons why competitive Magic has been "losing".

Some of that Shit was Unhealthy

Remember how I talked about the death of StarCityGames' strategy articles? Well, I've recently had an opportunity to do some reflecting on some of the writers I admired as a teenager back in the day, and let's just say not all of them live up to my admiration now.

I posted this recently on Bluesky, and was quickly informed that the Adrian Sullivan who Patrick gushes about in the screenshot is now a notable transphobe. This got me thinking about some of the stuff I used to consume back in the day, and to realize that not all of it was particularly healthy. Mike Flores, for example, was a very prominent Magic theorist whose "Official Miser's Guide" audiobook I used to listen to on the bus to and from high school.

The Official Miser's Guide seems to have been scrubbed from the internet, and it's not too hard to imagine why. There's a lot of uncomfortable, pickup-artist-adjacent stuff in there. I remember being a bit weirded out by it at the time, but not enough to really change my overall enjoyment of the book as a piece of Magic theory. In retrospect, I think it might not have been the healthiest thing to listen to as a 16-year-old "boy" (though obviously, I don't subscribe to the idea that this kind of content makes it impossible for boys to grow into fully functional and decent human beings, given that I feel pretty okay on that front).

I also remember being really impressed that a real-life Magic Hall-of-Famer (who will remain unnamed) went to FNM drafts at my LGS, and was incredibly proud when I beat him for the trophy in an Innistrad draft while his then-girlfriend (who later became a friend of mine, and an excellent player in her own right!) watched our match. Later, I heard vaguely that he'd been a pretty shitty partner, and was generally considered a pretty salty player and poor opponent.

I've also been pretty open about some of the ways I was toxically competitive when it came to Magic. I don't want to say that I was doing anything remotely like the examples I just gave, but it would be silly to think that growing up in that culture didn't influence me in unhealthy ways.

I recently met a friend of a friend who grew up in the midwest playing tournament Magic. Her brothers and her dad all played, and she did too! She described how it was "me, a little girl in a room full of mostly adult men trying very hard to beat each other in a competitive game", and how obviously, that experience was quite... interesting for her at best! I can't imagine she'd have found her way into that culture if her brothers & dad didn't also play.

If we're actually honest about what the game's culture was like in the past, it's not very hard to imagine why the "ruthless profit-maximizing capitalists" at Hasbro might have some incentive to brand Magic as a fun and inclusive kitchen-table game you can play with friends on a Friday night instead of going to your local store and trying to amass Planeswalker Points or raise your ELO.

Things have gotten a lot better, but talk to some women or Black people who compete in tournaments right now, then come back and tell me with a straight face that things are totally fine and there aren't any problems anymore. We need to clean our own shit up if we ever want to compete for cultural dominance again. Sorry, those are the facts.

The EV of Sports

Let me ask a pretty simple question -- what's the EV of playing Little League Baseball?

The answer is obviously that it's negative. Little League isn't something parents put their kids in to have them win the championship and bring home wads of cold hard cash, it's a recreational activity that they pay to let their kid participate in. Baseball requires equipment - uniforms, gloves, balls, bats, and helmets. It requires real estate - large, specially-constructed and maintained fields, either through public investment or donations from local businesses & wealthy folks. It requires adult human labor -- Umpires and Coaches, who are basically glorified babysitters when it comes to Little League. And it requires the work of parents coordinating transportation to practice and bringing snacks for the team.

Okay, so is there any revenue produced from all of this? Well, no, not really. I mean, the companies that make the equipment make money, but everyone else is certainly not doing this for the money. Local Little League organizations aren't raking in revenue. Some people somewhere along the line from local orgs to the Little League World Series might get paid, but they're not doing this because it's good business.

How about the EV of playing college baseball? At this level, we're talking about players who take the game extremely seriously. If you make it onto a collegiate baseball team, you're definitely in the top 5%, maybe the top 1% of baseball players in the country. You've worked incredibly hard to improve your abilities and strive for excellence. If you're really good you might get a scholarship, and you might get admitted to schools that you wouldn't be qualified for academically. You might get travel & food stipends, access to equipment and training facilities and other forms of support from your school. But are you actually making any money from this? Unless you're one of an extremely small handful of promising professional-level prospects, the answer is a clear no.

