Editorial Section:
2009 MTGO Year in Review:

January 2009 -
2 Man queues Launched -
This was a hugely important thing for MTGO's tournament structure.  It has given a low level starting ability to MTGO Constructed formats.  I have started using these to test out sideboard changes in Standard decks, and they're great for a low risk way to test out decks.  The lowest level of the now ubiquitous "Mt. MTGO".

February 2009 -
Avatars start to get 'fixed' -
A relatively minor fix to the client, all things considered.  However, this simple change really helped make the game feel a lot more polished than the default 2.5D images they tried to use.  I try not to speak ill of the dead and whatnot... but dang those old avatars were bbbbbaaaaaaaaaadddddddddd.

"Ham Jones" breaks $4000 -
They "Ham Jones" covers the overall prices of 1x of every card in the system.  The depth of economic topics that comprise this number are far too vast to cover in a small blurb here.  The upshot of hitting this point was a higher demand in many cards and an influx of players.  Generally attributed to Pauper being sanctioned and driving up a lot of cards prices across the board.

"Suggest Land" added to the client -
Another seemingly small item in the overall product but its inclusion was a very contentious matter for the MTGO community.  Some decried it as dumbing down the game, others lauded it as an equalizer.  Looking back at it now, it seems amazing it wasn't there all along.  The feature isn't perfect, and it's just helpful enough to save a few clicks overall and give a guideline for the land ratio.

Attempted "deck filter" for the client and Attempted "Auto match" -
I'll list these two together since they both met the same fate.... grizzled death.  When they were announced I stated I was skeptical but used the term 'cautiously optimistic'.  After all, this was tried with Version 2 that never worked and was scrapped altogether.  I wanted it to work as it would indicate that either V3 was better built than V2 or that the programmers on V3 had ingenuity than the V2 programmers.  Sadly, my hopes were dashed as both features were shelved.  You can still see the "Auto-Match" selection grayed out in the client as a sad testament to the attempted endeavor.

Free Trial Server Returns -
For some reason this wasn't very well publicized when it was brought back.  In fact, it was tucked away inside of a large lump of release notes.  It was a very important aspect to have back on and I'm still clueless as to why the event wasn't brought to the site with more fanfare.

March -
Magic Online Championship Series announced -
I can't begin to state how major this announcement was.  In many ways, it was the true beginnings of MTGO becoming a truly appreciated medium for playing high level Magic.  We had nothing that compared to the scope and depth of this tournament.  Its results were good enough to get the series renewed for 2010, and I'll go in to that below.

Kscope announced -
I like to call things like I see them, and this format was a blatant hype format for the "ALL GOLD" set of Alara Reborn.  That's not to say it was a bad format, far from it, it was quite good... up until they banned Anathemancer, anyway.  But I digress.  I had never seen a format created and supported for the sole purpose of selling a new set before.  Strange actions, and it wound up living a short life as there were to be almost no new cards for the format for the next year.

Customer Appreciation Week (CAW!) Events announced -
What an insane turn of events.  If you weren't around for these you missed some of the craziest ideas, attempts, and complaints I have EVER seen.  The good news is that it gave us a short-lived but quite entertaining meme of shouting "CAW!" at random intervals... so at least we had that going for us.

Prismatic Support dropped -
This marked the end of an era, you might say.  I was sad to see it go, but I hope that some day it will be back when the client can once again load a 250+ card deck with becoming unresponsive for some reason.  I just watched Iron Man and the quote: "Tony Stark was able to build this IN A CAVE!!! With a BOX OF SCRAPS!!!".  Perhaps not as over-hammed as James Franco's MMMMM PIIEEEEE scene in Spiderman 3, but it's up there.  Anyway, the point of that semi-random Iron Man quote is this... from an older programming language, under legacy code, from a long long time ago... V2 could, with relative easy, load a gigantic deck without bringing a quad core computer to its knees.  Essentially, they Tony Stark'd the V3 team when it comes to the ability to load a Prismatic deck.  Burn.  Yeah, I just used a proper name as a verb.  Bring it.

Pauper prizes to be 'core set' forever -
This issue created a lot of hubbub over the support of formats, Expected Value, secondary markets and everything in between.  At the end of the day WotC firmly landed on the side of "we don't care about the cost of the packs on the secondary market".  Which is really about all they *can* say.  They have chosen the support for specific formats and are sticking to their guns on it.  Things certainly could be better overall for some of the formats, like Extended, but all in all I think we're in a better place for most of the formats now than before.

Ticket Only Drafts (Nix Pax) -
A lot of these items on the list are Constructed based items.  This just illustrates how much room there was (and still is) for the Constructed formats on MTGO.  This one, however, was the scariest to me.  It essentially rendered the 'Out of Print' status useless as WotC can now just run an event for any format, any time, as 'ticket only' versions.  They have done this a few times and so far, hasn't destroy the world of MTGO.... so far.

