Subject: What is killing Magic?
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 14:35:06 -0400
From: Raymond Russell <rrussell@cas.org>
To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com, rrussell@cas.org

I think that in essense, Magic is a victim of its own success.  I
believe there are a couple of factors which are causing Magic to lose
the appeal that it once had.

1) Tournament Play

I believe that the tournament system has had a very negative impact on
Magic.  Magic was never intended for tournament play when it was first
designed.  Richard Garfield designed a game that would be creative and
fun to play, and in this he succeeded admirably.  Unfortunately, these
are exactly the same components which are squelched by the pressures of
tournaments.  There are only a limited number of dominant deck
archetypes for any given set or combination of sets, so if you play to
win you essentially must use one of these deck types.  This destroys the
creative aspect of Magic.  Second, tournament play is often an ordeal,
not fun.  People trash talk and cheat, you are playing with total
strangers, and a lot of time is spent waiting around for the tournament
to get going, or go from match to match.  Finally, by promoting the idea
that winning is the most important part of Magic (by celebrating and
rewarding those who do) a culture is created where people who play for
fun are denigrated as scrubs, and showing up with a theme deck at a game
store will result in nothing but loss and humiliation as you are
repeatedly beaten by decks honed for tournament play and nothing else.

2) Information

With the success of Magic, and the influence of the tournament system,
we had the market for mass-market Magic information.  To call this "the
Dojo effect" is really unfair, since there are many other means by which
information was spread - the Dojo was simply the ultimate expression of
this phenomenon.  With the spread of information on the best decks,
these decks proliferated as players simply copied winning decks rather
than lose to them (if you can't beat 'em, join 'em...).  This killed the
creative aspect of the game, outside of the first few weeks after a
release.  Furthermore, it discouraged new players who quickly found that
they would lose consistently if they just bought a few packs and tried
to throw a deck together.  Now you had to make a major investment in the
game in time and money in order to win 50% of the time.  This deterrent
meant that new players shunned the game, which was left to those who
were introduced to the game when the barrier wasn't so large.

While I believe it would help if WOTC minimized the role of the DCI and
de-emphasized the importance of tournaments, I do not see this
happening.  I believe Richard Garfield's success went to his head and he
thought he had created an intellectual equivalent to chess.  Magic is
not chess; it is more like tic-tac-toe, where after awhile you realize
there are only certain moves.  I love playing Magic and tinkering with
cards, and still find enjoyment in informal games with friends, but the
idea of copying a sligh deck (or whatever) and playing rude strangers
for the glory of the win has absolutely no appeal for me, and probably a
great many other magic players as well.  This is why the game is dying.

                                Ray Russell