High-Level Organized Play Decisions Absolutely Matter (Part 3 of ???)

Ari Lax's post on the soul of competitive Magic is a huge point on this topic, and is worth a read. After you read it, I want to make a few additional notes.

https://armlx.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-death-of-competitive-magic-via-mpl.html

Ari mentions new Silver as a 'canary in the coal mine'. People might not understand why this is, exactly. (I was only barely around before 'PWP Season 0'.) At the beginning, the very beginning, of the Pro club, documented here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/welcome-pro-players-club-2005-05-02

There was no 'invite to only some of the PTs' tier. You went from no invites, to all invites. They moved there to being 8 tiers at some point, but I can't find documentation on the exacts of that (despite me knowing that fact beforehand.) Silver was, therefore, apparently the first time that pro status didn't mean invites to all the tournaments. (EDIT: Ari reached out to me to make this note: 'The old 8 level system had both Silver (L3 was 15 Points for 1 PT invite) and minor rolling (if you got 1.5x Gold between last Season and the first 2 PTs of next season, you got the last half year as Gold).' His tweet is here. The arc here remains more or less structurally the same: rewarding progress and success and incentivizing increased effort in achievable ways vs... not.)

That is fine-ish though, because after Silver started to exist, there were still ways to parley your work in Silver into higher statuses (the biggest of them being the double-triple PTQ, where winning an event would get you enough points to get you silver for this year, and then silver for next year's first PT, the most valuable PT of the year.)

The cycle system's Silver destroyed that, which is what Ari is referring to as the 'hook'. In the cycle system, once you burned a Silver invite, it was burned for the next 3 quarters as well: being silver in those quarters actually got you stone nothing. So as Ari says, then you fall out of Silver and there's nothing.

This is a subtle-ish change, that not everyone caught at the beginning of the Cycle system, but Ari identifies it as key here, and it's worth dwelling on its details for a few moments.