In 2012, I got an email that knocked me out of my seat. It was an invitation to be a member of the MTGO Community Cup. Honestly, it was a bolt lightning bolt out of the blue (John Avon Island). Of course I had aspirations of going to the community cup, but I didn't think it would be something that would happen that soon. A few months before that, I'd made a big splash with my AVR Draft Overview article. It was the first article where I really found my stride with the statistics, and I was also lucky enough to have Marshall Sutcliffe and John Loucks discuss my article on Limited Resources. Suddenly, I was being read all over the place. PVDDR told me that he thought the article was great. I got offers from multiple big MTG websites, though I decided to stick with PureMTGO for a variety of reasons. I realized that I had found something useful and powerful for MTG players, and I decided that I wanted to make it a regular thing. But none of that compared to when I was invited to the community cup. I ran around my house screaming. I fell down on my bed and kicked my legs in the air. Seriously, I went nuts.

And then I looked closer at the dates. At the time, I was going to start my last semester of college, and I was going to be student teaching. My university has extremely strict guidelines when it comes to student teaching. They recently became a four-year university, and it takes an immense amount of work to put student teaching programs into place. However, one student causing a problem can destroy the entire program, and force the university to start from the ground up. I knew it was going to be a tough sell, but I called up the student teaching office anyway, and asked if I would be able to miss a few days for the community cup. They told me in no uncertain terms that if I were to miss those days, they would block my graduation. So I wrote one of the most painful emails I've ever had to write, and I gave up my spot on the team (luckily for me, I didn't have to be on the community cup team that lost to WotC). But that day, I made the decision that I was going to give as much as I could to the MTGO community, and do everything in my power to be worthy of an invite again.

Fast forward to a today, about a year later. My life has changed in a lot of ways. I'm not a college student anymore; I'm a second year teacher. I have a decent job with lots of room for improvement. My Magic skills have improved more than I thought they could have, and I've learned to dominate formats in a way that I never imagined. My articles have given me deep understandings of formats, including insights into incredibly subtle aspects of formats. I've started streaming at twitch.tv/oraymw, though I don't have a schedule on account of having two little kids. But my kids have gotten older, and my life has gotten more stable.

The hardest thing was when my sister was killed in a head-on collision in April. It's so hard to explain how that feels. All the words just feel wrong. But an article I read helped me wrap my head around the idea. Basically, doctors have seen that when you lose a very close family member, your body produces the exact same physiological reaction as when you lose a limb. The most surprising thing about the accident was the physical pain that I felt when I lost my sister. I got nauseous a lot, and had a hard time eating. I couldn't sleep at night. I couldn't remember anything. I just didn't realize the incredible physical pain that is caused by grieving, and that is in addition to the sheer emotion of it all.

Believe me, this has everything to do with Magic. At the time, I was going through the absolute hardest time in my life. I've lost loved ones before, but this was my baby sister, and I felt like I was just in a deep hole. At that moment, the Magic community reached out and embraced me in an incredible outpouring of condolences. No event has changed me more than my sister's death, and one of the things that I learned was the importance of community, and that what we have in Magic: the Gathering is an incredible force for good. This game and the people that play it have the ability to enrich the lives of millions of people, to give them a group of people that will always be there for them, to give them a safe place that they can go no matter where they go, whether it is to a new city, or if it is into the dark pit of despair. The MTGO community means so much more to me now than it ever did before.

And so, the community cup nomination meant more to me than it did the year before. I certainly didn't expect to get a nomination; but I did feel like I had put out the kind of quality of work to make me a good choice for the team. When I got the email, my response was more sober, but more deeply satisfying. Between that tragedy, and finishing school, and the economic recession, MTG has carried me through some of the darkest times in my life, and now I was going to be able to represent the community in the most awesome event of the entire year.

I've heard a lot of people question the validity of the community cup. So many players just don't see much use in it, for various reasons. But I would argue that, besides the World Championship, the community cup is the most important event in Magic. Yes, it operates on an entirely different axis. And if you aren't one of the people that is on that axis, then it is going to seem like a waste of time and money. There are some marketing benefits to the event, but honestly, there are plenty of other ways to market MTGO that can reach people and get them playing. It serves as a great vehicle for educating the public about things like the Wide Beta Client (I'll talk about that in detail later on in the article), but there are other ways to do that that would probably be just as effective. The reason why we need the community cup is because Magic is not just a game, no matter how much people try to say that's all it is. Magic is a lifestyle. In fact, I'll top that. Magic is a culture. And no event communicates the values of the Magic: the Gathering culture better than the community cup.