Let that sink in a bit. In the sport known as "America's pastime", most of the top 1% of baseball players in the country, people who have dedicated big parts of their lives to getting better at the game probably never expect to get any money out of it. They might dream of making the pros one day, but they're planning on majoring in psychology and getting a marketing job. Their schools might be getting some tuition revenue out of the equation because doing well drives fans to attend the games and encourages more prospective students to apply to their schools, but outside of elite Division 1 programs, most college baseball teams aren't actually driving commercial revenue for their schools.

Finally, I'll ask the obnoxious question that's really annoying for someone in my position to ask, but I think is still worth asking:

Why the fuck do competitive Magic players constantly talk about EV?!?

Look, on one level, I get it. Magic is unfortunately an expensive hobby, and it makes sense to do some math to have a clear picture of how much money you're spending on it. Magic's got close ties to poker and other games of probability, where EV is a very useful mathematical concept for understanding the impacts of strategic decisions. The content scene in the early days glorified things like "going infinite" on MTGO and treating the Pro Tour as a job (which is why lots of players still think that it was in some idyllic past, despite this never really actually being true for more than a handful of players at a time, in an MPL system that everyone agreed was terrible).

But playing in Magic tournaments shouldn't, and can't, be your job, or even something you expect to be a source of income as a competitive player. For Magic to be your job, you need to be a judge, a content creator, or a tournament organizer (who notably make extremely thin, sometimes negative margins on running actual tournaments, and mostly turn profits by selling singles). Either that, or your name needs to sound something like "Javier Dominguez", "Simon Nielsen", or "Kai Budde".

I think most competitive players would on the surface agree to this statement, but in practice, few believe it fully:

Tournament Magic is an entertainment experience, similar to amateur sports, that needs to be supported (financially) by the people who participate in it at least as much as it is supported by the company that makes the game. Expecting it to be "free" or "profitable", even for players who are more successful than most, is straightforwardly delusional.

If you want to see Magic as a legitimate sport, I think you also need to believe this statement. I think an underrated reason for why the part of the community that wants the game to be treated like a serious sport has failed to stay dominant and mainstream in the game's ecosystem is our (general, high-level) failure to recognize this simple reality.

When the feedback WOTC is getting from competitive players is "make it easier to go infinite on Arena!" and "give out more PT invites!", and the feedback they're getting from commander players is "print more secret lairs and legendary creatures from my favorite IPs so I can keep throwing money at you!", it's just not very hard to predict who they're gonna listen to.

As a quick aside, one place where I notably would blame the short-sighted capitalist logic of the company that makes the game, not the players, is WOTC's decision to pull support for its judging program when judges attempted to claim they were employees of the company and should have a union. Judges do perform revenue-driving labor for Hasbro, and they do deserve to unionize. Despite the higher-ups at Hasbro shitting their pants at the specter of organized labor and competitive players predictably turning on the now-even-more-under-resourced service workers in front of them instead of their bosses, it would have been an extremely good investment for the company to accept this change, even if it meant (gasp!) paying judges more for their work. It's going to take a while for Hasbro to hear the feedback "we'll pay higher entry fees for tournaments if you pay judges to provide a higher quality experience". That's if they ever do, because right now it's not a clear signal that's being sent.

This point about EV and how the economics of sports actually work doesn't mean, though, that I think the value of sports is negative. Quite the contrary -- I think competitive sports are an extraordinarily valuable and beautiful part of human society.

Obviously, one thing I haven't talked about is that there are professional sports leagues that make billions of dollars in revenue every year, so there is material profit in this equation somewhere - but we'll get to that.

While lots of the things professional sports leagues do are capitalistic, exploitative and deeply unhealthy, I still want Magic to be seen as a serious sport. Why? I believe that the net impact of sports on society, and the people who play them, is extremely positive.

Why We Want to Win

Let's talk about the more optimistic flipside of everything that's been said so far. Despite the obvious fact that there is no clear financial benefit to 99.99% of people who compete in sports, and the fact that treating Magic like an intellectual sport has led to some pretty toxic cultural tendencies and racist/misogynist gatekeeping, I still desperately want Magic to be treated as a serious intellectual sport. Why?

