No More Planeswalker Points?!?!?
Today we're going to look at the WotC decision to stop using Planeswalker Points and DCI numbers to track player progression and so you, yourself can track your progression. This came as quite a surprise to most people in the community as over the past month or so people have been ranting about a variety of things, mostly secondary market and reserved list things, but also about the newest expansion, Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths and how broken some of the mechanics are within the set and more specifically some of the cards with said mechanics.
"Adapting our technology to best serve a modern framework mean some software and services must change. On May 27, 2020 we will be sunsetting Planeswalker Points and removing access to the Planeswalker Points website." This is how Wizards chose to open their article on getting rid of the current system. For newer players that aren't entirely familiar with the system, you play an event and get a certain number of points based on sheer size of the event. The more participants, the more points you would get. Then there were points granted for game wins and match wins. It gave people incentive to get out and play. The more points you had, the more byes you could get for Grand Prix events and determined eligibility for entry into Nationals, Pro Tours, and Worlds events. Along with the points earned from events, some had point multipliers where you could earn even more points if you were to participate in. At the beginning of last year Wizards announced that Planeswalker Points would no longer be able to be used to grant byes in GP events.
Let's fast forward to today. The Planeswalker Points you currently have aren't good for anything. They're not going to transfer over to whatever new player tracking system will be in place. And your DCI number will no longer be used for entry into events. Wizards says that some events will still use your DCI until 2021 but we as players don't know which ones yet because they haven't told us.
They want to start tracking everything on the Magic: The Gathering companion app. The app originally launched for Android back in September of 2019 as an open Beta. Apple didn't receive any functionality of the app until February 2020. If it took five months between Android and Apple open Beta release, what will this potentially look like for a full release on both platforms? A full release on Android will probably happen around the same time the open Beta released on the platform, early September. A full release on Apple however, doesn't seem likely to happen until about December or January. This is just mostly because of licensing issues with Apple, it happens with most apps. Then when they release we will see a bunch of updates in the first couple of months due to bugs within the system, similar to what we saw with Arena.
This new system that's being implemented will require a Wizards account. If you play Arena, you're fine. If you don't play Arena for whatever reason, you'll need to go onto their site and create an account. I'm not sure what this is going to look like as far as event registration goes in the future, but my guess would be sign up using your email that's registered to your account. I know a lot of people do it to begin with, but to sign up for an event I predict that it will need to be done ahead of time and you'll be sent a QR code to be scanned when you get to the event. For multi-day events they'll do one of two things, either send you one code that will apply to each day, or send you one code per day.
"What impact will this have for the future of the game?" is a huge question that everyone is asking and speculating on right now. Here's my predictions:
1) We get a new, but lackluster point system. I predict it will require more points to grant a bye in a larger event if they even decide to do that. Points will likely only determine invitation eligibility to the really big events like Worlds.
2) Paper Magic will eventually disappear at a competitive level except various outlier events. We can already see this by WotC hosting more and more online events through Arena and MTGO. We also see this by Wizards and Hasbro collectively pushing more and more promotional and specialty products such as the Secret Lair products and Collector Boosters with alternate artworks and specialty foil printings of cards. They're also not doing much in the way of reprints of cards that actually need them such as fetch lands.
3) Paper Magic will ultimately be a status symbol for whales and nothing more. With the way promotional and specialty printings are being pushed on the consumer the only people that will be buying the product are the whales and collector/investors.
4) FNM will likely continue to be an at-home thing like it currently is further damaging the LGS and their money making capabilities. Finding a paper event as a whole will be like finding a legacy event 6 months ago. Hasbro and WotC collectively have been doing things to increase their profits and damage those of the brick and mortar LGS. They've gone away from the MSRP on products, they're printing more specialty products, and giving us as the player base fewer actual reprints of cards that desperately need them, and prize support quality has gone down drastically. The MSRP thing was quite noticeable with the second run of the challenger decks, the Izzet one to be exact. You could go to a big box store like Target, Walmart, or Gamestop and find it for about $41.99 +tax. My LGS however, was selling them for $54.99 +tax because of the up-charge through the distributor. This up-charge was due to secondary market prices at the time on some of the cards. It contained the most financial value out of the box at the time of release and distributors knew this so they charged stores more for their shipments. Big box stores don't really care about their profit margins on things like MtG, Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh, etc. because they have enough other product that they're making money on that it offsets everything. The LGS on the other hand, doesn't have those kind of profit lines and room to play with on their margins.
