The State of Magic

>League of Legends
253,208 viewers
>Dota 2
113,262 viewers
>Hearthstone
39,502 viewers
>American Truck Simulator
1,254 viewers
>Magic: The Gathering
258 viewers

How is WotC failing so spectacularly to capitalize on the rise of e-sports entertainment? MTG as a spectator experience is so dull that even the commentators get bored.

What can be done to improve the game?

Make an online client that works. You have duels of the planeswalkers. Literally just copy paste that and add all the cards from MTGO.

Make MTGO not cost the same amount as paper cards. At least put a couple of event tickets in paper booster packs or something.

Magic: the gathering is a mind game as well as a card game. It takes hard strategy and well-placed moves to win the game. If it was 3-D animated and fight scenes happened based on dice rolls relative to power then it would be entertaining. But it looks like people shaking cardboard at each other. Also people are usually playing magic more than watching magic since, you know, it's one of those games that can only be enjoyed by playing.

New idea. New rarity level at "unique".

Why do you make this thread every single day?

because it's a physical card game?

I don't think you know what an "e-sport" is

This is only the 2nd thread like this.
The first was up for 2-3 days because I don't know, people were interested in the topic I guess? Prick

This just in - Wizards is shit with technology. In other news, water has been discovered to be wet!

but duels is a shit client that they manage to make worse at every turn.

All the other Esport games don't ask you to drop 500+ dollars per character. That may have something to do with it

Yeah, but they ask you to sink hundreds of hours into it to be good.

Ideally, with MTG, you could be good with the right deck and some coaching and not nearly as many hours. So it depends on how you value your time. If you value it at $8/hr (i think that's fed min wage), it takes about 1.5 work weeks to pay for a deck.

And lets say the average time to git gud at a vidya game is 300 hours. At, fed min, that's $2400 you didn't earn because you were gaming.

I know it's a loose comparison. And with MTG, that money is upfront. Whereas you can esport at your leisure with hearthstone. Though, I'd argue it would take many many hours to unlock everything and be good at the game. It's more likely a push.

Well, at least you have that option with HS. I would hope that WotC for an online game would give you an option to grind for singles and not force you to purchase from the secondary market

There's a lot of time when you're watching MTG streams or even videos put up online where you're not watching the meat of the game.

Sideboarding, waiting for matches, while either player is thinking, if the opponent is playing 2 or 3 games at once, and so on.

Most people aren't gonna readily jump on watching or streaming something with so much dead space, much less to look at the financial constraints.

Plus any random guy can watch League or DotA or Dark Souls or any number of games and enjoy watching it without having any idea what's going on.

New players watching the Pro Tour are gonna have to have an extra website open to see what cards do, and that's before being expected to recognize the pictures or understand rules like the stack.

yeah. mtgo really needs to rework its structure. But the problem is that it's so deep into its workings right now that it would piss off SOOO many people if they made every card available through just playing the game

They need to do some serious work improving the speed of the gameplay.

For online or irl?

You have a point, and I think that is a lot of the problem. There are some major structural flaws inherent in mtg's system.

It strikes me as a pyramid scheme just a little bit, where the older players get to see their cards go up in value, and are mostly safe from depreciation, while newer players have to just fork over the cash of years of price increases, or get fucked by standard. It makes me think of GW just a little bit, with the caveat that its "not wizards, just the secondary market" doing this.

If you know how the rules work, experienced players can take all kinds of shortcuts IRL.
The problem is that so many of these shortcuts are really a communication/social thing, and computers, being the autistic things that they are, don't do that very well

Yeah. I can play 2 real life magic games in the time it takes to play 1 MTGO game with randoms.

Honestly? Better commentators. People who know shit about the game. Deck archetypes, card statistics, topdecks needed, combo potential.

>They need to do some serious work improving the speed of the gameplay.

>30 second clock after draw phase to think through your turn
>a few seconds for each priority, if your time runs out before you can do something then tough shit
>maybe a few extra seconds to order blockers because that shit can get complicated

Problem solved, Magic is now an infinitely better playing and viewing experience.

Having to think and act fast would also serve to widen the gap between good players and bad players, which is a good thing if you want figures new players can look up to.

>it would piss off SOOO many people
it would only piss off a small few MTGO vendors, who are largely responsible for the current mess and would be surplus to requirements if Wizards was to move toward a Freemium model anyway

They already have good knowledgable commentators. Are you saying LSV isn't knowledgable enough to commemt on Magic ganes?
How are you supposed to follow a game of Magic if you can't even see what cards a player has in hand?
>have a little glass window with a camera, like poker, and tell the player to place the card he draws on the window. update onscreen graphics accordingly as a card enters/leaves the players hand
bam! magic is infinitely more watchable, you're welcome WOTC, you fucking idiots

If anything, sometimes its the opposite problem of having bad commentators. Sometimes, a commentator will say what the player probably will do, then after the player thinks about it for a good two minutes, does exactly what the commentator suggested he would. You especially notice this with the better commentators like LSV. I'm not sure how one fixes this, as 's solution seems pretty bad, but it can also put a drag on watching. Furthermore, the timing rules of mtg are really pervasive, in that almost every action short of tapping lands for mana requires a stop to see if the opponent wants to respond. Especially after playing a tcg with much less of those stops, you really start to notice it when you go back to mtg.

I think they should dump mtgo for magic duels. Duels feels like Hearthstone does, and people seem to enjoy watching that. Duels also has a, mostly, issue free client.