The Lifestyle of the Professional Magic: The Gathering Player

by Anonymous Pro 

[The Pro Tour player who wrote this asked me to share it without his name attached.  Please respect the author's anonymity by not sharing guesses or context clues about who may have written this piece.] 

Many articles have been written about the lifestyle of a pro. They are all lying, of course. The first rule of the Pro Club is that you don't talk about it. Nobody ever tells the truth because it just doesn't sell. You are a consumer.

Staring at the bottom of your glass, you reflect upon yet another weekend. Yet another city that looks the same as the last one, yet another airport, yet another convention center, yet another hotel. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

If the tournament is a success, you drink to celebrate. A failure and you drink to commiserate. Either way, the alcohol dulls the extreme emotions of victory and defeat. This tournament might be one of the lucky ones, where you make the early-morning trip home with some hardware jammed into your backpack, a phone full of notifications, and some weariness lifted from your heart. But most of the time, you are simply hungover and empty, passing your documents to the official before boarding your plane home.

Why would anyone want to live this life? One might also ask why someone would become a heroin addict. Cardboard crack is just as addictive as its cousin, and it has even been said that "nobody ever really leaves Magic, they just take breaks." Magic, the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it, but you can't.

As a young person seeking escape from a grime and lonely existence, Magic was the perfect vessel. It slowly changed from an escape to something more, as you became more and more competitive and began to reach higher and higher tiers of play. Attempts to play FNM or casual games of Commander couldn't get the juices going anymore, you now require a higher dosage of the drug only available at high-stakes tournaments.

You are awake late at night, unable to sleep, too many thoughts caught swirling around in your mind. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything's far away. You're never really asleep, and you're never really awake. You head downstairs to the couch, turn on the television. A late night talk show host is going on about some debate. You haven't really been following the election. You shift over and knock a stack of cards over, and frantically drop to the floor to gather them all back up into a stack.

You wake up to the sound of your alarm clock. Somehow you had dragged yourself back into bed and slept for 7 hours. Its already 2pm, and your flight is leaving in a couple hours. You check your phone to see where you are off to this time. Providence, RI. What format is that again? You check your luggage. No cards packed, it must be a limited event. You wake up at O'Hare airport. Your last memory was checking your bags before leaving your house.

"I pass the turn. Go ahead." Your head bobs up. You have 5 cards in your hand. 3 lands in play. Your opponent has 5 creatures and your life-pad says you are on 3 life. Doesn't seem like you are winning this one.

Another round. You see your opponent signing the match slip, carefully check to see that its 2-1 in your favor. Good thing you got that one. What round is it again? The slip says 12. You always communicate in algebraic notation, only the losses matter, the number of wins changes yet remains irrelevant. You've already accumulated three losses, and in a tournament of this size your chances of top 8 are precisely zero. You simply have to grind out the last few rounds for pro points and cash. The money means nothing to you, it’s simply a number on a computer screen as your online account registers your input of cash, and as you pay bills, the numbers go up and down, up and down. As long as the number never reaches zero, it doesn't matter what it is. You remember a time when the number was so close to zero, and few of the changes were upwards, when earning $250 at a Grand Prix meant something to you. Now you flip coins in the parking lot for thousands of dollars, having started for smaller stakes, but kept on going up and up when flipping for $20 no longer gave you that rush you craved. Just like playing Magic for $250 no longer matters to you. You've dropped from events you could have won a single round in to cash.

You wake up to the sounds of your stomach growling. Home. You check your phone. It says you got 3 pro points in Providence. Good work. Heading downstairs, you open the fridge. There's some bread in the freezer, but the fridge is empty besides a bottle of ketchup, some half-rotten lettuce, an old jar of strawberry jam, and what looks like a couple spoons full of peanut butter.  How embarrassing, a house full of condiments but no food. You close the fridge and drop to your knees on the ground, laying your head on the cool marble countertop, purchased from an Ikea catalog. You've just slept for 13 hours, yet you still feel exhausted. That’s what a weekend of mental exertion with little sleep and a couple of flights will do to you.