The specialty products like the Secret Lair line are damaging to the LGS because they're getting released in limited quantity to the stores, but only if that store meets certain requirements set by Wizards. They're also damaging because now when the store runs out, if they got any to begin with, the rest are being bought direct. Then they had the Mythic Edition products for the recent cycle of Ravnica sets that could only be bought direct from the Hasbro store for an obscene price. The LGS was never even allowed to stock them for sale. Now they have Collectors packs. $30 for a pack of 15 cards, some of which have an alternate printing, whether it's artwork, extended borders, etc. Stores can't seem to get rid of them. They spend this money on a few boxes of Collector's packs and they just sit there. There's two reasons for this in my experience. The first is why buy a $30 pack of cards when you can buy a $4 pack of cards and get the same ones? Yes the $30 pack has special alternate printings and such but overall you're getting the same thing. I understand that there's people out there that like to bling out their decks with whatever foil or alternate art printings they can get their hands on but it's definitely not for everyone. I mistakenly bought a playset of foil Breeding Pools for a deck and because I wasn't paying attention I ended up spending about three times what I planned on for them.
FNM is, in all reality a money pit for the LGS. You spend $5-$10 to play and most people end up with a pack of cards or enough prize support in store credit to play again the next week essentially letting them play for free. I personally went on a streak of FNM events that I used store credit to pay for for about six weeks. I spent $6 to enter the first week and played for free for a month and a half after that. I continued to gain prize support as I went along as well. While yes it was my goal to get on a streak to be able to just pay that one time and keep playing off of my store credit earned, I also understood that they were losing money in my doing that so I made it a point to try to buy something each time I played. Whether it was some new sleeves or some dice, I wanted to show them that I still support them as a business so they could keep the lights on and give people in the community a place to go to play Magic, or Pokemon, or even board games.
The lack of reprints hurts the LGS as well. There's a lot of people that go to an LGS and buy singles. There's less people that go to an LGS and buy singles valued at $20 or more. I talked about this in my article on reprints and the reserved list some but I'm going to approach the reprint thing from a financial angle from an LGS perspective. Your LGS buys say, five cases of the newest set to come out. They'll likely be opening one case worth to sell as singles, use one case for prize support, and the rest to sell either as individual packs or as a whole box. We're going to focus on the case that was opened for singles use. All of the money cards will be listed at around market price as listed on either TCGPlayer or CardKingdom normally. If there's a large change, they'll hopefully notice that and change their prices accordingly. Those will be sold primarily to people that play standard. Some of them will creep into the eternal formats but not usually. The standard playable cards will be their big money maker in the singles department. Then the EDH playables. Then the modern and legacy ones. The expected value(EV) on a box is generally around $100 on release. There's been some outliers for a standard product but this is about average. Your LGS likely gets their sealed product at about $85 a box then marks up the product to about $100 because they have to make some money. If they buy a box for $85 and the EV is $100+ they're making money. Even if they don't sell the bulk stuff they're generally breaking even on sales with singles. This is for standard legal product. When we move into the eternal formats like pioneer, modern, EDH, etc. they rely on either reprints to come up to stock their cases or they rely on us to not play those particular cards and trade them in for store credit. These cards don't really do anything for them financially because they don't generally move as quickly. Other players either already have the amount of that card that they need for their deck(s) or they also don't have a use for that card generally. Then there's finally the players that are newer to the game or a specific format and want to expand their knowledge and abilities. New players or new to the format players aren't likely to go out and buy an expensive meta deck right away for a variety of reasons. The most common ones I see are, they either don't have the money to be able to invest in the deck they actually want or they are unsure so they build a budget deck they found online from a source like MTGGoldfish. The problem with this from an LGS perspective is they have say 10 copies of each fetch land. They bought them off of a person that's downsizing their collection, getting out of the game, etc. If the average cost of a fetch land is $50 and they paid out in cash because the seller had no use for the store credit they're giving him probably 40% of the value or roughly $20. That comes out to around $2000 in total spent for all of these cards that will likely sit for months before being sold just because of the price. The store will ideally be able to sell them for the $50 each and get $5000 for all of them making about a $3000 profit. The longer they sit in the case though, the less money they're making. They could be putting out standard singles that will move quickly making them money the whole time but instead they've dedicated slots to a potential profit. Also, though not likely, they could buy those cards for that same $2000 and be stuck with them because the game just fell off and doesn't have the player base that it used to or even just the format those cards are legal in. It happened to a bunch of cards when they decided to do away with extended as a format. Plenty of cards lost their value and stores were stuck in the red on singles they had bought. The less they reprint cards, the less accessible various formats are to people and the less money the LGS brings in from singles sales outside of those that are standard legal. I understand that stores don't generally make much