:- wotc hires judges, for cards and some (smaller) amounts of money here and there, pays hotel for them (often), etc.
This is incorrect. Judges are hired and paid by the company that organizes the tournament they are working in, not WotC itself. Star city chooses and pays the judges for their events, as do all the rest. The only events WotC directly runs and staffs are the 4 pro tour events and Worlds.
This is not meant as direct continuation of the above;
- wotc makes cards and rules, and wpn.
- wotc makes dci (a department of wotc).
- wotc hires judges, for cards and some (smaller) amounts of money here and there, pays hotel for them (often), etc.
- Elliott is the HJ of the mtg world (probably were different one earlier, and before that, etc)
- when rules discussions come up, the more you press it, you eventually will be directed to Mr Elliott. Who is Elliott ? He is a volunteer us citizen, he can resign any moment and no player (or even wotc) can sue him for anything game related.
DCI or WotC this or that, the players last appeal possibility is something that can just resign from it all. This is how WotC runs their business, and I do not believe people understand what impact this has on how the mtg(-tournament) life is.
1: they make something.
2: they write the words for it.
3: They get the money for the product.
4: they let OTHER people interpret those words and (have them take the blame if they are wrong).
The disconnect is absurd.
(Possible) context ?; The judge lawsuit against wotc in California.
That judges are tired of;
- players that complain in social media and whatnot and are horribly wrong about it.
- getting multi-interpretable rules from wotc in front of every prerelease.
- not getting paid enough.
- other judges that interpret things wrongly.
- players that complain and are right.
I disagree that WOTC is greedy. Sure they are a business, and a business only has one reason to exist, that being profit, but they are too good to the community, they gave a lot of money to Christopher Rush's family after his passing. They are active with Extra Life. They have been active with Child's Play in the past. I cannot recall how many times I have seen them send product to a small child, or a solider, or a school club. To say that WotC is motivated by greed or communicates with greed only in mind I feel is not correct.
Of course it helps when your parent company is named one of the most Ethical companies. Also one of the 100 best corporate citizens.
With Impact Tremors being (standard) pauper-legal, I've had success using the tokens as 'direct-damage.' If they stay around long enough to actually attack or block, it's a boon. Obviously, this places the 'mono-white' deck into a Boros shell, but I think the payoff works well, especially with Collateral Damage. Just my $0.03 (adjusted for inflation). Would be happy to see this deck evolve, with rationale into card choices. Moreso, a weekly (or semi-regular) check-in to see the matchup reports of matches played, outcome, etc. With the new 1 drop, 2-toughness common that nods to card drawing options, I'd like to see where it goes.
When you are as greedy as wotc is you cant run a conversation that is predictable (like always take first and then give something lesser back just after), you have to become absurd so that the communication itself is extremely hard to approach in general.
Compare this to the Comp Rules, that's where they learnt this.
I also disagree with this, but not nearly as much as I think I do. I think WOTC is good at communication in terms of hey, they have something to say that could be good for the game, but they are not good at full information, or letting their communication be overcome by noise.
For instance, the first time Modern was dropped as a Pro Tour format, they left out that the Standard rotation was going to be changed. Had they included that key bit of information, there still would have been outrage (because there is always going to be outrage), but it would have been more palpable. People I think were rightly incensed that Standard was going to be the main format, because Standard at the time had been easily solved and grew stale quickly. Had we been given this bit of information I think the narrative is able to change about how cool Standard will be on a faster rotation schedule.
Their communication in regards to the Platinum changes I think is one overcome by noise. I don't mean that they were hard to understand, what I mean by noise is why would they be making this change so close to the end of the season, when everyone that was grinding for platinum has already spent so many resources to make that costly grind based on what was promoted already. The noise here was because of the timing of the announcement. Had it been before this past season, or the timing not been effective at the next pro tour, I don't think #paythepros overshadows the documentary release or dominates twitter.
