Which is Bigger - Paper Magic or Magic Online?

Everyone likes to think they are in the majority - or at least in the upper half.  It's the Lake Wobegon "all our children are above average" thing.  The question is are we Magic Online players significant?  Well, okay, we are, and Magic Online is a big profit center for Wizards.  That's a given.  The real question is how significant?  Arguing and posturing does nothing - let's look at some statistics.

Ideally, what we want is a count of the number of players active online, verses the number of players playing paper Magic.  That should really include casual players, but counting them is just not feasible.  While it is possible to count the number of players who play in the casual and mulitplayer rooms online, it is not possible to count those that play paper Magic around kitchen tables, in dorm rooms or in high school cafeterias.  The best we can do is estimate.  The total number of players is some multiple of the number of tournament players, and it is easier to count tournament players. 

Well, sort of.

Wizards provides rankings for all paper Magic players, in each of a number of formats.  You can check your ratings at wizards.com, but you need to log in using your DCI number.  Using my number,  I find that I have a rating in these formats:  Constructed, Eternal, Limited, Team Limited - Trios, Total and Two Headed Giant Constructed.  Wizards probably provides ratings for other formats, in which I have not played a sanctioned tournament recently, but my list at least gives you the idea.  More importantly, for each format, I can see not only my rating, but the ratings of all other active players.  Players are listed in order - for example, I am tied with about 200 other players for 16,142nd place in Constructed. (Sounds pretty sad, doesn't it - but that does put me in the top 5% in the world.  Yes, that's foreshadowing something about the numbers.) 

Back on point:  I can move up and down the list and see that the number one rated Constructed player in the world is - Wow!  way to go Gau! - from my local store.  More importantly, I can scroll down the list to find out that the very lowest rated player ... is not.  He's in 205,331st place, and from Germany. 

The important number is 205,331.  That is the total number of Magic players "actively" playing sanctioned Constructed tournaments.  However, active is a relative term.  If you don't play any sanctioned matches for a period of time - two years, if I recall correctly - then Wizards takes you off the list.   Even with that caveat, the number of active players is still relevant.  The vast majority of those on the list are currently playing in tournaments at least occasionally.  Let's look at the number of active players, by format, for paper Magic.

Yes, total is a lot higher than any single format, but it is not equal to the sum of all formats.  That is because some players play only in tournaments with certain formats - e.g. players that only play Standard, or only draft - while others play in any formats when they can.  Those players show up in each format's total, but only once in the Total.  

 Now let's compare that with Online. 

Yeah, that's a problem.  Wizards does not publish online ratings, either individual or total.   They do not release the total number of MTGO players that play tournaments, either.. 

We can approach this another way.  We can look at the total number of online events - and compare that to the total number of paper events.  Online tournaments are all numbered - and apparently numbered sequentially.  As I write this, tournament number 1505904 has just launched.   That would indicate roughly 1.5 million online tournaments have launched.  I think that is since MTGO began, but I'm not completely sure.  Algona would know, but I'm too lazy to email him.

For comparison, the last event I sanctioned, earlier this month, had this sanctioning number: 10-08-2460874.   However, that number is not sequential.  It has both the date and a check sum built in.  Once again, paper and online are not directly comparable.  

Let's look at this one more way:  let's try to identify the number of unique tournament players on MTGO, in various formats, and see if we can find a comparable number for paper.

I started by listing all the players in all the sanctioned premier and daily events for a given week online.  I used the week of July 7th through 13th.  For each event, I entered every player in the event, as shown in the standings, into a spreadsheet.  Then I sorted the spreadsheet by  player and counted unique names.  Since every set of standings is on a different web page, this took a ton of clicking and copying and pasting and reformatting to produce the sortable lists.  I did this for Standard, and then for Legacy.  It took hours.  Here are the results:

Let me explain how these number are calculated in a bit more detail.  

Let's assume we have three Legacy events, each with 16 players.   Five players play in all three events.  Nine players play in two events each.  That leaves 15 players playing in just one event.  The result would be 3 events, 29 unique players and 48 total players.  

To the above totals, we have to add the players in the two and eight man queues to PE and DE totals.  I chose some random hours during the week, counted events and I got these results.  I am not completely sure how typical they are - the numbers vary all over the place, and the queues appear much more popular on weekends and after school/work hours in the US (which is also nighttime in Europe), butI did my best to count at different times, and weight accordingly.  The number of unique players in these events is even harder to estimate, since I could not list all the players in all the queues, then sort to find repeats.  Well, I could have listed them all, but "can" is not the same as "want too."  Not when I could draft, instead.