People say you are lucky. That you are living the dream. Everywhere you go, they are all the same. Lawyers, Engineers, Teachers. "Do you have another job? How do you make enough money?" are constantly asked. The players you encounter commend you for your skill, and ask for advice you know will ultimately not help them at all. None of them ask questions worth asking. They only want to know what is the next deck to buy, what cards to bring in against this matchup, what is your secret shortcut to being so good. They don't want to know the truth, that success requires deep introspection, self-analysis and extreme dedication. They don't want to be told that even if they tried their hardest and did everything right, they simply aren't smart enough to succeed. "But at least you do what you love," you are told.

This story ends with you on a plane, sitting next to a man in a dark grey suit, sipping on a vodka tonic. Like others, he asked you what you did for a living out of habit, but when he found out his fake interest became real. You look at his briefcase and thousand-dollar watch and wonder if his lifestyle makes him happy, or if he also feels the same melancholy you do. You take out your laptop and begin to slowly drudge out yet another article.

My 2016 Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame Ballot

I would describe this year in two ways: no quantitative slam dunks, and 2 qualitative slam dunks (Owen Turtenwald and Yuuya Watanabe).

I am not a statistician who was given a vote solely for my quantitative skills, so I can't ignore the qualitative feel, but I also want to cast not just a reactive ballot but an informed ballot.  So I find myself narrowed to two ballots that align with my general approach: 1) [Ballot Intentionally Left Blank], and 2) Owen & Yuuya.

Voting someone who doesn't belong is a bigger mistake than not voting someone who belongs, but when I think about Owen and Yuuya I just don't believe the risk of these being players who don't belong is very high.  Playing at or near the top (not top LEVEL but straight top) of the world for years and years is something that Hall of Famers are made of.  Leave all that "he loves the game!" crap behind, these two were some of the toughest opponents in multiple years, multiple formats, and multiple ways.  Even on a bad day, these guys didn't give you much you had to go take it.  My A Game never matched their A Game and their C Game, well, I probably couldn't even tell it apart from their A Game.

Notes on others: Heezy - I love the guy but if Arnost Zidek or Mitamura had his career I wouldn't think twice here and I owe it to everyone to try and be somewhat objective.  4 top 8s with a win is nice but if it was that simple the requirements would be hard-coded.  Can't do it.

Floch/Seth - Gotta stretch results out a bit, prove you can do it for an extended period of time.  They might enough for a Rich Hagon e-book though.

Justin Gary/Scott Johns/Saito etc: No need to have same discussions year after year when the crowd has spoken and the resumes have not changed.  The hall is too big to accommodate people who don't make an impression their first couple times on the ballot if nothing changes, unless they were very close and you never took a hard look the first time.  If people were dicks or angle shooters or whatever I won't be the most qualified to opine but I see no need to revisit every single year.

Marin Light Beer - See Herberholz above.  Where the stats are borderline and Zac Hill writes about how the person was a master I'm a mortal lock to not vote for them.  Hipster-master != actual master.

Platinum Pro Club Changes, Corporate Greed or Legal Mandate? (Both?)

Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, announced last week that the benefits awarded to its Pro Players Club members would be cut for the 2016-2017 season.  One of the most critical benefits (critical at least to those players trying to live up to the “Pro” in the “Pro Tour” name) was a $3,000 cash appearance fee at each of the four Pro Tour stops for Platinum players.  This appearance fee was slashed by $2,750 and is now a $250 reminder of the good ol’ days.  A replica (not to scale) of a Platinum Player Appearance Fee.

I am in some ways qualified to discuss this from the impacted player viewpoint, and in some ways not.   I am currently one of about 30 players enjoying the $3,000 Platinum appearance fee, but I am not tracking very closely towards Platinum again for the 2016-2017, and perhaps most importantly, Magic is not my day job as it is for several of my friends and colleagues in the Platinum player’s club.  (By the way, the Hall of Fame appearance fee of $1,500 per Pro Tour is also being reduced – it will now occur at a single Pro Tour each year, not every Pro Tour).

