OP will not be explicitly designed to support competitive Magic as a career path. However, there will be Grand Prix, PTQ, and Pro Tour – like events
— Magic Esports (@MagicEsports) May 13, 2021
Our focus will be the amount of play and the prize money, and less focus on the lifestyle or it being economically self-sustaining
Pro Magic is dead. 3.0. Or is 4.0? I lost track.
This line could be misread as a cycnical take, especially by players who made their livelihood playing Magic. I do in fact feel with those affected and understand their disappointment in losing a system that provided professional Magic players with a regular income for the first time ever. This must be rough time for everybody involved. That being said we should also take into account the bigger picture. And the bigger picture, as I see it, is that competitive Magic is much much larger than the less than a hundred players at the very top and that the current system was never working for anybody but those people.
Originally, the idea of the Pro Tour was about giving aspiring players the chance to test themselves against the best players in the world. As the Pro Tour matured and a PTQ and Grand Prix system was established around it, it turned out that the Pro Tour was also about dedication. Players would travel to dozens of events year in, year out—not just to hone their skills but also in search of that break: hoping that this time their Sealed pool would be so far above average to compensate for not quite being as good as the best, hoping that this time matchups would fall into place a bit better than usual, hoping to have that really good draw to carry them through their nervousness in that final match with everything on the line.
The problem with the professional league system of the past few years was that even extreme dedication was no longer enough for 99.999% (not an exaggeration) of players anymore. People knew that playing on the Pro Tour required skill and dedication and even then most of them would only get there a few times in their life, if at all. In a way that was okay. Playing on the Pro Tour was a dream for many, but unlike winning the jackpot in a lottery it was a dream that you knew had realistic odds of becoming true. Once the Pro League was considered the highest echelon of competitive Magic, though, the dream of reaching that highest echelon was dead.
And it was not only the dream that was dead. I have played Magic since I was thirteen. That's been 27 years now. From sixteen on I have aspired to play on the Pro Tour. 24 years. I have always been excited about professional Magic, but when the leagues were announced I lost all interest in following pro Magic. And my detachment has only grown since despite the pandemic and despite Magic being an easy and welcome distraction. This could of course just be me, but my impression is that many players feel about pro Magic the same way.
To me it is crystal-clear that the system failed. If you don't want to take my word for it, take a look at the viewer numbers. The Pro Tour never got where Wizards wanted it to be, but with the introduction of the league(s) that number fell from some ten thousands to something in the low thousands. I understand that it sucks for the affected players that Wizards took something away from them without saying with what they will replace it. On the other hand, the vast majority of players might not realize it yet, but this may have been a day to celebrate, at least if Wizards turn out to draw the right conclusions from the MPL disaster.
What Are the Right Conclusions?
I think it's sensible to look at what has historically worked for Magic. And if we want more ideas it is a good idea to find out what works for other individual sports.
Let's start in the beginning. When Wizards, mostly Skaff Elias, were envisioning a Magic Pro Tour, they too were of course looking what they could take from other sports. The Swiss-style pairing system and the Elo ranking we had for a long time come from chess, an so does the clock on Magic Online and later Arena. The structure with four "Majors" you find in golf and tennis, but if you look deeper you find that Magic almost copy-pasted the tournament structure of tennis. You have the four Majors with large player fields and a World Championship with a very small field. There is also a nation-against-nation team competition (Billy Jean King Cup/Davis Cup). Heck, tennis players even refer to the their tour as the Pro Tour. And the second tier of professional tennis tournaments are referred to—you guessed it—as the "Grand Prix." Did you know that Tennis Grand Prix events also often give byes to the best players …?
Golf in comparison does not have a real World Championship. The distinction between first and second tier also works differently. There is one tournament each week and the Majors are just part of that schedule, albeit naturally much more prestigious. Below the PGA Tour there is another layer of tours. The structure here is more akin to the Rivals/MPL distinction. The tours run in parallel and as a player you are part of either circuit. However, these tours are regional tours such as the Asian Tour or the European Tour, not a global second-tier league. Even for a sport with as much money in it as golf, they thought it a good idea to reduce traveling expenses and the like by keeping the second-tier tours regional. Maybe Magic can learn some from that as well.
