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Does Magic Online Represent the Future of the Game?
Jeff Zandi

Open testing of the new Magic Online software was completed a few days ago, and Wizards of the Coast plans to go live with the product very soon. When they do, you and I will have an online platform for playing Magic twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week from anywhere in the world; for a price. Wizards of the Coast is planning on charging prices for online product similar to the retail prices offered in game stores for physical product. Many people in the playing community, including a large number of the players taking part in the recent testing of the software, say that they will not pay such prices to play Online Magic. These players also believe that there will not be many people who will be willing to pay for the privilege of online play. WOTC believes differently. There are many questions about how successful Magic Online might be, and how the online game will affect the original game. Does Magic Online represent the future of the game in general?

Magic Online has an interesting business model that is different from the way most online services work. Most of the time, whether we talk about online gaming experiences or other online services, the name of the game is subscription rates. Most people pay a flat rate for their internet service, for example. You pay X dollars for the ability to access the internet as much or as little as you like in a given month. The good news for the internet service provider is that they get your money whether you use the service that month or not. Online gaming services, like Everquest work similarly. Wizards of the Coast has a different idea. When you connect to Magic Online, you pay for the cards, not for the ability to play with them. In a nutshell, you pay only when you are actually using the service.

There are many benefits to playing Magic Online compared to the traditional "3D" environment, but there are disadvantages as well. My first impression was a negative one. Back in November, a tournament organizer friend of mine was the first to tell me about the existence of a piece of software that was going to let you play Magic online. Moreover, he informed me that he was on the testing team and could let me see what the game looked like, even though the software would not be made public for the better part of a year. I was very skeptical, because I had not enjoyed or had much respect for the earlier Microprose game. Moreover, I felt that the game of Magic was played with cards, in 3D, with an shady-looking opponent sitting right across from you. I couldn't imagine why you would waste time playing Magic on the computer, even online, when you could be working on decks and working on your draft skills in "the real world". When I first saw the software running, I still thought I was looking at an engine a lot like the previous Microprose game, with a graphic representation of a game turn split up into these different squares showing each game step. The presentation was slick enough, the graphics were very nice and the sound, though not very important to me, was interesting. The bottom line was, I didn't think that I would be very interested in playing Magic this new way. I learned in a very short time how wrong I was. The biggest problem with Magic is not the cost of the game, even though the financial cost of the game can certainly add up, but the difficulty in having someone to play with when you are ready to play. Magic Online fixes the biggest problem in Magic by offering a venue in cyberspace that is always open, full of players that are ready to play.

After getting my own test account, I immediately saw how Magic Online could be very advantageous for limited play. In Dallas, there is currently no big game store that you can depend on for a booster draft. Online, you can get dependably get into a draft in mere seconds. Soon, I found out booster drafting was better online than it was in real life. Online, the software makes sure everyone is drafting according to the rules, no mistakes, no shady activity. Online, people don't forget to open their pack, or open the wrong pack of cards at the wrong time. When you draft online, all you have to concentrate on is your draft, which is the way it should be all the time. When you've drafted your deck, the software smoothly moves you into deck building mode. Once again, the efficacy of the online game is flawless, meaning you don't have to worry that players are adding cards from their backpack or binder into their deck. It simply can't happen. After deck construction, the software matches you up with your opponent and starts the match. When you win a match, the software tells you how much time is left before your next match. When you win or finish second in an eight man draft, the software presents you with your winnings in the form of online booster packs. In Magic Online, you can use the booster packs that you win in previous online tournaments to play in future booster drafts. In the real world, you will not often be allowed to use your own booster packs in a draft.

There are playability issues in the online design, most or all of which may be unavoidable. Every time a player does anything in the game of Magic, or whenever play moves from one step of the game turn to the next, there is the opportunity for that player and his opponent to respond with an action of their own. When you play Magic Online, this interaction is facilitated with a lengthy series of "ok" buttons that you must press whenever you are ready to hand over priority. Everyone has had the experience of playing against the obnoxious rules lawyer that tells you out loud every step of the game, like "I am doing nothing during my upkeep step, would you like to initiate a new spell stack before I move to my draw sub-step?" Playing Magic Online is a little like playing against this kind of opponent in EVERY game. I'm sure, however, that this is the kind of necessary evil you can't escape with a game as potentially intricate as Magic. A more serious playability issue involves the way Magic Online prompts players when they have the opportunity to do something, even when that player has actually forgotten that he has such an opportunity. This sounds like splitting hairs, but it really isn't. When two players of equal skill play each other in a game of Magic, the game can very easily come down to one player making a very small mistake that causes them to lose. When you play online, the software often makes it less likely for you to make such mistakes. For example, if you have Think Tank in play, you might forget to activate it during your upkeep step and look at the top card of your library. You SHOULD have to remember this yourself. In fact, the DCI crafted the rules of the 3D game such that you have to remember things like this without the use of reminders that are outside of the regular layout of the game. When you played Necropotence, it was illegal for you to put the enchantment on top of your library to remind you not to draw a card. (Yep, lots of people got away with doing things like this, but I can assure you, as a DCI judge, it's not legal) Magic Online, on the other hand, often prompts you to do things that are optional, as in the case of the Think Tank. These prompts give bad players a LOT more help than they would ever be allowed to get in a 3D tournament game, and good players are protected from play errors that really should be allowed to make the difference in game outcomes.

