State of the Program for November 11th 2016

In the News

Changes to MTGO Events: Lee Sharpe published an article on changes to MTGO events. You can read it Lee Sharpe published an article on changes to MTGO events. You can read it here . He outlines three main changes. First, Wizards is offering a Competitive Draft League. Second, Wizards is rolling out prestige avatars. Third, Treasure Chests are being improved.

Competitive Draft League: Wizards is rolling out a new draft league. Kit costs 15 TIX, or equivalent, to enter, and pays out only to players finishing 3-0 or 2-1. It also drops players after their first loss – in other words, it is single elim. Prize payouts are better: 3-0 garners 6 packs, 150 play points and 2 QPs. A record of 2-1 earns 3 packs, 150 play points and 1 QP. The existing 6-2-2-2 Draft League will be renamed the Friendly Draft League, and will no longer award QPs. Otherwise, its prizes will remain the same.

Prestige Avatars: Players will soon be able to advertise their skills by playing with special avatars with colored borders – colors that mimic those for uncommons, rares and mythics. These avatars will be awarded at the time leagues close. This season’s avatars:

Treasure Chest Changes: Wizards is also changing the Treasure Chests and increasing the payout for going 4-1 by one chest. Here’s a short list of the changes: TCs will be tradeable after the Nov. 16th downtime. The play point payout will be eliminated, and that slot will be replaced with a booster pack (or, in very rare circumstances, 36 booster packs.) Wizards is adding a bunch of cards from recently released paper sets (like Commander 2016) while cutting about four dozen of the lowest value cards on the current curated list.

No Community Cup this Year: Wizards tweeted that “the calendar was running out” on the Community Cup this year. Wizards had not done the necessary prep work and planning, and did not have enough time to make it happen this year, so the Community Cup is cancelled.

Peregrine Drake BANNED in Pauper: (repeat from last week) Wizards has issued an unscheduled change to the Pauper B&R list. Effective November 16th, the current Pauper league will end November 15th . A new league will begin the next day, sans the Drake. Expect commentary (and rejoicing) from our regular Pauper experts. Wizards has issued an unscheduled change to the Pauper B&R list. Effective November 16 Peregrine Drake will be banned in Pauper. Wizards explains their reasoning here . Important note – because of the banning,. A new league will begin the next day, sans the Drake. Expect commentary (and rejoicing) from our regular Pauper experts.

Original Modern Masters Phantom Drafts Here Now: We can draft the original Modern Masters until next downtime. The event will be run as a league, and cost either 10 TIX or 1000 play points. Prizes will be play points. In case you have forgotten, Original Modern Masters was a great format.

World Magic Cup Coming: The World Magic Cup will be played November 18-20. Coverage will be on Twitch.tv/magic.

The Timeline

This is a list of things we have been promised, or we just want to see coming back. Another good source for dates and times is the weekly blog, while the best source for known bugs is the Known Issues List . For quick reference, here are some major upcoming events. In addition, there are either one or two online PTQs each weekend, with qualifiers running the three days prior to the PTQ.

Recurring Events Timing Power Nine Challenge Last Saturday of the month, at 11am Pacific Legacy Challenge Second Saturday of the month, at 11am Pacific No Downtime November 23rd and 30th and December 14th Extended Downtime November 16th Current Leagues End January

Upcoming and Ongoing Events Begins Ends From the Vault: Lore On sale now January 4, 2017 PAUPER LEAGUE ENDING EARLY DUE TO BANNING Now active November 15th Kaladesh Standard Championship November 13th Details here Kaladesh Sealed MOCS events December 4th, 11th, 18th and 30th. Details here Standard MOCS events November 25th Details here Modern MOCS events January 7th & 21st Details here . Amonkhet Spring, 2017 release Aether Revolt prerelease January 27th January30th Modern Masters 2017 Edition MTGO release March 23rd

Flashback Schedule:

Flashback drafts cost 10Tix or 100 Play Points or 2 Tix plus product. They are you-keep-the- cards, not Phantom. These are single elimination events that pay out in play points: 200 for first, 100 for second, and 50 for third and fourth place.