This is an event that is about pure joy. It's exuberant and exciting and playful. But it is also competitive and challenging and emotional. It's an event that celebrates who we are as gamers, and ennobles us with ideals to improve the community around us. I don't know; maybe being a member of the team makes me look at it with a different perspective. And maybe I'm an idealist. But I believe that this event has a purpose, and that purpose is to tell the community that these are our values, and that if you reach out and make the community better, then you can have awesome experiences too, because that is what our game is about. It is about providing a framework in which we can celebrate life and intelligence and creativity and joy.

But lets' stop talking about pie in the sky topics. This is a tournament report-ish. So much happened at the community cup, so this is probably going to be a lengthy article, but I want to make sure that I'm comprehensive.

The first thing you should know is that WotC really treated us well for this event. Actually, that's a mundane statement. They rolled out the red carpet and treated us like celebrities. I started writing this on the airplane home, and I have to say that I didn't know how I was going to get all of my swag home. I literally filled half of my suitcase with stuff from this event. And all kinds of stuff too; cards, and sleeves, and boxes, and merchandise. We got an awesome tote bag, and some pins, and even a Fblthp doll. Everywhere we went, WotC just kind of threw stuff at us, and told us to take what we wanted. We stayed at a quality hotel, we ate good food, and we got to see awesome stuff (that I can't talk about). We got a tour of Wizards facilities (except level 3), and we got to go to PAX. One cool story really sums up this experience. After the event was over, we went to the Theros PAX party. I was hanging out with Keya and Tom, and we got into the party, and they headed over to the bar. Tom got his drink, and walked off. The bartender turned to Keya and said, "Where did he just go? He didn't pay for his drink!" Of course Tom ran back and took care of that, but when he got back, he told us that after having been treated to so much stuff over the weekend, he'd just forgotten that he had to pay for things like drinks.

The next thing is that we played a ton of Magic. At previous community cup events, there have been some fairly grueling constructed events, like Unified Modern, for example. During those events, the community team had to spend an incredible amount of time just building and tweaking their decks for the event. This year, WotC made what I thought was an incredibly intelligent and gracious move, by having mostly limited events. Also, the Ironroot Chef Challenge was a fantastic idea that allowed us to still play constructed, but to do so in a way that didn't require us to spend hours fine-tuning our decks. This meant that we had a lot of free time, in comparison to past teams. So what did we do with that time? Well, what would you do with a bunch of Magic players if you have a couple of hours to spare, and a big pile of packs? We drafted. A lot. Drafting Modern Masters was fun, especially when I realized that I was sitting directly to the left of Mike Turian, who is considered one of the best limited players ever, but the highlight "side event" for me was when we got to draft Zendikar. But this time, we got to do it the awesome way, and we opened up the Worldwake packs first. It had been so long since I played Zendikar and Worldwake, and I ended up getting a pretty sick WU deck after first picking a Vapor Snare. My draft pod included Marshall Sutcliffe, Ryan Spain, Brian-David Marshall, Rashad Miller, Nate Holt, Jan Van Der Vegt, and I can’t remember who the eighth person was (forgive me!!!!) but it was also someone awesome. The thing is, the other draft pod had a lot of great people as well, so it’s difficult to remember who was playing where. It was a fun draft with fun people with good food, and Ryan Spain was on my team, so he didn’t just beat me like he did in every other match we played that weekend.

Which brings me to what was the most important and awesome part of the entire event, which was the people. I met a ton of incredible people during that week, and there is no way that I could talk about all of them. Meeting up with Marshall Sutcliffe and Ryan Spain was particularly awesome for me, since I was one of the first Limited Resources listeners, and I was with them right from the beginning. I got to have a nice long conversation with Lee Sharpe, sort of my Bizarro/WotC stats guy counterpart, and he was one of my favorite people to meet. Aaron Forsythe’s chair was back-to-back with mine during the entire event. Sean Gibbons had our backs through the entire event, and he did an amazing job at making us feel welcome. But what I really wanted to do was take a small section of this article to talk about how awesome my team members were on the community cup.