Anyway, for Magic the model with four Pro Tours seemed to work best. Wizards experimented with having more Majors especially in the early days, but the Pros complained that it was too much. I also expect that Wizards realized that there are diminishing returns to the number of top-tier tournaments as it takes some time for excitement to build. If you hold too many tournaments, the whole shebang gets a feeling of yet another Pro Tour and that's not where you want to be. The fact that Magic, golf, and tennis settled on four Majors should give us some confidence that the four-Major structure generally works well for individual sports.
One caveat when comparing Magic tournaments to other sports tournaments is that they should not be viewed as serving the exact same function. As I see it there are three main functions a sporting event can serve: a show for its own sake, acquisition of new players for the sport, and retention of players active in the sport already. Naturally every event will have some of each, but if you compare the Super Bowl to a Magic Pro Tour it should be obvious that both are not much alike in this regard. Hundreds of millions watch the Super Bowl, but how many play the sport? In contrast the Pro Tours are never watched by anybody who doesn't play Magic, but the dream (of playing on the PT) was a very successful marketing tool for retention. And Wizards should try to measure the success of the Pro Tour as such. They had a great tool to increase retention in a big, very dedicated portion of their audience. Reshaping this tool toward an esports thingy that is supposed to attract new players is foolhardy in my opinion. If you desperately need that, create a new tool, but keep the Pro Tour and the whole competitive Magic scene. Use it for what it is a good at, what it originally was envisioned for.
I believe getting the Pro Tour back online (in an offline setting) should be the baseline when evaluating any "new" vision for high-level competitive Magic. Along with it comes the need for a support structure and the one thing that has worked really well for Magic in the past are the Grand Prix events. You can argue about the Grand Prix being flawed all you want, but when thousands of people come to tournaments hundreds of miles away every other weekend, then you have something special.
The Pro Tours
If the Pro Tours come back, what should they look like?
The Pro Tours need to be large enough to allow aspirational players a shot to qualify, otherwise they can't serve their purpose. At the same time their size needs to be limited. Since at least 2010 Pro Tour attendances of 400+ players became the norm and that put various contraints on them that made them feel like a glorified Grand Prix. As I understand it, cutting the size of the Pro Tour in about half would open up options for Wizards to create something really special instead. For example I still remember how there used to be a players lounge with free food and refreshments at Pro Tours. Just do something like that again and then find a few other cool things to impress the players with, thus letting the qualified players feel a little like stars for a weekend. When they come home, they will inevitably tell their friends what a great experience it was and raise excitement for the Pro Tour.
The small size unfortunately guarantees that it will be extremely hard to qualify for these events. You have to assume that the number of Magic players has probably doubled since the last time a Pro Tour was held under that name and there would only be half as many slots. On top of that—salary or no salary—there will have to be some amount of regulars on the Pro Tour, otherwise the system will be very attractive neither for spectators nor the top tier of aspiring players, so you cannot just give all invites out via PTQ and GP. If you quickly run the numbers, a Pro Tour of this style has some 200 players and at least 32 of these invites should go to players who did well at the previous event. Some will go to players with sustained success. Eventually you will not have much more than a hundred slots to give away for people to qualify from outside.
With so few slots something like the old PTQ system cannot work. Direct qualification for the Pro Tour from a local tournaments is out of the question. The last system that Wizards used for a longer period, the PPTQ/RPTQ/PT three tier-system, already acknowledged that direct qualification from local tournaments was not feasible anymore. Personally I never was a fan of the PPTQ/RPTQ/PT system either. I won't go into detail here, but let's suffice to say that PPTQs were extremely unsatisfying tournaments. RPTQs often weren't that much better, only much more inconvenient because you had to travel for them.