from singles sales but a good selection of singles for various formats will definitely help bring people into the store. In other words, less singles=less customer base. I'll use a personal story as an example. It was about 2014 or so, Magic Origins was coming out in about a month. I found an LGS near where I lived. They had a reasonable singles selection for MtG. I'd stop in there once every couple of weeks to look for cards that I had found while doing research on what cards were good, popular, etc. As time went on they focused less and less on MtG, one of the biggest card games, if not the biggest card game in the world and focused more on Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh singles. A combination of that along with their limited selection of past issue comics and their focus on memorabilia type products cut their customer base and they ended up closing their doors in early 2018. The other two stores I had found after that had a great selection of Magic singles and that's what they focused on was MtG. They sold other products as well but that was their primary focus and because they used that as their focus they did quite well actually. One of the two stores had such a large player/customer base that on Friday's they had two different groups. One would play modern and the other would draft. The draft group was large enough to usually run 3-4 pods of 8. The modern crowd was generally about that same amount or more. They also held other events throughout the week that were Magic related. They did free play on Saturday, legacy on Sunday, Standard was a day during the week, and they also had league play for whatever the current set was during the week. The other store I went to generally just played drafts for FNM with a group of about 2-3 pods of 8. He also did standard and league events during the week. Both stores have been serving the San Diego area for about 10 and 20 years respectively. The store that had to close its doors, open less than 5 years.
The moral of the story here is that doing away with something that worked as a whole despite its flaws is likely going to hurt the paper game and push it more towards online play. The more towards online play the game is pushed, the less people will play I feel for a variety of reasons. You would think it makes the game more accessible to people because not every town has an LGS people can go to but there's also towns where there's not reliable enough internet to support a few hours of play on a Friday night, or any night for that matter. I know at my dad's house he has satellite internet. It goes out a lot due to various weather conditions. There's no way I would trust his internet to be able to last for the duration of an MTGO tournament. The push towards online play will also take away from the LGS causing them to shut their doors because they simply won't get the support from Wizards to keep people coming into the store. I also feel less people will play because they won't have the "gathering" so to speak. Yes, MTGO has a chat feature to chat with your opponent but you're not hanging out with friends, talking about the new spoilers from the next cool set or trying to help each other brew up a new "anti-meta" deck. Yes, financially it's more feasible to play online but then you're missing the biggest part of the game. All I have to say is let's hope for the best and in the mean time happy brewing.
"Adapting our technology to best serve a modern framework mean some software and services must change. On May 27, 2020 we will be sunsetting Planeswalker Points and removing access to the Planeswalker Points website." This is how Wizards chose to open their article on getting rid of the current system. For newer players that aren't entirely familiar with the system, you play an event and get a certain number of points based on sheer size of the event. The more participants, the more points you would get. Then there were points granted for game wins and match wins. It gave people incentive to get out and play. The more points you had, the more byes you could get for Grand Prix events and determined eligibility for entry into Nationals, Pro Tours, and Worlds events. Along with the points earned from events, some had point multipliers where you could earn even more points if you were to participate in. At the beginning of last year Wizards announced that Planeswalker Points would no longer be able to be used to grant byes in GP events.
Let's fast forward to today. The Planeswalker Points you currently have aren't good for anything. They're not going to transfer over to whatever new player tracking system will be in place. And your DCI number will no longer be used for entry into events. Wizards says that some events will still use your DCI until 2021 but we as players don't know which ones yet because they haven't told us.
They want to start tracking everything on the Magic: The Gathering companion app. The app originally launched for Android back in September of 2019 as an open Beta. Apple didn't receive any functionality of the app until February 2020. If it took five months between Android and Apple open Beta release, what will this potentially look like for a full release on both platforms? A full release on Android will probably happen around the same time the open Beta released on the platform, early September. A full release on Apple however, doesn't seem likely to happen until about December or January. This is just mostly because of licensing issues with Apple, it happens with most apps. Then when they release we will see a bunch of updates in the first couple of months due to bugs within the system, similar to what we saw with Arena.
This new system that's being implemented will require a Wizards account. If you play Arena, you're fine. If you don't play Arena for whatever reason, you'll need to go onto their site and create an account. I'm not sure what this is going to look like as far as event registration goes in the future, but my guess would be sign up using your email that's registered to your account. I know a lot of people do it to begin with, but to sign up for an event I predict that it will need to be done ahead of time and you'll be sent a QR code to be scanned when you get to the event. For multi-day events they'll do one of two things, either send you one code that will apply to each day, or send you one code per day.
