186 players.

Giant Question 1
Regarding Modern and Legacy - but particularly Modern - the company line is "We do not acknowledge after market pricing" and that "Magic is not an investment." I'm fine with both of these concepts, but every action you all take is quite the opposite in regards to both of those things. Why didn't you all rush to, at least in the EDH/Command Precons, print the Ravnica duals? Why isn't Dark Confidant, Goyf, Vendilion Clique, etc available readily?
Why create an entirely new format and then proceed to not make staples available to people prior to an entire PTQ season?

Giant Question 2 You all have just created a ranking system for which you became both a champion and PR mouth. You did an admirable job. That aside, the system which is very obviously founded on the idea of leveling up and staying at said levels completely missed the boat on why levels like that work in various capacities. If you're going to treat participation and such in competitive play as an RPG, you're supposed to get rewards when you level up.
Sure, some obscenely small number of people participated in MPR, but I don't walk around telling people I'm a Wizard of any level as that's a little bit beyond dumb. What's in this system for people who don't ever qualify for big events on Planeswalker Points? Just a level and a name?
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[–]mtgaaronDirector of R&D, M:TG 43 points 11 hours ago
100% SURE. YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST PEOPLE.
1) Magic is a collectible. We know that. From the reprint policy website: "The Magic trading card game has tremendous appeal as both a game and a collectible." That means we have to be deliberate with reprinting cards. Should the right product for those cards come around, we will reprint some of them. The demand for Modern cards has not gone unnoticed, so please bear with us. Our timelines are not exactly short.
2) We know the system needs more robustness (is that a word?), and more is coming. We're going to be trying out various levels of incentives and/or rewards and see what sticks. Expect some changes/augmentations to Planeswalker Points later this year.

Q)How much does R&D consider rarer formats, like vintage, when designing sets? Did anyone go "oh yeah, Slash Panther's going to be amazing in T1"?

A) Not much. Sometimes a card like Lodestone Golem is made with Vintage in mind, but we can't ever really predict things like Slash Panther. Slash Panther was made just to be a Phyrexian Lightning Elemental.

Q) Is there any sort of plans to bring the Vintage format to Magic Online? I love the format so much and would love more players having access to it.
A) It's a hot topic here. We're (relatively) sure we want it to happen, although plans aren't in place yet.

A) How does Wizard plan on keeping Legacy & Vintage from becoming extinct in the future?
B) Does the policy not lead to a future a secondary market full of high quality counterfeit cards?
C) It is known that upper-management made the final decision to keep the reserved list and close the loophole. What can the player base do to get this decision reversed and the list abolished. We saw a change after the player base revolted to ratings can we do the same for the reserved list?

A) Two ways, most likely. One, we'll keep supporting them at the level we do now. At the very least, the sizes of those communities will stay the same as they are now, and as more sets are released, more decks made up mostly of newer cards (like Affinity) will let more people in. Two, I imagine Magic Online will someday have vibrant Vintage and Legacy communities. We can "print" whatever we want on there.
B) I hope not.
C) Nothing, really. It's not like it was decided merely as a matter of opinion. Someone made a promise a long time ago, and as much as I personally wish it wasn't so, we have to stick with it. I understand the demand is there, but we're not going to open ourselves up to ill will or worse by reneging.

There was a PDF uploaded to a media sharing site.  It's a "godbook" that has images of every single card in the set in order.

Apparently, that site has been taken down, and MTGsalvation has removed all links to it.   I've read the whole set though, and it's quite interesting.   Wizards isn't happy.  

Rumor has it that [redacted] is somehow involved in this fiasco.  

Can't wait to see results.  Sorry I couldn't make it, family issues arose at the worst possible time.  I imagine a lot of Blightsteel Oath and MUD.

The Basic User/Full User/Adept/whatever system is a bad idea.  Half the Vintage World Champions are basic users.  Half the Adepts are there for what appears to be no reason.  I would just reset everyone to "User" or "Moderator" or "Admin."

Agee 100% - love the new Vintage Issues forum, the new layout for deck dicussion by archetype, etc.... but the tournament forum results should be in one forum.

It is really weird to be having this conversation when Magic is more popular than it has ever been.

I want to make two points that I think are valid here:

1) The vintage community in general seems to focus more on prize support than any other group of Magic players I've been around. 

2) The vintage community seems to overlook the insane boon to older players that Magic Online is.  I have a real job and a real kid, and without MTGO I'd be very very sad. 

Of course they care.   I can confirm that in fact.  There are people at Wizards that do care.   

As I typed in earlier posts. I agree with you about the PTQ problem. I think were we disagree is that Wizards and Hasbro cares. And if they don't care your question and the article are irrelevant.
Well, alot of people disagree with you, judging by the response on the SCG forums.   

I agree that just because it's published doesn't make it true.  But there are a ton of players out there who burn out because the PTQ circuit treats them as disposable.  The prizes suck, and it's no longer fun enough to justify trying to qualify.   You are ignoring their experiences, which are affirmed in the SCG forums. 

I think there is another whole category of players who burnout, for reasons I described in the article.   This player is often a PTQ player. 

It's a very stupid company that doesn't care about it's public image. Brand loyalty is huge. I'd argue that the reprint fiasco is a better example of how they do care than the opposite. If the Eternal community wasn't a factor, why wouldn't they be selling freshly printed sets of power at four digits a pop? The happiness of your clientelle directly impacts whether or not they jump ship (and by extension, your bottom line).

Blizzard is a big company owned by a huge company, and they've moved in the direction of being more open and more accepting of customer feedback as WoW has grown. Their rep as a company that cares about it's image has gained them a loyal fanbase, and the effect of feedback on their product is readily visible.

The point is simple:

Magic has not reached its full potential because Wizards treats players as disposable.  If they fostered an experience that generated greater retainment and increased re-entry, then Magic would hit its potential.

As I said in the article:


Only by asking those questions can we reflect and think about how Magic as it might be, rather than how it is.   

The demographic data I cited in this article make a strong case. 

One of the questions I pose in the article is simple:

The classification between products for a certain age range with built-in obsolescence and eternal products is a good one, and I agree MtG can fall in the second category especially as gaming is becoming more and more an acceptable behavior for adults in our societies. But I believe a key difference between a product like Coke and Magic is that the basic business model for Magic is selling new stuff, whereas Coke can retain its old customers by keeping the exact same product. Any change for Magic (rules, card frames, emphasis on stack or red zone in cards design) has the potential to turn into a New Coke disaster, but at the same time change is necessary to the game in order to sell product.

I think we forget that Hasbro is a money making enterprise and in general look for the short term monitory gain rather then the very long term heath of the game and the desire of the long term players.

They make more money selling packs from limited and standard games then anything else. They are never going to support Eternal because they are too short sighted to have a plan for profitability in the older formats.