Rules enforcement online, especially where card interactions are concerned, is an area in which Magic Online shines… most of the time. When you play online using the competing software, Apprentice, you and your opponent have to agree on what happens. The Apprentice software does not know any card rules, and you and your opponent are free to screw up your games as far as your rules knowledge or mising instincts can take you. Magic Online MAKES you play the cards exactly as they are intended. This is a giant plus, of course, but relying on the software to do everything correctly did erode the basic fair play of a number of testers when some cards did not work correctly online. For a good long time, Seton's Desire did not work correctly online, and did not require the opponent to block with all legal blockers when the player attacking with a creature enchanted with Seton's Desire had Threshold. When this happened, you might expect the defending player to say "whoops, the software is clearly not requiring me to block with all my creatures, but clearly Seton's Desire says I have to, so I will gladly block properly with all my creatures." Well, this didn't happen that often. Mostly, the defending player would block any way they wished and then when they were made aware of their "blocking error" they would say something like "Wow, I had no idea. They should fix that card in the software right away!" This card remained broken (literally, not in the Magic-lingo sense) for months, so I don't really think many players blocking illegally were actually confused about what they were doing. The point is that reliance on the software can cause players to become less knowledgeable about the proper way to play their cards.

Now that I was completely captivated by the greatness of drafting on Magic Online, I was still sure that constructed play would be too tedious to be very interesting. In order to build good decks, you would need to acquire a very large number of rare cards online, a proposition as time-consuming online as it is in real life. (oops, I meant in 3D. Both versions of the game are "real life") Here, I was swayed by the resourcefulness of the minds behind Apprentice. In Apprentice, you enter a deck list and bang, you're playing that deck. In Magic Online, you literally have to find every card you want to play with. Magic Online provides a relatively efficient interface for trading cards with other players online, but that didn't excite me either. The difficulty of building decks, I was sure, would sink Magic Online as a legitimate way to play constructed. Again, I was completely wrong. Yes, collecting the needed cards was painful, but no more so than the process of chasing down the cardboard versions. The advantages of constructed play online became incredibly evident once I had the cards I needed. Once you get used to the process of pruning your collection of online cards in the deck editor, you can pull cards together for a deck fairly quickly. More quickly, I learned, and with a lot less actual effort, than building the deck in 3D. More importantly, you can save your deck design to some name you create, and then easily put your hands on a deck that you have built more easily in the future. Still more importantly, you can build a zillion decks with the same cards, over and over again. In other words, once you collect four Fact or Fiction cards online, you can create any number of decks that have all four copies in them. Online, you can have all these decks essentially built at the same time so that you spend more time playing instead of constantly taking apart decks to get the cards you want to play with in other decks. On the down side, the online game doesn't let you "lend" a deck to your friend. At best, you can trade the cards, then have your friend trade them back later, but the process to do this is generally too complicated to bother with for this purpose.

Of course, the biggest strikes that Magic Online has against it are the kinds of ideas that are part and parcel to any software game. In the 3D game, if one game store closes down, you can drive down the street to another place to play. Online, if the servers are down, you can't play Magic Online, and neither can anyone else on the planet. Unlike other online games, Magic Online's structure is centralized to the point that you will most likely not choose from a number of servers to play on. Everyone in the world plays on one system. This may be different in the future, if a couple hundred thousand players decide they want to play online at the same time. Also obviously missing is the personal contact that has made so many of the Magic tournaments you have attended so memorable. WOTC goes out of their way to make the locations for their premier events around the world interesting and unique. In tournament Magic, half the fun has often literally been getting there. Everyone has great stories about bonding with their teammates as they drove cross country (or across countries) to a Magic tournament. At the tournament event itself, Magic players enjoy the camaraderie of seeing their friends as well as meeting new friends. Some say there is no reason why Magic Online would take players away from tournaments in the 3D world. The fact is Magic players are limited to the same twenty-four hours a day as everyone else in the world. Just because Magic Online now offers huge new opportunities for play does not automatically change the amount of time players have available to devote to the game. Especially when you have to pay similar amounts of money to play Magic online or in 3D, players are going to make choices. This is definitely a situation where Wizards of the Coast cannot really expect to have their cake and eat it too. If you have X dollars to spend on Magic in a certain month, you can spend it online, or you can spend it at tournaments, but you can't do both. Organized play in the 3D world will have to suffer, at least at first, if the online game is to be successful. In either case, Wizards of the Coast will have the player's Magic money. The difference is whether or not game store owners and tournament organizers will be able to make a profit and stay available to gamers.

