I think there's a misunderstanding here: this article series is not about Tribal Wars (if not tangentially, but we all know Tribal Wars is a fringe format, most people don't even know it exists). Tribal in the title refers to the broader concept – new creatures sorted by type rather than any other criterion proposed by Gatherer – it's not a reference to a specific format. Many of the judgments given are about the tribe getting one or more new cards that will see play in Standard and/or Modern. It's said in the introduction I generically talk about Constructed eternal formats rather than Limited applications.
Maybe I should just eliminate that judgment, though. It's been there since two installments only, I mostly thought it was just cute.
When I assumed Serra Angel would have new art, the analog is Shivan Dragon in FTV: Dragons. Gabriel Angelfire needs new art because they probably would have to pay again for the old art regardless (since the payment structure was different way back then), and Wizards generally doesn't reprint such old art.
I'll admit Sigarda might be the "right" choice based on card availability/secondary value, but I feel that the cards need to span a wide range of time, and this set would be lacking in that, especially since there aren't any practical Portal cards to reprint.
Ok, I play only Legacy and Vintage. I like to brew a lot, and when I brew something sweet, I jump to daily to test it out. And where do I need to jump now? In an event, that costs twice as much as before? Thank you Wizards!
Bad news, folks: The Origins cards are not presently legal in Tribal Wars Legacy. If anyone has a working Login, please file a bug report. I'm going to go yell at Wizards via other media
The whole thing is disgusting. If it wasn't for the constant feedback for the past 2 years, they wouldn't change anything, even if they knew something was wrong. But since people were getting more and more vocal it seems someone said: "These guys are getting too annoying. Let's find a way to make them shut up." They came up with phantom points v2 and decided that this was the perfect opportunity to finally remove the last EV+ events MTGO offered. And since it was the players who asked for changes, they couldn't really complain. That's their logic.
I don't think I'm going to quit mtgo, at least for now, but I'll certainly cut back on playing.
"For example, if the exact same wine is prices at $5 and $75 a bottle, people will attribute far better attributes to the expensive wine."
May be true but less people are willing to pay 75 for a bottle of wine.
If daily events go to 12 tix,less people will play them.
It will be much harder for people to buy cards to build a collection,since part of the prizes will be not tradable player points.
I cant understand when they say, that they want dailies to be "special",the highest level of play available competition on magic online.
Remember when there was a thing called Premier Events on mtgo,something that some players stop playing because they didnt like the prizes and others stop playing on them because of the many program crashes... and they remove them.
I dont like the changes,maybe they can adjust the entry fees or the way the player points work, i guess i will have to wait and see.
I did not read all the commetns just your article so if it was questionned i am sorry to repeat myself
The biggerst problem is not being able to replay. Its that if i sold the boosters i had TICKETS that gave me options. Options have value by themselfs. If I want to buy boosters to draft i could, if i wanted to buy cards for another constructed deck i could, If i wanted to sell tickets because i had too much for real cash, i could... Option has value and PP have no value but to play again. The only way that this would come to a fair thing is if it was tradable. Then the value would be the same as they claim to be (which is 10:1) .
Another note is the payout. They always claimed (and always will) that 1 booster = 4 $.. Well just for an exemple of 1 on one duel. When i won, it got me 1 booster (valued at 4$ with WOTC) now it pays 30pp (which is valued at 10:1 so 3$ or tickets).. but they still ask for 20PP (not 15 to give a 2:1 ration like the old format was). So this comes to another point
Making more money.
By giving less packs and more PP that are not tradable people will need to buy FULL MSRP booster packs. or close to it by the market value (which will be higher).
I for one have slowly have giving out MTGO in general because their practice is not toward the customer but their parent company and by cutting slowly but surely in the value people just accept it and say nothing. I love this game but unfortunatly with how many new Tcg's that exist magic is not the only one (I am not talking paper but just digital)
Hex tcg would be a good example of how value is added to the customer.
I hope that people realise that everything they do is always badly implemented.
