Dear WotC/Hasbro,

I’ve been playing Magic since 2013. I’ve played in GPs, prereleases, Friday Night Magic, PPTQs, and pretty much anything else that was on the go. My fiancé and I played and bought into standard during the Season of Many Bannings, I’ve been voluntarily running unsanctioned events for two years to keep people in our community invested in the game after our LGS stopped supporting it.

Ravnica Allegiance release this weekend was the most fun I’ve had with a set for a long time, and yet I currently have never felt more upset or disillusioned with the game.

There are two big reasons for this.

Yesterday the above announcement was made in a Twitter thread regarding GP coverage. It’s currently not clear if it’s just text coverage of GPs that’s being stopped, or if video coverage is also on the way out, or if this is a permanent switch or something temporary.

I’m from a little country with a thriving, close-knit community, I use the text coverage and between-round standings to see how my friends are doing at European GPs. I check the “main stories” article to see if anyone I know has popped up, or what cool stuff has happened. When there’s a GP with video coverage and there’s a Scottish player in a feature match, someone will post and we’ll all be watching.

I would very strongly wager that we’re not alone, and that other small countries, or close communities in larger ones, are doing the same thing. Because we care. We want to see people we know do well. We want to celebrate their successes with them. It’s great that so much money is being invested into the professional game and the high-stakes payouts, but winding back the stuff that builds communities feels like a real kick in the teeth.

I mean, look at when Gary Campbell won the Legacy GP in Birmingham. This was a huge, huge moment for Scotland.

For those of us who will never make the Mythic Championship or be on the Magic Pro League, that’s what it’s all about.

I know Channel Fireball offer pairings on their own external online pairings site, so you can kind of work out how well people are doing from that, but the fact that Wizards appear to be moving away from it is disheartening.

There’s another reason I’m super upset that GP coverage has apparently been killed, and I can already feel blood pressures rising as I type it, but it’s diversity.

I was halfway through an unrelated blog post when this “announcement” popped up. In it I praise the steps we’ve taken in increasing visibility of female and LGBT players in the time I’ve been playing the game. Coverage -whether text or video based – and feature matches have been an ideal opportunity to show a cross-section of our community, and I’ve noticed a steady increase in the number of women at GPs in the past few years.

There are, unfortunately, very few women playing on the Pro Tour. (Let’s all just take a moment to appreciate Maria Bartholdi on coverage.) There are no women in the MPL. From the sounds of it, these are increasingly going to be the face of the game.

As someone who has a very heavy investment in making the community feel more open and welcoming to a wider range of people, I find it very disheartening that Wizards have chosen to eliminate both one of the most regular opportunities to get a glimpse into the competitive community, and one of the best opportunities for us to show that anyone is welcome in our world.

It’s a business. I know. You need to make money, or save money, and I’m not an expert; maybe there was no other option. But I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that canning GP coverage feels like a sucker punch.

*

There’s also a huge issue around organised play. Or rather, the lack of it.

I’m from Scotland. We’re a little country with maybe 15 WPN stores and another handful of unsanctioned player groups. Our Magic scene is incredibly strong. We’re a very close community, where everyone in the country pretty much knows everyone else. Our community recently featured in an Enter the Battlefield video, which was based on this moment from GP Birmingham – a moment which multiple people afterwards said was unlike anything they’d ever seen before at a GP.

The announcement that the organised play structure was changing set some alarms ringing for me. I presented PPTQs to our local players as an opportunity to try their hand at the competitive scene in a relatively easy-going environment, with this community that was welcoming and supportive. That’s gone. The World Magic Cup, the qualifiers for which were also a highlight in our calendar, has gone.

It’s now the end of January, and so far there’s no announcement of what’s happening in the future. We don’t know if the MCQs will be gated, how often they’ll be held, where they’re likely to be held, or if there’s going to be any other store-level competitive events offered. Stores can’t schedule anything locally because there’s no information on what’s coming, so events can’t be scheduled in case they clash with a WPN store level event. People are reluctant to buy into competitive standard decks – even though they really want to, from feedback I’ve been hearing – because nobody can give them any information on what opportunities they’ll have, if any, to play outside of casual games and Friday Night Magic.

For the grinders and those who can afford it, there are still MagicFests abroad, but for the local store owners, the competitive players who can’t afford to travel to another country to play competitively, and the people who’re interested in trying out the competitive scene, there’s currently absolutely nothing in the future.

From a personal perspective, I became a judge to contribute to the competitive scene locally. Now we don’t have one. I’ve put off working for my L2 judge test because I have no desire to work at a GP and have always been invested heavily in the local scene, but now I’m not sure if there’s any point. I know more than one judge who’s had to start contemplating their future in the programme because the event structure is so uncertain.

Our competitive communities are in limbo, waiting to find out our future.

*

Arena has been a runaway success and I don’t doubt that esports are going to feature heavily in the future of the game, but while free to play online Magic might be more accessible to new players, or players who don’t have a store locally, the idea that the future of the game is going to be funnelled into screens and a few shiny, hard-to-reach events a year at the expense of other aspects of the game is quite hard to swallow.

For many of us, the Magic brought us in, but the Gathering is why we stay. Please don’t lose sight of that.