What I will give them credit for is mastering the art of the walkback communication. They've had to go back on PWP invites to the Pro Tour, the Modern Tour getting cut, the platinum changes. They are granted, very good at product announcements, but public relations is much more than that.
I don't agree with your point of view. Occam's razor shows me a different, less complicated scenario than everyone at WoTC conspiring to rip off and bamboozle their customers (us.)
While I empathize with the feeling of betrayal that comes with each heavy silence (tribal wars filter gone without response to the community who fought for them to keep it) or miscommunicated missive like "We are cutting Pros appearance fees...", I recognize that in the adult world compromises are made in order to get things done.
It is more likely that whomever was given the directive to change how the marketing budget is allocated simply didn't do their due diligence and didn't ask those who would know what the consequences would be and then gave a poorly worded order to do x and y and then left it to the proper departments to take care of the details.
If they handled it properly in terms of communication (give enough time so that this year's crop of platinum grinders still got paid for example), whatever their ulterior motives might be, there would be NO outcries at all. (This is a game after all where a large portion of the player base practically screams at them to take their money.)
Instead because it was done without warning and with no finesse, they got the backlash their poor communication deserved. #paythepros suddenly trending very heavily.
Of course corporate greed is always a danger with corporations (because they exist to make money for their shareholders) And certainly within the context of Wizards there will always be tension between making enough money to support all the programs and products they want to support and making enough to justify their ongoing corporate existence to the shareholders (Hasbro).
I think it is far too easy to just assign a monolithic motive to this faceless entity that makes the cards we love but in order to better understand the reason why this keeps happening we need to gaze behind the curtain and understand the fact that this is a company made up of individuals (people in fact) who may have conflicting and sometimes contradictory goals/job descriptions/functions.
To be fair I don't think we should let them off easy because of the screwed up nature of their corporate culture. I think it high time WOTC gets their crap together and starts showing us (the players) more respect by giving us better communiques and by listening to us preemptively instead of just when we yell really loudly. And they need to be more open about what it is they need and want from the player base. (As they were with the Modern off the pro tour circuit article.)
Communication is a two way street after all. If one avenue is shut off or dysfunctional then it isn't working properly at all and that could lead to problems that snowball out of control.
I enjoyed it, too! Although, maybe next time do not record the audio next to a flowing river. :P
I don't exactly get why you chose not to attack with Ormendahl in game 1 of the last match. He only had a Crow he could block with, and every turn it would net you 8-9 life, and his Wurm was not big enough to kill you yet at that point.
Real annoyed at my own play today, punting two games. 1) I had a Divining Top with an Abrupt Decay in top 3, with only 2 mana untapped and no reason not to leave that on top - I lost to triple hasted creatures. 2) I had a 20/20 in play as my only creature with three lands in hand; I played a scry 1 land and bricked. I lost to a miracle topdeck sac effect (Consuming Vapors, and he gained 20 life to boot). Had I played more to his outs, I should have played the fetchland so I could have grabbed Dryad Arbor for fodder.
Even without a Pro Tour, Modern is still what I consider the best, most enjoyable format. I do admit, I was a slightly surprised at the trolls attitude. I even re-read what I wrote to make sure I wasn't just bashing different views. Since, even upon re-reading, I didn't feel that way, and it read to me like I was stating simple facts and expressing astonishment at the current situation, it was easy to simply ignore him.
Still, looking forward to many years of continued Modern hate. :)
What if WoTC simply raised the price of packs by $1? Selling packs seems like their main revenue-maker. Going up 20% would seem to make a big difference to their bottom line. And adults and kids (who get money from their folks) alike could probably stomach that, especially if it meant better events, better tourneys, and better MTGO. (All that is assuming Wizards plowed the money back into improving the world and business of Magic.)
I stand corrected then. I recall what I explained as the official answer years ago when this came up but *shrugs* old man and unreliable memory + not too bright, clearly.
