Planet Money on NPR did a piece recently on how WotC avoided some of these issues and made the card game such a success twenty plus years ago.

There's also some interesting anecdotes regarding the Hasbro buy out.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/11/392381112/episo...

That was not well researched though, if at all - it's by complete outsiders with little actual knowledge of what happened. Even the person they talk to (Skaff Elias IIRC) gives them a dubious offhand anecdote. It's a Malcolm Gladwell level story.

The stories about the Hasbro buyout I was thinking of were actually from Peter Adkison's blog, read that just after hearing the NPR piece and got them mixed up:

http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-3-wizards-of-the-coas...

I've played online now and then for about 10 years. For me, the biggest difference was the addition of phantom events. Unlike normal online tournements, where you have to buy some packs to paticipate, with phantom events you just pay a price. In return you don't get to keep the cards you play with.

For people just looking to play, not to compete or build a collection, phantom events make way more sense. I have to imagine their popularity has also depressed the secondary value of packs.

Yeah, if they just had a flat monthly fee for infinite phantom drafts, I would love that. Although having played on beta servers, infinite would probably be the wrong number as everyone just drops at the first sign of trouble.

Maybe infinite drafts + some ELO that people care about. Or Hearthstone style where you don't have to face the opponents you just drafted against.

Not facing who you just drafted against would be absolutely horrible. Magic sets are designed with draft in mind, and the draft tournament structure takes advantage of the rotating aspect of the draft portion. When you see your 14 potential picks, you know that a number of them are coming back to you and you get to pick another one later. You also know that every card you don't pick is potentially going to be in one of your opponent's decks.

Being aware of what's opened in a draft as well as what's being passed has an impact on how you pick (for example: tons of red cards keep going by - table isn't into red, so you can A) wheel red cards easier, and B) bank on not running into a hyper aggressive deck and build accordingly). If you were thrown into a match against someone who didn't draft at your table, they might have a deck that wasn't supported by the collective pool opened at your table and you'll be caught completely off guard.

If there's a monthly fee, they can just penalize players who disconnect. The usual barrier to that is free games where if you penalize/ban somebody they'll just come back with a new account.

The main reason the MTGO economy is broken is simple: MTGO is incredibly shoddily designed and coded. It crashes all the time and has so many memory leaks they still plague users ten years after it was built.

All of the issues lead to a LOT of refunds, essentially doubling the product (tickets and cards) in circulation.

Recently, the game moved over to "4.0" which was even worse than 3.0 which has, in part, exacerbated the problem.

This actually has a knock on effect on the paper magic markets where card redemption (can turn digital cards into paper cards) has a big impact on prices. There are countless articles on MTGPrice.com about this.

I've actually taken the opportunity while the economy is "broken" to get into the online game versus the paper game. I've quite enjoyed being able to draft for about half the price it is on paper in order to get practice, as well as build a smallish online collection. Seemed like the perfect time to jump into the economy.

For those interested in analysis with some actual data of the MTGO world, this site has a few folks who follow it rabidly: http://puremtgo.com/articles/state-program-june-12th-2015

The article is using 'fancy' graphs, economic 101 and a long analysis to hide the fact that he is basing most of his theory on gut feeling. There are several points at which he states this himself, but fails to mention that these become crucial to the whole analysis.

Why do players think it's acceptable to have an "economy" for trading virtual gamepieces? Why don't they walk away and play game/culture that charges a flat fee or a time/usage-based subscription?

In short, because Magic is one of the best games ever designed, and this is the only sanctioned way to play the full game online. Magic online was created a long, long time ago before more modern concepts of game monetization (freemium / mtx based) were developed. It's ended up as something more akin to an online poker room than a gaming server.

I get why people think it's silly and so forth, but I can't agree more with "one of the best games ever designed." Richard Garfield gave the world something really tremendous with MtG

I've tried other games that are similar to Magic, such as Hearthstone, but I always go back to Magic because there is nothing like it.

Hearthstone is very well designed for what it is--an online-only Magic the Gathering that is accessible in a casual way.

I simply won't spend on Magic Online since I can't exit. In addition, why should I spend hundreds of dollars on something whose value can plunge drastically?

If you have actual physical cards, you can sell them. Powerful modern cards hold their value reasonably well.

You can exit from MTGO pretty easily? There are automated bots that will buy your cards for tickets, and those same companies will give you cash for those tickets (95 cents per ticket right now, not a terrible rate).

