Over the past year or so, there have been some immense changes to the Magic Online tournament structure. Most notably, the number of Challenge events, which make up one of the most popular circuits on the client, has increased dramatically. When Daybreak Games started to oversee the program, they made it a mission to ensure that players in differing time zones and with unique work schedules were able to find windows to compete. They even adjusted the prize pool slightly if specific Challenges attracted more people.
This made a lot of players very excited. For the most part, these events have been running smoothly, with the majority of them well-attended. Unfortunately, though, a major shift in prize support was just recently announced that has left the player base at large quite annoyed. Prizes have been cut by a large margin pretty much across the board.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of disappointment within the community, and the long-term effects could prove to be devastating.
Massive Prize Cuts
The prize structure for Magic Online Challenge events has been a bit of a work in progress. Because the number of participants can vary widely from tournament to tournament, Daybreak implemented a system where the overall prize pool would be higher in Large Challenges compared to Small Challenges. Small Challenges required a minimum of 32 players to fire, while Large Challenges needed at least 64 players to run.
In this way, if a Challenge at a specific day and time routinely saw a high attendance rate, a 64-player minimum would be implemented with an increased prize pool. The downside to running more events with a deeper prize pool, though, was that the Magic Online economy took a bit of a toll.
Arguably the most appealing portion of the Magic Online prizing system is the use of Treasure Chests. Treasure Chests, similar to booster packs in paper, give players random cards. If you’re lucky, you can even pull complete sets that are redeemable in paper. With the huge increase in Challenge events, more and more Treasure Chests were in circulation. This resulted in the overall value of chests and their contents to tank in price. For reference, the general price of Treasure Chests has decreased by roughly 70 cents in the last year.
The solution highlighted in this week’s Magic Online announcement, as shown above, was to drastically reduce the number of Treasure Chests awarded in Challenges. For instance, 1st place, which used to offer 100 Treasure Chests, now only offers 70. 5th-8th place decreased from rewarding 25 Chests to only 10, which is a substantial drop-off. In the Small Challenges, 17th-32nd place used to be awarded with 5 chests each. Now, 17th-24th gets only gets their entry fee back, while 25th-32nd place gets nothing.
The goal, of course, is to make Treasure Chests individually more profitable, which can help circumvent the lowering of prize support. The entry fees for Challenges have even decreased from 300 Play Points or 30 Tix (the equivalent of $30) to 250 Play Points or 25 Tix. As expected, though, many players are not taking this sudden depletion of prizes lightly.
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Player Frustration
Overall, there’s a lot of concern within the Magic community that these changes are going to have a major negative impact on Magic Online tournament play. As the Twitter post above suggests, unless the price of Treasure Chests goes up by a significant margin (Tix are a common form of currency on Magic Online, with each one valued at $1), this prize depletion could have dire consequences. The biggest issue that many players have brought up is that by lowering the Treasure Chest pool this much, the incentives for players to join Challenges in the first place has decreased considerably.
A huge perk to joining Challenges instead of simply playing in Leagues (five-round events that pay out based on record and let you play rounds at your leisure) was that if you spiked the event, you’d get a bunch of Chests for your troubles. Now, there’s the risk that Challenges don’t even fire, since players won’t want to give up 5+ hours of their time for little reward. After all, making top 8 of a Challenge now pays out less Treasure Chests than going 5-0 in a League.
On the flip side, though, some players mentioned that these alterations to the prize structure resulted from previous complaints about how they were worth so little. In this way, it’s very difficult to please everyone in this scenario. Only time will tell if these changes prove to be hugely detrimental to Magic Online’s popular tournament series or not.
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