The State of the Program for September 13th 2013

This series is an ongoing tribute to Erik “Hamtastic” Friborg.

In the News this Week:

Theros is almost here: Theros preleases are coming. The paper prerelease will be next week. The online release will be October 7th. Spoiler season is in full swing.

The New Forums: Last week I mentioned that Wizards intended to redo their forums. I commented: We will see how extensive the rewrite actually is, and whether they can do it right. Whatever they do, it would be hard to be worse than what we have now. They nailed it – the forums are worse. Right now, the forums do not resort by most recent posts – all posts list by origination date, and Last week I mentioned that Wizards intended to redo their forums. I commented:They nailed it – the forums are worse. Right now, the forums do not resort by most recent posts – all posts list by origination date, and the bugs thread has just under 1000 posts in just three days. It’s bad, but they are working on it. I’ll say more in the opinion section.

Cube and RGD Drafts Coming: Wizards polled the community to choose the next throwback draft format. The winner is Ravnica / Guildpact / Dissension. Look for these drafts to appear alongside Cube beginning Sept. 25th. Cube entry fees and payouts have been modified again. Details : Wizards polled the community to choose the next throwback draft format. The winner is Ravnica / Guildpact / Dissension. Look for these drafts to appear alongside Cube beginning Sept. 25. Cube entry fees and payouts have been modified again. Details here – but I am pretty sure the phantom cube drafts do not actually pay out in Ravnica block packs. That was explained on the forums, IIRC, but those posts were lost in the forum conversion.

Battle for Charity all this month: Team DBC and MTGOStrat.com are asking us to donate a portion of our winnings this month to the . Team DBC and MTGOStrat.com are asking us to donate a portion of our winnings this month to the Child’s Play Charity , which provides help to kids in hospitals. Details are here

HammyBot Update: It’s still around, and still a great way to get cards and support the family of the late Erik Friborg. So far, Hammybot has raised over 6,100 TIX! Keep it going! Hammiebot still has 25.8k+ cards to sell, including a number of foil Mythics. It also has some sweet old cards that you might suddenly find you need. For example, if I decided to play Reid Duke’s GW Auras in a Modern event and discovered that I was short a : It’s still around, and still a great way to get cards and support the family of the late Erik Friborg. So far, Hammybot has raised over 6,100 TIX! Keep it going! Hammiebot still has 25.8k+ cards to sell, including a number of foil Mythics. It also has some sweet old cards that you might suddenly find you need. For example, if I decided to play Reid Duke’s GW Auras in a Modern event and discovered that I was short a Keen Sense , I would check out HammieBot first. I can get many of the older cards at market prices, and I help out Hammie’s family. It’s good karma (not the card, the other kind.)

Opinion Section: Harry Dresden Effect, Part XXIIL

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s happening again.

The Harry Dresden books are written by Jim Butcher, and I highly, highly recommend them. They are about modern day Chicago’s only practicing Wizard. He has full Wizard powers, but drives an old VW Beetle and lives in a house with a fireplace for heat and takes cold showers, because when he gets too near anything technological (like a water heater or computer), that technology malfunctions. Wizards – the Wizards of the Coast kind – seem to have the same effect on technology.

The latest manifestation is the rewrite of the forums. Now Wizards forums have always had issues. They have always been strangely formatted and a bit buggy – for example, I am currently on my fourth account. The previous three were all lost to password glitches: for various reasons my password would be reset to random gibberish, and neither Wizards customer service nor their technical folks could reset it, so they gave me a new account.

We began with boards1.wizards.com, which was serviceable if ancient and creaky back in 1990. Later, Wizards gave us forums.gleemax.com, which was part of the failed attempt to create “a facebook for gamers.” Then we had community.wizards.com, which gave us wikis and blogs and groups and teams and, seemingly as an afterthought, somewhat kludgy forums. Now we have an entirely new set of forums, built on a new framework.

The new forums seem to have a different appearance, and different bugs, depending on which browser you are using. I understand it won’t run on Opera. IE tends to smash things together, with graphics overlaying (and blocking) the search button and some pulldowns. Safari has some issues. Chrome has problems with paste. Firefox generally works, but not perfectly.

This thread begins with an official description of how to fix your profile and reset your security settings, then a brief list of the new settings, then the only official list of known bugs, plus the statement that they are working on them. No details.

It ain’t good. Here’s a short/partial list of what’s wrong:

· Anything posted to the forums in the two weeks prior to the changeover is lost.

· The wikis are a mess. This may be salvageable.

· There is a ton of wasted space.

· Some groups are gone.

· Neither the spellchecker nor profanity filter work when posting.

· Private messaging is busted.

· Friends are gone – changed to followers, and may be bugged.

· You cannot subscribe to a thread or forum.

· Threads are listed by date of creation, and new posts don’t bump them up in the listing.

· The formatting only allows you to see the first couple threads in each forum.

· Search is bad.

· The “new post” links don’t work.

· The graphics and lines are huge – but the actual text is tiny and hard to read.