(ps. Look at the software.... we are in 2015................ no other comment is necessary. )
So the higher the price of the booster (assuming the price is the same under both system), the better the old system is and vice versa. Also the higher your winrate the better new system is (or not, depending how much you value PPs). It's much worse when your winrate is under 57.5% (approximately), but if the price of the boosters will now rise this should remedy the discrepancy to some extent or even make new DEs favourable at lower win percentages (only avg. 0.5 tix price increase would go a long way as you can see from the numbers).
I think the new system is not so bad as some folks claim. If you are a grinder (player with high win percentage) I think it's comparable/better depending on some variables. If you are a casual player and the price of the boosters wont rise enough then DEs are probably not for you anymore, unless you don't mind losing money to play (which actually could lower the winrate of grinders if worse players will stop participating, so that is also a possible factor).
"I just found out that all instances of the word "opponent" have been replaced in card texts with "player". I don't think there's a way to have a creature deal combat damage to yourself, is there?" Does Harm's Way do that?; I'm not sure.
Anyways, you provide a solid review of the potential here except that I disagree with many of the conclusions regarding "impact" and feel this set is going to have an overall low impact. For example, Soulblade Djinn doesn't seem to be a build-around-me card at 5-mana, and probably needs protection before landing, else it will get Bolted. In Djinn tribal, it's ability will be win-more as the Djinn bodies usually already outclass the opposition. Similarly, Avaricious Dragon is probably not a 4-drop in a Dragon tribal deck as you'll be discarding a lot of your own Dragons (potentially a strategy with reanimation admittedly), and while he might shine at the top of the curve in other tribal decks, he'll have some stiff competition (as well as being illegal in Pure); hard to call its impact "severe". I could go on and on. It could be you realize all this and are just either more optimistic or less blunt than I.
Yeah, thats pretty bad. 60% WR and the boosters being worth 3.5 tixs (optimistic number) nets you only 1.1 tix (compared to 5.23 tix at 4 round daily).
I think it will be more expensive to draft after the change. The supply of boosters will take a significant drop. The drop will only be offset if it can be substituted with constructed players using their player points to cross over to limited thereby lowering the demand for boosters. If these two things balance each other there will be no change in prices, but I dont think that will be the case.
Standard Card prices will not change because they are linked to paper prices by redemption. Hence, the higher pack prices will be a deadweight loss to drafters - unless you accumulate a pack surplus from drafting. In that case you should be happy.
There have been many people defending this decision and comparing the new payout with packs at 3-3.5 (which is fair) to the old payout with the current 2.34 for DTK and 1.41 for FRF…
Seriously? While jumping into “the new prizes are terrible” without actually analyzing everything is bad, I think it’s even worse taking the time to analyze with several flaws and not understanding those flaws. One of the flaws is very huge. Let’s start with the smaller ones:
1) Wizard has always said that they only looked at the packs costing 4 because that’s what they sell them for in the store. And now that they make a change that benefits them if they look at what people sell their packs for, they do it.
2) We are all assuming 10 Play Points equals 1 tix but that is not 100% accurate. If you win enough, you might end up with Play Points that you can’t use. Sure, you can use them in drafts but in my case I never draft because I want to win as much as possible and sell the tix. Well, if I do very well, I won’t be able to sell everything which is pretty bad.
But the main flaw is: it’s very wrong to justify the new prizes being good when you compare to current pack prices. Of course the new system is better in this extreme case. The problem is that, despite pack prices being pretty bad since they increased redemption fees (the one and only real problem with mtgo’s economy), for most of the time, the prizes were still better in the old system comparing to the new one. You don’t think so? Let’s take a look at 3-1 prizes:
Under the new system and with packs at 3.5 you get (3×3.5×10)+180=285 Play Points. That’s not even 2.4 entry fees.
Under the old system with packs at 2.5 on average you get 6×2.5×10=150 Play Points. That’s 2.5 entry fees. Is it that unreal that packs are worth 2.5 on average?