The Team

There’s no best order to talk about them, so I’ll just use the order that they were listed in the announcement article. Melissa DeTora was awesome. I’ve always rooted for her when she is doing well at big tournaments, but actually meeting her was just something else. First off, she is a great Magic player. It’s so much different watching someone play on Pro Tour coverage, versus sitting behind their monitor and talking through their plays with them. I got to do this several times with Melissa, and she is definitely one of the best players I’ve ever met. She has an incredibly sharp intuition, but she also thinks through the game at angles that I simply didn’t see until she came up with them. She was also a great person to talk with. For example, one of the nights we ate at The Palomino, and I ended up sitting across the table from Melissa, and she was just enjoyable to spend time with. Melissa was also there with James Searles, who basically functioned as our social media manager and all-around press guy for the entire event. He did stuff like post photos of the team on twitter, and our decks, as well as keeping people updated on the event. He’s also the kind of person that will lead the charge whenever people aren’t sure what to do, and having him around really helped us keep everything together. I also spent quite a bit of time talking to James, which was great fun.

Tom Delia, the man behind MTGRadio and a pillar of the MTGO EDH community, was probably the heart and soul of the community team. He was always upbeat and fun to be around. Tom was always ready to do something awesome, and he really kept the entire team in good spirits. On top of that, Tom also surprised me by being just a great player. Tom, Keya, and I were definitely the worst players on our team, but it really goes to show just how amazing our team was that we were the bottom. Kenji Egashira, also known as Numot the Nummy, put up a lot of wins for our team. He was also very funny, with a very level delivery for all of his jokes. Reid Duke was the de facto community team captain, and I have to say, I think he is just the best player in the world right now. Reid is quiet, but we did some really great conversations. He’s not showy or self-absorbed at all, despite just being awesome. I got to draft next to Reid during the event, and he helped critique some of my deck-building choices, picks, and plays, and I think that I’ve never learned more about the game. The absolute best part of the entire event was when Reid came up to me and told me that he really enjoyed my articles and that he uses them to help prepare for the limited environment.

Jan van der Vegt was hilarious. He’s also a great and creative player. But Jan was just a ton of fun to be around. He’s sort of a party animal, but he was just the exact kind of person that you wanted to spend a lot of time with. In the last cube draft, Jan and I were passing to each other, and the two of us basically built our decks in tandem, and it was a ton of fun. Michael Jacob is kind of stealthy awesome. He was quieter than the rest of the team, but all of a sudden he’d make some really funny comment, or do something to make the entire event better (like holding onto the trophy and taking it to the MTG PAX party, which led to all kinds of shenanigans). He was also sitting right next to me, and it was great to have such a high caliber player there to veto my picks/plays whenever they were really bad. Last but not least, we have PureMTGO’s own Keya Saleh, cohost of the Freed From the Real Podcast. I probably spent more time with Keya than anybody, and we had some good conversations. We have a lot in common, since we both work in education, and we were the two married dudes on the team, and I loved spending time with him. He also sat next to me in the event, and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out complex situations together, while the rest of our team was occupied in tough spots. Who knows if we always came to the right conclusion, but we did do a pretty good job supporting each other.

Overall, the entire team was great. We got along really well, and if I had the opportunity to spend time with any of them again, I definitely would. I don’t think we could have had a better group of people on the team, and I’m proud to say that I was among them. Also, our team was such a sick gathering of MTG talent. WotC would definitely be wise not to invite such an insanely good group of players again. But I should say that what really made our team great was our communication. It’s hard to visualize exactly what was going on in the event, and the way that our team communicated, but we really did spend most of our drafts out of our seats, working through picks together. The last cube draft is a perfect example; I was passing to Jan in packs 1 and 3. So, when the packs came up, Jan would highlight his pick, and then come stand behind my computer. Together, we would discuss what the two of us should take, and then I would choose my card. Jan would go back to his seat, highlight the card he’d already decided to take, and then come back to my screen to discuss the next pick. A few picks that illustrate this are P1P3, where I take a Serendib Efreet over Gaea’s Cradle, which I normally wouldn’t do, but I did it because Jan was already in green, and it just made sense for him to get that, and for me to stay open in blue. In P3P2, I had a chance at a Primeval Titan which would have been a sick reanimation target for my deck, but instead I took Blood Crypt because Jan really needed the Primeval Titan for late game punch. We had this kind of communication going all over the table, and it really gave us an edge over WotC.

The Dev Chat

The one part of the Community cup about which I have received the most questions was our Q&A session with Worth Wollpert, Aaron Forsythe, Mike Turian, and Christ Kiritz. This was probably the most important part of our visit, and we got to ask a lot of important questions about Magic Online. We were there for probably around two hours, and the biggest chunk of the time was spent talking about the Beta client, known by the developers as “Shiny.” We also talked about lots of other elements of Magic Online, and it was a fantastic Q&A.

