High-Level Organized Play Decisions Absolutely Matter (Part 2 of ???)

Craig Wescoe is a long-time member of the Magic community, competing at the highest levels with his own style, while making content and writing articles for a decade. White Weenie has its hordes of dedicated fans, and Craig has been a standard bearer for that, while managing to stay on the train for the past few years. He's on the edge of what was Hall of Fame consideration. Last weekend at the Mythic Championship, a random person walked up to talk about White Weenie decks, and Craig invited him to dinner. Seems good.

However, he effectively announced his retirement from all that in his weekly article on TCGplayer.

While his ministry clearly matters to him (and has for as long as I've known him), to believe that this choice was made without thinking about the current and future state of Organized Play is foolish. Maybe the MPL was a plus, because the money was great. Maybe the lack of pro status was a minus. Only he knows for sure.

But what we do know is that there's no support for him in the system as stands. This was clearly a set of decisions which did not allow Craig to decide to continue playing the way he did. White weenie players will have to find a new standard bearer.

High-Level Organized Play Decisions Absolutely Matter (Part 1 of ??)

(I ran through this already on Twitter, visible here , but I'm going to note it here again as well.)

Recent winner of Mythic Championship #1 2019, Autumn Burchett, stated in their interview that Melissa deTora's success at PT Gatecrash in 2013 was a core inspirational moment for them.

Melissa's invite to that tournament was a community invite, not one given by the organized play system of the time, which had been shrunk down and made harder to get qualifications in, or to advance ones' position in.

The inspiration which helped Autumn would not have existed if the organized play system at the time had not allowed for such special invites (which is largely the case now).

Additionally, Autumn was talked about on PT coverage as a veteran of the GP circuit. I know for a fact they were Silver as of PT 25 last year. Those things do not exist in the modern MPL world. Neither could Autumn be a national champion.

So WotC celebrated Autumn's victory, while moving full-force into a system which would have made Autumn's success far less likely, maybe even impossible, and the inspiration wouldn't even have existed if WotC hadn't made an exception so many years ago.

Series: High-Level Organized Play Decisions Absolutely Matter (Part 0)

So this is something I've done on twitter a lot over the years, but I think it's time to be a little more rigorous about it. The entire time I've been involved in Magic at a competitive level, Organized Play structures have changed. From the pre-PWP times, into Planeswalker Poinnt Season 0, the big mushy middle after that, and through to the modern MPL era. One problem that I have is that people largely don't seem to care about these changes unless they have obvious, immediate effects. One example of that was 'Pay the Pros' and how everyone could immediately realize what the problem there was. But there's been a dozen or more changes in my time. And yet, nobody really seems to care. So I'm going to write a series. Every time something comes up which highlights the ways in which Organized Play changes matter (the larger changes have usually been bad, the smaller ones generally good), I'm going to add a post to this series. This post is going to be the thesis/mission statement, which is thus:

Given that Magic Players value community, that it takes a long time to build up sufficient skill to play competitively, and that Magic is an incredibly high variance game on an individual competitive level, even seemingly small organized play changes will have relevant effects.

Additionally, WotC and its representatives, being a part of the community, will praise things which they, themselves, disincentivize via their organized play decisions. This is worth highlighting because it indicates how their Organized Play decisions actively cut against their proclaimed ideals.

As a lot of these things happen as background, many people are able to dismiss them as 'just whining' or 'just an exception' or 'they chose to play, so they don't get to complain', or 'it's still hard/easy/doable so it's the same'. The goal of this series is to lay out so many examples that people might, finally, realize that what is going on matters. Maybe then we can have real conversations about doing something.