Not to mention there are two creatures that start with negative power, namely Char-Rumbler and Spinal Parasite. Damage which is less than zero is treated as zero, but power that is less than zero isn't.
"This means that not only does it deal 0 damage but spells that compare power see it as 0 not negative."
No, it uses the negative number. If, for example, you cast Tragic slip with morbid on a Wild Beastmaster with it's trigger on the stack, your opponent's whole team is going to have a bad day.
Javascript DOES get stripped out. Which is highly inconvenient and annoying but the guy who runs the backend likes it that way. (I suspect it avoids some security issues, namely injections.) But CSS does work if you add it in a tab at the beginning of the document in text mode (the RTF editor will surround it with P markers but that doesn't matter as long as the <script> tag is properly formed. (Don't forget to close it.)
As an alternative to hide/show scripting you can link offsite too.
I did use the image converter from that site, but I modified the size values (in the stylesheet) to make the cards full size for readability. For the next draft I post I'll definitely make use of the hidden section to make the article more manageable for folks who might not be interested in that part.
Yes and in paper magic you still keep track of the negatives so that the math works that way too. But for PRACTICAL purposes the power =0. This means that not only does it deal 0 damage but spells that compare power see it as 0 not negative.
it can be reduced to a negative on MTGO & happens all the time. the negative numbers are necessary to properly account for further modifications--for example, if you put a +1/+1 counter on a creature that is -2/7, it becomes -1/8, not 1/8. if you cast giant growth on a -2/7 it becomes 1/10, not 3/10. is this not true in paper?
(it's true that a creature does 0 *damage* regardless of whether it has 0 or negative power, but you absolutely see negative numbers on power all the time on MTGO, precisely for the reason I give above).
Great article Carl. It seems that the changes to the pro tour schedule haven't done anything to slow down our resident Modern format authors like yourself and Procrastination. I am glad to see that. By the way I, too am a dyed in the wool liberal even though I am registered Independent. And I too, am not one of the brick-throwing ne'er-do-wells the facebook troll was referring to mistakenly as a Liberal. But I totally get behind format hate. Sometimes you just have to bring the LD to stop the worst nonsense.
As per usual Pete, your wisdom strikes to the heart of the matter. Wizards are absolutely terrible at communication. It is a skillset that is only slightly better than their ability to create and maintain a happy player experience on MTGO. And I think the two problems are interrelated. They post stuff on tumblr, twitter, and facebook in order to be "with the millenials" but miss a good portion of their player base entirely when they had a perfectly usable home base in their own site until they deliberately and with malice aforethought wrecked it. (Killed it.)
As you said like thunderbolts out of the blue. That is usually what I mean when I say a decision (any really) that they made seems draconian. No warning, no believable or palatable explanation and then later when (if) the decision is detracted a sense of shock that they were wrong. This DOES seem like a pattern relatable in some psychological manner. Like having a drunk uncle who steals the family car, wrecks it, apologizes, almost kills the family pet then manages last minute to save it and finally while in rehab, admits that they never did pay the utility bills that they were given responsibility for. In other words: Dysfunctional. I have felt that WOTC acts in a dysfunctional manner for a long long time now. It grieves me because in some important ways I do see the company as family. Very upsetting, Randy Quaid sort of family.
i know I must be missing something. Bearer of Overwhelming Truths is a 3/2. Jace's Scrutiny gives a creature -4/0. You say "Before damage, you cast Jace’s Scrutiny, making my Bearer a 0/2." Why not -1/2? It doesn't change the answer to your question, just curious what I'm missing.
I'm cracking up trying to get the mental picture of the Cockatrices with their short, stubby wings drawing a long bow with one of their poison-tipped arrows while in a deathgaze. Congrats, again, GL.
:- wotc hires judges, for cards and some (smaller) amounts of money here and there, pays hotel for them (often), etc.