You should know that we absolutely did not pull our punches. We were very direct about every aspect of Magic Online, and we asked many probing questions in order to dig deep at what the team was saying. We were honest about the Magic Online Beta client, and we talked about our worries with that and with other aspects of the program. We also talked about our expectations for the program in the future.

However, the most important thing that you should know is that the Magic Online team was very open with us, that they didn’t shy away from the questions, and that they genuinely have our best interests at heart. These guys are on our side. Worth was especially open with us, and he almost let slip several features that they are not ready to announce, but Mike, Aaron, and Chris were able to reign him in a little bit.

Worth mentioned over and over that his motto for the wide Beta is “Do No Harm.” By this, he means that they will not be forcing player over onto the new client until they are sure that the client is at least as good as the old client. They don’t want to repeat the same experience that they had with V3, and so they are going to make sure that the performance and stability are equal to V3 before they force a switchover.

We asked if there was a scheduled deadline for the force over, and Worth said there is not. They are going to stick by the Do No Harm rule even if it means waiting longer to switch over. He did say that they have internal goals, but that those goals are not a concrete timeline, and they are subject to movement. Overall, Worth gave us the impression that the “Shiny” switchover is not looming over us, but that it will eventually come.

There are two important things that go along with that point. First, Worth said that they are not planning on making any feature changes to the shiny client at this time. He said that he doesn’t want to use the term feature-locked, because they aren’t completely closed off to new features, but that they are at a point in development where they won’t be changing any features unless they absolutely have to. He said that whenever you are working on software, any feature change will have dramatic changes on everything in the code. At some point, you just change mess with the features any more, and you have to focus on performance and stability. That is the point that the beta client is at. Second, at the moment the MTGO team has to divide its work between V3 and Shiny. This means that they can’t focus enough energy on one client in order to do all of the things they want to do with MTGO. There are many features that they would like to implement in the new client, but until they are able to turn off V3, and move completely over what is now the beta client, we won’t be seeing a lot of feature changes on either client. Helping the MTGO team improve the beta by doing a lot of testing in the client is one of the best ways that you can help improve MTGO.

Now that we’ve covered the main discussion points that we had about the new client, there were also a lot of smaller details that we discussed. I’ll put these into a list, and try to go through them as quickly as possible.

1. They are working on improving matchmaking. This is one aspect that the team feels is improved in the new client, but they would like to see improvement even from there. I don’t have any specifics in this area though.

2. We talked phantom drafting technology and cube drafting. Phantom drafting and cube drafting went hand in hand in the first stages of their development. The team threw out some ideas they’ve been considering such as player run cubes. This was the original intent behind the phantom drafting technology, and it took a little bit different path, but is still a potential area. They also talked about the possibility of loading decks for your opponents to play. For example, if I have a WU control deck and I want to test it against a RG aggro deck, but I can’t find an opponent with the cards, there would be a system in place whereby my opponent could play with my RG deck. These aren’t ideas that are in development, but just some ideas that the team would like to implement.

3. The team is working with the idea to alter the windowed structure of the beta client so that you can reattach the windowed games into the main client, in order to keep the entire program in one window. This would be an option, in case the windowed client doesn’t work as well for players.

4. Leagues. The team is currently developing leagues. They’ve got a plan that they think is going to hit a lot of the strengths that leagues originally had, while fixing some of the flaws. Their philosophy is to have a limited format that you can play for about an hour every day, instead of having to commit three hours to a draft. One of the things they are looking to get rid of is the grinding slog of leagues. For those that don’t know, leagues originally had a tie-breaker system that was based on the number of matches that you won in addition to the normal amount that counted towards your record. This meant that the people at the top of the league standings would typically have hundreds of extra matches won, in order to get first place. Since the prizes were a little top heavy, this incentivized the kind of grinding behavior that the MTGO team wants to avoid in leagues for the second go around. Again, this is something that is in development, and that will be implemented soon, though they gave no specific timeline.

5. Clans. We talked a little bit about added functionality for clans. The answer was that a lot of the problems with clans are back end related, and the others can’t be changed until we move off of the old client. They are trying to figure out what to do with this, but it also isn’t a particularly high priority.

6. Beta Draft Table View – We talked about why the team brought back the table view, which shows to whom you are passing. They said that it was a feature that got lost in V3, but they added it back because “Why not?” It mirrors real life, and there is not really a good reason not to have it.