Fate Reforged has been between 1.8 and 1.4 since the DEs started paying a mix of DTK and FRF. If you waited, you could have sold them for 1.6-1.7 easily by waiting for the right time during most of this period. Let’s average it at 1.5, just to lowball it, considering they were at 1.7 not long ago, before this 2-3 weeks period where most people are just drafting cube and mtgo is missing the set already released in real life. Thats 3tix for the 2 FRF packs for a 3-1.
DTK was over 3tix easily over half of the time it was paid as constructed prizes. Let’s once again ignore these past 2-3 weeks, where it took a huge drop and it’s very easy to sell them for over 3 tix. It was just a matter of waiting and getting 3.5 or more was not very hard. I’m going to use 3.25 for DTK just to lowball it as well. The 4 packs of DTK give us 13 tix from the 3-1.
13+3=16 16/6=2.67 pack average and even if I put DTK at 3 a 3-1 gives us 15 tix which is the 2.5 per pack average.
Now, I’m not saying 2.5 per pack is good but it’s still better than what we’re gonna get with the new system and that is really really bad.
I have thought about the problem of unredeemable play points piling up. My first thought was that you can burn through a lot of them playing drafts, but that only works if you like to draft. If you primarily play constructed, and win, you will start to pile p PPs faster than you can use them up.
One solution - Wizards could offer some form of "redeeming" PPs. For example, they might do some sort of trade of 1000 PP for a paper FtV set or something like that. (Concept off the top of my head - no idea if the math works or this is even feasible. Simple solution, though, at least when the FtVs are selling above MSRP.)
The question is how good you have to be to have that problem. I am working on crunching those numbers, but it take a while. You cannot just use a player's overall win percentage. In either Swiss or single elim., players face better opponents with each win. That's why my win percentage in round one of an event is far higher than my win percentage in round 3 when I am 2-0 at that point. I will probably have something on single elim soon, but with GenCon and GP FW easting most of my next ten days, not sure how soon.
I've been surprised that no one has actually done an EV analysis of the new Daily Events, so here are a couple numbers:
You match win percentage in DEs needs to be more than 62% before you start accumulating excessive PPs. If you have match win percentage less than that you will use all of your PPs for entering fees (assuming you are a grinder who consistently plays of course).
If you have a match win percentage of 62%, you will win approximately 6.12 tix/DE under new system whereas you won 5.62 tix under old system. That is assuming the value of the booster is 3 tix for both. If the value of boosters will be higher under the new system because of lower supply, then you will win even more tix in new DEs.
Let's say your win percentage is a very high 70% and you start accumulating excessive PPs. Under the new system you will win on average 8 tix from boosters and 40 excessive PPs. Under the old system you would win 9.33 tix. So the difference is 1.33 tix but you get 40 PPs which are arguably worth much more than just 1.33 tix (it would cost you 4$ to buy them, and you can use them in drafts to turn them into tix). And that is again assuming that the price of the boosters is the same under both systems.
I am really surprised that people who have done no actual math speak like this is the end of DEs, but the trut is that EV is actually better for the grinders (people with high win percentage).
The group of people that will be worse off are those with like 50% match win percentage. You could earn a small amount of tix before (0.5/event (assuming again 3 tix booster)), while you would lose 1.8 tix now.
So its better for the good players and worse for the average/bad players.
Hey Pete, thanks for your analysis on the Constructed prize payout changes. The one aspect that i believe you missed here is that if one wins enough such that they continue to pile up PP's, then the new prize payout hurts no matter what packs are worth. Particularly for fringe formats, the changes really hurt the players. Sure, people that grind Standard and occasionally draft will find PP's to be a somewhat welcome change, but for people like me who only play Vintage (and dabble in Legacy) and NEVER draft, PP's are just about the worst possible thing to happen since $25 redemption fee... which is a great point. None of these changes would be required if they just lowered the Redemption fee to a much more reasonable $10/set rate. That's still 100% higher than it used to be, and they'd probably realize additional revenue as more sets would ultimately be redeemed.