"What impact will this have for the future of the game?" is a huge question that everyone is asking and speculating on right now. Here's my predictions:
1) We get a new, but lackluster point system. I predict it will require more points to grant a bye in a larger event if they even decide to do that. Points will likely only determine invitation eligibility to the really big events like Worlds.
2) Paper Magic will eventually disappear at a competitive level except various outlier events. We can already see this by WotC hosting more and more online events through Arena and MTGO. We also see this by Wizards and Hasbro collectively pushing more and more promotional and specialty products such as the Secret Lair products and Collector Boosters with alternate artworks and specialty foil printings of cards. They're also not doing much in the way of reprints of cards that actually need them such as fetch lands.
3) Paper Magic will ultimately be a status symbol for whales and nothing more. With the way promotional and specialty printings are being pushed on the consumer the only people that will be buying the product are the whales and collector/investors.
4) FNM will likely continue to be an at-home thing like it currently is further damaging the LGS and their money making capabilities. Finding a paper event as a whole will be like finding a legacy event 6 months ago. Hasbro and WotC collectively have been doing things to increase their profits and damage those of the brick and mortar LGS. They've gone away from the MSRP on products, they're printing more specialty products, and giving us as the player base fewer actual reprints of cards that desperately need them, and prize support quality has gone down drastically. The MSRP thing was quite noticeable with the second run of the challenger decks, the Izzet one to be exact. You could go to a big box store like Target, Walmart, or Gamestop and find it for about $41.99 +tax. My LGS however, was selling them for $54.99 +tax because of the up-charge through the distributor. This up-charge was due to secondary market prices at the time on some of the cards. It contained the most financial value out of the box at the time of release and distributors knew this so they charged stores more for their shipments. Big box stores don't really care about their profit margins on things like MtG, Pokemon, Yu-gi-oh, etc. because they have enough other product that they're making money on that it offsets everything. The LGS on the other hand, doesn't have those kind of profit lines and room to play with on their margins.
The specialty products like the Secret Lair line are damaging to the LGS because they're getting released in limited quantity to the stores, but only if that store meets certain requirements set by Wizards. They're also damaging because now when the store runs out, if they got any to begin with, the rest are being bought direct. Then they had the Mythic Edition products for the recent cycle of Ravnica sets that could only be bought direct from the Hasbro store for an obscene price. The LGS was never even allowed to stock them for sale. Now they have Collectors packs. $30 for a pack of 15 cards, some of which have an alternate printing, whether it's artwork, extended borders, etc. Stores can't seem to get rid of them. They spend this money on a few boxes of Collector's packs and they just sit there. There's two reasons for this in my experience. The first is why buy a $30 pack of cards when you can buy a $4 pack of cards and get the same ones? Yes the $30 pack has special alternate printings and such but overall you're getting the same thing. I understand that there's people out there that like to bling out their decks with whatever foil or alternate art printings they can get their hands on but it's definitely not for everyone. I mistakenly bought a playset of foil Breeding Pools for a deck and because I wasn't paying attention I ended up spending about three times what I planned on for them.
FNM is, in all reality a money pit for the LGS. You spend $5-$10 to play and most people end up with a pack of cards or enough prize support in store credit to play again the next week essentially letting them play for free. I personally went on a streak of FNM events that I used store credit to pay for for about six weeks. I spent $6 to enter the first week and played for free for a month and a half after that. I continued to gain prize support as I went along as well. While yes it was my goal to get on a streak to be able to just pay that one time and keep playing off of my store credit earned, I also understood that they were losing money in my doing that so I made it a point to try to buy something each time I played. Whether it was some new sleeves or some dice, I wanted to show them that I still support them as a business so they could keep the lights on and give people in the community a place to go to play Magic, or Pokemon, or even board games.