Legacy Set release event changes (the release and out the door) with Stronghold -
Announced with Stronghold was the fact that release events would go on for two weeks then the set would disappear from the store (but it would continue on in other ways).  There were a few reasons cited for this change, one of which being the increased sense of urgency for these events.  Sadly, it seemed that players decided that it would be better to just skip the events than bow to the sense of urgency created.

8 Man Constructed queues return  -
These had died off and were replaced with four man queues when V3 couldn't fire a full 8 man.  Thankfully now Standard and block can fire 8 man queues, and even other formats can fill and fire from time to time. Yes, even Extended has done it a couple of times.

April -
MTGO Ratings to go away -
Even though I dislike this change for a few reasons, I know full well WHY they did it.  I played some Alara Block right before this happened and, upon beating my opponent I was treated to a wonderful insight into the shortcomings of the education system of whatever country the player was from.  Random expletives, threats on my life, aspersions of my sexual orientation... you know, the usual warm fuzzy after match spooning pillow talk.  Well, turns out I wasn't alone, and one of the things WotC noticed was that a lot of these things stemmed around, you guessed it, publicly viewable rankings.  I've recently gotten back into Standard and have played a handful of games.  Not once have I been attacked.  I've had one or two snide comments of course, but really, nothing of note since this change.

MTGO Banned and Restricted to be handled monthly -
I support the idea behind this change.  MTGO can, and should, be able to move more quickly than paper.  Namely due to the information channel needing to be much more shallow than in paper.  In paper, judges need to know, documents need updating, etc, etc, etc.  But on MTGO, it's a post, an announcement and a change to a file.  BANG done.

May -
MTGO Pre-releases announced -
I completely whiffed on what this might have been.  I still like my thought (that it would be a near-simultaneous release with paper) better.  But that's going to be infeasible for a good long while.  The impacts of this certainly have been felt around the MTGO economy.  The surge of players getting the cards before the dealers means that they now get first dibs on reselling singles instead of subsidizing the dealer's pack cracking.  The upshot is that prices of singles have dropped faster and harder during the real release events as players already have access to the cards they want.

CBS Bot Implosion -
Going back through the news items of the past year I completely forgot about this one.  I recall, vividly now, my interview with the proprietor of this chain shortly before this whole thing went haywire.  At the time it seemed coincidental, but looking back at it now, I noticed that he got riskier and riskier shortly after I interviewed him.  Possible because he felt he needed to speed things up after getting attention.  Maybe not, but really a crazy turn of events.

June -
M10 Rules Changes Explained and announced - One of the few MTGP/MTGO overlaps on my list, but this was a big change all around and something that certainly should be noted in a 'what happened this year' list.

July -
Promo Program Announced -
The promo program, in development for something like 18 months, came out of the legal department with some major strings attached.  Namely that it was US ONLY.  Anyone who says they aren't in the US is ineligible to participate in the program.  However!  For those that say they are in the US, the promos are pretty sweet.  Lands just for logging in, cards for playing/buying.  All in all a good reward system for those that are lucky enough to enjoy it.

New Account Product Changed -
This is another float in the parade of newbies, and one I particularly find a good idea.  For the truly new player, these help you get going right off the bat.  For the long time Paper player, they let you draft with a little bit of purchase, or get some constructed play in while you figure out where you want to go.  For the long time MTGO player... they suck.  But if you're a long time MTGO player,... you already have an account.

August -
PTQ's on MTGO Announced -
The third coolest news of this year (First coolest was MOCS '09, the second coolest is MOCS '10, below).  PTQ's online really got the attention of the paper players.  Granted, it wasn't all good, but even Kyle Sanchez' rantings helped to publicize them.  So that was nice.

September -
First MTGO Reporter announced for Pro Tour Austin! -
I don't think a lot of people realized this at the time, but I was invited not just as coverage, but as the first official MTGO coverage reporter.  I hope to be able to do more next year, but even if someone else gets chosen to pick up the torch I'm excited that MTGO did well enough to justify getting a coverage reporter.  When I speak about MTGO getting more and more attention, this is the type of thing to which I am referring.  Coverage, special events, PTQ's.  All are huge indicators that MTGO really IS the future of Magic.

October -
MTGO Community Cup Announced -
Speaking of 'special event's, here's a great one.  I've expounded on how awesome this was and how privileged I feel to was chosen to attend.  I wont bore you all with it again, but it's on the list for its significance to MTGO in general.

Millibots get shut down -
This is a recent event, but it's an important one for the year of 2009 because it signifies the public acknowledgment that there are third party clients that have connected to the MTGO server.  According to the bot creator and WotC the actual game state, collection state, etc are not available via a third party client which was good to hear.  However, it's still opens a lot of concerns for some players about account security, server configurations, and all that.

November -
Community Cup held in Renton -
Great times, great fun, great idea and great execution.  Next time I hope the contestants get to stay a bit longer and have some fun around town.  It felt very 'jam packed' as it was.  Great, but over way too fast.