· Text in the forums itself is dark gray on light gray background. In the preview pane, it is off-white on light gray (which is literally unreadable.)

I could go on and on, but since pictures are worth a thousand words, and I am already long...

Wasted space – this image thanks to Bubba0077

An example of overwriting. This from Firefox. IE is much worse. I’m not sure about other browsers.

And here is a full screen shot of a list of threads. I can see seven threads. I have not cracked up the size – this is about the smallest resolution I can use and still have some chance of reading the tiny font used in actual posts.

The biggest question people have so far is “why?” Why did Wizards roll out such an incomplete and buggy product – and why change the software at all if it isn’t any better. We have no official word, but speculation by people who do this sort of thing for a living seems to coalesce around this: the software underlying the previous forums was the problem. The best theory is probably that the cost of that license was too high. That could also explain the rushed roll-out: Wizards had the choice of paying for extending the license, or rolling out the new software even if it was not completely debugged.

Wizards is doing what it can to fix the bugs. A few have vanished. On the other hand, problems like the profanity filter not working are still around, as I write this, and you would think that was a high priority fix.

Worst of all, it appears that the problem of threads not moving up in the list as new posts appear is permanent. In the past, as threads got new content, they were bumped to the top of the list. Apparently, this is not possible with the underlying framework Wizards chose for this build. Threads can, apparently, be sorted only by creation date or number of responses. I thought that having active threads automatically bumped to the top of the list was a standard for forums, but apparently not.

I just don’t know what to say. I really don’t.

Opinion Section II: Price of the Power Nine

Mathew Watkins wrote a great recap of his experiences in winning the Community Cup, here . It contains a ton of information about the future of MTGO, since he got to spend a couple hours questioning the people who run MTGO. A lot of important info, and very much worth the read.

One point he mentioned bothers me, though. Here’s a quote from his article:

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.

This scares me. It sounds like the Wizards team is okay with the idea that Black Lotus and the Power Nine will cost something akin to what power costs in the paper world – meaning at least $500 per copy. Right now, Lion’s Eye Diamond is closing in on $150, and unless Wizards begins offering old format sealed again, that will only increase.

That will kill Classic and Vintage online. The formats will never, ever fire. Right now, Classic struggles to get 16 players together once a week. The decks are already very expensive, and if you add another $4,000 to the cost of those decks, players will not play the format.

Prizes for all constructed formats are the same. The cost of entry is 6 TIX plus a deck. You can win the exact same prizes playing Pauper as playing Vintage. However, a good Pauper deck is a couple hundred. A good Vintage deck, if Black Lotus runs $500 or more, is going to cost many thousand dollars.

I like old formats. I play Legacy regularly at local stores. I would play Vintage, if it were available. However, I have found exactly one sanctioned Vintage event within reasonable driving distance in the last decade, and that one got eight players only because one player entered with a Standard deck, and another bought a precon and used it, just to get the event sanctioned. Three of us had fully powered decks. We blew out everyone else.

In the paper world, actual sanctioned Vintage is played in Europe (which has higher population densities and great mass transit) and a bit on the east coast and as special events at GenCon, but that’s it. Everywhere else, if Vintage exists at all, it does so as unsanctioned events with proxies. Wizards will not allow online events with proxies.

Wizards employees all have “god accounts” – accounts with a playset of every single card. They don’t have to buy cards. They cannot trade. That means they don’t have to deal with budgets or work extra hours to afford cards. This affects them in various ways. They forget how disappointing it is to be able to afford one sealed event at the Prerelease, and to open a Steamflogger Boss or yet another copy of Clone. They create an online interface for their collectable card game and do not include any useful way to actually view that collection.

I see two possible ways that Wizards could possibly ensure that the Power Nine are more expensive than Lion’s Eye Diamond (a/k/a Bad Lotus). The first is to release a ridiculously small number of copies. The second is to get more copies of Lion’s Eye Diamond into the mix, to drive the price of cards like that down, then release a reasonable number of power cards.

The first option would be to hold a small number of high stakes, high entry fee tournaments, and give out Power Nine cards to the top 64 or 128 players. I could see a Wizards hosting a Modern event, minimum players 128, entry fee 50 TIX, with the top 64 getting the Power card of the month and the Top 8 getting foil versions. If they ran one event each weekend, for nine months, they would be introducing 350 copies of each of the Power Nine into the card pool. Those cards would be extremely valuable – worth a lot more than the “Bad Lotus.”

I could totally see Wizards doing this.

The second option would be to create a “Classic Masters Edition” with the cards that need reprinting, like LED and Rishadan Port, as rares. The Power Nine would appear in that set as Mythics, or possibly super Mythics. Creating a Masters set that is fun to play and includes the high priced cards seems like a lot of work. I would love to see this, but I don’t think it will happen. It is too much work for too little payback.

In short, I expect to see the Power Nine appear as prizes for some high-stakes online tournaments. Wizards has the data to predict what payouts and entry fees would create the right number of cards in the system to generate a final price of whatever target they need.

