Weekly 'Wizards Is Killing Competitive Magic' Post
Wizards of the Coast is once again killing competitive Magic. No, this is not about Universes Beyond, or the number of sets per year, or the high number of playable mythics, or the high cost of competitive decks across all formats, or the death of promos, or the lack of reprints, or any of the other hundreds of issues currently facing Magic. Instead, this is about the amount of data that's published from MTGO's competitive events. Regrettably, I have a lot of thoughts about data transparency and communal information sharing and thus I once again feel compelled to ruminate on a corporation's weekly stupid. Forgive me.
One of my favourite things about the internet generally, and one of the best features of fan or enthusiast culture, is the enormous efforts made to disseminate information about niche topics. Wikis like Dustloop, Kiranico, or the Oldschool Runescape wiki are fantastic fan made information repositories that are invaluable for enthusiasts and casual fans of their respective games alike. (And of course, projects like Wikipedia have become staples of modern information sharing for an enormous number of people.) Sites like these are huge boons to communities looking to increase accessibility and have informed discussions of metagame in their chosen hobby, in all sorts of ways. These wikis often include things like calculators, data aggregators, and guides, and independent projects beyond the wikis have been developed to tackle more specialized problems, each contributing to this broader culture of open information sharing.
Sites like MTG Goldfish and 17Lands, which take play data from online Magic events and publish lists, play rates, recent placings and the like are some of the most prominent information sharing tools in the broad Magic ecosystem and players have adapted to using them heavily. Deck play rates and win rates across events and different match ups are a regular reference. Brewers looking to build something new mine play rates looking for niches that aren't being covered by the current metagame, or vulnerabilities in common lists that aren't being exploited (or are, but not hard enough). Spikes sift through play data looking for new tech ideas, ways to adapt their chosen strategy to shifting metagames, and to better assess which decks to play, or test, at all. Even more casual fans use play data to help understand what formats suit their tastes, or to try to find decks that strike a balance between cost and power for them to bring to Friday Night Magic. There are as many uses for this information as there are types of Magic players.
It comes as no surprise then that Magic players aren't stoked with Wizards' decision to cut the information that MTG Online shares about their challenges. Wielding the confidence of someone who clearly does not understand the ubiquity of online data and information sharing tools, players have been fed a response by Ryan Spain that argues that reducing information availability will help to decrease the rate at which metagames are solved, and therefore increase the diversity of the metagame. This is obviously stupid and misguided for many reasons, but I'd like to point to a couple that concern me most heavily. I'm sure I'll miss some ways in which this impacts formats like Legacy or Pauper disproportionately (as they're smaller less volatile metagames), and I'm sure there will be historical intricacies and nuances that I fail to pick up on due to the recency with which I've picked up Magic. However, I play a whole lot of Magic Arena, and I play Pioneer, a format that has already been impacted by a pattern of both neglect and poor understanding by Wizards of the current online meta-metagame of MTGO and Arena, and this decision is awful from my own niche perspective as well.
Wildcards suck.
Arena is the most accessible official way to play Magic. It's quick to download, has a fairly intuitive interface, and automates many of the things that can be difficult for new players while still giving veterans the opportunity to make use of those intricacies manually. It also allows players to play for free. I'm living proof of this, having spent exactly 0$ on virtual cardboard since I started playing. I've built a number of tiered meta decks entirely through opening free packs and accumulating wildcards (Arena's system for letting players create specific cards to play with), and while the system is clearly built to incentivize swiping, it is doable. However, doing so requires either a metagame miracle (a tiered strategy built up almost entirely of commons and uncommons), a level of expertise that can't be expected of a new player (being a strong drafter who can win over 50% of their games, or brew a new successful budget strategy), or an immense amount of time and willingness to lose. A lot. I am in the latter camp, but my experience tells me most aren't.
This wildcard economy means that players are very strongly incentivized, regardless of how they get their wildcards, to use them very deliberately and judiciously. If you spend all your wildcards crafting your favourite cards across all five colors, you won't have the wildcards to build an effective manabase — which are composed almost entirely of rares. If you want to win, you are therefore pushed very strongly towards looking up a strategy online that has demonstrable success and then crafting that. Tools like Goldfish even let you see deck breakdowns by the types of wildcards required, letting you choose the strongest strategy that requires the fewest rare and mythic wildcards to craft. Thus the wildcard economy creates its own metagame that players 'play' in order to most cost-effectively access the Magic metagame of their chosen format.
This has led to a fair bit of misery. Decks that relied on banned cards like Up The Beanstalk were made up of enormous numbers of rare and mythic cards that are now mostly unplayed in Standard. Wizards offers a wildcard refund on the card banned (in this case Beans, which is an uncommon), but not the cards that it enables, which has meant a major loss in playable cards for former Overlords players. On the other hand, the bans of This Town Ain't Big Enough and Hopeless Nightmare were no great loss in terms of wildcards, but their play rates on Arena made for an extremely unfun metagame. Their home deck, Esper or Dimir Bounce, was a deck designed to pray on fast Red Aggro strategies by repeatedly replaying permanents with removal effects attached like Nowhere to Run. Hopeless Nightmare's discard effect and burn also meant that the deck had a way to deny non-aggro decks by having them repeatedly discard. Bounce decks on the play could routinely force players to discard two or more cards before they've even been able to cast a spell. This sort of repeatable discard effect made for uncompetitive games that frustrated even the most mentally fortified players. Unfortunately, this deck saw extremely high play rates on Arena even when it was unsuitable for the metagame (and after bans). Because it was largely made up of commons and uncommons, and had multiple versions that let players use the manabase they already had pieces of, it was heavily netdecked and created those miserable play patterns far beyond its success as a deck should have manifested.