Obviously, there is some part of me that wants this because it might be personally financially beneficial for me. You, reader, get to decide how much of a conflict of interest there is here before weighing my arguments. I'm not going to try and convince you that I'm a neutral party -- I'm very far from that. But the one thing I will say on this point is that if I were in this for the money, I'd have stopped playing the game a long, long, long, long, long time ago, and I would certainly never have left a high-paying job to try and succeed at "professional" Magic. I also don't know if I'd be as successful at Magic as I am now if there were higher rewards for success on the pro scene, given that I believe one of my largest advantages is my willingness to outwork the competition, an advantage that would disappear with enough financial incentive for the most rawly talented folks to succeed. I'm here, and have always been here, because I love Magic, and I especially love Magic as-a-sport. Let's talk about why.

The Value of Competitive Games

The first, and most obvious reason, is that sports build character. I know lots of the Magic nerds reading this might not like me saying that, partially because it's become a cliche of toxic parents who secretly won't be proud unless their kid dominates the competition in an individualistic and unhealthy way. But I really do think that competition in something that has clearly defined success and failure, something that requires good teamwork and dedicated practice in order to succeed, is an important experience to go through as a young person.

Any kind of competition will create some amount of toxicity, warped incentives, and structural inequalities. It's an inescapable side effect of assigning winners and losers in situations where human beings, living in unjust societies, are involved. Despite my handwringing over the strains of this that exist in Magic culture, I do actually think that tournament Magic is an extremely good ground for these kinds of competitions to take place.

While sports can of course lead to developing an unhealthy relationship with your body, especially at the professional levels, I think one thing many former athletes will tell you is that playing sports actually taught them how to love and take care of their body. As a kid who learned to neglect their body in order to succeed in academic competition, I think I might have had a healthier relationship with my physical self if I'd had athletic outlets that weren't so dominated by gender norms and genetic differences. In fact, I've always enjoyed playing sports as a game, ever since I was a kid. I'm even pretty good at them when I play casually! And yeah, I definitely dreamed of pitching for the Red Sox one day when I was in Little League.

I strongly believe that Magic has a similar effect for teaching you how to take care of your mind. I'm a pretty naturally "book-smart" person, but I don't think I'd be nearly the type of strong critical thinker (and communicator!) I am today if my desire to do well at Magic tournaments hadn't directly incentivized me to keep my mind both sharp and flexible.

To succeed at Magic, and this is a crucial point, no matter what level you're at, you need to cultivate an ability to observe your own thought patterns and get comfortable molding them to new and different situations. In other words, you need to be able to learn and take care of your own mind -- just like to succeed at sports, no matter what level you're at, you need to cultivate the skills of directing your own body to do difficult things, and taking care of it well enough that it can meet those demands. There's obviously a large mental component to sports and a physical component to Magic, but I'm emphasizing the differences here.

These days, our society pushes kids into this kind of intense mental competition, whether they want to or not, through academics. If you think it's hard to be a kid who sucks at little league because you're genetically a bit shorter, weaker, and less coordinated than most, imagine what it must feel like to be told, explicitly or not, that you're going to be held back in life because it's not as easy for you to earn good grades as it is for some other kids. Sports also serve (or have served) this purpose too, selecting for physical prowess as an indicator of who would have the right skills to thrive in the more physically exerting activities that were highly valued labor in the past. Today though, academics are very clearly the primary gatekeeper between economic classes, although sports and physical prowess certainly play an important role in lots of usually-unstated social and economic dynamics.

I don't believe in a world where a kid's ability to perform well on standardized tests determines their lot in life, where the only characteristics we value are crunching numbers in a spreadsheet or developing complicated arguments for why your clients or stakeholders should win.

Just as strongly, I don't believe in a world where a kid's ability to run faster and jump higher than other players on a soccer pitch determines their lot in life, where the only characteristics we value are the ability to outrun predators or bully others into obedience.

At all points in human history, it has been and will continue to be not just the ethical imperative, but the practical imperative to empower as many people as possible to cultivate and deploy their strengths in the world in ways that help the group thrive.

I don't see the alchemizing of these skills into games and competitions as furthering their respective dominance in society -- I actually see this as healthily sorting competition into the place it belongs -- the pursuit of excellence in one's chosen domain, whatever that might be. Humans are driven to push our own limits, compare ourselves to each other, and achieve incredible things. The desire to measure ourselves against others isn't a bug in our programming, it's a deeply necessary feature that allows us to go beyond what we've accomplished before.