December -
MOCS '10 Announced - way bigger than MOCS '09
How much bigger?  About $65,000 bigger.  MOCS09 had a $35,000 pool.  MOCS10 will have $100,000.  Also, it will award some saucy promos... like Yawgmoth's Will for season 1! Yeah baby!  I'm very stoked for this year's events.  I'm already gearing up for playing and utilizing the formats for fun and profit.  Extended will be the first and it will piggyback onto the PTQ season for San Juan, so look out for rocking Extended prizes

... I may have missed a few things, it's always hard to catch EVERYTHING from a year.  For the most part I think I got a lot of the major items.  Looking back, it was a pretty busy year with lots of strides made in regards to MTGO's constructed events and constructed health.

Discussion Items:
No NIX TIX this Holiday Sesason -
The time honored tradition of Nix Tix has been changed this year and instead, we're getting a lot, LOT of constructed bonuses.  If you're toying with the idea of participating in Constructed... there's no better time than right now!

Oath of Druids to become #2?
Some thoughts and speculation about how high (Oath of Druids) will go, and what will take the #2 price slot behind Force of Will

Holiday Wishes Thread -
Get a free alternate art avatar for posting in the above thread!  Not much more to say about that, I guess.

Time Spiral Bonus Redemption Frustrations -
There is no good news in this thread... I'm still in awe of how badly this situation was handled.  Lots of frustrations all around.  I really only have hope that WotC will step in and do something... anything... to make this right for the people that got hosed by it.

If you didn't get a Momir... -
You're not alone...  there are links in the above thread for posting a complaint to WotC to get your Momir avatar.  Remember, the MomirBasic tournament is coming up soon!

Card Price Discussion:
Sphinx of the Steel wind has proven to be a really important card lately as a very difficult to answer card by the best decks in the format, once it hits play (of where there are numerous manners).  A great finisher for the Standard format.  Mono-red is a solid deck in Standard right now, and as such, some of its imporant cards have decided to jump up in price.  Cards like Earthquake, Hellspark Elemental and Obsidian Fireheart are amongst that list.  For Block Sorin Markhov has often been the dealbreaker in the mirror matches and, being a Mythic rare, his price moves at lot more than most would.  Felidar Sovereign has the coolest chart I recall seeing in a long time.. up down up down up down... really amazing to see that guy move around so much.  

The inexplicable movements where the massive dropping of the Classic only cards.  While I understand the dropping of the MED2 duals (they were speculated to sky high prices), but others didn't really have that same fate, and yet, are dropping.  I will say that it's about time that the price of Vindicate dropped as it can be replaced in many ways by Maelstrom Pulse.   Also, many of the lesser used Exodus cards (or the ones that have simulacrum or replacement) have already fallen in price.  Meanwhile, (Oath of Druids) has gone up quite a bit.  Overall though, Exodus lost ground this week, which is pretty interesting.

Card Price Graphs:

sphinx of the steel wind chart
oath of druids chart
stomping ground chart
tarmogoyf chart
sorin markov chart
chalice of the void chart
felidar sovereign chart
obsidian fireheart chart
earthquake chart
hallowed fountain chart
hellspark elemental chart
sphinx of lost truths chart
sphinx of the steel wind chart
obsidian fireheart chart
finest hour chart
felidar sovereign chart
blood moon chart
mindbreak trap chart
essence sliver chart
chalice of the void chart
taiga chart
abeyance chart
tundra chart
earthcraft chart
mind over matter chart
badlands chart
mox diamond chart
vindicate chart
arcbound ravager chart
price of progress chart
volrath's dungeon chart
oath of scholars chart
skyshroud elite chart
price of progress chart
mindless automaton chart
mind over matter chart
wall of nets chart
convalescence chart
workhorse chart
dominating licid chart

Card Price Charts:

Tournaments:
You can see my last week's table breakdown here, instead of repeating that I think this space is better served by showing off the new MOCS season information!  First of all, the announcements is here.  But what does this mean?  Let's break it down!

First of all, read the following:
'Playing on another person's account, selling your account, etc. are all violations of the Terms of Service. If you play in these championships, win, and expect to get your prize, be very, very sure you are on your own account. We do not recognize "I and a friend jointly own the account," "It's my brother's account but he gave it to me," or similar. The only exception is an adult may authorize a single dependent child age 13-18 to play on an account that adult has purchased."

No if's and's or but's about it.  Your account is your account.  Anyone else on it risks losing it and being disqualified.  Don't do it, just do your own playing and if your brother/friend/alien roommate needs an account... buy one for them with their own information.

Next up, they are changing the point structure a bit, it will now be as follows:

Next up, the Qualifier Point structure -

Another important item is the schedule (Season one promo is Yawgmoth's Freakin' Will!):

And of course, what's the end result of winning these season championships?

Mmmhhmmmm... that's some sweetness right there.  25k for the winner is an awesome prize, even 9th through 12th is going to more than pay for the trip to Worlds in Japan. 

Conclusion:
Hopefully by next week I'll have something special for you all.  I can't go into specifics yet, but I hope you all will find it as interesting as I did... until then, be safe and enjoy some MTGO!

"NASH OUT!!!!"