Worlds 2010 was another smashing success. I was glued to the Sunday coverage all day – much to the chagrin of my incredulous fiancée – through the quarters, the semis, the MODO championships, the team finals and finally that epic Guillame showdown. Hats off to Rich, BDM, and everyone on the coverage team who makes the Sunday webcast possible. However outside this audio-visual feast of pro-tour goodness, the official coverage does leave a few things to be desired. Rather than simply complain about the things that bother me, I am going to suggest a few improvements that could be made. I’ll also discuss the new SCG Live coverage from the Kansas City Open, which did a lot of things right – and a lot of things wrong. After you’ve heard what I have to say, I’d love to hear your constructive thoughts about magic coverage in the comments!

1. Faster Updates

This is a major bugbear for some of the more avid fans, especially those of us with an interest in finding bargain cards before the steep price rises that follow big events. On Friday of the World Championships, it was noon in Chiba before we had any sort of update on the day’s play – not even pairings or results for the morning rounds, let alone a feature match. At 5pm the same day, we had the pairings for round 11, but no features past round 8. Since the end of round 9 there had been a round and a half of play plus an entire second draft by this point. Now without wanting to blame anyone, somewhere between the match being observed and the words and images going up on the coverage page there is a bottleneck.

My ManaNation colleague Adam Styborski has done coverage for wizards before and says the delay is in the behind the scenes technical side of things, which is obviously not open to our casual scrutiny, but I urge the folks at Wizards of the Coast to review this process. Perhaps there can be a tech guy travelling with the coverage team to do the uploads right then and there, or that guy can be removed from the process entirely with some sort of user interface like Wordpress and other blogging sites offer? From me finishing the writing part of my blog post to that post being available and automatically advertised on twitter is mere seconds. This is an age where people expect immediacy. We are used to sharing our own content immediately – and really, what’s the difference in technical terms between a piece of coverage and an article comment on the mothership? (Cue technical web people with well researched answers).

Another possibility is that corporate oversight requires everything put on the website to be vetted – by Monty, or Kelly, or Bob from accounting or whoever – to make sure it won’t cause any embarrassment or potential liability for Wizards or Hasbro. If there is such a person they need to get their act together and start pushing content through faster, just as I’d like the technical people to do.

2. More Twitter

Twitter is an amazing tool for sharing information immediately with a large self-selected audience, and it’s one the coverage team is dramatically underusing in my opinion. Nearing the end of the individual portion of day 2 @magicprotour had had 6 tweets all day, mostly updates on Brad Nelson’s record. There could be so much more in the way of interesting tidbits on here! @mananationlive has some examples of the sort of things that add life and colour to tournament reports: “Martin Juza is watching Survivor on his laptop after finishing verifying his neighbours card pool” or “The shark is in the water, @mtgmetagame is trawling the dealer booths before beginning to trade” add to the atmosphere of the coverage. I was expecting @SCGLive to have a similar wealth of amusing 140 character anecdotes from their Open event series, but Kansas City was a disappointment. They don’t necessarily tell us anything about the games going on, or what hot tech is surprising people at the top tables, but without the personalities and sideshows these live events might as well be played on Magic Online, with replays in place of the coverage.

3. Magic Online Replays

Actually, that would be fantastic! Not the playing online – the replays. I could log on after the Magic Online championship between Carlos Romao and Akira Asahara and watch their games, the same as any other replay. What about replicating the top 8 matches on Magic Online? This is probably the most “wish-list” idea on here, but I don’t think it’s out of the question. They have enough cameras and coverage staff surrounding the players that they should be able to record each card played. I know most of the programmers’ time is spent coaxing the hamsters back on their wheels to keep the MODO servers powered but surely it can’t be too hard to set up a custom replay, can it? I would love to be able to go on and run through the play by plays of PV’s intense control match with Jonathan Randle after watching it on the webcast. They obviously want to use their live events to market Magic Online - hence the championships being held at Worlds - and this could be another way to cross promote. Just have Brian and Rich encouraging people to hop on Magic Online after the webcast to check out the replays, and maybe have a draft while they’re there. Get on it, guys!

