The Pro Magic Autopsy

I've hinted that the pro Magic scene may not be the healthiest and most durable thing in the world for years now. Recently, the veil has been lifted altogether on the pro Magic "dream" being dead, which means I can finally just talk about it without beating around the bush. As a career Magic(ian) on the industry end, I've been afforded a very direct look at the economics of competitive Magic.

Here are a few of the biggest reasons we've finally surpassed the inevitable.

The Great Structural Shuffle

From year to year, season to season, however you want to divide the time up, how many times did professional Magic not change? Whether it was the criteria for qualification, the branding of various event types, the administrators overseeing things, the various thresholds and prizes... basically nothing was ever on stable ground.

Magic is already complex as a game; making the methodology of tracking your relationship to competitive Magic as tangled as the rest of the game's demands didn't help anyone, especially players who were never all that interested in being competitive players anyway.

When things are that unstable it's hard even for people who want the project to succeed to do anything to help it, as more "help" equals more change and this project overdrew at the change bank a long time ago.

Imagine if the Super Bowl had different rules every year. Imagine if there was an announcement every year that changed how chess pieces move.

The metaphors can be suited any number of ways, but the point is continual change brings about a lack of belief in the ability of the institution to do what it claims to do. Between World Champions not being invited back to defend, runner ups and other top finishers not being able to stay qualified out of nowhere, and various other legislative efforts of influential status quo pros to stay in at the expense of new people with new chances, suddenly the entire meritocracy of the endeavor disappears.

And here we are.

Entitlement is the Reason People Give When They Don't Have a Good Reason

Speaking of invested, the most sentimental losses in this episode seem to be that of the 1% of the 1% of pros who for some period of time made a living on Magic. The only issue is that this was never all that true to begin with.

As someone who worked closely with Magic content creators for a long time, I can assure you that the actual Magic was rarely what was paying their housing. A high prize payout Pro Tour could carry you for a while, but that was a rare occurrence for even the most fortunate. There were three or four a year and the game has tens of thousands of dedicated tournament players. Divide prize payouts by expenses, taxes, and other necessary overhead and you're looking at the absolute best of the best "getting by" on the most unreliable salary you can imagine.

The best win percentages in the history of the Pro Tour still have something like a 37-40% loss rate last I checked a few years back. This was never a reasonable career path to point and aim at more than incidentally. It's much more a lottery ticket than a job interview, and it always has been. You don't have a lot of control over it.

Accordingly, it's been more important to sell the idea of being able to make a living solely by playing in a few big events a year than it's been for anyone to actually see how many people are literally doing that. Among even the most privileged pros were people who lived almost entirely on other income or spent most of their winnings investing back into tournament Magic through travel or whatever else. As we get more and more toward a post-pandemic gig economy, the halcyon fantasy of being paid to take pictures holding a trophy in a hammock seems more and more naive to me.

And you know what? It was probably always naive. For years and years I've wanted someone to provide an argument in favor of the Pro Tour status quo system that wasn't entirely based on the idea it feels good to hope you have a chance to be a pro gamer instead of an accountant or an insurance adjuster or whatever it is people don't think is sexy to do for a living. I've still not heard that argument.

Lots of players are really honest about their shortcomings as players, but few seem to do the additional meta-level math that would explain how unreal unlikely it is for you to get anywhere near the experience you're being peddled.

There is a subset of very confused players mourning the loss of a dream that was never there. The several tens of thousands of us that remember those Pro Tour champion pictures and who are nostalgic for them are very important Magic players because we're Magic players, but we're not a viable business model just because we have those feelings. The lucky few who got to win those events and experience those moments have to find it crushing to see some aspect of that dissipating into time, but by the same token that they were ever there at all doesn't mean they're entitled to it forever. At some point, you've got to wake up, look at the data, and realize that this was definitely a dream, and a nice one - but it was never the one we were pretending it was.

I won't call everyone entitled. Not everyone is. The Magic people I worked with over the years were varied individuals, and many of them were more professional than about anyone I've ever met in any job field; however, there is a subset that literally can't communicate honestly if they're not lobbying for their own self-interest. Parties with these characteristics, especially the more visible ones, did the greater good of professional Magic zero good by not being able to look out for anyone but themselves and the status quo reward functions of their own nostalgic egos. The only ethics are meta-ethics; we were never going to make this work by looking out for only ourselves. See also: everything.

Further downstream, it probably doesn't help that the same skills and personality traits that are coupled with value-obsessed Magic player minds don't make for very coordinated union reps or negotiators.

A chicken without a head doesn't get far.

B'gawk!

Just Click Update Later

So as all of this congeals together into a really tepid and maladroit public presentation that attracts only the people it was mostly already attracting, which, if you're new to Marketing, is not the goal.

On top of that, you get your run of the mill bad press when another cheater gets busted or Standard is solved before the latest set even comes out or someone Magic-famous gets attached to a scam so transparent than even the Facebook addicts smell it coming. All of this can be cleaned out if the whole project is systemically healthy, but obviously that hasn't been the case here in a while.

And so, the can gets kicked down the road again and again as Magic's status quo parties insulate and protect one another through social incentives, which in turn homogenizes all the new viewpoints and ideas. This is why there isn't a gigantic difference in the experience of watching late 90s Magic on ESPN2 and watching stuff from more recently; until you get someone from outside the bubble to come in with the agency to implement change without being exiled on sight, nothing gets updated. That's why the Pro Tour was never properly overhauled: the people in charge validated themselves on it because it was their finest hour, and they never wanted that moment to end. To someone outside of this point of view, it's just a project that is supposed to accomplish business goals. I suspect the same forces that finally turned digital Magic into something deserving of the property are largely responsible for "updating" the pro structure here.

One of the most amazing things to notice as a Magic lifer doing Magic work all of the time is how little data factors into any of this sometimes. As I wrote about recently, the Covid pandemic exposed how many of Magic's structures are not dependent on being able to play Magic tournaments. The knowledge that Magic is primarily driven by more casual players than the super invested tournament tryhard has been in the open for at least a decade; it took an actual pandemic banning tournament Magic for someone to actually do the obvious with this information and reset the router. Furthermore, anyone with a passing interest in the business data on competitive Magic could get basically everything they need for any equation by looking at Round 1 player numbers for any tournament and matching them with entry fees and prize payouts. And yet, it took this long?

To the Future!

It's time to embrace the reality of Magic's situation. In case you didn't notice, we're over two decades past the inception of professional Magic as a concept. It's been a different world for a long time, and traditionalism only helps those who are shackled to it hang on a little longer. That should not be Magic's problem.

Enough already. Put the Marketing lies away long enough to get inspired. Stop trying to get every cookie in the jar. Turn off your priors and your nostalgia. Let's look at actual reality and get real.

Let's build something better together.

(~_^)

The Rascal

The Indestructible Danny West