Sports might carry some of those same toxic cultural byproducts of physical and competitive dominance, and competitive intellectual games like academics and Magic might carry some similar-but-inverted dominance-oriented toxicity. But the reality is that we don't want to throw competitive games like Magic out -- Either as serious intellectual endeavors, or as low-stakes (but still competitive!) games that can be played by anyone. In fact, we desperately need to have fields where people can push the limits of human ability and try to dominate the competition (ideally, with grace and mutual respect), and it's much better for the popular forms of these competitions to be games rather than direct battles for social and economic dominance.

Making Games Good and Fun

I believe that Magic is the best game ever created, and competitive Magic is one of my favorite... things? in existence?, so I think it would be a disservice to simply make the argument that intellectual competitions that are also fun games are good, Magic is one of those, and so therefore it should be treated as a serious competitive sport.

I don't just believe intellectual sports should exist, I very strongly want MAGIC as an intellectual sport to exist. Why?

The first layer of this is talking about why Magic is a fun game. This has been done countless times, but I want to highlight some personal reasons why Magic feels so fun and engaging, even when I'm not trying to treat it as a serious competition:

• Magic rewards personal expression and creativity.

• The color system is rooted in deep philosophical questions about human nature, and speaks elegantly to characteristics we all hold inside ourselves, leading to endless opportunities for personal expression through deckbuilding and gameplay

• Even at the highest levels of competitive play, Magic players still have "personalities" and "reputations" for how they play the game. Limited players tend to be more improvisational and theory-focused, while constructed players are master technicians and engineers - some with a reputation for expertise on a specific archetype, some more focused on optimizing whatever the powerful decks are currently and making the right predictions for each tournament.

• Magic derives beautiful complexity from great simplicity.

• Although more complicated than most "board games" to learn, once you understand the basics of how to play Magic, an endlessly complex world of possibilities opens up to you from the starting point of a (relatively speaking) very simple set of rules.

• Many real-world systems are like this -- markets, social and cultural dynamics, biological systems, language, and most great forms of art!

• Magic games tell interesting and compelling stories.

• This can be seen from the most casual to the most competitive ends of the spectrum.

• Shows like Game Knights highlight how Magic can be a compelling storytelling device similar to games like Dungeons & Dragons, even when certain liberties are taken around competitive balance and strict adherence to the rules

• Nearly 20 years later, the Topdeck of the Century from Pro Tour Honolulu is still a classic example of the incredible drama Magic can produce when played for stakes

• Magic balances randomness and skill in incredibly elegant (and invisible) ways

• Any Magic player can see that the game has large amounts of variance. Mana screw and mana flood, lucky topdecks, and swingy matchups mean that "on any given Sunday", the least experienced player in the world might be able to defeat a Pro Tour veteran.

• But behind this mask of luck lies an incredibly rewarding game for skill development and pattern recognition. Players can start learning basic heuristics that immediately help them succeed more as soon as they understand the rules (even before they understand all of them!). Even at the professional level, learning effective heuristics remains one of the crucial differentiators between the winners and the losers.

• Magic speaks to deep human instincts for exploration and curiosity

• There are over 30,000 unique Magic cards that exist, and while the designers of the game are careful not to overuse new design space too quickly, it doesn't seem like they're on pace to run out of new cards to make any time this century. The game is constantly reinventing itself, and it gets to do this because it has the intellectual space to.

• Not only this, but there are roughly infinite variations on how to play Magic, such that it's often dubbed "the game for game designers". The most popular Magic format today, Commander, is a completely fan-designed format!

I think this last point often goes underrated. While Magic is in one sense a competitive system with metagames that keep getting "solved", in a broader sense, it's the Exploration Game to End All Exploration Games. There is just no perceptible limit to how many different problems there are to both create and solve in Magic. You can develop the skills to solve any given problem effectively, but there will almost always be genuinely new problems to solve. I was recently chatting with my lovely friend Sky who now works for Wizards, and was telling them that this was a category of fun in the game I had underrated in the past as a competitive player:

(Here, "NWO" refers to New World Order, a Mark Rosewater term for Magic design's need to reduce the game's tactical complexity in the late 2000s!)

