I already knew most of the stuff but didn't know about the Weekend challenges as I've never tried them.

Also it's easy to sell ZZZ for 12 if you are not in a hurry as the prices fluctuate a bit and sometimes the bots are selling ZZZ for 11.97. If you put ZZZ for sale for 12 at that time some people will buy from you because 0.03 is almost irrelevant and that way they're supporting the humans.

About the prizes I think that all the prizes (except for draft and sealeds) should be awarded in a booster X which you could choose to be any booster (except the out of print ones). Something like that would certainlly improve the playability of some formats. For limited it obviously makes sense rewards of the same kind.

Also improving 4-3-2-2 to 5-3-2-2 would also be a good improvement.

I sent you an email telling youd Id not be in this week lol. Guess I should have sent it to Flippers instead. Hopefully I too will be back in time for next week's PRE.

thanks again for that Flippers. Now if all goes smoothly this week I will be back for this saturday's event.

i liked the article very much, it was a nice change of pace for the site and something that people need to know even if they dont know they needf to know it.

as for combined classic pack pay outs. This is a grand idea in theory and as long as the packs are not being sold in the store it makes a lot of sence, unfortunatly there is always at least 1 classic set on sale in the online store so that puts a kybosh on wotc's bottom line. also what if i want to just open a pack? if its a classic pack to i get a random set? or do i get to pick which set i would open a pack from? I think that it would be a no go for both of these reasons, what wotc should do to help alleviate the price drop of me3 and tempest block is stagger the prizes on a weekly basis, ie. week 1 what ever is the currant core set, week 2 the currant med set, week 3 the current block , week 4 the current classic block ie tempest/stronghold/exodus all these would be for classic based prizes. What may happen is that on weeks 2 and 4 the events dont fire because no one wants packs worth less then 3.5, this is fine because it will show wotc that they deffenatly need to change the pay out. staggering the payout could also help raise the price of indivdual classic packs as well since there only being given out 1 week in every 4 instaed of every week. Or what i would personally enjoy is a split payout. lets say for instance you go 3-1 in a classic daily, currently you would get 6x me3, how about 3x me3 and 3x m10??

just my thoughts

Nice Articles. The videos in particular are a very very nice addition to the articles !

One thing I noticed that you should probably start doing is cracking your fetchlands before you draw when you no longer need land. There were quite a few times in the videos where you had more than enough lands in play/hand and then cracked your fetch on your turn after drawing your card. Filtering out extra lands is one of the best things about fetchlands and while it only helps you slightly it is these types of plays that add up in the long run. Just something to consider.

I love these articles. nice work. I wanna buy turbofog but its an investment. How do i get my screen to look like that?

Parade canceled due heavy torrential downpours and hail stones the size of Chicago. News at 11! (You made some of my points in far more detail and with much greater scope than I bothered to imagine. One small quibble about the packets accomplice. That seems easily preventable (and a pain to accomplish) assuming the player are using closed systems to log on to Modo. Nice response.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but I don't think we'll ever see the Pro Tour events moving to Magic Online, nor should we. Even if they could overcome the huge logistical issues and the expense (think about transporting or leasing locally over 1000 computers and displays for the biggest Grand Prix events!), and in spite of the fact that it'd resolve rules enforcement issues mostly (I don't know what they'd do with judge calls involving a bugged card!) & allow them the option to use chess clocks to remove intentional draws, and rounds wouldn't go late much.

1) The dramatic appeal of the game is lessened. I read the coverage about the finalists sitting with two LCD monitors between them, actually chatting through their keyboards, just briefly leaning around the monitors before the game started to smile at each other and wish each other luck! I was at Pro Tour Austin, and I got to watch pros like Paulo Vitor Damo de Rosa and Brian Kibler face down their opponents. Looking at each other for any hint in facial expression or body language to help them guess if the other guy has that critical card in hand, or not. The delicate "thwip" of card sleeve corners slapping lightly down against the table when a card is played. The human drama of mano a mano competition. Lessening the face to face interaction would be very bad for the event.

2) Wizards spends a few million dollars a year on this event for one reason, and one reason only. Marketing. Making the latest cards that form tournament winning decks seem "cool" or "powerful", or even "they seem like they might let ME have a chance at winning one of those awesome tournaments" makes people buy more boosters. A LOT more boosters. Also singles, which forces somebody, somewhere upstream of the singles-buyer to have bought some boosters so that single was even available to re-sell. The way it is now, the sales boosts also carry over to Magic Online. If the Pro Tour was held on MTGO, it would clearly still boost sales of boosters on MTGO - but would it continue to boost sales of the physical cards as much as it does now? Or would it fail to make the actual physical cards seem quite as cool, and only function highly effectively as marketing for the virtual cards? If you're WoTC with millions of dollars in sales at stake, do you want to take that huge gamble with one of your top marketing tools when it's working well as-is?