As the amount of information from MTGO drops, decks like Bounce that are successful and cheap despite obnoxious playing patterns, as well as decks like Red Aggro or Izzet Prowess in recent memory will see even more disproportionate play. With fewer decks being catalogued, new or returning players looking for a deck will be presented fewer options and therefore congregate even more heavily onto whatever the most wildcard-light deck is. Not exactly the metagame diversity they claim to want, is it?
Smaller formats are hit harder.
The other side of this, that is less true of Arena but more true of MTGO, is that smaller formats that have challenges and other events on MTGO tend to have a higher number of players who play them only to compete in this events for the rewards. Many of these players are very strong, but when playing a format they haven't extensively tested for money they trend towards the strongest highly linear strategy on offer. Inevitably, fast combo and aggro strategies that accelerate the format and require strong targeted answers are the MTGO event grinder decks of choice. We saw this last year when Mono Red Mice was an outsized portion of the Pioneer metagame despite not performing particularly well in challenges, as well as following Avatar's release (when Mono Red had Heartfire Hero banned), where the new Lessons package guaranteed a high flow of cards alongside Academic Dispute, leading to a 30% metagame share for Izzet Prowess.
Crucially, these strategies are not actually power outliers. The metagame has effectively adapted to them. Decks like Greasefang, Control, Selesnya Company, and Orzhov midrange have all cropped up to combat these decks in Pioneer and then other strategies that beat those decks and the cycle continues as it ought to. However, the popularity of linear strategies in these small tournaments does have knock on effects for the affected formats. In Wizards' Banned and Restricted announcement last fall, they rationalized banning Heartfire Hero due to an exceptionally high play rate in Arena's best-of-one ranked ladder, which is a format that naturally incentivizes aggressive linear strategies to begin with, and is popular among players simply trying to play as many games as possible to grind ranked. The decks that prey on aggro are often common here too, but they need to be adapted to beat the aggressive decks without the use of a side deck and that constrains the accessibility of the format as new players need to look up not only what strategies are popular, but also how to change those strategies to fit the unusual best-of-one meta. This ladder also generates an outsized number of matches since they can be played so quickly, leading to skewed data on Arena play rate aggregator sites.
This trend interacts extremely poorly with the aforementioned wildcard metagaming to become absolutely horrific. Not only is netdecking due to win rates common, and heavily biased due to the low number of enfranchised players on MTGO (where most play rate date originates), but also one of the most popular Arena ranked formats incentivizes playing the same strategies that MTGO event grinders already opt for, leading to a feedback loop of players looking to MTGO play data for wildcard-efficient strategies, playing a highly linear strategy that they modify to be maximally linear, and then artificially increasing the play rates of those decks elsewhere. This crushes metagame diversity and all but promises to bring on more bans like the Heartfire Hero one, where the actual strength of the card is secondary to its play rate to justify banning. And, because that sort of reasoning has been used by the B&R committee recently, that means formats like Pioneer are likely to be in a perpetual state of shadowed by not only the lack of official support from Wizards, but also both extreme and misleading play data on sites like Goldfish and the constant threat of more bans making both dollar and wildcard investments useless.
This is a feedback loop that demands action from Wizards that they are demonstrably unwilling to give. Pioneer has no scheduled official paper events for the foreseeable, and players don't expect it to come back. The metagame is, in my opinion, engaging and open with the larger-than-Standard card pool lending itself to brewers looking to target specific holes in the meta, but its data on play rate aggregator sites often suggests a format that's languishing and unfun. In principal, this ought to be a format where Wizards' stated goal of reducing the rate at which players solve the metagame is most needed. In practice, we're already seeing the current limits of play data impacting the perception of Pioneer. With Wizards reducing this data sharing even further, I fear we're going to continue to see aggro (or whatever the flavour of the month deck is) play rates as high as 40% on Goldfish, and more unneeded and damaging bans.
Wizards owes it to players to increase their information sharing, not decrease it. Unfortunately, they seem set on making the wrong decision at every possible turn. At a time when metagames upend themselves rapidly due to the sheer quantity of cards entering the pool, reducing the ability of players to understand what's happening and what they might encounter at their local events or online serves only to make 60 card competitive Magic less approachable, not more. Instead of interfering with community efforts to understand the game we love, maybe Wizards should do something that would actually help like halting their printing of staples at mythic rarity, reprinting highly played cards instead of printing an endless barrage of new sets, and do more to facilitate tournament organizers for smaller formats running successful events. They won't do these things, but I really wish they'd fuck off until they do.