#Paythepros

If you know me, you've probably heard the words "Magic: The Gathering" at some point in your life. Magic is a collectable/tradable/playable card game that is too complicated to explain briefly. Last weekend Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns Magic and is a subsidiary of Hasbro, held a quarter-yearly Pro Tour, which consists of the 400 or so best players in the world competing to see who is the coolest planeswalker (and for $150,000 in prizes). I followed the whole event at Twitch.tv/magic. For those who don't know, twitch.tv is a website where people livestream (like regular streaming, but live) themselves doing various things (usually playing video games). It's kinda like watching a football game on TV, except it's on the internet and it's a bunch of guys playing with cards. It was a great weekend. The metagame was awesome and my favorite player made it to the Top 8; the current format is the best it's been in a while. What wasn't so awesome was an anouncement that Wizards of the Coast made right before the final match.

Some background information is required to understand exactly why the announcement was so detrimental. Among the players at the Pro Tour are around forty players (38, exactly) who are at the top of the global rankings currently; we call them Platinum Pros. You can find the rankings here.
These players are given $3000 each from Wizards for every Pro Tour they show up to (for a total of $12,000 per year), because they literally make their entire living from prizes and sponsorships. These players are the heart of the community. They are the ones that get everyone else excited about Magic and give players aspirations, and the professional Magic circuit literally can't exist without them. They are just like the pro basketball, football, soccer, etc. players within Magic.

Right before the finals of last weekend's Pro Tour, one of the most epic Magic tournaments ever, Global Organized Play Director Helene Bergeot made some announcements regarding the appearance fees awarded Platinum Pros. You can find the video here (skip to about 2:30).
To summarize, the change involves cutting appearance fees from $3,000 per Pro Tour to $250 per Pro Tour. The big payoff? Next season, the World Championship prize pool increases by $100,000, and the season after that it increases by $250,000. This is problematic for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are 38 Platinum Pros currently (that number will increase before the season ends), and only the best 24 go to the World Championship. This leaves 15+ pros screwed out of very important money that they probably need to continue to be able to play magic, and no one is sure which ones that will be until the season is over, not even the pros, so they are really playing for a 60% chance at making the money they need to continue playing. Secondly, the prize pool increase doesn't affect the payout for the bottom 15 spots at the World Championship until two years from now, so pros have very little incentive to play the game competitively for a whole season.

As you can probably imagine, this caused quite a stir from the community. Even though the changes only directly affect a very small group of people, the ramifications of an empty pro circuit would be devastating to the community at large and even the ability of Wizards of the Coast to make magic in the first place. Twitter blew up. Content creators on Youtube were posting videos left and right about how angry they were at Wizards. One pro, Brad Nelson, who won $10,000 by making it to semifinals at the Pro Tour posted this:
This all seems very negative, but their is a different perspective to take on this, one that a few people in the Magic world have. It's that this game means so much to players that they were all willing to very outspokenly rally behind a cause for what they saw as the integrity of the game. It made me feel admiration for the Magic community to see the unity with which we tackled the problem.

My hope is that at this point all of you are pissed off at Wizards and really emotionally involved in the whole thing, and I'm just going to assume that that's true. Well, I'll put your mind at ease, because on Thursday Wizards released a statement retracting the changes for the upcoming season, entirely in response to community upheaval. You can find that here.

Now it looks like the whole problem has been resolved and everything's fine. However, the more inquisitive of you may have been wondering something along the lines of "Why did Wizards make the changes in the first place?" And to tell the truth, I'm not quite sure. In the announcement video, Ms. Bergeot says that they want to give the World Championship a larger prize pool because that seems fitting, and I can kind of buy that. That being said, the people at Wizards are certainly aware of community attitudes about professional players, and I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't realize the enormous reaction the community would have. The people at Wizards are members of the community themselves, and I can't imagine they wouldn't be upset by the changes too. And once they did make the changes, the turnaround was REALLY quick, about four days, which seems oddly quick to make such a drastic change, considering all of the bureaucratic nonsense a company that large has to go through to make a change in fund allocation. So why did they do it? My theory, and one shared by some members of the community, is that the Wizards team was pressured into the decision by higher-ups at Hasbro, and they felt the only option was to release the statement and let the community's reaction force them to backtrack. This theory obviously has some holes, but I've thought about this for a while and can't seem to think of anything. It is interesting to try to find out what's going on behind the scenes based entirely off of the public relations front enclosing the company. If you come up with anything, I'd love to talk in the comments. In the meantime, one of my favorite players is streaming on twitch.