Without support from Wizards, one of the game’s active playing legends is going to run into difficulty. While he could play online, in order to play in the real-life circuit he’s going to have to play in real-life events. “For me to go to a tournament, I feel like I have to dedicate a lot.”ĭa Rosa, one of the top players of all time, is going to face difficulties making it to events from Brazil. Everything is very expensive - it takes me 20, 24 hours for a flight to travel,” da Rosa says. A lack of investment in pro-level players - no more free rides to all of the events, replete with plane tickets and hotel rooms - and a flattening of the competitive atmosphere is supposed to make the event more friendly to players of all skill levels. Photo: Clarence Williams/Los Angeles Times via Getty Imagesįurther changes have made the landscape prohibitive for pros. “People want to play Magic more than they want to watch it,” Davis says. It’s good to have an event like the Pro Tour for people to follow along, he says, but in order to cultivate an audience, there has to be something that grabs their attention. By reducing the level of competition, he says, Wizards has somewhat “killed a lot of what made the old Pro Tour so exciting, which was that it was an aspirational system.”ĭavis also feels that the company’s decisions on how to market the competition have been perplexing. Jim Davis, a former pro player turned content creator whose YouTube channel focuses on Magic, says that in his view the tournament’s mutation has taken away elements of the circuit that made it worth playing, and paying attention to, for years. “We saw the end of the Magic Pro League and the beginning of a sort of broader play structure that is as inclusive as possible, that gives people all around the world as many opportunities as possible to come in and play Magic at whatever level they want,” Rasmussen says.īut for some players, from amateurs like Squailia to pros like Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, the changes over the past four years haven’t been quite as positive. That meant a more open field where high-level play and mid-tier play could coexist, even though it meant reshuffling how the company treats its top players, who had been part of a circuit called the Pro League. He says that in Wizards’ view, the Pro Tour as previously structured had outlived its usefulness and it was time to pivot to meet the players where they were. Players and others in the Magic community are divided on what this all means.Īs Magic communications director Blake Rasmussen tells it, the Pro Tour never really shut down. Players can also get in the door through Magic Online and the Arena app pros from the hall of fame are allowed one free entry per year. There are regional championships set up around the world with invitations varying per event. The new system aims to integrate the former pro structure with the game’s growing amateur play groups (which make up the vast majority of Magic players). Now that the world is reopening, Magic parent company Wizards of the Coast is reestablishing the Pro Tour, yet it’s coming with some changes. Then the COVID-19 pandemic forced other changes as players found their ability to play paper Magic - offline and in person - curtailed by the health crisis. “The reason this mattered to me wasn’t that I ever thought I could be a professional - I just wanted to compete against the best, and to learn from getting trounced.”īut Wizards of the Coast abruptly stopped the event in 2018, moving instead to Mythic Tournaments, a hybridization of the physical and online play that added layers of bureaucracy to the game. “It did seem vaguely reasonable for a decent player who put the time in to make it to the Pro Tour once or twice,” Squailia says. That meant Magic’s Pro Tour, the premiere public event for high-level Magic play. And, as a competitive person, she soon wanted to see if she could handle the big leagues. When Gabby Squailia started playing Magic: The Gathering in 2017 after taking two decades off, she was hooked.
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