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On Going Pro At Magic - The Gathering
VonGuard writes "It's been 12 years since Magic: the Gathering was released, by WotC, and the game is now six million players strong. The East Bay Express has a long-form piece narrating the trials and tribulations of a man who's trying to turn pro at this addictive trading card game . Richard Garfield is always demanding the mind athletes be treated with the same respect as physical athletes. As you can see in the story, however, we're not quite there yet."
I'm not entirely convinced that MtG players are so much "Athletes of the Mind" as "Athletes of the Wallet"...
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Aren't professional role players generally called actors? I'm confused...
Magic: The Gathering isn't a role-playing game, it's a competitive card game with definite winning and losing states (utterly unlike most pen-and-paper RPGs). Going pro at magic is thus much more akin to being a professional poker/chess/(other competitive intellectual game of your choice) player than acting, which it shares little if anything in common with.
I actually stopped playing about the same time you did (Alliances). Believe it or don't there are far MORE people playing magic now than there were back then. Around here (Phoenix AZ) there were 300+ people playing at a tournament last weekend, that had no cash prize. They each payed $30 a piece for the right to play. There will be a money Tournament in Oakland this coming weekend (the article mentions this at the end) that will draw around 1000 people from all over the country.
Your comment about "It is a game of money" really isn't true anymore. While it was in the past, "TYPE I" magic, where you can play any card, no matter how powerful, is pretty much dead. These days, "Standard" or "Type II" magic where only the last 2 years worth of cards can be played, is far more common, and it doesn't take much cash to build a competative deck in this format. Even cheaper to play (and what I still play from time to time) is Limited magic, where you buy 45-100 cards when you enter, then build your deck out of only those cards. The only expense is the entry fee ($10 to $20 depending on the number of cards used). The "Pro Tour" plays primarily these last 2 formats, so saying that its all about who spends more money really isn't accurate these days.
The game isn't as skill based as chess, and has more luck involved than poker, but it's still a game where the better more experience player will tend to come out on top. Which is more than I can say for Fluxx....
In high-level Magic, the price really isn't an issue. You'll never see someone at a PT playing a sub-optimal list because they just didn't have the cards.
And Draft, widely regarded as the most skill-intensive format, doesn't even require you to own any cards; you sit down at a table with seven other people, pass packs around while you each take a card in turn, and then make decks from the cards you pull.
The only format where price matters and where $300 cards are legal is Type 1, the format that includes all the sets printed (sans Portal and Unglued), and there are no truly high-level T1 tournaments (that's not true, but WotC does not host high-level T1 tournaments, so the difference when discussing Pro Magic is negligible because the prizes in T1 tournaments come mostly from notoriety and success, as opposed to cash winnings).
I won't address the other issues in depth, because skill and strategy depend on what level you play the game, and we don't need to degrade the discussion by bickering over "more from your 'talent' spectrum."
With thousands of cards to remember, hundreds of deck styles, and perhaps most importantly millions of players, MtG is a good mind sport. Strategies off hand? High Mana decks. Vampire decks. Suicidal creatures decks. Control decks. Land destruction decks. Small damage high volume decks. Swarm decks. Rainbow decks. Green Giants. Deck destruction. Artifact sacrifice. Living lands. Everyone dies. etc, etc, etc. Is your deck fast or slow? Is one more card of type X worth 1/60th of every other card in your deck? Do you concentrate on a perfect opening or a perfect ending? Do you balance resources or creatures? Does enchanting a particular creature make it too much of a target? And that's just the planning phase, coming from what I remember 5 years ago.
This game is deep, and in a much less artificial way than, for example, being able to read out 50 moves in a go game. That's not to say that it is as deep as Go, just that it is deep in a way that is both more interesting to the average player and more likely to be watched by the average viewer (in this country).
Of course they don't teach it to children... Children are so interested in learning about it that they teach themselves. That kind of interest draws quite a large business side, an unfortunate but expected side-effect. And there was a time when Christian Fundamentalists decried all card games, including Bridge, as the devil's work.
The Olympics are not the be-all-end-all of what can be considered a worthy pursuit. The Nagano Olympics had ski shooting. Ski shooting. I rest my case.
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