Format Begins Ends Triple Magic 2012 November 9 November 16 Triple Avacyn Restored November 16 November 23 Triple Magic 2013 November 23 November 30 Triple Return to Ravnica: November 30 December 7 Triple Gatecrash December 7 December 14 Dragon’s Maze, Gatecrash, Return to Ravnica December 14 December 21

Opinion Section: The Community Cup

Wizards could “not find time” to organize the Eric “Hamtastic” Friborg Memorial tournament this year.

Sigh.

Crunching the Numbers: Treasure Chests

Wizards has updated the Treasure Chests. They made a couple changes.

First, Treasure Chests will be tradeable starting next downtime. This means that the bots and dealers will begin buying them. Dealers will also sell unopened Treasure Chests, but I doubt many people will want to buy them. That means the dealers will primarily be opening the chests to sell the contents – and that lead us to the second change.

Treasure Chests will no longer contain Play Points. The slot that had been devoted to play points will now produce a booster pack. This should improve the sell price of Treasure Chests, since booster packs will have value to the bots. Assuming Treasure Chest sales take off, a BOT or dealer could easily have wound up with thousands of play points. About the best a dealer could do with those points would be to crash draft queues to raredraft and leave, which wouldn’t be good for anyone. Changing play points to booster packs makes a lot of sense in that regard.

Wizards announced another change, buried in the Competitive Draft League announcement: Leagues will now accept a mix of TIX and Boosters to enter the League. For now that is because of the increased price, so you have to provide 3 boosters and 3 TIX. However, if the technology works, this might mean that Wizards could offer other payment arrangements – like two boosters and the rest in TIX. I have often found myself with two boosters, and the choice of buying another booster or paying TIX to draft. If this works, Wizards might spread these choices across the board. Please, Wizards, we have waited so long.

Back to Treasure Chests. As I predicted / as was obvious, Wizards has made some changes to the Curated Cards list. They have added a number of valuable cards (Candelabra of Tawnos, Containment Priest, The Rack, True-Name Nemesis, etc.) to the curated cards list. At the same time they have cut out a couple dozen of the lowest value cards. When I previously ran the EV (technically weighted mean retail value) of the cards on the curated list, the result was a couple cents over $5.00. With the changes, the value jumped about seventy-five cents. More importantly, there are far fewer feel-bads (e.g. Wargate ) on the list.

Wizards has also added some of the Commander 2016 and Conspiracy II cards to the treasure chests. These have a separate column so they are less likely to get lost in the list. Since some of these are seeing play in paper Legacy and Vintage tournaments already, they should have some real value (which I have not included, because they had no prices at the time I put this together.) Here’s the new content percentages list.

Slot Curated Card Modern Rare/Mythic Rare C16/CN2 Booster Standard Common/ Uncommon 1 19% 45% 16% 20% 0% 2 5% 16% 10% 0% 69% 3 1% 1% 7% 0% 91%

Finally, Wizards has added the missing treasure chest to the 4-1 result prizes. When I crunched the numbers on Treasure Chests the first time around ( here ), I noted that players finishing 4-1 were worse off than under the old prize payouts. This change fixes that problem. The EV of the new prize structure, including Treasure Chests, is now higher at all levels that the old prize was.

Well done Wizards. Nice set of tweaks.

Cutting Edge Tech

Standard: The GP was Modern, and the SCG Open was Legacy, but Reid Duke won an SCG Classic, so he gets the feature.



Modern: We had a Modern GPs last weekend. This was the first major Modern event since Kaladesh became legal. The event was huge – over 2,000 players. We got to see what Modern is like. The answer is that it is very diverse. Coverage showed us the breakdown of the Top 100 decks. Here’s that graph.