WotC had to raise the cap on DEs because of its EV not because players preferred the four-round swiss format to a single elimination format. After this prize cratering, some DEs won't even fire after August 12th.
I don't think that ORI boosters will drop nearly as much as KTK/DTK did 16 days after release. Some number of rational players will simply hold their ORI boosters while supplies are being pumped out and sell them after Play Point implementation. There may even be speculators who hoard ORI boosters expecting them to rise post-Aug 12th.
Streamers probably hate this. Streamers are often skilled players (people do watch people lose with fun decks by the top streamers are very good at the game) and continually winning 8-mans or DEs will net you thousands of untradable Play Points instead of boosters you can sell for cards/tickets.
What does it mean? If you try and start a Tribal Wars game with them in the decks, it says the deck is illegal?
I think there's a misunderstanding here: this article series is not about Tribal Wars (if not tangentially, but we all know Tribal Wars is a fringe format, most people don't even know it exists). Tribal in the title refers to the broader concept – new creatures sorted by type rather than any other criterion proposed by Gatherer – it's not a reference to a specific format. Many of the judgments given are about the tribe getting one or more new cards that will see play in Standard and/or Modern. It's said in the introduction I generically talk about Constructed eternal formats rather than Limited applications.
Maybe I should just eliminate that judgment, though. It's been there since two installments only, I mostly thought it was just cute.
Thanks Marcus for those answers, I appreciate it.
When I assumed Serra Angel would have new art, the analog is Shivan Dragon in FTV: Dragons. Gabriel Angelfire needs new art because they probably would have to pay again for the old art regardless (since the payment structure was different way back then), and Wizards generally doesn't reprint such old art.
I'll admit Sigarda might be the "right" choice based on card availability/secondary value, but I feel that the cards need to span a wide range of time, and this set would be lacking in that, especially since there aren't any practical Portal cards to reprint.
I've got good news and I've got bad news. Go read the update, they changed the price and structure of dailies for Legacy, Vintage, and Pauper.
I think Undercity is a huge addition as Lotleth is the only troll now that's playable at 1 or 2 CMC.
I've won 13 trophies with Stomphowler so Naturalists will also be added as soon as Gatherling accepts it
http://gatherling.com/profile.php?player=The_Sensei
Ok, I play only Legacy and Vintage. I like to brew a lot, and when I brew something sweet, I jump to daily to test it out. And where do I need to jump now? In an event, that costs twice as much as before? Thank you Wizards!
Bad news, folks: The Origins cards are not presently legal in Tribal Wars Legacy. If anyone has a working Login, please file a bug report. I'm going to go yell at Wizards via other media
I feel the same way. Nobody likes the 8-man Dailies either.
Glad you're back! Anyone who uses Cuombajj Witches in a deck deserves 5 fireballs!
The whole thing is disgusting. If it wasn't for the constant feedback for the past 2 years, they wouldn't change anything, even if they knew something was wrong. But since people were getting more and more vocal it seems someone said: "These guys are getting too annoying. Let's find a way to make them shut up." They came up with phantom points v2 and decided that this was the perfect opportunity to finally remove the last EV+ events MTGO offered. And since it was the players who asked for changes, they couldn't really complain. That's their logic.
I don't think I'm going to quit mtgo, at least for now, but I'll certainly cut back on playing.
"For example, if the exact same wine is prices at $5 and $75 a bottle, people will attribute far better attributes to the expensive wine."
May be true but less people are willing to pay 75 for a bottle of wine.
If daily events go to 12 tix,less people will play them.
It will be much harder for people to buy cards to build a collection,since part of the prizes will be not tradable player points.
I cant understand when they say, that they want dailies to be "special",the highest level of play available competition on magic online.
Remember when there was a thing called Premier Events on mtgo,something that some players stop playing because they didnt like the prizes and others stop playing on them because of the many program crashes... and they remove them.
I dont like the changes,maybe they can adjust the entry fees or the way the player points work, i guess i will have to wait and see.