I want to first discuss my conspiracy theory (of which I’ve convinced myself, but that’s the easy part), then the decision to cut benefits itself, then the timing of the decision, with an aside on legal action against Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary. 

Is this All Motivated by a Desire to Undermine the Claim that (Some) Players Are Employees?

I don’t think it puts too much tinfoil on my head to note that the timing of this announcement relative to the lawsuit claiming Magic judges are employees of Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, is interesting.  Also, the announcement itself focused on shifting the goals away from trying to support professional Magic players, who presumably would then be acting in many ways at the direction of Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, in order to earn a living. 

It is possible that because of the judges’ suit, an employment/labor attorney was forced to come in and look at not just judges but other 1099 independent contractors and they said, “Uh oh, here we have a program with not only the function but even the stated intent of creating professional, full time players.  Who decided the company wanted to do this and what is his or her phone number?”  If that kind of analysis is what led to the decision, a change has to be made and announced, but you can’t announce that you’re attempting to reduce future liability for wages & benefits where you might have past or present liability … so what do you announce? 

Maybe you announce that “The appearance fees we awarded for Platinum pros were meant to assist in maintaining the professional Magic player’s lifestyle; upon scrupulous evaluation, we believe that the program is not succeeding at this goal, and have made the decision to decrease appearance fees.

Instead, we will be increasing the amount of prize money awarded at our biggest tournament of the year: The World Championship.”

You revise the Worlds payout structure to create both a positive smokescreen and a sensible use of the available funds. 

The HOF appearance fee reduction doesn't fit neatly into this story, but that's exactly what they wanted you to think when they came up with it.  Okay, I should probably go to sleep - will write the rest in the morning. 

The Decision to Reduce Appearance Fees

Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, is the embodiment of everything I hate about corporations.  It has become not just interested in quarterly earnings, but myopically focused on the trailing few quarters and the targets for the next few.   It is the owner and supposed warden of an important part of my life and culture, but it is constantly willing and able to make trade-offs against my interests in favor of its own.  As KFC has protected the institution of wholesome dinner for working families, Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, has looked over trading card gaming for competitive players.  

This analogy runs fairly deep.  Nobody has to enter a Magic tournament or eat a bucket of fried chicken, and indeed, each year, more evidence emerges that doing neither is a good idea. 

The great bridge in corporate strategy between Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, and the rest of the worst of corporate free trade is the shortcut.  Why scale tournament prizes to keep pace with profits when you can just keep them flat and show a bigger margin in the short term?  Ask the Colonel: if they keep buying the chicken with the cheap ingredients, why use the healthy version?  Why fund a headline grabbing (by 2001 standards I guess) prize pool in the World Championships by increasing the total budget for organized play when you can just cut some benefits elsewhere?  Shortcuts. 

Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, claims that the appearance fee was intended to support players making a living off the Pro Tour, but that it wasn’t accomplishing that goal.  It must be the goal that has changed, since nothing in the announced changes helps professional players earn a living from year to year with any consistency.  Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, is free to change its organized play goals, but all the evidence suggests that they barely know what they want to accomplish with organized play, let alone how to achieve it.

I keep going back to that in my mind: Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, barely knows what it wants to accomplish with organized play, let alone how to achieve it.  If the goal is to scale viewership and community on Twitch, hire a real team to produce that content and don’t let Blizzard hire Brian Kibler to commentate every major event for your primary competitor.  If the goal is to allow aspiring competitive players to rationalize spending way too much money and an unhealthy amount of time on your products, build trust with those players instead of constantly undermining it (see timing section below for more).  If the goal is to grab a few headlines when major tournaments happen, then try to hold those tournaments on the same scale, relative to your sales levels, as the gaming tournaments it competes with for headlines.

Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, has always been, and likely always will be, a group of talented game designers plagued by visionless leadership, incompetent and overly risk-averse legal strategy (of course with blind spots where it really might matter like whether Judges are employees – being conservative doesn’t guarantee conservation), sister and parent offerings that lose money (preventing proper reinvestment into what’s working – Magic), and a corporate culture of hindsight bias and myopia that observes growing sales but doesn’t even start evaluating how much more they could have been growing until a competitor comes along and punches them awake. 

When measuring the progress of Magic as a product in Q1 2016, don’t be content to compare to Magic in Q4 2015, show me how you’re tracking against Q1-2016-Alternate-Universe-A -B and -C in which the game isn't inhibited by a failing online version, isn't held back by weak organized play support that doesn't scale with the growth of the game, and/or doesn't advertise via an embarrassing offering on Twitch.  What Magic earns Hasbro is a fraction of what it could earn them, what it should earn them.  Blizzard filling some of the gaps was supposed to wake these people up, but maybe this wasn’t an “asleep at the wheel” situation but a “doesn’t know how to drive” situation.

Long story short, the decision to gut support for the career player itself did not surprise me.  They are entitled to try different incentive structures for their players in the competitive gaming landscape, and they will in fact try new ones.  And they will do it in the same old frustrating way, as an industry laggard on everything but the product itself holding back a leading (and still best) product.  They will continue to succeed, at an immeasurably fractional rate relative to their potential, despite themselves, and they will call it an obvious success.

The Timing of the Decision to Cut Appearance Fees

Even though I got to enjoy $3,000 appearance fee checks in 2016, I earned them in 2015.  The players who earned them in 2016 have had the rug pulled from under them since their investments of time and money in 2016 are unrecoverable and (for now) it looks like the payoff has been nerfed.  PokerStars recently did the same thing to its players, and the backlash there was something Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, probably didn’t consider or understand.

Here is how it should work: when a company says, “Do X in period 0 and we’ll give you Y in period 1,” the company should budget for Y in period 0 and then keep their promise in period 1.  Maybe accounting rules say you can put Y in the 2016 budget.  Maybe the law says you can break the promise (see below), but this isn’t the way a mature company worthy of trust from its customers should act, if it cares about preserving that trust and continuing to appear mature.

These players deserve the money they earned.  I don’t care if it helps them survive as a professional player or pay taxes on 2016 earnings they used to get by, or if they use it to figure out what to do next with their life, or if they give it to charity like Jon Finkel probably does.  They earned it, it’s their money.    

For the players’ part, when a company acts in an untrustworthy and immature manner, you have to simultaneously adjust your expectations and withhold your full support.  Ask the PokerStars pros if they hold that company in the same regard, provide it with their full support, or feel comfortable tying their livelihood to its existence and success.

Quick Aside: Legal Analysis of Whether Players Could Successfully Sue Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary for Breach of Contract or Promissory Estoppel

Every Reddit thread on any change a company makes will inevitably include a claim that the company can be or should be sued.  I’m sure on /r/SoupCanCollecting when Campbell’s changes the shade of red on its soup cans someone posts “IANAL, but can’t collectors just sue them?” 

I already said above that a labor & employment case on behalf of Pros is possible, but costly and not even likely to succeed.  A case against Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, for breach of contract or promissory estoppel (a fancy term for essentially breaking a promise you made that you knew or should have known others would reasonably rely on), has several issues that in my view are fatal to the players’ cause.

For as long as I can remember, descriptions of the Players Club benefits have been accompanied by a reservation of rights, the right to change or revoke the benefits at any time.  This language makes it difficult to claim that the promise of these benefits a few lines of text away could be reasonably relied upon in an actionable way, whether contract or quasi-contractual theories are invoked.  Wizards legal is bad, but they did repeatedly pepper us with the right disclaimer in the right place on this issue.  

Few things in law are truly open and shut, so of course there is a chance it could be found the other way, but it would have to be litigated to find out and when the class of potential plaintiffs is ~30 people and the dollar amount per claim is $11k or whatever, that dog just won’t hunt. 

Where Do the Pro Players Go from Here?

