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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."
Madison Square Garden on a Saturday Night ...
Completely sold out ....
Its the finals of the Magic the gathering world championships
Hugh Moore vs. Erik Lauer ...
TO THE THOUSANDS IN ATTENDANCE AND THE MILLIONS AT HOME LETS GET READY TO RUUUUUUMMMMMMBBBBBBBBLLLLLLLEEEEE!!
Fans wearing shirts that say "My Serra Angel loves me" and "I've got Craw Wurms"
Can you imagine it?? Scary huh ...
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 played magic when I was younger. The reason I stopped? The endless expantions. Not only did they keep adding more and more cards to the game (not all bad but games took forever as people tried to figure out what each card did after it was played) but you have to keep upgrading your decks with new packs. And you can't just buy the cards you want. You have to keep buying packs until you happen to be lucky enough to get them. It got very expensive very fast as your pile of worthless cards kept growing and every once in a while you added something good.
The only games I could still bring myself to play are the 1 pack tournaments. Everyone gets one brand new pack of cards, and thats all you have to play with. This forced you to think on the fly and develop strategy as you drew cards because you couldn't set up the deck beforehand. Quite a fun way to play (allthough you still had to buy a new pack every time you wanted to play it)
Hugh looks boyish, but actually he's 35, and takes this shit very seriously.
Boy, can this sucker write! New York Times, here he comes!
demanding the mind athletes be treated with the same respect as physical athletes.
Mind athletes?? The last time I checked, an Athlete is someone who required good physical attributes in order to be sucessful. The term "Mind Athlete" makes no sense whatsoever.
Lets call these people what they are...gamers. Being a gamer is nothing to be ashamed of, and I would love to see more professional gaming, and more pro gamers. This goes for both the electronic and "pencil and paper" variety.
But come on people, is Gary Kasparov a "Mind Athelete"? Maybe gatorade can come out with a new marketing campaign:
"When you're trying to decide between bishop to R3 or a queen gambit, your body depletes essential minerals and nutrients..."
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....
It's a fun game, and the poker comparison is accurate, but it's a LOT more luck based than Poker ever is. If you get mana screwed (have no lands to play), you could be the best player in the world, and you're still fucked. You get a bad hand in Poker and you can at least bluff.
If you want to play in the tournaments, you have to spend a fortune as there's a new expansion every 3-4 months, and expansions are removed from the tournament cycle with regularity. To stay competitive, you have to keep buying new cards. I had a friend who played tournaments and he'd buy two BOXES of booster packs every time a new expansion came out. That's about $200 I think. Maybe more now. It's a complete money pit, but hey, if you have fun and can afford it, good luck to you.
I used to collect the cards, have over 6000 of them. The aforementioned friend used to send me his doubles of his common cards (there's common, uncommon and rare. The rare cards go for a quite a price in some cases. I have single cards worth over $10). I used to wind up with 6-8 of each common. That was after he had taken enough for his deck building needs.
It's definitely fun to play, but bear in mind a lot of kids play it too. Finding mature players may be a trick.
Magic the Gathering, on the other hand, is deplored by some fundamentalist christians for the pictures it uses, known perhaps more for its business side than its academic side, and continually changing the dynamic of the game.
Don't get me wrong, it's already harder for an intellectual athlete to get funding to go to international meets for the more traditional academic competitions, and a local basketball trophy will usually be more proudly displayed than an international medal even for the better accepted intelectual athletics. I just think MtG is likely to generate even less respect.
I've played Magic tournaments off and on for 6 or 7 years. I've played in the Pro Tour. I still play the occasional limited tourney. Limited means that you dont bring along your expensive cards to play. You open brand new randomized packs like everyone else, and make a deck.
99.995% of those who attempt or think they can make a living playing Magic, are dreaming. The prizes are very top-heavy, so that only the top 4 players per Pro Tour event (6 per year) can even hope to turn a decent profit.
And that's only for one year! Next year they have to manage an insane finish once again. Rarely do "name" players actually make repeat Top 4's in Pro Tours. I could count on 1.5 hands the number of players that are making a good living (i.e. 30K/yr) off this game.
I even made a nice little chart: http://goa_entranced.tripod.com/pic/protour.jpg (damn filter refuses an underscore in the URL.)
And yet, there are hundreds of thousands of players who chase the illusion of making a living playing Magic.
You've got to hand it to Wizards, they have hit a goldmine of addicts.
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"What's impossible today is normal tomorrow."
What really surprised me is how the author wrote 6 PAGES about a guy playing Magic: The Gathering.
And I read the whole thing.
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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