The lack of reprints hurts the LGS as well. There's a lot of people that go to an LGS and buy singles. There's less people that go to an LGS and buy singles valued at $20 or more. I talked about this in my article on reprints and the reserved list some but I'm going to approach the reprint thing from a financial angle from an LGS perspective. Your LGS buys say, five cases of the newest set to come out. They'll likely be opening one case worth to sell as singles, use one case for prize support, and the rest to sell either as individual packs or as a whole box. We're going to focus on the case that was opened for singles use. All of the money cards will be listed at around market price as listed on either TCGPlayer or CardKingdom normally. If there's a large change, they'll hopefully notice that and change their prices accordingly. Those will be sold primarily to people that play standard. Some of them will creep into the eternal formats but not usually. The standard playable cards will be their big money maker in the singles department. Then the EDH playables. Then the modern and legacy ones. The expected value(EV) on a box is generally around $100 on release. There's been some outliers for a standard product but this is about average. Your LGS likely gets their sealed product at about $85 a box then marks up the product to about $100 because they have to make some money. If they buy a box for $85 and the EV is $100+ they're making money. Even if they don't sell the bulk stuff they're generally breaking even on sales with singles. This is for standard legal product. When we move into the eternal formats like pioneer, modern, EDH, etc. they rely on either reprints to come up to stock their cases or they rely on us to not play those particular cards and trade them in for store credit. These cards don't really do anything for them financially because they don't generally move as quickly. Other players either already have the amount of that card that they need for their deck(s) or they also don't have a use for that card generally. Then there's finally the players that are newer to the game or a specific format and want to expand their knowledge and abilities. New players or new to the format players aren't likely to go out and buy an expensive meta deck right away for a variety of reasons. The most common ones I see are, they either don't have the money to be able to invest in the deck they actually want or they are unsure so they build a budget deck they found online from a source like MTGGoldfish. The problem with this from an LGS perspective is they have say 10 copies of each fetch land. They bought them off of a person that's downsizing their collection, getting out of the game, etc. If the average cost of a fetch land is $50 and they paid out in cash because the seller had no use for the store credit they're giving him probably 40% of the value or roughly $20. That comes out to around $2000 in total spent for all of these cards that will likely sit for months before being sold just because of the price. The store will ideally be able to sell them for the $50 each and get $5000 for all of them making about a $3000 profit. The longer they sit in the case though, the less money they're making. They could be putting out standard singles that will move quickly making them money the whole time but instead they've dedicated slots to a potential profit. Also, though not likely, they could buy those cards for that same $2000 and be stuck with them because the game just fell off and doesn't have the player base that it used to or even just the format those cards are legal in. It happened to a bunch of cards when they decided to do away with extended as a format. Plenty of cards lost their value and stores were stuck in the red on singles they had bought. The less they reprint cards, the less accessible various formats are to people and the less money the LGS brings in from singles sales outside of those that are standard legal. I understand that stores don't generally make much from singles sales but a good selection of singles for various formats will definitely help bring people into the store. In other words, less singles=less customer base. I'll use a personal story as an example. It was about 2014 or so, Magic Origins was coming out in about a month. I found an LGS near where I lived. They had a reasonable singles selection for MtG. I'd stop in there once every couple of weeks to look for cards that I had found while doing research on what cards were good, popular, etc. As time went on they focused less and less on MtG, one of the biggest card games, if not the biggest card game in the world and focused more on Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh singles. A combination of that along with their limited selection of past issue comics and their focus on memorabilia type products cut their customer base and they ended up closing their doors in early 2018. The other two stores I had found after that had a great selection of Magic singles and that's what they focused on was MtG. They sold other products as well but that was their primary focus and because they used that as their focus they did quite well actually. One of the two stores had such a large player/customer base that on Friday's they had two different groups. One would play modern and the other would draft. The draft group was large enough to usually run 3-4 pods of 8. The modern crowd was generally about that same amount or more. They also held other events throughout the week that were Magic related. They did free play on Saturday, legacy on Sunday, Standard was a day during the week, and they also had league play for whatever the current set was during the week. The other store I went to generally just played drafts for FNM with a group of about 2-3 pods of 8. He also did standard and league events during the week. Both stores have been serving the San Diego area for about 10 and 20 years respectively. The store that had to close its doors, open less than 5 years.
The moral of the story here is that doing away with something that worked as a whole despite its flaws is likely going to hurt the paper game and push it more towards online play. The more towards online play the game is pushed, the less people will play I feel for a variety of reasons. You would think it makes the game more accessible to people because not every town has an LGS people can go to but there's also towns where there's not reliable enough internet to support a few hours of play on a Friday night, or any night for that matter. I know at my dad's house he has satellite internet. It goes out a lot due to various weather conditions. There's no way I would trust his internet to be able to last for the duration of an MTGO tournament. The push towards online play will also take away from the LGS causing them to shut their doors because they simply won't get the support from Wizards to keep people coming into the store. I also feel less people will play because they won't have the "gathering" so to speak. Yes, MTGO has a chat feature to chat with your opponent but you're not hanging out with friends, talking about the new spoilers from the next cool set or trying to help each other brew up a new "anti-meta" deck. Yes, financially it's more feasible to play online but then you're missing the biggest part of the game. All I have to say is let's hope for the best and in the mean time happy brewing.
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