In an attempt to move towards some sort of bottom line, I would like to say that while playing with this product during the six months of Beta testing, I grew to love Magic Online. Literally, this new way to play opened up opportunities to work on my skills that I thought were only available to kids in school and financially independent professional Magic players (handouts from parents). Being able to play Magic whenever you want to is a very powerful thing. It takes a lot of play to make a player good enough to compete at the highest levels in this game. In the past, if you were stuck living somewhere far from the tournament scene, you were just out of luck. Magic Online is a fantastic way to democratize the world of Magic. Ask pro tour regular Neil "just the money" Reeves. He admits that his first pro tour top eight earlier this year at San Diego was largely due to the practice that he was able to get from playing Magic Online as a Beta tester. If the online game was not a possibility, would he have found other ways to prepare for the pro tour? Probably, but it would not have involved regular tournament play, since this world-rated player lives in a small town in Texas hours away from any significant gaming opportunities.

Is Magic Online the future of our game? Wizards of the Coast thinks so. Why else would this year's DCI Invitational, the most unique and exclusive Magic event, be held in Seattle and played using Magic Online? Almost apologetically, Mark Rosewater proclaimed in his announcement two weeks ago on the Sideboard that the 2002 Invitational was being held for the first time on the North American continent, as though people might have already been rolling their eyes at the lukewarm idea of playing this prestigious event at (yawn) Company Headquarters. In the same article, Rosewater pointed out that with this year's event, North America will become the sixth continent to host the Invitational. Based on the understandably low potential turnout for future premier events on Antarctica, (other than scientists there playing Magic Online) there seem to be no new continents for Magic to conquer. Cyberspace is the undiscovered country, the eighth continent that will be as much of a host to the Invitational as the North American soil on which the Invitational players will walk to buy their Starbucks coffee. Of course, Seattle is a great city, and who wouldn't want to visit Wizards of the Coast, and who wouldn't want to play in the DCI Invitational? Without implying that WOTC is moving toward a world of EXCLUSIVELY online Magic play, it is interesting that the Invitational is being used as an advertising tool for Magic Online.

In the end, I have to say that I do like Magic Online very much. It nearly knocked the breath out of me this last Sunday, when I was interrupted in the last round of an eight man OTJ booster draft by the message stating that the Beta testing was coming to an end, and that the servers would be brought down shortly. The messages in the common area window were wild and coming from every conceivable direction as players made their final comments to each other before the servers were shut down for the last time for the Beta testers. Some used their last comments to thank the software developers and test volunteers for their time and effort in creating such a remarkable product. Others blasted Wizards for the proposed pricing of the upcoming live release of the game, stating things like "you've seen me for the last time" or "oh, well, now I can give up Magic" or other similarly negative ideas. I, for one, was more than a little sad. I don't know, as of this moment, exactly when Magic Online will be available. No lie, being able to play for free all this time was a dream come true, even though it was like playing with borrowed cards. Among our team, only about half were ever able to experience the Beta test, and the ones who could not were completely sickened by the constant talk about online play at our weekly practice sessions. Eventually, we created the codename "Steve's Card Shop" to refer to Magic Online, just so that we didn't completely beat down our friends that could not play online. Fellow Texas Guildmage Rob Lawing hipped a lot of people previously to our use of the codename "Steve's Card Shop" on another popular Magic web site. (it would be unprofessional to tell you which web site, but it rhymes with "mojo") In fact, it was in deference to the fact that Rob could not get into the Beta test right away that some of us created the codename in the first place. The important thing is that everyone I know that was a part of the Beta testing group is in love with this software. Will Magic Online be as popular when it costs money to play? I suppose no one can say for sure, but I have to ask you a remarkably related question: during the time you have played Magic, have you continued to spend money on the game? In the end, Magic players will take advantage of whatever way they can best play the game.

Jeff Zandi
zanman@thoughtcastle.com
Level II DCI Judge
Member of the Texas Guildmages All original content herein is Copyright 2000-2009 Ascension Gaming Network, Inc.
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