This is incorrect. Judges are hired and paid by the company that organizes the tournament they are working in, not WotC itself. Star city chooses and pays the judges for their events, as do all the rest. The only events WotC directly runs and staffs are the 4 pro tour events and Worlds.
This is not meant as direct continuation of the above;
- wotc makes cards and rules, and wpn.
- wotc makes dci (a department of wotc).
- wotc hires judges, for cards and some (smaller) amounts of money here and there, pays hotel for them (often), etc.
- Elliott is the HJ of the mtg world (probably were different one earlier, and before that, etc)
- when rules discussions come up, the more you press it, you eventually will be directed to Mr Elliott. Who is Elliott ? He is a volunteer us citizen, he can resign any moment and no player (or even wotc) can sue him for anything game related.
DCI or WotC this or that, the players last appeal possibility is something that can just resign from it all. This is how WotC runs their business, and I do not believe people understand what impact this has on how the mtg(-tournament) life is.
1: they make something.
2: they write the words for it.
3: They get the money for the product.
4: they let OTHER people interpret those words and (have them take the blame if they are wrong).
The disconnect is absurd.
(Possible) context ?; The judge lawsuit against wotc in California.
That judges are tired of;
- players that complain in social media and whatnot and are horribly wrong about it.
- getting multi-interpretable rules from wotc in front of every prerelease.
- not getting paid enough.
- other judges that interpret things wrongly.
- players that complain and are right.
I disagree that WOTC is greedy. Sure they are a business, and a business only has one reason to exist, that being profit, but they are too good to the community, they gave a lot of money to Christopher Rush's family after his passing. They are active with Extra Life. They have been active with Child's Play in the past. I cannot recall how many times I have seen them send product to a small child, or a solider, or a school club. To say that WotC is motivated by greed or communicates with greed only in mind I feel is not correct.
Of course it helps when your parent company is named one of the most Ethical companies. Also one of the 100 best corporate citizens.
With Impact Tremors being (standard) pauper-legal, I've had success using the tokens as 'direct-damage.' If they stay around long enough to actually attack or block, it's a boon. Obviously, this places the 'mono-white' deck into a Boros shell, but I think the payoff works well, especially with Collateral Damage. Just my $0.03 (adjusted for inflation). Would be happy to see this deck evolve, with rationale into card choices. Moreso, a weekly (or semi-regular) check-in to see the matchup reports of matches played, outcome, etc. With the new 1 drop, 2-toughness common that nods to card drawing options, I'd like to see where it goes.
When you are as greedy as wotc is you cant run a conversation that is predictable (like always take first and then give something lesser back just after), you have to become absurd so that the communication itself is extremely hard to approach in general.
Compare this to the Comp Rules, that's where they learnt this.
I also disagree with this, but not nearly as much as I think I do. I think WOTC is good at communication in terms of hey, they have something to say that could be good for the game, but they are not good at full information, or letting their communication be overcome by noise.
For instance, the first time Modern was dropped as a Pro Tour format, they left out that the Standard rotation was going to be changed. Had they included that key bit of information, there still would have been outrage (because there is always going to be outrage), but it would have been more palpable. People I think were rightly incensed that Standard was going to be the main format, because Standard at the time had been easily solved and grew stale quickly. Had we been given this bit of information I think the narrative is able to change about how cool Standard will be on a faster rotation schedule.
Their communication in regards to the Platinum changes I think is one overcome by noise. I don't mean that they were hard to understand, what I mean by noise is why would they be making this change so close to the end of the season, when everyone that was grinding for platinum has already spent so many resources to make that costly grind based on what was promoted already. The noise here was because of the timing of the announcement. Had it been before this past season, or the timing not been effective at the next pro tour, I don't think #paythepros overshadows the documentary release or dominates twitter.
What I will give them credit for is mastering the art of the walkback communication. They've had to go back on PWP invites to the Pro Tour, the Modern Tour getting cut, the platinum changes. They are granted, very good at product announcements, but public relations is much more than that.
