What the fuck are we doing here?

There's nothing wrong with playing games for fun. It passes the time, it gives us something to talk about, and maybe on some level, it makes us smarter. But why have so many of us basically devoted our lives to Magic? Couldn't we be virtuoso piano players or world-class botanists by now if we'd done something other than argue about Magic all these years?

Are we all crazy people?

Does any of this matter?

Are we creating anything of lasting value?

Maybe it's similar to sports. In the broad scheme of things, it doesn't matter who wins a game or who wins the championship—other than the value we assign it. Dollar bills and Super Bowl rings have no value other than that which society assigns to them (compared to, say, a sandwich, which has the very real objective value of being able to keep a person alive . . . and potentially being delicious). The purpose of sports isn't to assign a championship; it's to create an environment that just happens to have exciting, entertaining things happen along the way. The title is a real-world MacGuffin—it would just feel silly if we paid Calvin Johnson to jump up and down catching things with no bigger goal in mind.

Creating an analogy between sports and Magic can quickly fall apart because of the huge difference between the percentage of sports fans who care what pro teams win and that of Magic players who care who wins a Pro Tour. People start playing sports because they want to experience similar things as their heroes, but people only follow in Luis Scott-Vargas's footsteps once they've already started playing Magic. Still, though, for Magic to be worthwhile to us, it has to create something along the way that will retroactively justify its existence in our lives.

Magic doesn't have the aesthetic advantages that overt displays of physicality have. If anything Magic-related (other than the actual game) is going to last, it's going to come in the form writing about the game (or at least tangentially related to the game). Otherwise, other than for the people who directly experienced the game, it'll be as though it never happened at all.

This is why I am so often frustrated by people's articles about Magic. Bad logic or strategy can be corrected and discussed, and bad writing can be mocked, but a lack of ambition or determination to do anything other than write about this exact moment in Magic will never lead to anything more than continual, ephemeral mediocrity.

Why do we go to tournaments? This isn't some ultra-casual-player type of question that attempts to attack the validity of playing a game seriously rather than just for fun; I can't really have fun playing a game unless I'm genuinely trying to win it. But what's the purpose of attending a specific tournament? The orthodox answer is that unless someone seriously thinks he can win a tournament and will do everything legal within his power to accomplish that, he shouldn't even bother attending. This view is fairly ridiculous, especially within the context of the Planeswalker Points system, which rewards consistent finishes in huge numbers of events rather than spectacular play.

Even that misses something, though. When players break down the EV of certain tournaments or events, they look specifically at the prize payouts and point benefits that people receive for doing well. But what about everything outside of that? Shouldn't we take into account the possibility that someone can Top 8 a tournament, write a report about it, and have that launch his or her writing career?

Don't people play in tournaments to become well-known players?

Who has the better chance of a tournament turning out favorably? The player who pilots a completely stock version of the best deck or the one who plays something totally off-the-wall and isn't quite as good? Assuming the latter deck is worse, but not completely unplayable, he'll certainly have a reduced chance to win the tournament, so only looking at that, the stock deck seems better. But what are the benefits of winning the tournament? How many people are going to read his report if he writes about how he didn't change anything in the deck . . . and compare that to if he tells the story of creating something no one thought would win a game? Even discounting his phenomenal finishes, people knew who Conley Woods was not because he was in the Top 10 players in the game, but because he would come up with rogue decks for every tournament. There was value in that, and it didn't always come from extra percentage points in certain matchups.

Bad news for people reading this: This is just another Organized Play–changes article in a fancy dress. As much as people have talked about them, people are dramatically underestimating how Planeswalker Points affect how we look at people’s experiences of tournaments. While the concept of winning a big tournament is still the sculpted ideal of player experiences, PWPs remove most of the actual incentive to win a tournament. If tournament wins are therefore devalued, individual tournament reports should be devalued in equal measure (assuming they aren’t simply written to entertain, although those are, admittedly, the best kind of tournament repots), replaced with a sort of travelogue and synopsis of the grind undergone to qualify. Players, assuming they act rationally and don’t cling to the old practice of extensive testing for a single PTQ or GP, should practice dramatically less and travel much more. This is assuming that people will go to tournaments attempting to qualify for the Pro Tour, which is only a realistic goal for a very small contingent of players who have deep pockets without currently being employed in a nine-to-five job.

Carrie Oliver's first ChannelFireball article is a great example of this. There's no strategic information (and certainly no innovative deck lists), just an analysis of how she can qualify for the Pro Tour for the least amount of money. This isn't a criticism of Ms. Oliver or of her article; people have to operate under the framework provided. But articles that are multi-day rundowns of minor side events with between eight and a few hundred people and articles giving large tournaments weight only because of their increased point payouts are what tournament reports will look like from this point forward.

What's the value of a tournament about which no one writes or otherwise covers and of which the winner doesn't matter?

For those of you who had dreams of making the Pro Tour with your off-the-wall, but competitive decks, unusual strategies, or innovative tunings: Unless you luck out at a PTQ, it's just not going to happen. The best-case scenario, unless you want to sell your soul to the PWP grind, is to become well-known enough somehow through writing, smaller tournaments, and connections that players who have already made the Pro Tour can get decks from you. Because it takes such an enormous amount of time just to stay on the PT now, it'll be a lot more efficient to divide labor between multiple camps: the people who actually play tournament Magic day in and day out and the people who are dedicated to improving those players' decks and performances. Anyone serious about making it in high-level Magic simply won't have enough time to test new decks anymore.

Even a reconfigured PWP system would attempt to measure how people have been playing in a variety of events over a period of time, as opposed to how the Elo system would almost always rank a person who did well in the latest Pro Tour near the top. For the same reason that an individual March Madness or NFL playoff game is more exciting than Game 2 or 3 of an MLB or NBA playoff series, placing more weight on individual high-variance events makes those events vastly more exciting. Part of the purpose of the Pro Tour is to create an engaging spectacle, and if the participants don't gain or lose very much at individual tournaments, people will be much less interested in those tournaments (unless Wizards spins them to be exciting despite their lack of importance). The closest thing Magic has to a last-second Hail Mary pass is a moment when a player flips over the top card of his library and wins the game from it, but if the loser just shrugs, knowing that he hasn't lost much of anything, the moment still doesn't matter. If that part is only mentioned offhand midway through a seven-day cataloguing of different events, it'll be as though it never happened at all.

For Magic to matter to people, an individual game of Magic has to matter.

With such steep barriers of time and finance for the Pro Tour, people need to seriously consider exactly why they're going to tournaments (and everyone should think, from time to time, why they're playing Magic at all). This doesn't mean “Don't go to tournaments if you can't qualify.” I intend to go to GP: Seattle, and it will cost me a lot of money for very little potential benefit. But everyone should give it serious thought.

What are you doing here?