I did not read all the commetns just your article so if it was questionned i am sorry to repeat myself
The biggerst problem is not being able to replay. Its that if i sold the boosters i had TICKETS that gave me options. Options have value by themselfs. If I want to buy boosters to draft i could, if i wanted to buy cards for another constructed deck i could, If i wanted to sell tickets because i had too much for real cash, i could... Option has value and PP have no value but to play again. The only way that this would come to a fair thing is if it was tradable. Then the value would be the same as they claim to be (which is 10:1) .
Another note is the payout. They always claimed (and always will) that 1 booster = 4 $.. Well just for an exemple of 1 on one duel. When i won, it got me 1 booster (valued at 4$ with WOTC) now it pays 30pp (which is valued at 10:1 so 3$ or tickets).. but they still ask for 20PP (not 15 to give a 2:1 ration like the old format was). So this comes to another point
Making more money.
By giving less packs and more PP that are not tradable people will need to buy FULL MSRP booster packs. or close to it by the market value (which will be higher).
I for one have slowly have giving out MTGO in general because their practice is not toward the customer but their parent company and by cutting slowly but surely in the value people just accept it and say nothing. I love this game but unfortunatly with how many new Tcg's that exist magic is not the only one (I am not talking paper but just digital)
Hex tcg would be a good example of how value is added to the customer.
I hope that people realise that everything they do is always badly implemented.
(ps. Look at the software.... we are in 2015................ no other comment is necessary. )
Harm's way does, and there are a few other redirection effects that do as well.
Here are some more numbers (new system listed first, old system listed 2nd):
2.5 tix booster:
50% WR: -2.44 -0.53
52.5% WR: -1.11 0.21
55% WR: 0.3 1.01
57.5% WR: 1.82 1.85
60% WR: 3.42 2.75
62.5% WR: 5.11 (+0.8 PPs) 3.68
65% WR: 5.6 (+13 PPs) 4.68
67.5% WR: 6 (+27 PPs) 5.71
70% WR: 6.7 (+ 40 PPs) 6.78
3 tix booster:
50% WR: -1.87 0.56
52.5% WR: -0.47 1.45
55% WR: 1.03 2.41
57.5% WR: 2.63 3.42
60% WR: 4.33 4.5
62.5% WR: 6.12 (+0.08 PPs) 5.62
65% WR: 6.7 (+13 PPs) 6.81
67.5% WR: 7.3 (+27 PPs) 8.04
70% WR: 8 (+ 40 PPs) 9.33
3.5 tix booster
50% WR: -1.31 1.66
52.5% WR: 0.17 2.7
55% WR: 1.75 3.81
57.5% WR: 3.44 5
60% WR: 5.24 6.25
62.5% WR: 7.13 (+0.08 PPs) 7.56
65% WR: 7.8 (+13 PPs) 8.94
67.5% WR: 8.6 (+27 PPs) 10.38
70% WR: 9.35 (+ 40 PPs) 11.89
So the higher the price of the booster (assuming the price is the same under both system), the better the old system is and vice versa. Also the higher your winrate the better new system is (or not, depending how much you value PPs). It's much worse when your winrate is under 57.5% (approximately), but if the price of the boosters will now rise this should remedy the discrepancy to some extent or even make new DEs favourable at lower win percentages (only avg. 0.5 tix price increase would go a long way as you can see from the numbers).
I think the new system is not so bad as some folks claim. If you are a grinder (player with high win percentage) I think it's comparable/better depending on some variables. If you are a casual player and the price of the boosters wont rise enough then DEs are probably not for you anymore, unless you don't mind losing money to play (which actually could lower the winrate of grinders if worse players will stop participating, so that is also a possible factor).
"I just found out that all instances of the word "opponent" have been replaced in card texts with "player". I don't think there's a way to have a creature deal combat damage to yourself, is there?" Does Harm's Way do that?; I'm not sure.