3) Paper events have problems like theft and cheating, but they're manageable & account for an acceptably small percentage of the total number of players, matches, etc. Imagine the things that can go wrong with a network of 400 computers - or 1200+. Windows crashes. Network outages affecting a large subset of the PCs on site - that could make a round go a LOT later than a control on control mirror dragging through its 5 extra turns. And now, the cheaters have a whole new world of evil opportunities opened to them, to replace the ones taken away. If you have an accomplice who's skilled at hacking, you can sit there behaving perfectly, following every rule, while the other guy with no obvious ties to you floods your opponent's PC with packets to lag him. Or makes his MTGO crash, which it tends to do on its own sometimes anyway, losing him precious minutes from his clock. Or installs a trojan that lets him make one "misclick" happen at a critical juncture.

4) The infrastructure isn't mature and solid enough to put that many additional players on the production server, it strains at the seams still every time there's a release event and has problems with lag, events crashing/freezing, etc. Plus you'd be at the mercy of the internet link between the event site and the rest of the world not going out or lagging (or running short on bandwidth). So you'd have to set up another MTGO server cluster, and transport it with you to the event site. Even then, if you commit to that additional expense (and server admin and network admin manpower had better be on site with it!), I'm not convinced that the current system can reliably execute an event of this scale every time with no game freezes, crashes, bugs, etc. If something goes wrong with paper cards, there's almost never anything a judge can't resolve in a way that allows the game to complete without holding up the next round start time by half an hour or an hour. Short of the cards actually bursting into flame. Cards do not crash. (Ok, maybe if The Flash played he might windmill-slam his bomb rare onto the table fast enough to make it burst into flame from friction of the card against the atmosphere. But if he isn't at a given tournament you're good to go.)

5) Paper-only players would be at a bit of a disadvantage against MTGO players. This is the most minor of concerns on the list and would evaporate over time.

6) Paper-only players at constructed events would see their investment in paper cards to enable them to do well at tournaments shrivel up and vanish. Players of both formats like me would still see situations like "I have 4 Reveillarks in paper for my deck I wanted to play this time, but only 1 Reveillark on MTGO, I have to switch deck choices or buy more cards". The only alternative here is to create special temporary accounts and put everyone through a paper deck registration and copying onto MTGO process that would be a HUGE logistical nightmare for the judges and make tournaments take a lot longer to start. This is a problem with standard, but an even bigger problem in Extended and Legacy (the entire Legacy cardpool isn't even available, so they'd probably do Classic instead I guess). Alternatively, if you let people use their MTGO collections (which you'd have to), you have to copy the entire database over from the production servers before starting the event, and then listen to people who didn't read the fine print whine as the cards they got 3 hours before the event aren't available to them because the dump was done a couple days ago in Washington before the servers were packed up to fly to Thailand.

7) Cards are not currently available in Japanese, Spanish, Italian, German, or any other language, putting non-English speakers at a huge disadvantage, and those whose english is marginal at some disadvantage too. It's one thing to have to call a judge sometimes to give you the translation of your opponent's card. It's quite another when you can't have any of your OWN cards printed in your native language, especially in draft/sealed tournament rounds!

8) Magic already has problems being as "spectator-worthy" an event as we would all like it to be. It got onto ESPN-2 briefly, then disappeared for being unable to attract a large enough audience for television. At our current level, we do get coverage on the web and even some videos and a live webcast of the finals. If we make it less "spectatable", we'll have even less to read and watch. Short of moving all Magic to Korea where they love to watch Starcraft tournaments on television, I think this is a bad move. Would Gabriel Nassif's "called shot" of Cruel Ultimatum been as "cool" or "fun to watch" on MTGO? Yes, we could potentially make game replays available, making it nicer for the ultra-hard-core gamer nerds. But I think you lose more for the non-hardcore majority of the human race than you gain for that minority, there. (Live viewing of games over the net as opposed to just replays opens up a LOT of cheating possibilities, tips could go to a player over a cellphone text message, an earphone, etc.)

9) Side events would almost certainly still be run in paper. I think that's just better in a lot of ways - if you propose moving side events to MTGO then there'd be a whole separate list of problems with THAT, plus your expense and infrastructure problems go up.