A very simple solution would be to allow qualification to the Pro Tour only from two sources, from a Grand Prix and the Pro Tour itself. At 50–60 Grand Prix events a year and with at least the Top 8 guaranteed qualification, that would make the GP circuit account for about 500 invites—which is exactly what we need if we assume each PT invites its Top 64 back and we want to leave some invites for sustained success, too. It could be done this way and the system would have the appeal of being very easy to understand, It would come with downsides though.
First, invites would rely on peaking at certain tournaments. You could go 12-3 at five Grand Prix in a row and still not get an invite to the Pro Tour. This would be frustrating as it would be very tangible for players how they are going nowhere. It is much more encouraging to have those good results help to build for something. The fractional invite system that Wizards devised—but that never got any traction due to the pandemic—seems like a good step in the direction of solving this issue.
The other problem with the simple model is that one size does not usually fit all. Doing a Grand Prix in Las Vegas is very different from doing a Grand Prix in Auckland. A structure this simple will probably not make it easy to account for such structural differences. Again Wizards was aware of this and in the last couple of years Grand Prix had different prize purses depending on expected attendance, but I think this still does not afford as much scalability in events as is necessary.
For an alternative way of solving this problem we can take a look at the tennis Pro Tour again. Their second tier actually has three sub-tiers. Tournaments are designated as belonging to 250, 500, or 1000 category. These numbers refer to the points (something like our old pro points) that the winner gets, but the cash prizes also vary, even more greatly actually. Winning a 1000 event can be worth more than a million dollars whereas winning a 250 can give you as "little" as $20,000. Unsurprisingly the PVs, LSVs, Nassifs, et cetera of the tennis world usually all show up for the 1000s while 250s often don't feature a single Top 10 player.
If we envision transferring this diversity to the Grand Prix circuit in Magic, then we can imagine a Grand Prix scene with extremely high-profile events at the top a few times a year, maybe one in each month that doesn't have a Pro Tour. For these events Wizards would work closely with a tournament organizer to host a huge marquee event with thousands of players, big prizes, coverage, tons of side events, and so on. Considering that double- and triple-GP weekends have worked in the past these could even be three day events, thus allowing for a tournament structure that better suits the huge number of players. At the same time the higher number of rounds would make these events more interesting to the best players as more rounds mean more time for luck to even out.
At the other end of the spectrum there would be relatively small events, maybe a few hundred players, that Wizards licenses liberally. These events would have to adhere to certain standards of course, but the schedule of these would not necessarily have to be finalized a year in advance and organizers would have some flexibility to determine formats, locations, and dates on their own. In the middle there would be the bread and butter, the GPs as you fondly remember them: tournaments that attract a crowd of around a thousand players; highly standardized events that Wizards schedule and assign locations and formats for, but for which they let a trusted tournament organizer handle the rest.
When considering events of such different scope it is clear that not every tournament can provide the same number of invites to the Pro Tour. A GP of the lowest category would naturally only provide very few invites while events of the highest category would provide invites well beyond the Top 8. A problem that remains is that if we don't have something like fractional invites, then frequent close misses can become very demotivating. Having fractional invites comes with another upside. In each previous system successful players were rewarded with pro points, which always entailed certain benefits (usually via the Pro Club). However, Wizards has clearly said that they don't want something like the Pro Club anymore. Pro players are great, but guaranteed "salaries" are not. Fractional invites are a great solution here too. If you allow some stockpiling of (fractional) invites then successful players, have the means to ensure regular play on the Pro Tour even during unsuccessful periods. At the same time the nature of an invite is that it is an invite and nothing more.
So fractional invites are great, but honestly why call them fractional invites? This is just nomenclature, but still, instead of having people juggle fractions just call these things qualifier points and make some number of them, for example ten, worth one invitation.
At this point we still have a simple and beautiful system with the Pro Tour as the pinnacle of competitive play and the Grand Prix as gateways to the Pro Tour. The flaw, that I already mentioned yet ignored so far, is that people would quickly realize how hard it has become to qualify for the Pro Tour. As I outlined above, it would probably be three to five times as hard to qualify now compared to how people remember it. And it was pretty damn hard even then. The diffculty of making it to the Pro Tour would not even begin to compare to the difficulty of getting into the MPL. But I believe it would be a level of hard that would lead to people discarding the dream as too unrealistic for them to chase.
