On paper, collectible card game Magic: the Gathering has a 25-year-old legacy of strategic depth and competitive stability. Now, armed with the release of a new digital platform called Magic: The Gathering Arena, developer Wizards of the Coast wants to take on esports. The Esports Observer sat down with Wizards’ new director of esports, Bear Schmiedicker, to see how he plans to merge a fledgling esports product with over two decades spent on tabletops.

Schmiedicker’s previous job is one of his major strengths as he tackles this unique challenge. Prior to his hiring at Wizards in February, Schmiedicker spent eight years at Riot Games, developer of influential esports title League of Legends, with the last four as a senior esports manager.

“I worked with a really awesome team there, about 90 people or so… Esports was in its nascent stage and was going through a lot of growth, so we wanted to professionalize the scene as much as possible.”

During his time on Riot’s esports team, Schmiedicker led several format changes, most notably the 2018 franchising of the North American League of Legends Championship Series (now just LCS). One of the biggest lessons learned, however, came when the league tried to move to a format that gave several teams a week off at the same time. Fans of those absent teams simply didn’t tune in. “Make sure that the changes that you’re making to the format and to the league structure, or different rules, aren’t going to harm sizable parts of your audience,” he learned.

Credit: Wizards of the Coast

Following the franchising of the NALCS, Schmiedicker was looking for a new challenge. So when Wizards announced a $10M USD Magic pro system with esports elements, he reached out. “I was pretty excited, and I was hoping that they were hiring, and hopefully they were,” he admitted. “I thought, ‘wow, this is super ambitious, the team is really set up for success, Arena is a really great digital product.’ It really sucked me into Magic.”

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Now facing the first full year of operation, Magic’s pro scene and Schmiedicker are growing on each other. For Schmiedicker, that means adapting to Magic’s team-free format. As a former player support manager, Schmiedicker is familiar with the benefits that a team organization can bring to players—”sports psychologists, nutritionists, best practices on building a brand personality, etc.”—and looks forward to pushing those concepts. He also sees a lot of strength in the game’s individualistic nature, particularly in how few barriers there are to going pro.

“What really drew me to Magic, and to the benefit of having that individual-style sport, is that you could theoretically pick up a deck tomorrow and qualify for the World Championship at the end of the year. We truly do have a ‘Path of Pro’ compared to other esports.”

The biggest challenge, to Schmiedicker, is dealing with Magic’s 25-year history. His main priority upon joining the team was to “respect the legacy” and leverage the game’s history to showcase what makes Magic “really awesome to play and hopefully really awesome to watch.” He sees the structure for the complex new esports league, details of which were released recently, as a balance between the old and the new.

Credit: Wizards of the Coast

“We really wanted to build a system that respected both the tabletop side and the Arena side and, no matter which way you wanted to play… both have paths upward to the Pro-level ecosystem.”

As this new system plays out, Schmiedicker and his team will be gathering feedback and data, looking at how their changes are impacting the player community, and whether they need to make further tweaks. Schmiedickeroutlines success through product evaluation (for both paper and Arena), viewership metrics, player assessment, and feedback from pro players, teams, and sponsors in the space.

As the game exists both online and on tabletops, Schmiedicker is particularly interested in exploring sponsorship opportunities that can bridge the dual nature of Magic. “We want to intertwine [sponsors] as much as possible,” he said, adding that the product teams are also free to find partners for “what makes sense” for each product.

Other decisions across the new competitive structure stem come from seeking a balance between old and new as well. The new Magic Pro League, for example, will be a consistent showcase featuring the best players, and the best decks. As such, Schmiedicker intends the MPL to “reward and evangelize” aspiring players.

Credit: Wizards of the Coast

Schmiedicker’s experience at Riot Games is also playing a heavy role. The fresh start of Arena is allowing the Wizards team to make format changes that tabletop players would not readily accept. Some of these changes include best-of-one gameplay, a new format called Dual Standard, and even a new mulligan rule.

“The digital side gives us a lot of flexibility to try things out that are just infeasible, or almost impossible, on the tabletop side… If the fans are super unhappy, or if the format has issues, we’ll definitely take a look at our data and figure out what the best path forward is.”

The key point Schmiedicker is trying to get across to his team, and to the greater community of Magic players and fans, is that each change announced so far (and each one coming) is intended to make the game “as fun to play as it is to watch.” Nothing is set in stone, and he looks forward to working with the community to find a new format for Magic.