Somewhere else perhaps.  But even if we learned that Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary doesn't need us, some of us may need it.  The game is fun, the community is great (the ecosystem of many communities actually, fuck off with that Community Super League appropriation), and only 30 of us were platinum anyway.  Maybe this is getting a little overblown, I respect that take.  And I suspect Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, will back off the timing component of the decision and make the new benefits effective 2017-2018.  I suspect this because the backlash has been much larger than the dollar amounts are.  As described above, Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, is a greedy hellscape of myopic corporate pragmatism, and I predict they do the now seemingly pragmatic thing on the timing issue.

If they don’t back off the timing of the change, I suggest all current Platinum Pros, myself included, coordinate in order to boycott PT Sydney and to prepare and present counter-programming against its broadcast that weekend on Twitch by having top Magic pros learning and streaming other TCGs.  For me, at 28 points with a few GPs coming up, there is a very good chance that skipping Sydney would cost me Gold (and a shot at extending my last-PT-of-the-year top 8 streak and making Platinum, which used to be different than Gold by the way).  As a community of top players, we don’t have many high-powered tools to push back with and we have no such tools which involve zero personal sacrifice.

However, assuming things go as predicted and this is walked back to a 2017-2018 change, that gives professional players a couple years to figure out how to downshift into “hobbyist who pursues the World Championship but not at the expense of everything else” or find something else entirely to spend time and money on (Hearthstone, HexTCG, or even, gasp, personal or professional pursuits outside of gaming). 

Attempting to unionize or sue for back pay on a, based on my best guess, fairly thin but not entirely unprecedented definition of “employee” seems likely to kill the Pro Tour at the same time it consumes a bunch of time, energy, and money of the players involved.  But if the players who did attempt to make a living at Magic feel entitled to unionize or to seek back pay I would support their efforts.  Nothing in this post shall be construed as an admission or waiver, express or implied, of any of the author’s rights under the NLRA, WA or CA state law, or otherwise. 

The one thing none of us should do for several years is trust Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, to act with integrity or respect towards the community of entrenched competitive players.  Some individuals working there certainly want to do right by the players and support them, but if you’ll allow me to return to my favorite analogy, people at KFC merely wanting you to stay healthy doesn’t get it done in a corporate culture that either renders them powerless or incentivizes them to do the opposite while keeping up appearances.   

Aaron Forsythe recently tweeted that Greg Leeds, who resigned as President of Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, “went out on top.”  On top of what, a steaming pile of shit?  Now we have received an indication of where to set our expectations for new President Chris Cocks.  I wish him luck in stopping the hemorrhaging of market share to Blizzard’s Hearthstone.  Unfortunately, Magic’s organized play won’t be helping the cause.  Not with this approach or at this scale. 

Take care,

Matt Sperling.

Twitter @mtg_law_etc is a better place to converse than the comments below if you want me to read and maybe respond.  Someone should also post this on Reddit so we get the free expert legal advice that's easy to find there. 

The Underlying Sin of Proxygate and Leakgate: Using the WPN and DCI as Hit Men

In separate clarifications/apologies, Wizards of the Coast has walked back a little bit from its initial position on both Sharpie-on-card = proxy [edit: Counterfeit, we all agree they are proxies] & the penalties issued to those judges that knew or could have known about spoiler leaks but didn’t tell Wizards about it. 

Neither clarification/apology backs down from the most troubling aspects of the issues though: Wizards’ willingness to use the WPN and the DCI to enforce corporate policy very loosely related to the mandate of those organizations, and its legal team’s repeated failures to locate the balance between protecting IP and not harming marketing and business interests.  The lawyers don’t understand or can’t work within the nuance that exists in both the market and the legal landscape, and the mouthpieces outside the legal team like Trick Jarrett, Helene Bergeot, and Elaine Chaise are able to sort-of find the mark, but only after they are able to review a swath of negative public reactions to their initial remarks in order to locate exactly where and how badly they missed.  