4. More Interviews

I want more of everything that’s there already – especially the interviews. Even if Gerry T or Brad or whoever doesn’t have a new brew for a Deck Tech, get them on camera and just talk about how their day is going. Evan Erwin on The Magic Show does this all the time, and it’s great to watch. These guys are smart, and witty, and they are doing what we coverage viewers want to be doing – playing on the Pro Tour. We have Brian’s mothership article every week talking about this or that group of up-and-comers, the player of the year race, or interviewing the last GP champ. Wizards know that their audience is interested in the personalities of the tour. Why don’t we have this sort of coverage live? This goes for any R&D staff on site as well. Evan had a half hour video recorded at Worlds with Mark Rosewater, where the camera was static on the seated Maro. Evan asked questions from off camera and Mark answered them, and it was downright compelling viewing. Mark is so animated and has so much to say about magic from such a unique perspective that I am always happy to watch or listen to him. Mike Turian is another R&D guy I love to see on The Magic Show. We read Making Magic and Latest Developments every week, so please, put these guys on screen more often!

That concludes my list of suggestions for the official coverage; now let’s take a look at the latest arrival on the coverage scene.

The New Challenger: SCG Live

This weekend we saw the first of the Star City Games Opens being covered by SCG Live. For those who missed the announcement, GGSLive is no longer officially covering SCG Opens, instead SCGs own team of commentators – in partnership with GGSLive – will be doing the coverage. As well as a simple rebadging of the video, there’s an associated twitter feed (@scglive) and the same deck techs, feature matches and so on from last year’s opens which pretty much mirror the official coverage.

First, the good – SCGLive’s commentary team is excellent. Adrian Sullivan and Jacob van Lunen kept up some relevant and insightful banter all through the standard matches I watched. Adrian’s been writing quality articles for as long as I can remember, and JvL is a Pro Tour winner and a mothership columnist to boot. Besides these two we have Rashad from GGSLive popping in in his new role as director; Joey and Bigheadjoe from Yo! MTG Taps; and Gavin Verhey, another longtime columnist and once one of the three regular hosts of Monday Night Magic. We know all these guys can talk about magic til the cows come home and I expect them to do a stellar job on SCGLive. Glenn Jones, the coverage manager is unknown to me, but he seems to be competently handling the written coverage at this stage.

Having live video is also obviously great – but “it exists” is about the best that can be said. The main camera for the feature matches hovers directly over the centre of the table. Visible to the viewer is most of each players board, though occasionally in long games with a lot of permanents some are off the edge of the screen. In this angle the players aren’t visible, except for their hands, but they do have cutaways to closeups of the players’ faces. The problem with all of this is the quality of the video. The cards are so blurry that it’s almost impossible to determine what they are without the assistance of the commentators, even being familiar through long experience with near every card in the format. The overlaid player names, life totals, and pointless pictures of Elspeth and star city badging that circle the screen take up an absurd amount of screen real-estate. The cutaways look like police interrogation recordings, with sleep-deprived magic players looking in to space off screen under a ghoulish yellow patina. “Where were you on the night of the eleventh, Mr. Woods?”

The upshot of this is I left the coverage running in the background so I could listen to the commentary. If I can’t see what the cards are the occasional close-ups of the blank, jaundiced faces of the players isn’t enough to keep me watching. I want to encourage the SCGLive team to invest in some better quality cameras so we can see what the cards are, and to pick some more interesting camera angles. A good camera angle can really do a lot to draw the audience in – the over the shoulder, isometric view of the board; the low shot of the contents of the player’s hand, the wide shot of the players bantering between games. Just watch the Worlds Top 8 videos or even poker tournament coverage to see some examples of how you can better frame what is essentially two guys and a table with little bits of cardboard on it.

That said, it is their first show under the new banner, so I’m sure they’ll be doing their own review after the event. They’ve put together an excellent commentary team and if they can just get the technical side up to scratch and start using twitter properly they could be leading the field in magic coverage. I can’t wait to hear the rest of the commentators, and hopefully some better resolution video from the next Open event.

Ask the Audience

That’s all from me - now it’s your turn. Are you an avid coverage fan? Are you F5ing the event pages every five minutes during a pro tour, aching for some crumbs of news or tech? Let us know in the comments what you like about the coverage – either WotC or SCG – and what you’d like to see improved.