There's probably more reasons I'm not thinking of at the moment. The number of venues to choose from that have adequate support infrastructure goes down limiting choices of locations, in Chicago you can't even plug in a power plug but have to pay expensive unionized guys to plug in stuff for you, in some foreign countries you need 1000+ power adaptors because the electrical plugs are different, etc. etc. But moving the drama of a live event into a less dramatic and exciting form just strikes me as the wrong move, even though there's advantages to go with the disadvantages. You're also focusing on solving a problem that's comparatively small with a very large change. If cheating were epidemic, it'd be more worth considering drastic measures. As it stands now, I think the best solution is what they've been doing for years - continued refinement of judging policies and practices, and of the tournament rules. If there ever comes a time when that approach can't "get 'er done" I'd reconsider, but I hope that day never comes. Right now I think the judge system is mostly a success, with few enough problems "leaking through the cracks" that the events are pretty successful, fun, etc. If it ain't broke, don't fix it?

I agree in part with this except that I think Gindy's case is only somewhat clarified by what we do know. He made a comment about the state after it was too late to rectify it. Now to me that implies he was either confused about the state or knew but thought hed get by with an aside. "Oh by the way..." I do know that competition does funny things to people and in such situations people can be very illogical and irrational when that is not their normal behavior. In Gindy's case as I initially said in another post, I can't believe a non-rookie pro made a goof that big and so publicly. But he did. Either by intentionally cheating and then getting caught or by unintentionally cheating and not realizing his position. I think fraud is a pretty harsh charge but I understand the reason behind it. Just as Dave Williams and others have been given equally harsh punishments in past Worlds events. The pros are held to a higher standard because they are in the public eye. It isn't really up to us judge them as moral/immoral, cheaters/righteous guys, but to know that stuff exists.

Cheaters, liars, thieves do exist and we need to protect ourselves against them and also to recognize that some people just make mistakes. And that is where I agree with you on the subject of digitalizing big events. On the other hand we can't really hold people to a higher standard if there is no standard to be held. Which means the Pro Tour becomes less meaningful as a role-model display if we take away the possibility of wrong doing and mistakes. It makes a less epic tale when Jon Finkel beats an irate Mike Long. Well that's my pov. I can see how WotC would rather keep the status quo and the potential for epicness than to sanitize things and at the same time lose some of the glory.

And so you're saying you prefer a format where honest players like Wise get penalized with a game loss because of clumsy fingers, to one that would prevent him from making the mistake in the first place? Do you also prefer a format where people cheat and get away with it? Because that's what you're doing, unless we are pretending that every infraction is always caught.

This is at heart an age-old issue and the logic has always been clear: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It's naieve to say "well if everyone's good there's no problem." Do you never lock anything based on that principle? Doubtful. You can punish or you can prevent, but you can't perfect humanity through force of will.

And a system based on punishment rather than prevention will result in false punishments as well as false misses, because the judges are just as human as the players. To DQ Gindy you have to rule out many possibilities - including the actual gamestate - inside the head of someone who was, by definiton, confused. He _knew_ the ability wasn't optional (which it's not) AND _knew_ 2 damage wasn't dealt to the 3/3 (which it actually was) and we're completely certain of this? Am I the only one without those mind-reading powers?

But this is larger than Gindy. Think about everything at a PT that detracts from the actual game:

Drawing extra cards, allowed or not, caught or not. Triggers missed intentionally or unintentionally. Deck registration. Draft marking. Draft peeking. Cheating in deck registration. Making honest errors in deck registration. Having the cheating or errors of deck reg come to you via deck swap. Starting play early or late. Stalling for draws (intentionally or unintentionally). Getting slow play warnings for thinking. Flipping up cards during shuffling. Shuffling in an opponent's card. Shuffling badly (int or un). Shuffling period. Forgetting to de-sideboard. Misunderstanding cards. Misunderstanding game rules. Bad judge rulings. Unclear game states. Sloppy announcements. Out-of-order plays. Misreported results. Mis-entered results. Oh and flawed/delayed/missing coverage for those of us not playing.

I don't think saying "be good" will eliminate all that. Call me a pessimist.

Now playing online brings its own issues. And I think you do lose a lot when you can't see the opponent to read expressions or bluff your own. (Hammy's Community Cup trick only works so well.) We don't need the full range of currently-possible maneuvers. I'd be fine if Chapin's "all my legal targets" trick wasn't possible anymore. But stuff like holding your hand over a plains to bluff Path, whether it works or not, is a valid part of the game and hard to do online. I think that's probably themost compelling reason not to move off paper.

But as that list should demonstrate, there's a lot to be gained by trying.