Personally, I almost never have the time to play in 4 round events, let alone a large PE or online PTQ. Even if I had the time, I doubt I have the skill to Top 64 such an event. That pretty much shuts me out of ever playing Vintage online. It probably also means that Vintage will join Kaleidoscope and Prismatic in the graveyard of dead formats.

For Wizards, making sure that online Power cards are the most expensive cards on MTGO is a goal that does good things for the brand, I guess. For me, having power cost that much means I will never again play Vintage, either online or off, and should probably sell off my Classic cards.

Depressing thoughts.

Cutting Edge Tech:

Standard: We are a couple weeks away from a new format. That means that very little new stuff is happening, and all the interesting work involves brewing with Theros cards. I want to see the whole spoiler before I start covering that stuff. Ditto Modern and Legacy. Classic gets a mention because it fired another event. Montolio won it with Shops – again. No need to post the decklist – I’ve posted a lot of shops lists.

Card Prices:

MTGOTraders Bots, so check out mtgotradersbot, mtgotradersbot2,mtgotradersbot3, mtgotradersbot4, mtgotradersbot5, CardCaddy and CardWareHouse. These Bots often have the cards in stock even when the online store shows as out. Now, on to prices. Notes: All my prices come from MTGOTraders.com . For cards that are available in multiple sets, I am quoting the most recent set’s price. Thus, the price I’m quoting for Garruk Relentless is from M13. These cards are also available from theso check out mtgotradersbot, mtgotradersbot2,mtgotradersbot3, mtgotradersbot4, mtgotradersbot5, CardCaddy and CardWareHouse. These Bots often have the cards in stock even when the online store shows as out. Now, on to prices.

Standard prices are moving around a bit, with a slight overall recovery from last week’s fall. Rotating cards are dropping, but not universally. We have a couple more weeks of current Standard, after all. I did remove Thragtusk and Huntmaster from the list – they both fell again this week, and they are no longer worth tracking.

Modern prices are generally climbing. Thoughtseize is the exception, but that’s because it is being reprinted, as a rare, in under a month.

Legacy and Classic are climbing slowly. The money cards are climbing. Lion’s Eye Diamond is pushing $150, and Rishadan Port is almost at $100 each. Show and Tell climbed a bit more, as it generally does.

Pauper prices are jumping around. Some of the expensive stuff is more so this week.

The Good Stuff:

The Good Stuff starts with a list of the non-foil, non-premium cards on MTGO that cost more than $25 each. The list has gotten even longer this week. Rishadan Port has now passed Force of Will, meaning it is time to bring back Mercadian Block drafts. Or something. Note that being reprinted as a Modern Masters Mythic was not enough to serious hurt the price of Tarmogoyf.

Card Rarity Set Price Lion's Eye Diamond R MI $ 146.32 Rishadan Port R MM $ 97.63 Force of Will R MED $ 93.44 Tarmogoyf R FUT $ 81.31 Wasteland U TE $ 79.10 Tarmogoyf M MMA $ 78.06 Show and Tell R UZ $ 75.85 Misdirection R MM $ 63.05 Gaea's Cradle R UZ $ 52.05 City of Traitors R EX $ 47.53 Mox Opal M SOM $ 46.47 Underground Sea R ME2 $ 44.61 Liliana of the Veil M ISD $ 43.79 Underground Sea R ME4 $ 42.47 Voice of Resurgence M DGM $ 41.19 Sphinx's Revelation M RTR $ 39.71 Vendilion Clique M MMA $ 39.00 Vendilion Clique R MOR $ 38.69 Jace, the Mind Sculptor M WWK $ 37.03 Vampiric Tutor R VI $ 35.12 Karn Liberated M NPH $ 34.26 Grove of the Burnwillows R FUT $ 33.67 Tangle Wire R NE $ 32.29 Tropical Island R ME3 $ 32.00 Tropical Island R ME4 $ 31.15 Flusterstorm R CMD $ 30.80 Vindicate R AP $ 30.42 Bayou R ME4 $ 29.60 Natural Order R VI $ 29.37 Bayou R ME3 $ 29.31 Tundra R ME2 $ 27.87 Tundra R ME4 $ 27.85 Batterskull M NPH $ 26.99 Dark Confidant M MMA $ 26.03 Fulminator Mage R SHM $ 25.84 Dark Confidant R RAV $ 25.83 Mana Drain R ME3 $ 25.81 Scalding Tarn R ZEN $ 25.69 Volcanic Island R ME4 $ 25.52 Mishra's Workshop R ME4 $ 25.24 Volcanic Island R ME3 $ 25.03

The big number is the retail price of a playset (4 copies) of every non-foil card available on MTGO. Assuming you bought the least expensive version available, the cost of owning a playset of every card on MTGO you can own is $23,650. That’s up three hundred dollars since last week.

Weekly Highlights:

Rough week. Between Vintage and the new forums, I’m not sure I have any.

PRJ

“one million words” on MTGO.