I was 200 words into a post entitled “How to Go Pro on a Budget”, a post in which I was going to recommend grinding Pauper Leagues for Qualifying Points into the Magic Online Championship Series, when I read something in the 2017 MOCS Update that I hadn’t seen discussed anywhere else online:

“when the new MOCS year begins on September 28, we are removing QPs from friendly Leagues, phantom events, flashback events, and Pack-per-Win Draft Leagues.”

There’s justification for this, and it’s a change that I don’t necessarily disagree with. Lee Sharpe claims that having Qualifying Points in these events was “not segmenting players in the right way.” And that makes a lot of sense to me, I don’t want the Modern Flashback drafts (which are designed to provide a fun and nostalgic experience) to become the arena in which MTGO grinders battle it out to get QPs for the MOCS. However, it’s also a change that causes a fair amount of disruption.

Firstly, I’m not sure I agree with removing QPs from phantom events. Whilst flashback and Pack-per-Win Drafts are designed to provide a more fun experience, phantom drafts are the most competitive form of limited by design. Rare/value drafting doesn’t happen in a phantom draft, so every draft decision is made to create the strongest deck possible, which most closely emulates drafting at a high-level event (Goyfgate aside, at least). With QPs gone, the utility of phantom drafts has fallen to just practising a Limited format, and with now only Play Points as a reward, the incentive to join a phantom event seems lower than ever, and I’d expect attendance to fall accordingly (not that phantom events have the highest attendance in the first place, but this is just further damage).

The second, and probably more important effect, is that it removes QPs entirely from Pauper as a format, which in turn ruins the entire premise of the article that I was writing (and that’s the real travesty here). Pauper is currently an under-supported format as-is, and although I can understand that Wizards of the Coast doesn’t want to heavily support a format that makes them almost no money, this is a real blow to competition in Pauper.

For context, Pauper was previously available to play in 2-player queues, 8-player queues, and Daily Events, of which the latter had the highest rewards (which was all in the form of packs, Play Points hadn’t been invented yet). When Leagues came out, there was only one League per format with no Competitive/Friendly split. With the dawn of the dividing of Leagues, the playerbase for Pauper proved too small to justify splitting it, so the Pauper League became the Pauper Friendly League, with no changes bar the name. This was overall agreeable as a split would have caused queue times to skyrocket and having a Friendly League makes more sense than a Competitive one as it encourages more innovation and diversity, which could help to make the format more appealing.

However, with Qualifying Points now removed from the format entirely (the only other way to play Pauper outside of practice rooms is in 2-player queues which rewards only Play Points) the fiscal barrier to entry into a Magic Online Championship Series event is now much higher. Whilst previously one could acquire a Pauper deck for ~$50 and grind Leagues for 35 QPs, the cheapest option is now between Standard at ~$200 and Draft at $14 per League. It could be argued that technically grinding Pauper leagues will eventually give you enough packs to translate into a Standard deck, or to fuel drafting, until the QPs can be acquired, but that’s theoretically twice as hard, and in practise likely much harder than that.

Of course, even before the changes there was no Pauper MOCS event. Grinding out 35 QPs from Pauper Leagues would still require you to either play Standard or Sealed for the MOCS. However, the fact that there’s literally no cost to entering a Sealed MOCS bar the 35 QPs, I think it’s still accurate to say that removing QPs from Pauper Leagues represents a much higher sunk cost to get into a MOCS.

So what’s the alternative? The addition of a Competitive Pauper League is out of the question. The playerbase, even before the emergence of Peregrine Drake turned players away from the format, couldn’t support a split in the Leagues. The current Friendly League could be made into a Competitive one, but that would turn players away from the format as innovation would be punished even more than the Peregrine Drake-centric format already is.

I think the cleanest solution is to revert the changes to Pauper Leagues (and also to phantom events) so that players can still earn Qualifying Points through them. With the recent changes making the MOCS more accommodating, I can’t see the need to raise the barriers to entry and thus lower the turnout. We’ll see how these changes pan out over the next few months, and hopefully we’ll see Sharpe and the team make some slight revisions to their plan.