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.
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