Foundational (lmao) refers to the Foundations starter collection home of my favorite "wait, that's legal in standard?" cards like Myojin of Night's Reach

The beautiful fact is that this game is larger than all of us. Incomprehensibly larger.

You will never be able to know and understand all of Magic -- but what makes it such a good game, and in my opinion the best game, is that goddamn, it really fucking makes you want to try. Understanding different parts of Magic is one of the most intellectually rewarding things I've ever experienced, and I don't think this is only true for competitive players.

Figuring out how to hack the political dynamics of games like EDH in order to win with budget decks is a perfect example of this. Magic allows for brilliant human ingenuity and creative problem-solving to shine through in all kinds of ways, and not all of them have to be through the tournament scene. I will probably never understand the dynamics of a Sauron, the Dark Lord EDH deck as well as someone who pilots it every Friday in their local playgroup, just like a 28-year-old NBA player might not understand how to lead your YMCA league team to victory with a 50-year old body and creaky joints, and I think that's just really fucking awesome. It makes Magic the perfect intellectual sport to exist at all levels, from casual to competitive.

That being said, I very much think that both levels of play need to exist for the other to be stronger. Magic is not a viable tournament game if people don't play it casually at their kitchen tables -- someone needs to be watching at home to care, and someone needs to buy the cards without any expectation that they'll one day make a profit from playing with them. But I think a lot of people don't see the more subtle risks that come with de-emphasizing tournament play.

One of the biggest inspirations for this piece was this episode of Distraction Makers, where they talk about how competitive Magic started as the primary way for WOTC to market the game, and how it influenced the game's design from very early on -- but how now that era of marketing the game primarily as an intellectual sport might be coming to a close. They make this point, and I want to make it too -- It's not a coincidence that Magic has continued to be the best-designed trading card game in the market, and that it also emphasized high-level competitive play from the very beginning.

Having a competitive and prestigious organized play system doesn't just incentivize designing for good game balance, it incentivizes designing for fun and compelling gameplay, and simple-to-learn but difficult-to-master systems... in other words, exactly what makes Magic the best game.

If players don't feel like they can ever understand enough to compete, they won't play in tournaments. If they don't feel like they're being rewarded for learning new skills, they won't keep playing in tournaments. If the game becomes too imbalanced and one strategy starts to dominate, players won't feel like they can express themselves through gameplay, and they won't just stop playing in tournaments, they'll stop playing your game entirely.

Tournaments aren't the only way to incentivize good game design -- There is enough incentive for designers to maintain some level of surface-level balance that you don't necessarily need tournament attendance as a primary motivator. However, what high-level competitive play is really good at is making sure your game is intellectually deep, as well as fun.

Not only does tournament play incentivize good game design from the current designers of your game, it also produces many actual human beings who are good at designing for the game they've succeeded at - human beings that you can pay to be designers, probably in amounts far less than their labor would be worth in the open market, because they love your game!

One thing the Distraction Makers guys touched on in the video but got a bit wrong in my opinion, was the concept of Emergent Design. As Magic has moved further towards more casual and narrative-driven gameplay as opposed to "tight, competitive" gameplay, the kinds of design that incentivize the "emergent" and more flexible/unpredictable properties of Magic are more needed, and the tendencies of more "reductive" design that are about capturing and reigning in the balance of closed competitive systems might be less important.

I think this actually gets things precisely wrong in an important way (though no diss on the Distraction Maker guys, they're very thoughtful and entertaining commentators on Magic, and were mostly presenting a bunch of hypothetical arguments and concepts in this video without landing anywhere concrete).

To design dynamic, flexible, and engaging game systems with exciting emergent behavior that doesn't result in imbalance and kill the fun, you actually have an even GREATER need for smart people who are good at working in these kinds of complex systems, optimizing them, delving their depths and pushing their limits. This makes it more possible to predict what will happen when a vast playerbase pushes the boundaries of your game -- not pretending to know what will happen precisely, but being good at reasoning under uncertainty about what kinds of Magic people will play when they lean into the natural human instinct of wanting to win a game, and how to "funnel" that instinct in directions that still lead to having fun.

