What's NEXT for Magic Digital? WRITTEN BY Wen Fu

Hasbro—the company that owns Magic: The Gathering—just announced an insane fiscal quarter, and their stock is soaring to new highs. No, don’t go snap-sell your collections and buy their stock; as an avid investor and swing trader, I delved (Ed. note: Pardon the pun) into their 2017 earnings reports to see how Magic is doing, their plans for the future, and make a few educated guesses and suggestions.

Growth in Magic

Hasbro announced that their entire gaming category—most notably Magic and Monopoly—were up 11 percent this quarter. While I love Monopoly, people usually don’t buy more than maybe 2–3 of the same board games (minus a special edition or two). I really think that a big portion of this is from Magic; I feel that Hasbro threw in Monopoly with Magic because almost everyone knows what Monopoly is.

They also stated that Magic continued to grow for the eighth straight year. This is good news! Wall Street investors generally value growth much more than a simple income stream, and companies are forced to really focus on their growth divisions to please investors. (I.e. Investors care more about the number of growing subscribers in Netflix than the fact that they made almost $2.5 billion dollars in three months.)

Hasbro also said that in 2016 they had higher expenses because they were investing in Magic for the long term (including higher compensation to get the right people). This is all great news for us, because it means that Hasbro—not just Wizards of the Coast—is focused on more than just maintaining the status quo of Magic. They're focused on growing it and making it better.

Digital Magic

Throughout the report, they made many mentions that digital gaming is something they need to “grow” and are really focused on in the upcoming year. The CEO of Hasbro stated that they want Magic Digital Next to be up and running in 2017, which is very ambitious since there still has to be alpha and beta testing. Any project manager knows that to keep a tight schedule like this means they are really putting money into this new digital platform. Corporate lingo is constructed very carefully; the worst thing they can do is promise shareholders something and then not be able to keep that promise. By specifically naming the product Magic Digital Next and telling shareholders that their money is being invested into this program, it means that Hasbro is dead serious about doing it right.

As an avid player of Hearthstone, here are some things I feel that Hasbro has to get right on Magic Digital Next:

It must have a semi-viable Free-to-Play (F2P) Mode. In 2016, Apple announced that the App Store offered 631,091 gaming applications. This is an extremely competitive market, and in 2017, it is tremendously difficult to get people to pay for something without even trying it. When it comes to business, getting in the door is the hardest part; it doesn’t matter if you have the best card game in the world (which Magic still is) if nobody signs up because there’s a $10 fee to get started. I also believe they should follow the business model of many F2P games that they give out free things to incentivize players to come back every day such as daily quests, a free draft, something to keep people interested. I’ll admit that even though I have pretty much every competitive card in Hearthstone, I still religiously log in every Wednesday to claim my free Tavern Brawl pack.





It should not be just a watered down version of Magic. I saw some people speculate that Digital Next might be an easier version of Magic without phases/Instants to make things go smoother. While I think this is a good idea if the game has two different play modes, the game of paper Magic should still remain. Whether or not Wizards decides to keep Magic: The Gathering Online (MTGO) (more on that later), I believe it’s crucial that Pros and Competitive players have a digital platform to test decks and the limited formats before they head off to their Pro Tour Qualifiiers or Grand Prix.





The Interface doesn’t have to have Call of Duty graphics but it must look nice. Wizards have done a really good job for their Magic Expansion Set videos in the past year, and I expect to see the same for Digital Next.





Any bugs or issues must be fixed immediately. Currently Magic Online has cards that still don’t work properly, and while this is the .01 percent, it is still unacceptable. Any known bugs that affect gameplay or the outcome of a game should not have a turnaround time of more than week at most.

Now that some of the basic things are out of the way, I’m going to talk about the elephant in the room: The secondary market. I can honestly say that there’s really no perfect or even good solution on how to figure this one out so I don’t envy the team that’s working on this program. They can make it a subscription model, stay with the current model of MTGO, or go with something that resembles Hearthstone. I think given the complexity of Magic’s secondary market, it probably has to be a combination.

I might be in the minority—and please don’t be scared to criticize me—but Magic Digital Next should not allow peer-to-peer trading. Hear me out, I know Magic is a trading card game and I believe that paper Magic fulfills this role. I’ve played many games where peer-to-peer trading was allowed and what ends up happening is that if the game becomes popular enough it creates a black hole of a secondary market. Countries with cheap labor hire digital farmers, gameplay becomes second-tier to hoarding currency, and I’ve even seen some games sell an extremely rare item via lotto! Yes, it became essentially more about gambling than gameplay! Many players complain about MTGO because they see it as having to pay for their collections twice; I think by drastically lowering the entry to Digital Next, Wizards can help draw in current players as well as new people who never heard of Magic. One option is that Hasbro can insert digital codes in paper Magic packs so that these have some value in real life, but are still tied to their digital platform. This would give paper players a chance to try out the digital platform, give it to a friend, or even trade it for value to digital-only players.

When MTGO first debuted, it was really one of its kind and people didn’t trust digital currency back in 2000. Now pretty much all of our bank accounts, gaming libraries, and books are all stored in the cloud. By getting rid of redemption, they cut out a lot of costs and would make entry much cheaper to compete with other digital card games.

Current MTGO players

Unfortunately, Hasbro has not mentioned any concrete details about the future of the current MTGO system, which leads me to believe that it’s on borrowed time since they specifically stated that all their resources are going into Digital Next. Many of you might know from my last article that I’m a big proponent of companies being loyal to their most loyal customers. The most hardcore players and MTGO Bot dealers stuck with the program through thick and thin; Hasbro simply cannot just tank the value of their collections to zero. This would really hurt the consumer confidence of some of Magic’s biggest supporters and is simply wrong. There’s probably no solution that will reimburse players fully for the values of their collections but I guess the money lost will probably have to be seen as you paid for hours of entertainment. While there’s literally no perfect solution here’s a few that I can think of that Hasbro can do for current MTGO players:

The best solution is if Magic Digital Next is almost a double program that has two sides, where one side is a "fixed" MTGO for competitive players who want the full Magic experience on a more complicated platform and players/dealers can just port their cards over.

Allow players to redeem all their cards for points (yes, value will be lost) and then allow players to use those points to either buy credits in Digital Next or use points to redeem current standard paper sets including premium sets. (This should be announced at least 2 years ahead so it doesn’t crash the value of the current paper set and give players a chance to prepare) Hasbro would need to put a cap on this so dealers don’t end up all redeeming the same set and make standard cards nearly worthless for stores to profit on.

What do you think? I’m excited for Magic Digital Next, and as someone who doesn’t have the time to spend a whole day playing Magic anymore, I really look forward to battling some old friends online from time to time.

- @usnwfu