Hey everyone! Josh here with wizardden.com here to talk about the hot topic of MTGO and the new Play Point system. I, like many of you, grind often on MTGO and the new Play Point system is a radical change that has caused several of my friends and acquaintances to jump ship which happened, in my opinion, a bit prematurely. I don't want to dabble too much into the EV and numbers game though I will touch briefly on it as the numbers will tie to my main point. Their concern, of course, is why should I continue to play on a client where I am rewarded with points that are essentially worthless? Well, if the changes I'll be discussing are implemented, which I think they will be in the near future, the Play Point system could be a great thing for Magic Online.
I must admit I'm not sure if this was the actual beginning of a beautiful thing or not but it is the first time I directly encountered it.
The day was August 6, 2014. I crammed into my father's Suburban along with my teammates Tim Zaleski and Brian Young and the star studded team of Daniel Gardener, Christian Calcano and Miguel Gatica on our way to Portland to play some team sealed. Aside from the excitement of putting a ton of practice in to the format I was excited to see the unveiling of the new Prize wall system. I always enjoy playing side event drafts at these events (as limited is by far my best format) but would occasionally feel down on the fact that all I am doing is bringing home a box or two of whatever the most recent set was. That all changed here, Prize Points were the hot new thing and they were definitely awesome. Being able to change my successes into something that was actually relevant to me was a pretty cool thing and something I know a lot of other players welcomed with open arms. This is something I wish we could get excited about with MTGO.
I propose a "Prize Wall" for MTGO based on the new Play Points. The concern, of course, is how to put a price on items that will constantly have a fluctuating price via the ticket system. This is true, but with the implementation of the play point system it would cut in half the amount of fluctuation that occurs with these items as tickets are only one way to go about the purchase of this item meaning they will have a more consistent price overall. Under several other examples a Play Point is around 1/10 the value of the current ticket. So let's take for example a Black Lotus which is around 90 tickets currently, but to be generous, we'll call it 100 for this example. Setting up a Prize Wall where 1000 Play Points gets you a Black Lotus, 40 Play Points gets you a booster of any standard set and some other fun goodies like fetches and whatnot seems like a pretty good system. If there is a legitimate concern for the fluctuation in price of some of these items they could easily be updated during downtime (as long as it doesn't take an additional five hours like the change to this system did).
I'd like to briefly touch on the numbers game of this and why this would be beneficial to the community as a whole. Looking at 8-man events which currently have the lowest entry to highest EV we can find looking at 100 sample events with a 66% win percentage that we are up nearly 400 Play Points by the end of the ordeal. This is all well and good for going infinite on play with earning around 60 packs to poorly promote the growth of our decks. What happens when we decide to jump ship on MTGO and go to cash out? We are left with an excess of play points that will rot in our account until Wizards deletes it from the servers. Implementing a Prize Wall gives players the chance to turn their collection into a tangible item when it comes time to give it up.
I truly hope we will see this change occur in the near future and would love to hear if you feel the same. If you do, pass feedback along to Wizards. They can't read every piece of content that is out there and won't know this is something we want unless the players let them know. I apologize I never was able to post Mono Black Devotion videos, I still haven't had a chance to pick up a microphone to patch up the audio and would like to get this before I bring you more video content, hopefully before the Magic Origins Limited Championships on Saturday. Thanks for the read!
Happy Battles,
Josh Kreiter
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