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He makes a ton of great points here on how to revitalize and dying competitive scene, and this is something I’ve been feeling for a while but haven’t really been able to articulate why.
Just commenting on a few of the things he raises, I think one of the bigger issues is beyond “bring back the GPs,” which I 100% agree should happen. It more just doesn’t feel like there’s a visible ladder/path competitively like there was before. I remember as a kid it was clear, FNM -> PTQ -> PT -> Worlds (!), and I had a DCI rating that moved up and down and felt like it mattered. Maybe it’s a marketing issue b/c I know there are local RCQs and other regional championship things but it just doesn’t feel clear to me at all.
The elephant in the room is obviously Commander as well, and Mengucci addresses this one. WotC is Commander-first now and it’s not even close, and I know this has been one of the main reasons local events just don’t happen anymore like they used to. This plus Arena eating into any remaining competitive player time probably nuked local competitive scenes for good, and I think that has gone a long way in making everything “feel” worse now.
I guess the other elephant in the room is the price of everything. I cannot pay $500 for a Standard deck, full stop. When I was a kid it was way, way more approachable, and we also had Block Constructed which I loved and was even more approachable. Not just price too but the shear volume of sets now just makes it feel overwhelming. It’s like 20 sets now for Standard, before it was just a known 7 sets (3 from a block each year and core set).
That’s kind of how it’s felt for me I guess, I’m not sure what if anything would correct it now or what is driving it the most but I know for a fact that I just feel way different about playing competitive magic now, even though I watch it every day and play for fun still.
WotC is Commander-first now and it’s not even close, and I know this has been one of the main reasons local events just don’t happen anymore like they used to.
While I loved (I say past tense because when I closed my shop I gave up Magic) commander, I miss 60 card.
The Commander Parties were fun to run, but I would have a group of players who would come In and wanted to play plain commander. They would end up in a pod with someone wanting to do the party and then refuse to acknowledge the night’s rules. This ended up souring people to the commander parties. Since my shop was in a small town, a lot of times I would only get enough for a single pod, maybe 2, and 3 on a really good night.
Yeah and sorry in no way did I mean to say Commander is “lesser than” or anything like that if I came across that way. I just meant that it’s completely different from the 1v1 competitive stuff/experience that LGSs I grew up with were all about. It’s definitely fun, I just think it’s rise in popularity came at the cost of competitive 1v1 magic and I kind of lament that.
No, i did not think you meant Commander is lesser. It is very different, and I wish WoTC push 1v1 Commander more, and multiplayer 60 card.
Brawl was a great format, i wish it had done better.
Now that I can just open the laptop and fire up Arena/MTGO, I’m not sure what it would actually take for me to go to the local LGS for paper magic.
Maybe if a local friend wanted to go, but I just don’t have the motivation.
This is sad to hear, and No slight on you. I ran an LGS for 7 1/2 years. The last time I really got an FNM with more than 4 players, that was not commander/prerelease, was either 2019 or 2021.
I tried so much to get people in to play at my shop. I only charged if we were doing a sealed/draft/prerelease. I gave out the WoTC promos, I gave out my standard decks I built, I threw a pizza party (0 attendees for that one).
The real answer is take WotC out of the equation. Hasbro does not care one bit for competitive play if it does not make them more money. WotC does what Hasbro tells them: print and sell as much shit as you can for as much money as you can so that they can tell investors they sold this many units for this many dollars and they expect to do more next quarter. Not one thought enters the minds of the CEOs that it’s a game that people play for enjoyment.
Going for a garden walk here, but my two cents (it comes around to competitive play):
D&D players already showed how to do it. Take the game away from WotC. Rules can’t be copy written. Create an Open Source rule set for the game and call it “Spells: The Open Sorcery” or something better. You can even call it a “MTG Compatible” product. Change anything that might be trademarked: mana symbols, tap symbols, etc. I’m not sure if it’d be required, but you could change the wording if needed for legal reasons; instead of tap, say spend or something. Instead of mana, call it ether, creatures are minions, artifacts are relics, lands are domains, upkeep is the reset step, etc.
Normalize proxies. It’s not like Wizards isn’t already printing proxies. They sell Secret Lairs for a stupid high premium which are basically proxies for 20 cent cards that cost them 2 cents to print. They have so many alternate styles and art now that unless you’re looking at old cards, how the hell are you supposed to know if it’s a WotC card or not when you’re sitting at the table? And of course there’s the whole Magic 30 scam.
Now you’ve got the groundwork for anybody who wants to play competitively to be able to just print out their deck and go play. No more pay to win and a much larger potential competitive player pool.
So, you just need events. Game stores probably don’t want to sanction proxy events so that they don’t ruin their relationship with WotC, so the players need to make these happen. It won’t start with 100-1000 player signups. It might only start with a handful of players for a given event, but if they are done with notice and frequency, they’ll grow.
For smaller events like that, it can be done in somebody’s garage, or a park, maybe the local library if they have a conference room you can reserve. There are also places like movie theaters or bowling alleys that also rent out space for things like birthday parties if you’ve got a larger group. Entry fees can be put to renting the space and prizes can be cool proxies or altered art cards.
There’s ways to do it on the cheap and still be fun. Even a well made flyer for the event can be a cheap collectible for anybody who attends. These days it’s cheap to print whatever you want on a coffee tumbler or 3 ring binder or what-have-you, so interesting prizes are easy enough to come by.
Create novel events. Since it’s about taking the game back and making it what you want, you can create alternate rules for the event. You can have no ban list. You can have cube events. You can do blocks. You can do chaos draft. You can do any format you want. You can create your own rotating format with curated sets. There are tens of thousands of cards to pull from, or you can make your own cards and you can try your own hand at game design. You don’t need WotC for any of that.
If one of these regular events takes off it can form into a league. There can be any number of leagues, but if one or two grows enough, it’s simple enough to track things in a database for players who want to climb ladders to get to larger events.
And then promote it all. There are plenty of disillusioned YouTubers who may put up videos of these events if it’s done well and with the spirit of a game for the players in mind.
that sounds reasonable but we’ve seen the corporatization of EDH ruin EDH so i’d be worried about the monkey’s paw.
my thought long ago during some banlist drama was that organized play should be entirely separate from hasbro the way that sports leagues and equipment manufacturers are
Same feels true for EDH, having it separated from wotc was great.
looking back on it, all my favorite formats were ones that they didn’t intentionally design cards for
I think that’s a fantastic idea and often think that would “save” Legacy to a certain extent. That format in particular needs a community running the ban list/tournament scene that is completely divorced from Wizards.
They hardly are going to make pauper a competitive format, when the point of having competitive play was always to move product.
Promoting Commander as a competitive format might not be great for casual play. I think you can see that every well with RTS computer games, those with a competitive scene have a way sweatier casual player base.