All together, this group has inspired so much fear in our community that I have people messaging me saying essentially, “Maybe you should avoid poking that bear with negative commentary or jokes, their legal team could fly off the handle at any time and their business team clearly can’t stop them.”  I can’t go public with the detailed examples of how the public discourse has been impacted by a fear of Wizards’ next overreaction, but you can trust me I’m not making this shit up.  Multiple people, multiple times, have expressed concern to me about where and when the shoe will fall next.  It is shaping behavior and discourse for the worse.  It sucks.

Here’s my take on the two recent issues that brought these issues into pretty sharp focus:

      The new Proxies Policy

Wizards recently announced to its WPN store locations that they may not run unsanctioned events with proxies, and later clarified that marker-on-card = a counterfeit card in their view.  Their explanation made little sense.  “Counterfeits” no one would mistake for real cards simply aren’t counterfeits.  That's what the word means.  

You can call a black spell “Devoid’ and say that makes it colorless.  It isn’t a good idea, it makes for a shitty set, but you can do it if you want.  You control the definition of the word Devoid in the game engine.  But you don’t control the definition of the word Counterfeit in the secondary card market.  You can’t just say cards no one would mistake for the original are counterfeits.  This type of overreach is typical of Wizards. 

I presume they would never actually sue someone for writing on their own toys with a Sharpie (unless they felt like lighting some money on fire), so they use the network of game stores (the Wizards Play Network or WPN), comprised mostly of struggling or very modestly profitable businesses, to exert their influence over a problem that wasn’t an actual problem.  Well done Wizards, some fantasy your bad lawyers dreamed up about a culture of counterfeiting being encouraged by proxies, or who knows what else, is now negatively impacting the entry point for older formats, an issue you claim to care about in countless Reserve List and Modern Masters articles. 

I wish the WPN, a part of the infrastructure of Organized Play, wasn’t the stage for Wizards to act out these fantasies, which leads me to….

      Banning people from competitive play for leaking Magic cards or not reporting leaks

The DCI shouldn’t be whacking people for Wizards like it’s a corrupt police officer with bad coke and gambling debts.  The DCI is a governing body for competitive play among hobbyists, not an intellectual property protection service.  Wizards, if someone violated your Nondisclosure Agreement and leaked your IP, take legal action and/or restrict that person’s access to information in the future.  Do your own dirty work within the frameworks that were set up to govern how the flow of corporate information is controlled.

Before you all get in the comments and shout “Playing Magic is a privilege, not a right!’ or “They are a private org, they can ban whoever they want,” just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.  Just because you have leverage over people by virtue of controlling their hobbyist club, doesn’t mean it’s ethical to say “you can’t engage in your hobby anymore in this club because you didn’t inform on your friend when he violated a confidentiality promise you never made.”  That’s again, an overreach.  These are the actions of an entity that is armed only with a vague idea about which pieces of IP it needs to protect, and repeatedly burns the stables down to prevent anyone from stealing the horses.  

They have successfully disincentivized leaks by acting like Soviet Russia. “Inform on your friends and you might be spared” was explicit in the first round of announcements about the punishments and still very present even in the most recent Elaine Chase statement.   “Our Olympic athletes will do what is good for Mother Russia at all times, or they will not play.”  “Fear will keep them in line.”  I believe that last one was Grand Czar Tarkin, and I assume someone had to talk Trick Jarrett out of quoting it.

Learning about something confidential shouldn’t be a violation of anything within 10,000 miles of the DCI, especially if the person in question had no direct obligation to breach.  Being in a Facebook group where you have access to posts but don’t participate in the dissemination of information is “Possession of stolen property?”  Get real. 

The message here is that if they don’t like what you’re doing, they will use the WPN or DCI to put pressure on you.  I’d love to read an updated WPN or DCI mission statement that lines up with this role as mob enforcer. 

Again, the apologies they have issued (following outcry in the community) are statements to the effect of, “That guy/proxy-method didn’t deserve to get whacked I guess,” but they lack the realization that whacking people with your OP networks is a bad idea in the first place.