I didn’t watch the Mythic Invitational. Give it a score out of ten for me. Then rate Pro Tours on the same scale.

A friend of mine — we’ll call him Brad — posed this question to me on Monday morning. As I tend to do with any difficult question, I attacked its premises instead of tackling it head on. “They’re apples and oranges,” I said. “Give me criteria to evaluate the two tournaments on and I can tell you how they compare.” Call it a side effect of my day job, but for better or worse I’m apparently now unable to watch a tournament and identify if it was good or not — my evaluations are wholly context-dependent, with deference to fabricated end users whose profiles live in my head and may or may not have any basis in reality. I could’ve probably told Brad which kind of tournament he would like better very easily, but that’s far less interesting than taking broadcast criteria from a (relative) curmudgeon who’s been paying attention to the game with various levels of enthusiasm for the past 15 years and pitting the two tournament styles against each other.

Too many analyses of Magic tournament broadcasts claim authority simply because they’ve played and thought about the game a lot or because perhaps they’ve achieved something close to mastery of the game. It never occurs to this particular brand of critic that that their perspective or preference is not what Wizards of the Coast is looking for at all — that the more time you spend with Magic, the more likely you are to eventually focus your energies on the insatiable maw that is its competitive scene. The implication in 99.% of tournament coverage critiques is that what’s good for the competitive Magic community is good for Magic as a whole, and will grow the game as a matter of course. Now that the high-variance, pro-unfriendly Mythic Invitational and its record-shattering viewership numbers are in the books, it’s finally safe to dismiss the idea that what’s good for Magic’s professional players is necessarily good for the game’s growth as well. The two are unrelated, which is fine; sometimes WotC does things that are bad from both perspectives and sometimes they do things that are good from both perspectives (citation needed) and sometimes WotC’s initiatives are only good for growth and neutral or even harmful for professional players (it should be a given that WotC would never intentionally launch an initiative that’s totally unconcerned with growing the game’s brand). The only reason to mention any of this at all is that establishing that the things I want to see on Magic coverage would, in all likelihood, halt the Magic brand’s steep post-Arena ascent, feels important to do here.

W hich tournament features the most interesting Magic?

The Mythic Championship was a bittersweet moment. The production value of the broadcast was immense and it was wrapped around a thoroughly unenjoyable format. I have not watched Magic that bad since Pro Tour Columbus ‘06.

Pierre Canali blundered through an entire Pro Tour because somehow he was the only dude in the room who thought that all those busted Affinity cards might just work in Extended too. He played the finals abysmally, missing multiple on-board kills, but it didn’t matter because he was smart enough to take a year’s worth of design mistakes into battle and the raw power of the cards pulled him kicking and screaming towards the first place trophy. Even in hindsight, it is difficult to imagine an actual person this narrative would appeal to. If Osyp Lebedowicz hadn’t been in the booth to make the best (depending on your perspective, of course) out of a bad situation, this match would probably be swept aside like so many other forgettable Pro Tours of the mid-2000s. Can you imagine this match being called straight?

I’m not claiming the Mythic Invitational was full of Pierre Canalis, but it did showcase a format similar in undesirability to 2006 Extended, even if the two gameplay styles are worlds apart. When evaluating the Mythic Invitational’s bizarre Duo Standard format, it’s important to consider what WotC’s aims might be with this tournament. Pinning down their goals with 100% accuracy or even 50% isn’t the goal; this is just a thought exercise.

One of MTG Arena’s hallmarks is the constant action. The default on Magic Online is that you bluff everything at every possible phase — every time you get priority, your chess clock starts ticking. On Arena, a juiced-up version of “F8” where the game grabs the nearest megaphone and tells your opponent “THEY’RE NOT HOLDING AN INSTANT” whether or not you have eight lands untapped is the default. There’s an option to turn on full control in Arena to make it play just like Magic Online, but wow is that not the point. Jeff Cunningham recently described Arena as “Magic mainlined,” and that’s as apt and succinct a description as you’ll find:

Without mana screw, waiting during drafts, or the fussiness of sideboarding, and with constant in-game action, and faster matchplay than ever, Arena concentrates the thrilling parts of Magic.