I don't agree with your point of view. Occam's razor shows me a different, less complicated scenario than everyone at WoTC conspiring to rip off and bamboozle their customers (us.)
While I empathize with the feeling of betrayal that comes with each heavy silence (tribal wars filter gone without response to the community who fought for them to keep it) or miscommunicated missive like "We are cutting Pros appearance fees...", I recognize that in the adult world compromises are made in order to get things done.
It is more likely that whomever was given the directive to change how the marketing budget is allocated simply didn't do their due diligence and didn't ask those who would know what the consequences would be and then gave a poorly worded order to do x and y and then left it to the proper departments to take care of the details.
If they handled it properly in terms of communication (give enough time so that this year's crop of platinum grinders still got paid for example), whatever their ulterior motives might be, there would be NO outcries at all. (This is a game after all where a large portion of the player base practically screams at them to take their money.)
Instead because it was done without warning and with no finesse, they got the backlash their poor communication deserved. #paythepros suddenly trending very heavily.
Of course corporate greed is always a danger with corporations (because they exist to make money for their shareholders) And certainly within the context of Wizards there will always be tension between making enough money to support all the programs and products they want to support and making enough to justify their ongoing corporate existence to the shareholders (Hasbro).
I think it is far too easy to just assign a monolithic motive to this faceless entity that makes the cards we love but in order to better understand the reason why this keeps happening we need to gaze behind the curtain and understand the fact that this is a company made up of individuals (people in fact) who may have conflicting and sometimes contradictory goals/job descriptions/functions.
To be fair I don't think we should let them off easy because of the screwed up nature of their corporate culture. I think it high time WOTC gets their crap together and starts showing us (the players) more respect by giving us better communiques and by listening to us preemptively instead of just when we yell really loudly. And they need to be more open about what it is they need and want from the player base. (As they were with the Modern off the pro tour circuit article.)
Communication is a two way street after all. If one avenue is shut off or dysfunctional then it isn't working properly at all and that could lead to problems that snowball out of control.
WotC isnt terrible at communication, on the contrary they are quite good at it.
This is all about wotc greed and a customer mass that is easy to mislead.
I enjoyed it, too! Although, maybe next time do not record the audio next to a flowing river. :P
I don't exactly get why you chose not to attack with Ormendahl in game 1 of the last match. He only had a Crow he could block with, and every turn it would net you 8-9 life, and his Wurm was not big enough to kill you yet at that point.
Real annoyed at my own play today, punting two games. 1) I had a Divining Top with an Abrupt Decay in top 3, with only 2 mana untapped and no reason not to leave that on top - I lost to triple hasted creatures. 2) I had a 20/20 in play as my only creature with three lands in hand; I played a scry 1 land and bricked. I lost to a miracle topdeck sac effect (Consuming Vapors, and he gained 20 life to boot). Had I played more to his outs, I should have played the fetchland so I could have grabbed Dryad Arbor for fodder.
This game is so frickin' tough!
Even without a Pro Tour, Modern is still what I consider the best, most enjoyable format. I do admit, I was a slightly surprised at the trolls attitude. I even re-read what I wrote to make sure I wasn't just bashing different views. Since, even upon re-reading, I didn't feel that way, and it read to me like I was stating simple facts and expressing astonishment at the current situation, it was easy to simply ignore him.
Still, looking forward to many years of continued Modern hate. :)
Great analysis and wisdom, as always.
What if WoTC simply raised the price of packs by $1? Selling packs seems like their main revenue-maker. Going up 20% would seem to make a big difference to their bottom line. And adults and kids (who get money from their folks) alike could probably stomach that, especially if it meant better events, better tourneys, and better MTGO. (All that is assuming Wizards plowed the money back into improving the world and business of Magic.)
I stand corrected then. I recall what I explained as the official answer years ago when this came up but *shrugs* old man and unreliable memory + not too bright, clearly.