7. We also talked a bit about performance metrics. We talked a little about how WotC uses metrics, but they didn’t give us any specifics. But we did talk about making personal metrics a little bit more available. The team is in favor of increasing the amount of metrics that players can access about themselves. One of the problems is that they don’t want to implement rating in the same way, for two major reasons. First, it was often used by players to harass other players. Second, they don’t want to tie too many emotions to the numbers. Worth talked about implementing the kind of system that makes players feel like they are leveling up when they succeed, rather than making them feel like failures whenever they lose. We also talked about tying PWPs to MTGO, but we didn’t get any specifics on this answer. They did say that the eventual goal is that the two experiences would be unified.

8. Report Abuse. The MTGO team is very aware the current system for reporting behavior is not very good. They do want to have in-client reporting. Eventually there will be a system where you can click on a person’s name, hit report abuse, and the client will automatically take a screenshot of the game client, and file it along with the report. This will lessen the amount of time and energy needed to report behavior. This also led us to an interesting discussion about dealing with behavior in MTGO. The MTGO team has been looking at what League of Legends is doing in this field, and believes that Riot is definitely blazing the trail in improving online gaming communities. However, MTGO is a unique program with a unique community, and they want to find a system that fits Magic players. We threw around some ideas of a “niceness” rating, which would be similar to an Amazon seller rating. When you go to join a match with someone, you could see whether they had good ratings, and if you see comments like “this person consistently disconnects from matches when upset,” then you will know not to join a game with that person. We also talked about possibilities of positive reinforcement for good behavior, but the MTGO team is very wary of such a system, because they know that MTG players are gamers, and as soon as you introduce a new system and attach rewards, they are going to try to figure out how to game the system. The last thing they want is to have people bullying other players into giving them honor.

9. Competition. We talked about how much WotC sees games like Hearthstone or SolForge as competition. The team acknowledged that these games are doing a lot of great things, but they also said that those games don’t have the benefit of being tied to (arguably) the most popular card game in the word. They are aware of those games, and have played with those games, and they intend to learn from the things that these competitors do well, but they are not worried about their market share being taken over. They made a comparison to when the market was flooded with TCGs a decade or so ago, and how those TCGs inevitably brought more people to Magic. They said that Magic has a depth of strategic complexity and variability that you just can’t find in other online TCGs.

10. DotP. This was a brief comment, but the team reasserted the long term goal that Duels of the Planeswalker and MTGO be the same experience. Eventually, you would play Duels and it just transitions into MTGO.

11. Non-Traditional Formats. I asked about the success of non-traditional formats like the FOOLS sealed, or the Full Ravnica Block sealed formats. The team said that in short doses, these formats are enormously successful, and that we can expect to see future developments in this area.

12. Vintage. The MTGO team has a plan in place to release the Power 9 on MTGO. This is going to go into effect some time during this year (2013). There was a rumor that they were once going to be Mythics for Masters Edition Four, but that rumor was unfounded. The dilemma has been that they want the Power 9 to be released in a way they deserve considering their power and prestige in the game. For example, if they just released the Power 9 as Mythics in a set, then the price of Black Lotus would be less than the price of Lion’s Eye Diamond. They don’t want Black Lotus to cost less than Bad Lotus. There weren’t any details about how this is going to happen, but the team is obviously confident in their plan.

13. Trading. The V3 system is tied intrinsically to the classifieds system. There is a lot of software and hardware dedicated to this. It cannot, absolutely cannot, be revamped while V3 is still active. Eventually, the team is going to take a hard look at trading, but it is a project that is still down the road, and there are no current plans.

I’m sure there were other things covered in the meeting that I didn’t record and didn’t remember. I think I hit most of the main points. If you have any questions, you can ask them in the comments, and it might jog my memory about something I missed.

I really thought that I would be able to make this article shorter. However, I’m already past 5000 words, and I haven’t even gotten to talk about the actual event. So, I’m going to split this into two parts. In the second part, I’ll give a report of the event, but I’ll also spend some time giving preliminary Theros thoughts, as well as some discussion about throwback draft formats. Thanks for reading along for this non-mathy Ars Arcanum. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed it, and I’ll see you next time.

As always, you can follow me on twitter @oraymw for updates about articles. I’ve also put up a Tumblr account at http://oraymw.tumblr.com/ where I post links to my articles. You can go there and subscribe to the RSS feed, and then you’ll be able to get updates whenever a new article goes live.



Finally, I encourage you to check out the podcast that I do with my buddy Zach Orts, which is called All in the Telling. In it, we look at stories from a professional standpoint in order to get a better understanding of why they are important to the human experience. But mostly, we just talk about what makes awesome stories awesome. http://allinthetelling.libsyn.com/