Chris Cocks became President of Wizards of the Coast in June 2016, before which he served as Vice President of OEM Technical Sales at Microsoft. We sat down with Chris to talk about his origin story, the future of digital Magic, and plenty of other fun topics.

This is part three of a three-part series, covering card stock, the future of Organized Play, and Dominaria. You can read part one here and part two here. Since we talked about so many things over the course of the interview, we are also providing the full transcript here for you to peruse at your leisure.

On Card Stock

Let’s get this out of the way first. We took this opportunity to ask Chris Cocks about the Magic community’s concerns about card stock. “We definitely follow people online, follow the social media trends, getting feedback and we’re constantly monitoring card quality,” he said. Chris reiterated that “[Wizards] regularly listen[s] to the feedback of our players” and revealed that he’s a Redditor: “My preferred platform is Reddit. I go and look through the Reddit channels for Arena, finance and TCGPlayer.”

Chris implied that any variations in the quality of Magic’s card stock came down to, “the old adage: you can have it fast, cheap, or you can have it good.” But he emphasized that Wizards of the Coast is “committed to having all three. It’s important to us. So we meet with our vendors regularly. We test the heck out of the cards regularly, and if we need to make any changes, we’ll make those changes.”

The Future of Organized Play

Last May, Helene Bergeot, the long-time head of Organized Play, unexpectedly left Wizards of the Coast. In order to fill Helene’s role, Chris told us that he brought in “Davide [Bonati, Senior Director, Competitive Gaming & Esports]…from Wizards Europe and he runs our Organized Play team.”

Despite the abrupt change in leadership, Chris said that “last year, our overall Organized Play grew by about 5-7% in terms of total number of players and about 30% in terms of new players who participated. So it’s definitely a core strength for the brand and we’ll be continuing to invest heavily through our network of 6,000 plus local game stores.” That 5-7% increase is an interesting number, given that it occurred in the face a series of unbalanced Standard formats that led to the banning of not one, but nine cards.

In terms of Grand Prix and the Pro Tour, Chris hints that there are big announcements coming this summer. “I wish I could tell you more, but the interview is about six months too early,” he joked. “[Y]ou’re likely going to see us make some announcements about how we can further extend the reach of Organized Play. We have ideas to make Organized Play be even more watchable and streamable, Then we can get more people playing at the highest levels, and taking some cues from some of the best in the business in terms of how they’re thinking about the leagues and teams and kind of the overall professional level play.”

These announcements seem like they are in line with what Chris explained was their guiding philosophy for streaming Magic. “We’re a big believer in online streaming and watching card games being played in order to learn how to play them and help with deck design,” he said. “We definitely see that as a trend in Magic. And we definitely see that as a trend in other TCGs. What you’re going to see us do is really optimize our approach of the offerings we have in those so that we’re always live with great content that people can watch that is programmed by Wizards or programmed by our partners.” Chris also noted that MTG Arena will play a big role in providing user-generated content that can serve the same purpose. “My hope is that as we have Arena and then we have other games come out, you’re going to see this explosion of viewable content that’s a lot of fun to watch and is valuable to players.”

This first step in this streaming strategy was Wizards’ exclusive partnership with Twitch that began in 2017. Chris seemed pleased with the first year of the deal, noting that viewership “was up substantially, like mid-double digits.” Stay tuned later this year, when Wizards officially announces how they will build on evolving their Twitch streams.

Channel Fireball’s Grand Prix Performance

Last year, Wizards announced another exclusive partnership, this time with Channel Fireball, which would be the exclusive tournament organizer running Grand Prix in 2018. Even though it’s only one month into 2018, we asked Chris if he had any early impressions on CFB’s handling of the Grand Prix. “So far so good,” he said. “It’s still pretty early and we worked with them really closely, and right now we’re monitoring player feedback on satisfaction with the events and you know, where we can optimize. Channel Fireball, they have a vested interest in making sure these players have a good time and feel like they’re having fun at the events. Because it’s not just the events that they have to concern themselves with, its their overall brand, just like us.”

Magic’s Next Set: Dominaria

We were immediately jealous when Chris told us that he had drafted Dominaria just last week. “I’ve only gotten to play about three or four times,” he casually mentioned, only making us more envious. “We just did a draft last week of first off the line product, and it’s fun. You definitely get that flavor of the past if you’re an old-school player.”

“Playing in 1994, 1995, I remember looking at the art on the package going like, wow, this is amazing, really geeking out about it,” he continued. “Now, revisiting Dominaria for the first time in a decade and a half and looking at the art is amazing…It’s kind of like comparing Gawain and the Green Knight to Game of Thrones. Technically, they’re both fantasy, but one definitely has much more modern sensibilities. I think that’ll be very surprising and pleasing to the people who play the game.”

Chris wouldn’t give us a sneak peek into characters or mechanics, but did say that “the R&D team did a good job of finding an accessibility point for newer or more casual fans that make it relatively easy for them to be able to draft or play limited or build constructed sets with classic fantasy tropes…Like, Hey, I want to play as the white knights or I want to play as the dark paladins or I want to play as wizards from the school of magic, but also having a lot of more highly competitive subtle mechanics that the competitive old-school player will like, and that are really nice references to the past.”

The interview from which this article draws upon was conducted by Rich Stein and Zac Clark. David McCoy also contributed to this article.