Anyways, you provide a solid review of the potential here except that I disagree with many of the conclusions regarding "impact" and feel this set is going to have an overall low impact. For example, Soulblade Djinn doesn't seem to be a build-around-me card at 5-mana, and probably needs protection before landing, else it will get Bolted. In Djinn tribal, it's ability will be win-more as the Djinn bodies usually already outclass the opposition. Similarly, Avaricious Dragon is probably not a 4-drop in a Dragon tribal deck as you'll be discarding a lot of your own Dragons (potentially a strategy with reanimation admittedly), and while he might shine at the top of the curve in other tribal decks, he'll have some stiff competition (as well as being illegal in Pure); hard to call its impact "severe". I could go on and on. It could be you realize all this and are just either more optimistic or less blunt than I.
Yeah, thats pretty bad. 60% WR and the boosters being worth 3.5 tixs (optimistic number) nets you only 1.1 tix (compared to 5.23 tix at 4 round daily).
I think it will be more expensive to draft after the change. The supply of boosters will take a significant drop. The drop will only be offset if it can be substituted with constructed players using their player points to cross over to limited thereby lowering the demand for boosters. If these two things balance each other there will be no change in prices, but I dont think that will be the case.
Standard Card prices will not change because they are linked to paper prices by redemption. Hence, the higher pack prices will be a deadweight loss to drafters - unless you accumulate a pack surplus from drafting. In that case you should be happy.
Lol this keeps getting worse and worse.
I seriously don't know how they took all the feedback they got and turned it into this.
Wizards just revised the constructed options for Legacy, Vintage and Pauper as below. Standard and Modern seems same.
Entry option: 6 tix / or 60 pp
3W: 3 booster + 80 pp
2W: 60 pp
1W: 20 pp
Source: http://magic.wizards.com/en/MTGO/articles/archive/magic-online/august-20...
I am really disgusted with these changes.
There have been many people defending this decision and comparing the new payout with packs at 3-3.5 (which is fair) to the old payout with the current 2.34 for DTK and 1.41 for FRF…
Seriously? While jumping into “the new prizes are terrible” without actually analyzing everything is bad, I think it’s even worse taking the time to analyze with several flaws and not understanding those flaws. One of the flaws is very huge. Let’s start with the smaller ones:
1) Wizard has always said that they only looked at the packs costing 4 because that’s what they sell them for in the store. And now that they make a change that benefits them if they look at what people sell their packs for, they do it.
2) We are all assuming 10 Play Points equals 1 tix but that is not 100% accurate. If you win enough, you might end up with Play Points that you can’t use. Sure, you can use them in drafts but in my case I never draft because I want to win as much as possible and sell the tix. Well, if I do very well, I won’t be able to sell everything which is pretty bad.
But the main flaw is: it’s very wrong to justify the new prizes being good when you compare to current pack prices. Of course the new system is better in this extreme case. The problem is that, despite pack prices being pretty bad since they increased redemption fees (the one and only real problem with mtgo’s economy), for most of the time, the prizes were still better in the old system comparing to the new one. You don’t think so? Let’s take a look at 3-1 prizes:
Under the new system and with packs at 3.5 you get (3×3.5×10)+180=285 Play Points. That’s not even 2.4 entry fees.
Under the old system with packs at 2.5 on average you get 6×2.5×10=150 Play Points. That’s 2.5 entry fees. Is it that unreal that packs are worth 2.5 on average?
Fate Reforged has been between 1.8 and 1.4 since the DEs started paying a mix of DTK and FRF. If you waited, you could have sold them for 1.6-1.7 easily by waiting for the right time during most of this period. Let’s average it at 1.5, just to lowball it, considering they were at 1.7 not long ago, before this 2-3 weeks period where most people are just drafting cube and mtgo is missing the set already released in real life. Thats 3tix for the 2 FRF packs for a 3-1.
DTK was over 3tix easily over half of the time it was paid as constructed prizes. Let’s once again ignore these past 2-3 weeks, where it took a huge drop and it’s very easy to sell them for over 3 tix. It was just a matter of waiting and getting 3.5 or more was not very hard. I’m going to use 3.25 for DTK just to lowball it as well. The 4 packs of DTK give us 13 tix from the 3-1.