Not to mention there are two creatures that start with negative power, namely Char-Rumbler and Spinal Parasite. Damage which is less than zero is treated as zero, but power that is less than zero isn't.
"This means that not only does it deal 0 damage but spells that compare power see it as 0 not negative."
No, it uses the negative number. If, for example, you cast Tragic slip with morbid on a Wild Beastmaster with it's trigger on the stack, your opponent's whole team is going to have a bad day.
Javascript DOES get stripped out. Which is highly inconvenient and annoying but the guy who runs the backend likes it that way. (I suspect it avoids some security issues, namely injections.) But CSS does work if you add it in a tab at the beginning of the document in text mode (the RTF editor will surround it with P markers but that doesn't matter as long as the <script> tag is properly formed. (Don't forget to close it.)
As an alternative to hide/show scripting you can link offsite too.
I did use the image converter from that site, but I modified the size values (in the stylesheet) to make the cards full size for readability. For the next draft I post I'll definitely make use of the hidden section to make the article more manageable for folks who might not be interested in that part.
ah, i see your point. i think it's fair to say we're both right (how often does that happen?)!
Yes and in paper magic you still keep track of the negatives so that the math works that way too. But for PRACTICAL purposes the power =0. This means that not only does it deal 0 damage but spells that compare power see it as 0 not negative.
it can be reduced to a negative on MTGO & happens all the time. the negative numbers are necessary to properly account for further modifications--for example, if you put a +1/+1 counter on a creature that is -2/7, it becomes -1/8, not 1/8. if you cast giant growth on a -2/7 it becomes 1/10, not 3/10. is this not true in paper?
(it's true that a creature does 0 *damage* regardless of whether it has 0 or negative power, but you absolutely see negative numbers on power all the time on MTGO, precisely for the reason I give above).
Great article Carl. It seems that the changes to the pro tour schedule haven't done anything to slow down our resident Modern format authors like yourself and Procrastination. I am glad to see that. By the way I, too am a dyed in the wool liberal even though I am registered Independent. And I too, am not one of the brick-throwing ne'er-do-wells the facebook troll was referring to mistakenly as a Liberal. But I totally get behind format hate. Sometimes you just have to bring the LD to stop the worst nonsense.
Because power can not be reduced to a negative. That would lead to confusion about maybe actually gaining life from an attacker with negative power.
As per usual Pete, your wisdom strikes to the heart of the matter. Wizards are absolutely terrible at communication. It is a skillset that is only slightly better than their ability to create and maintain a happy player experience on MTGO. And I think the two problems are interrelated. They post stuff on tumblr, twitter, and facebook in order to be "with the millenials" but miss a good portion of their player base entirely when they had a perfectly usable home base in their own site until they deliberately and with malice aforethought wrecked it. (Killed it.)
As you said like thunderbolts out of the blue. That is usually what I mean when I say a decision (any really) that they made seems draconian. No warning, no believable or palatable explanation and then later when (if) the decision is detracted a sense of shock that they were wrong. This DOES seem like a pattern relatable in some psychological manner. Like having a drunk uncle who steals the family car, wrecks it, apologizes, almost kills the family pet then manages last minute to save it and finally while in rehab, admits that they never did pay the utility bills that they were given responsibility for. In other words: Dysfunctional. I have felt that WOTC acts in a dysfunctional manner for a long long time now. It grieves me because in some important ways I do see the company as family. Very upsetting, Randy Quaid sort of family.
i know I must be missing something. Bearer of Overwhelming Truths is a 3/2. Jace's Scrutiny gives a creature -4/0. You say "Before damage, you cast Jace’s Scrutiny, making my Bearer a 0/2." Why not -1/2? It doesn't change the answer to your question, just curious what I'm missing.
I'm cracking up trying to get the mental picture of the Cockatrices with their short, stubby wings drawing a long bow with one of their poison-tipped arrows while in a deathgaze. Congrats, again, GL.