The Duo Standard format has more to do with “the fussiness of sideboarding” than with the inherent complexities of explaining what a sideboard is. Maybe it’s because of when I started playing, but even at 11 years old, the concept of sideboards made perfect sense to me right away. It certainly helped that the packs back then contained things like Lawbringer and Root Cage — the idea of narrow cards that you’d only want against specific decks became a lot easier to grok when the packs were full of hosers. As an idea, the Duo Standard format is less intuitive: both players come with two decks built for BO1 play, but still play a BO3 match. The first deck selected is random, then both players switch decks for the second game. If a third game is necessary, players submit their choice of their deck in a blind ballot. Not only are there less choices to be made by the players than usual, but the choices that do get made are awkward or difficult to explain from a commentator’s position. Why did an overwhelming majority of Invitational competitors decide to bring Esper + mono-white/red as their configuration? What factors come into play when selecting a deck for a third game? Why does every Esper control mirror feature 3–4 uncastable cards in both players’ hands at all times?

While sideboarding creates a richer experience for the player and the entrenched viewer, it is hard to deny that the act of sideboarding takes a lot of the energy out of a broadcast. Professional players already suck a ton of wind out of every match by virtue of tanking.* I’m not saying that taking some time to think through your plays and their potential repercussions is bad or even wrong — Magic is hard, and it’s much easier to screw up an important turn than it is to play it correctly — but if you think that abruptly halting the flow of a game to stop and think, however necessary it may be, doesn’t have any impact on a first-time viewer, then you’re not acknowledging your own biases.

*The first Pro Tour Top 8 I ever watched was Worlds 2005, where Frank Karsten infamously set the record for the longest single game ever played (90 minutes) during the quarterfinals. Watching him play drove me nuts. In my 16-year old mind, whatever it was he was doing felt less like tanking and more like inconsiderateness towards everyone else’s time. By the finals, I hated him and his stupid Greater Good deck, and was relieved he lost in the finals. Imagine my surprise when Katsuhiro Mori (his finals opponent at that PT) was soon exposed as one of the most savage cheaters of all time and Frank ended up being one of my favorite Magic writers. Ah, youth.

I think it’s safe to assume that WotC landed on the Duo Standard format because it takes sideboarding out of the equation, ensuring a steady stream of game actions. They surely didn’t go with Duo Standard because it’s intuitive or easy to explain (“well, each player has two decks…”) or even because it yields an enjoyable viewing experience. Because it doesn’t! The event certainly had tight matches — it was still Magic, after all — but the games where subtle decisions mattered were few and far between. Zvi Mowshowitz summed up the overall feeling of Bo1 well:

When I play best of one, the games blur together. This set of moves again, and again. Rote responses, because you lack the information to improve your choices. A binary outcome except for time spent, with a huge desire to ‘get on with it’ once the outcome looks clear… What we get in best of one are lots of decks that are simple and linear. Decks that do one thing hard, and do them well, repeating patterns over and over. The decks where you used to say ‘I’ll have a sideboard ready for them’ are now most of your opponents. A burning sea of red, or an endless ocean of blue or plain of white. The more we turn games into grinds, the more we see this, even with best of three. When the last few days of Mythic play came in February we saw a dramatic rise in mono-red, and mono-white did much better than it does in normal play. With best-of-one this gets doubly reinforced and thus turbo charged.

While the answer to “which tournament showcases the best Magic?” might be obvious, “broadcasting the best Magic” was almost certainly never one of the goals of the Mythic Invitational, and it would’ve been ridiculous if it had been. In his piece linked above, Jeff Cunningham calls out the term “quality fading,” defining it as “a supplier’s gradual depreciation of a product’s materials up until the point when the buyer would consciously notice and object.” Quality fading is a useful tool to explain the Magic on display at the Mythic Invitational: yeah, of course it sucked, but only the most entrenched viewers would realize that, and the whole point of this event is to get new players into the funnel (to crib another marketing term) anyway.

What was the primary difference?

I’m still unsure how I feel about the Mythic Invitational’s tournament structure. I am a big fan of Swiss-system tournaments; I think Magic’s three points per win, one point per draw (I will never understand the loud minority that bellyaches about the existence of intentional draws) system serves the game well. The most contrived aspect of the Mythic Invitational, if not the Duo Standard format, was its tournament structure, applied to Magic like a square peg hastily sanded down to fit in the round hole. Double-elimination, with its clunky brackets and asymmetrical victory criteria, works for fighting games because there’s such little variance in them. Magic is far more random comparatively; having a “winner’s bracket” in a Magic tournament, especially in a format as coin-flippy as Duo Standard, is ludicrous.