Pretty much all that is necessary for an "economy" to develop is some form of scarcity, the ability to trade reasonably freely, and the ability of the traders to set prices. If you've got that, you'll get a market of one sort or another, and it's not hard to even accidentally end up meeting one of the conditions when you didn't mean to. Charging flat fees or usage-based subscription fees is not enough to guarantee that an economy will still not emerge... MMORPGs have those things and economies, too.

(There's not much guarantee about what sort of economy you'll get... it's easy to get one that pathological in some sense, either psychological or mathematical. But you'll get something.)

Basically, because Wizards of the Coast came up with the core concepts of the pay-to-win money treadmill game 15 years before the App Store launched--low cost to start playing, psychological impetus to spend more money on a regular basis, appealing to kids and teens with lots of free time and a willingness to badger their parents for money, social enough that players will stay in the game for years because all their friends play. It's kind of breathtaking when you look at the parallels now.

They had that entire previously-untapped goldmine of a market space to themselves (or near enough, given the quality of their early competition) for long enough to get really culturally entrenched, and that meant they were able to shift the model online (and keep a much greater chunk of the profits) without as much resistance as you might expect--if you already believe that 5 cents' worth of ink and cardboard can be worth dozens or hundreds of dollars if it's got the right picture on it, it's a lot easier to believe that the same picture on your computer screen can be worth the same.

>pay-to-win money treadmill game

Money isn't really an object at any kind of serious tournament - everyone has/ can borrow all the cards they need to play.

Sure, but you're not going to tournaments unless you're already a serious player, and if you're a serious player you're going to be buying new cards on the regular. The tournaments and such are really just icing, from WotC's perspective.

MTG, like many other collectible card games, is as much about the "economy" and the collecting aspect, as it is about actually 'playing' the game. This has unsurprisingly carried onto the official online version as well.

Those who don't want to pay, have always been able to play for free with GccG and others.

"Again, I have no data to back this up, just a sense of this trend."

That statement just doesn't fit well with what is being said - what the author meant was something more like "my hypothesis is that constructed popularity goes down over time but since Wizards doesn't release data on this we cannot know for sure". This really should have been caught by the editor (cough Andy... cough) and clarified.

Yes, this is how a hypothesis is formed.

The whole concept of collectable cards feels like a scam, right alongside the freemium pay-for-virtual-clothing hustle.

You seem to be overlooking a huge thing - collectibles have an (above-the-board) resale value. While perhaps the market crashes someday, for 25 years Magic cards have done nothing but go up in value. I'm personally up tens of thousands of dollars lifetime from paper Magic, and some thousands from dabbling in digital. And all of it was purchased for play, not investment.

Non-collectible virtual goods have dubious resale value. You can technically sell game accounts I suppose, but it's inevitably against Terms of Service and commensurately difficult.

Did you see this link: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/37tqqa/how_sellin... ?

That was an entirely bizarre incident with entirely unique circumstances. Nothing similar has ever happened before, or may ever happen again once the troll is shot down in court.

Among other things it involves someone who's made 2,200 sales on a marketplace and was dabbling in straight up speculation.

Artificial scarcity is the scam. You have pieces of mass produced paper with ink.

When all my friends got into MtG back in high school I said, "I'll play but I'm going to make my own cards. I don't want to buy them from the store." But no one would go for it. I never understood. I used to say, "But there are no actual wizards at Wizards of the Coast."

Yeah, that was a thing for us too circa 1996. It ended with there being two groups of players: "Poor" players that printed cards and had access to the entire card catalog and could build insane cheese, and "rich" players who didn't and didn't.

Then there were the my-dad-owns-a-textile-mill types who would learn a cheese from the print-it-yourselfers, spend millions of lire on cards, and replicate the cheese with the people who played with the official cards.

It seems making it "pay a lot to win" isn't that much better than straight pay-to-win. I never understood how these players could tolerate broken mechanics in such an expensive game.

I know someone who prints out color images of the cards he wants to play with and sticks them into sleeves as inserts. It works fine.

It's even easier and cheaper to insert a little strip of paper with a card name on it, though then you need to be familiar with what all the cards do.

My six year old came up with this idea for pokemon cards on his own this week. They are loving it - and so am I!

cough cockatrice

Hearthstone.

I feel like there's a great MtGox joke to be made here, but it's not coming to me.