It is really hard to estimate the number of unique players per week.  I suspect I am being generous - my estimates are high.  When I play two mans, or start drafting seriously, I often play in a dozen or more events in a week, and I am not a hard core player.  If everyone played just ten events per week, the the number of unique Standard players is under 2,000.  It is also hard to estimate how many of the players in the Daily and PE events also play in the 2 and 8 man queues, and thus should not be considered unique.

Let's take the best case scenario, and add the numbers of unique players in the 2 man queues, the 8 man queues, the dailies and the PEs - in effect, pretending that there is no overlap.  That's ridiculous, of course, I'm building a best-case scenario. With those favorable assumptions, we get around 5,000 unique players playing sanctioned Standard matches online in a given week.

We don't have directly comparable numbers.  Wizards does not announce the number of sanctioned paper matches, by format, or even total for all formats.  However, we did get one number, recently.  In the podcast "Judgecast,"  Toby Elliot was making a point about the relative numbers of events run at Competitive and Professional Rules Enforcement Level (REL), verses the numbers run at Regular (a/k/a casual) REL.  The later is much, much bigger.  

The number Toby used was for a "dead" format - one that will never again be played at Pro Tours, GPs or PTQs: Two-Headed Giant Constructed.  He was pointing out that, although judges rarely dealt with the format, it was still being played.  It is nowhere close to Standard or draft in popularity - participation in those formats is probably orders of magnitude higher - but he only gave numbers for the 2HG format. 

The number:  30,000 sanctioned events per year.  That equates to 575 sanctioned events per week.  Since most stores run such events once a week, that means that the weekly numbers are nearly all unique players - and since the minimum sanctionable number for 2HG is four teams - eight players - we can assume a minimum of 4,500 unique players per week.   The actual number is almost certainly much higher:  The week before GenCon, I ran a constructed 2HG tournament at my local store and got 43 players.  43 >> 8.

In short, it looks like Magic's most popular constructed format is attracting about the same number of players as paper Magic's least popular format.

Sure, there are a lot of assumptions going into the above.  I would also love to have data on drafts, which are clearly the most popular tournament type in both paper and online Magic.  All I can say is that the numbers in both cases are huge.  I live near Madison, Wi, and we have three stores running FNM drafts.  Last night I played at Pegasus, where we had 30 players.  The other stores were at least comparable.  That's 100 or so unique drafters in a city of a quarter million or so. Madison may not be typical - you certainly cannot say Madison is x% of the world's population, so just gross up the Madison numbers - but it is not that atypical.  FNM drafts happen all over the place.

MTGO drafts are also very, very common, and not just on Friday nights.  I have done some counting, and I get an average of about 40 drafts firing per hour.  Even with a favorable assumption -  fifty drafts per hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week - that means  8,400 drafts per week.  That's 67,000+ players in a draft, but a lot of those are repeat players.  I have played a couple dozen drafts in a MTGO heavy week, and at least a couple drafts most weeks.  Again, with a best case scenario taht almost certainly overestimates the numbers, we get 32,000 unique MTGO drafters per week.  Just 320 Madisons around the world - and there are probably more like 3,200 such areas - means that FNM has more drafters than MTGO.  And counting just FNM does not count all the other drafts at stores, around kitchen tables, all the 3 on 3 team drafts, all the money drafts etc. etc., that happen every week.  We fired 320 drafts at GenCon, and generally fire at least a couple at most PTQs and so forth.  Drafts happen all the time, and not just on MTGO.

Paper drafts outnumber MTGO drafts by quite a bit.  I would estimate by an order of magnitude, and maybe more.

One last way of looking at this:  I have heard MTGO players talking about how strong their format is, based on being able to get Daily Events to consistently fire.   That's good, but Legacy events often fire with 16-25 players - and there are over 30,000 active Eternal format paper players worldwide.  Thirty thousand active players in Vintage and Legacy, and you can get two dozen together pulling from the entire world?  Sorry, but I got twice that number for a Vintage 2HG on a Thursday night last week, and I have maybe a half million people within feasible driving distance.  Half a million >>> the whole world.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying  that MTGO is unimportant.  It is certainly important.  Wizards brings a bunch of equipment - computers, monitors, network equipment, people, etc. - to places like GenCon and Pro Tours specifically to promote MTGO.  At GenCon, they gave out cool wristbands with built-in USB drives - and the USB drives came preloaded with the MTGO launch code.  They would not do that if it was not profitable.  MTGO clearly makes money, and makes more money than Wizards spends supporting it.  (The costs of running MTGO, however, are not insignificant.  MTGO is certainly not "a license to print money," but that's another article.) 

The point of this article is that MTGO is not all that large compared to paper Magic.

Over time, I have heard a lot of MTGO players complaining that Wizards spends more on paper Magic than on MTGO, and that paper Magic gets better support.  Well, yes, they do, and paper does.  And should.

Okay, flame away! 

PRJ

"one million words" on MTGO