Having a winners’ and losers’ side of Grand Finals is contingent on two things: that each set has a clear favorite, and that match-ups have a certain threshold of “play” to them — that with enough practice, a bad matchup can be turned into at least a winnable one. Neither of these were true for the Mythic Invitational, so it ended up looking like a Magic tournament with an esports tournament structure shoehorned in. Which is what it was.

There was a vibe to the broadcast — one that I’ve come to associate with esports — that grew tiresome almost immediately. The energy of a typical esports broadcast is loud, enthusiastic, and almost devoid of substance. I think my issue with the esport ethos is that it tries to be both an informative authority and a giddy hype man, and it can’t fully lean into either aspect of itself. Esports can’t embrace its gleeful nihilism because it exists to sell things, and it can’t be too knowledgeable or clever because being smart is for nerds and we need this to look cool in order to sell headsets that light up on the side. So esports ends up being this hollow, contrived energy that should, in theory, satisfy no one, but winds up defining the media and consumer habits of an entire generation instead.

In her replies to my tweet, Adrienne Reynolds made a good point — the broadcasters needed to match the energy of the Arena client itself. With its whooshes and explosions and fluid, constant movement, Arena is the furthest possible thing from Magic while still technically counting as Magic — it really is an all-out assault on the end user’s faculties, especially when you consider how taxing even the simplest games of Magic can be to play. The client is a minefield of distractions in a game that rewards laser focus above all else. Somehow all of this added up to the most successful Magic broadcast by an order of magnitude.

Arena’s not all downside, though. Tabletop Magic broadcasts can be frustrating to watch for altogether different reasons: board states aren’t always clear or consistent, cards are hard to make out, determining players’ cards in hand is more guesswork than anything else. It’s often difficult to jump into a game in process and understand the totality of what’s going on at a glance. With Arena, there’s no guessing what’s in either players’ hands. Board states are consistent and can be gleaned in seconds.

Another thing that helped immensely was all the streamers invited to play alongside the pros. I think the competitive community largely looked at this as a delegitimizing factor, but why not acknowledge how much the Mythic Invitational legitimizes streaming? Non-MPL streamers tend to get shit on, but I’d say they’re doing more to grow Magic right now than the MPL is, and it’s clear to me that being media-savvy and colloquial are far more important real-world skills than being really good at the wizard squares. As a believer in how much visibility and inclusivity matter, seeing a more diverse array of players than usual was thrilling.

It was clear from watching the broadcast that no expense was spared in making the tournament look as crisp as possible. The player interviews were as stilted and cringey as they’ve ever been, but this time, against a backdrop that suggested that it all mattered. It helped. Was it the tightest broadcast in the world? No it was not (whoever is in charge of cutaways for Pro Tours and this tournament treats their job like they have a mousetrap perpetually stuck to their dick). Did the set look great? Yes. Did the spectacle resonate with someone watching the stream? I think it did. Could this approach apply to a Pro Tour? I don’t see why not.

This is what ultimately makes the Mythic Invitational so bittersweet. Pro Tours are a cool thing. WotC has had a cool thing for two decades and it has languished under their care. It’s unclear if WotC thought about the potential spectacle of the Pro Tour less than they did for the Mythic Invitational or if they couldn’t justify investing more in a property that by and large already worked adequately enough.

Then again, since they nixed Elo ratings, every single Organized Play decision has made it feel worse and worse to be emotionally invested in the success of the Pro Tour. That’s an incredible streak, especially considering Planeswalker Points debuted in 2011. Eight years — almost a decade — and the governing body of competitive Magic hasn’t even satisfied their core users on accident. That’s incredible.

The Mythic Invitational is an incredible achievement and an excellent case study in how appealing the mechanics of a 25-year old game can still potentially be. It’s probably a sign of my own myopia that this barely registers in the face of the fact that there remains no suitable replacement for Gold players yet and it’s already Q2.

But the Mythic Invitational wasn’t designed with Gold pros in mind. If you’re an entrenched player who bemoans the decade-past demise of Elo ratings and thinks about its ripple effect from time to time, that broadcast was not for you. The whole point was to show the game to new players. And I’m sure it worked. What I’m less sure about is what WotC’s doing to prepare this new wave of consumers for a steady stream of complicated, overwrought qualification paths and heedless Organized Play decisions.