Can Magic Online Recover?

Recently there has been a huge shake-up on Magic Online.  Last weekend both the Magic Online Championship tournament AND a large Pro Tour Qualifier crashed before finishing.  Wizards rolled out the usual compensation announcements but that didn’t satisfy a large portion of the players. In particular, one Brian Kibler. See his post about the debacle here.

Seemingly in response to all this rage directed at WotC, they shutdown all major Magic Online events.  The only events running now are 8-player queues, 2-player queues, and the two makeup events for the MOCS and PTQ.  Yowsa.  It was a strong response, but was absolutely necessary.  The stability of MTGO *must* be fixed.

I remember the last MTGO PTQ I played in… Oh yeah, it crashed as well. I believe I was 5-2 when it crashed, so I didn’t have top 8 aspirations or anything, but I would have liked to play until the end.  I had to block out the entire day to play in the event, because let’s face it, every round goes to time (and I swear it’s longer than 52 minutes or whatever it should be).  I wasn’t very angry, however, because they were issuing some packs and I wasn’t in contention anyway, but I realized how upset the top 8 hopefuls had to be.

I completely understand Kibler’s frustration and anger over the recent crashes.

I think that a message needed to be sent to WotC/Hasbro that the game in its current state is unacceptable. I for one am thankful that WotC actually paid attention this time and did something about the problems. I remain hopefully optimistic that they will find the root cause and fix it. FIX IT….

FIX IT!!!

Can Magic Online recover from these problems? Absolutely. Wizards has kept their property to themselves all these years and will likely continue to do so.  Will they bring in another company or at least hire more people? I sure hope so. Other online games work with essentially no interruption these days. I played WoW back in its hay-day and we experienced the growing pains of that game, with servers going offline weekly.  I only seem to remember that happening for about a year, though, and Magic Online has been crashing like this for years.

For now I’ll continue to mess around with Standard decks casually and I’ll see what they are able to do with the larger events. I, like a lot of players, will wait out the first few big tournaments that come back and see what happens.  I’ll be back eventually because I can’t really play paper Magic anymore and I need a place to play.

My First Magic 2014 (M14) Draft

At the M14 Prerelease, I lost in the finals. The deck that beat me? Blue/Green. My opponent used Zephyr Charge+Plummet to kill my non-fliers, and given the fact that I had 10 or so fliers in my deck, the Plummets were usually just Doom Blades. It was quite the savage beating.

So I went in to my first draft thinking about how good fliers were, how good green was, and how good black was. I know that white and red can also be very good, but only in the right circumstances. I knew that I would lean on green in some capacity unless blue/black presented itself or another color came on really strong.

I would post the draft visually, but it looks like the draft converter is having troubles.

Here is the deck I ended up building:

Round 1:

My blue/green guys outpace his white/red guys rather quickly. He does win the flip on Molten Birth twice, though!!! I was pretty freaked out by that, but still had enough to win. Archaeomancer getting back Enlarge did the trick.
2-0 games

Round 2:

Played against blue/white fliers and good stuff. I was terrified of this guy because he was playing very well and had a lot of counterspells. He also had the flier that taps my fliers, which could just completely swing the game in his favor. Luckily for me, he had to go see a movie and he conceded in game 2. I hope it was the Wolverine; I hear that movie is sweet!
2-1 games

Round 3:

This time I face off against a red/black deck. Yikes. Talk about a powerful color combination. And he does not disappoint. I steal game one thanks to a pretty darn good draw. Game two, however, winds up with his Mark of the Vampire on his Canyon Minotaur and my bunch of dudes. Crazily enough, though, he swings into my wall of guys and we trade like 2 for 2. In the end, it looks like he just drew a lot of lands and 3 unidentified cards in his hand. Perhaps all enchantments or lands?
4-1 games

Won!

Overall, I had fun with the draft and am definitely looking forward to drafting core set for a while. I feel like the simplicity of the format is more appealing after the crazy gold-fueled madness that is Return to Ravnica block.

My favorite color is green, and it does not disappoint in this draft format. Thankfully I’m also fond of the other colors so I can keep my options open. If I had one piece of advice for those trying to improve their draft game… Don’t jam your favorite color/archtype and try to force it. You have to evaluate each pack on its individual merits. You also need to pay attention to what’s coming your way and what you’re passing. Identifying something good that tabled could be your key to victory.

Until next time, have fun with Magic 2014!