13+3=16 16/6=2.67 pack average and even if I put DTK at 3 a 3-1 gives us 15 tix which is the 2.5 per pack average.
Now, I’m not saying 2.5 per pack is good but it’s still better than what we’re gonna get with the new system and that is really really bad.
I have thought about the problem of unredeemable play points piling up. My first thought was that you can burn through a lot of them playing drafts, but that only works if you like to draft. If you primarily play constructed, and win, you will start to pile p PPs faster than you can use them up.
One solution - Wizards could offer some form of "redeeming" PPs. For example, they might do some sort of trade of 1000 PP for a paper FtV set or something like that. (Concept off the top of my head - no idea if the math works or this is even feasible. Simple solution, though, at least when the FtVs are selling above MSRP.)
The question is how good you have to be to have that problem. I am working on crunching those numbers, but it take a while. You cannot just use a player's overall win percentage. In either Swiss or single elim., players face better opponents with each win. That's why my win percentage in round one of an event is far higher than my win percentage in round 3 when I am 2-0 at that point. I will probably have something on single elim soon, but with GenCon and GP FW easting most of my next ten days, not sure how soon.
I've been surprised that no one has actually done an EV analysis of the new Daily Events, so here are a couple numbers:
You match win percentage in DEs needs to be more than 62% before you start accumulating excessive PPs. If you have match win percentage less than that you will use all of your PPs for entering fees (assuming you are a grinder who consistently plays of course).
If you have a match win percentage of 62%, you will win approximately 6.12 tix/DE under new system whereas you won 5.62 tix under old system. That is assuming the value of the booster is 3 tix for both. If the value of boosters will be higher under the new system because of lower supply, then you will win even more tix in new DEs.
Let's say your win percentage is a very high 70% and you start accumulating excessive PPs. Under the new system you will win on average 8 tix from boosters and 40 excessive PPs. Under the old system you would win 9.33 tix. So the difference is 1.33 tix but you get 40 PPs which are arguably worth much more than just 1.33 tix (it would cost you 4$ to buy them, and you can use them in drafts to turn them into tix). And that is again assuming that the price of the boosters is the same under both systems.
I am really surprised that people who have done no actual math speak like this is the end of DEs, but the trut is that EV is actually better for the grinders (people with high win percentage).
The group of people that will be worse off are those with like 50% match win percentage. You could earn a small amount of tix before (0.5/event (assuming again 3 tix booster)), while you would lose 1.8 tix now.
So its better for the good players and worse for the average/bad players.
Hey Pete, thanks for your analysis on the Constructed prize payout changes. The one aspect that i believe you missed here is that if one wins enough such that they continue to pile up PP's, then the new prize payout hurts no matter what packs are worth. Particularly for fringe formats, the changes really hurt the players. Sure, people that grind Standard and occasionally draft will find PP's to be a somewhat welcome change, but for people like me who only play Vintage (and dabble in Legacy) and NEVER draft, PP's are just about the worst possible thing to happen since $25 redemption fee... which is a great point. None of these changes would be required if they just lowered the Redemption fee to a much more reasonable $10/set rate. That's still 100% higher than it used to be, and they'd probably realize additional revenue as more sets would ultimately be redeemed.
WotC had to raise the cap on DEs because of its EV not because players preferred the four-round swiss format to a single elimination format. After this prize cratering, some DEs won't even fire after August 12th.
I don't think that ORI boosters will drop nearly as much as KTK/DTK did 16 days after release. Some number of rational players will simply hold their ORI boosters while supplies are being pumped out and sell them after Play Point implementation. There may even be speculators who hoard ORI boosters expecting them to rise post-Aug 12th.
Streamers probably hate this. Streamers are often skilled players (people do watch people lose with fun decks by the top streamers are very good at the game) and continually winning 8-mans or DEs will net you thousands of untradable Play Points instead of boosters you can sell for cards/tickets.