A Second Tier of Pro Tours
Is there a fix? Actually the last system that Wizards used for in-person events, the one with Regional Players Tours and Players Tour Finals, already acknowledged this problem. I don't think making a two-tier system out of the Pro Tour is the most appealing solution, but given the parameters I don't see a great alternative either. There is something that we change about it, though.
In the old system there were always two fundamentally different ways to qualify for Pro Tours, either via direct invite or with a pro points-based invite. If we conclude that we need Regional Pro Tours as a second tier below the actual Pro Tours, then that raises the question of what qualifies for the actual Pro Tour? Realistically the options are that the Regional Pro Tours confer direct invites or that qualifier points are somehow involved. I think the latter solution is much more appealing. Imagine some pro player wins three GP events in a season but unfortunately never does better than 10-6 at the Regional Pro Tours. It wouldn't feel right for that player not to play the Pro Tour Finals, and with all the limelight on that player it would be a miss for the system, too.
A system that uses qualifier points for the Pro Tour Finals as well doesn't have that problem, but how would that work? The obvious is answer is that you "buy" entry into an event with your QP, but the Finals would be more expensive than the Regionals. I don't think having players contemplate how to spend their invites optimally is very productive though. A solution that seems better to me is that the QPs a player accrues count toward the Regional Pro Tours and the Pro Tour Finals each. You wouldn't have to decide if you want to use your QPs for the Regional Pro Tour or the Pro Tour Finals, but instead QPs used to play a Regional Pro Tour would still be valid to be used for the Pro Tour Finals as well. And of course entrance into Pro Tour Finals would require more QPs than entrance into Regional PTs. Exact numbers would depend on various parameters, but imagine it to be something like this: playing the Regional PT costs ten QPs, playing the PT Finals costs twenty QPs. If you manage to gather ten QPs in a year, then you can play one Regional PT once; if you get to twenty, you can play two Regional PTs and one PT Finals. 30? Three Regional PTs and one PT Finals et cetera.
Another nice thing about doing it this way is that you have a lot of knobs to modify the system in a away that produces the results you want. These knobs also don't do anything else, so changing numbers has very predictable consquences, unlike pro points where you might end up with some extra Platinum-level pros that you didn't plan for.
Other Tournaments
Is this all? Of course there should be a World Championship on top of this. Eventually there also should be Nationals and and a World Magic Cup. (National team competitions are successful in other individual sports as well.) But if I were in charge I would start by making sure the core of the structure works. Nationals have always been a favorite of almost everybody I know, but they are not essential to this kind of system so it makes sense to introduce them only when the other things have proved their mettle.
If It's So Simple, Why Didn't Anybody Else Think of It?
While I think it makes sense that the system as outlined above would work, the question is justified. I believe the main problem was that pro points were always part of the equation and pro points carried a lot of baggage. Originally pro points were designed as a way to determine the best player of the season and nothing else at all. Quickly invitations were tied to pro points, then the Masters Series came a long and qualification relied on pro point standings. The end-of-the-year payouts that came later depended on pro points as did the Pro Club. Qualifications for Nationals, Worlds, the WMC were added even later.
Pro points served many different masters and since 1997 have always served more than one at the same time. I believe having the pro point system at the heart of competitive Magic in this way must have caused a lot of problems in balancing the system. At the same time pro points were beloved by the players as a means to compare the success of players across history. Wizards even wanted to get rid of pro points around 2011, but the outcry that followed had them reconsider this decision.
Now Wizards have decided for the first time to tear the whole system down and start from scratch. As much as I understand this causes a lot of anxiety in some of the most valued players in the game, I firmly believe that this fresh start comes with the chance to build a much better system. Let's all hope Wizards doesn't squander this unique opportunity!
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily Cardmarket.