Hey, does anyone know any fun ways to incentivize people to reason under uncertainty about how to win at Magic?

Greater need for a game with winners and losers to have strong emergent design requires designers who are more skilled at understanding competitive systems. The reasons for this are tightly related to my revelation that I shared with Sky about how exploration, uncertainty, and discovery can still lead to a lot of joy even in competitive Magic.

Increasing the complexity of Magic by printing more cards that are exciting and compelling on their own, which sometimes requires adding a lot of text and accepting some unexpected emergent interactions between cards, hasn't reduced the amount of skill required to succeed in the tournament scene, but actually increased it.

I talked about this recently in my article about the importance of building Information Advantages in tournament Magic -- When you take a game that is complex enough that full knowledge of it is totally inaccessible to even the very best and most invested players, and incentivize enough people to explore it deeply anyways and compete against each other, you tend to create people who are pretty good at designing not just fun, but deep, engaging fun for players at all levels.

Player acquisition matters, but it isn't the only metric of success for a game. Player retention is equally crucial, and it's something that Magic's been ludicrously good at, historically. At one point Hasbro put out a statistic that about 1/3 of Magic players had been playing for less than 3 years, 1/3 had been playing for up to 10 years, and 1/3 had been playing for MORE than 10 years. That speaks to a pretty insane level of player retention, and I strongly don't think it's a coincidence that this was achieved by a game that emphasized tournament play from the very beginning.

High-level competitive play helps your game stay deep, and depth retains players. Line go up good, but line STAY up even better. Simple enough for ya, Hasbro execs?

Conclusion

What Magic hasn't been great at, historically, is player acquisition. Magic is notoriously a very difficult game to learn compared to other board games and TCGs. It's hard to remember things like what order "untap, upkeep, draw" happen in, and I think this is a something that goes underrated for most longtime players (casual or competitive) who build complicated decks in their heads as they go to sleep every night.

This is why I think Universes Beyond, in its most basic form, is an incredibly good thing for the game. Maro has said that not only is UB an extremely effective tool for new player acquisition, players who get into the game from UB are actuallymorelikely than other first-time Magic players to keep playing. It turns out that the game is just extremely good (partially because it's designed by smart and caring people, many of whom have a deep history in the competitive scene) and once you give people enough incentive to learn it (like dangling cards representing their favorite characters in front of them), they stick around long enough to love it for everything else it has to offer.

But at the same time, Magic is a deep game that is incredibly good at retaining its players precisely because it emphasized prestigious tournament play and the dream of playing well enough to become "the greatest Magic player in the World" from the very beginning.

There is no Magic as we know it today without the Pro Tour dream. Sure, people might play basketball if the NBA didn't exist, but because the NBA exists, basketball is a cultural staple that sells shoes, jerseys, and video games and inspires countless kids to go to the park and play with their friends because we get to watch incredibly gifted and hardworking humans compete at the absolute limits of their abilities in a high-stakes duel for dominance.

In some sense, the argument I'm trying to make doesn't fully hold when it comes to sports, because professional leagues often come to be when a game is already popular and widely played. There's a reason soccer is the most profitable and prestigious sport in the world, and it's not because it started as a professional league, it's because it's already an incredibly good game that humans will kind of invent out of thin air on their own (Though there are pretty strong cultural & historical arguments that this "bottom-up" dynamic isn't always how it happens).

Games like Magic might seem on the surface like they don't need the same prestige and investment as professional sports leagues to exist as successful games. There are plenty of examples of successful board games and video games without big tournament scenes and huge cash prizes. Why can't Magic be like them?

Well, that's exactly the point. Magic isn't like other board games and card games. It's been far more successful than any other game at turning skeptical newbies into lifetime players. Magic's been successful at this because the emphasis on competitive tournament play has driven the game's design and its depth from the very beginning. This isn't a goal in conflict with the incentives of making casual play fun and exciting -- the two actually complement each other extremely well, and this dynamic is even more true for intellectual games than it is for sports.

In capitalist terms, you want people to give you money, and then you want them to keep giving you money. In human terms, you want people to play with you, and you also want them to want to keep playing.

We're not playing a zero-sum game here, people. We're playing a BEAUTIFUL game. Let's try and keep it that way, yeah?