Magic: The Gathering

You can be a profession retail clerk,doesn’t mean it will pay all of your bills.

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When you’re one of the top 50 people that keep a nine figure industry churning you probably should make enough to pay the bills.

Do you really think that if any of these 50 people were to disappear off the face of the earth it would affect M:tG’s business in any way?

I know I’m being kind of brutally capitalistic here, but how much do these tournaments actually contribute to Hasbro’s bottom line? If they were to suddenly stop, would it really hurt M:tG all that much?

It should. Every full time job should provide a living wage.

I agree with so much in this thread but I’m over here battening down the hatches ready to have the “evolving language” argument that maybe “pro” in some modern cases just means you’re really good at something, not that you’ve dedicated your life to it as your chosen profession and career.

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MTG pro circuit should unionize

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For what it’s worth, many mainstays of the Magic Pro Tour have joked in the past that the “Pro” in “Pro Tour” doesn’t stand as much for “professional” as for “promotional”. The issues with the decentralization of the industry surrounding MtG but the profits being centralized into WotC/Hasbro is rather old at this point, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be changed.

As for DMLous suggestion, I believe that yeah, if all those people were to move on from Magic that would certainly a black eye for the game, and it would impact their ability to promote the game to an extend. Doubly so if they moved on to a competitor’s game. It wouldn’t mean that their departure would sink the game entirely, but it would still be an impact. WotC also knows this which is why they have repeatedly tried to bring people like for example Brian Kibler who moved on to Hearthstone back to MtG.

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This is the same fucking thing. Except WotC steals all their labor.

The top minds in the game are responsible for a ton of innovation and development of popular decks. Those ideas and tweaks flow downward through the Grand Prix, Pro Tour Qualifier, and local tournaments and do a ton of things for the game even if you aren’t a part of any tournaments. Casual players just cracking packs might find that a card that they would otherwise have no interest in is worth $20 or more because of the tournament scene. Those valuable cards cause way, way more boosters to be opened than if there was no strong tournament scene pushing those cards to prominence and keep the singles market churning which keeps local stores in business.

So I should get paid by game publishers every time I find a cool strategy, share it online, and make others excited to play?

There’s also a major contradiction in this thread. On one hand, everyone knows the pro tour is a joke and nobody cares about it, so it is generating little to no benefit to WotC. On the other hand, people are saying they really care about the big names, and the pros are a big benefit to WotC.

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I love competitive Overwatch, but fuck if I know the name of even one player. I watch it for the game itself.

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This is something I happen to completely agree with, assuming it’s a viable full-time job. There are a lot of jobs that many people may want to do full-time, but that doesn’t mean they are viable. My only argument is whether you need to do it full-time to be a “professional,” but as I said, I’m not going to die on that hill.

Okay, fair enough, but again, would the lack of a “pro” tournament scene actually matter in this case or not? I’m no M:tG expert, but I’m sure there were tournaments going way, way back before the whole “pro” scene showed up. Wouldn’t these tournaments also have some of the same effect?

[quote=“Matt, post:50, topic:314, full:true”]
So I should get paid by game publishers every time I find a cool strategy, share it online, and make others excited to play?[/quote]
Don’t share it online. Do it the old fashioned way: write and publish a book about it. Heck, sell it as an self-published Amazon ebook or something if you don’t want to deal with editors and such. I mean, going back to my poker example, you walk into any book store and there are tons of poker strategy books floating around.

I’m definitely more in the first camp than the second camp. I honestly feel that if these pro tournaments were to suddenly cease, the effect on Hasbro/WotC’s bottom line will be negligible.

Most competitive games all reward players who put in lots of preparation and practice whether it’s M:tG, Overwatch, tennis, or Go. The cap on the ROI of investing time into being good at these games is very very high. Someone who plays full time will have a huge advantage over people who play part time. Therefore, if prize pools are the way to make money, no matter how big they are, full time players will take the vast majority of the money.

I think that goes for nearly any sort of skill-based activity, whether a competitive game, writing code, arguing the law in court, carpentry, etc. The more time you spend working on it, the better you’d probably be at it, subject to whatever limits you have on your own inherent abilities in said tasks (i.e., no matter how much time I may spend practicing basketball, I’ll never be as good as LeBron James). It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worthwhile to spend the amount of time trying to master those activities. From the sounds of it, the ROI on playing M:tG full time is pretty crappy given how little money you can make at doing it.

Now we can argue as to whether it’s fair that a top-notch basketball player can make millions of dollars a year, whereas a top-notch M:tG player can’t earn a living wage at it despite hypothetically spending identical time at mastering their respective crafts. However, for whatever reasons, society has decided that it’s more willing to pay tons of money to watch skilled basketball players than it is to watch skilled M:tG players and, as a side effect, more money is available in the “money pool” to pay those millions out to basketball players.

I mean, there are lots of things that I find fun to do that I think I could be very good at if I dedicated the amount of time at it to truly master it. For example, I happen to be really good at remembering and recalling random facts. I’m a pretty darned good Trivial Pursuit player, if I do say so myself, as a result, and I probably could also do fairly well at Jeopardy. I’m not sure I could be Ken Jennings good, but I think I could certainly be quite good at it. While I think it would be fun to dedicate myself to winning trivia contests/game shows/etc. full time as a living, I don’t think it’s a viable way to make said living, hence why I don’t do it.

Hasbro obviously feels like it’s millions well spent and would cut it in a heartbeat if they felt like it didn’t matter. They’ve owned WOTC since 1999 and recently have increased the number of Grand Prixs (the lower circuit) from 20 in 2011 to 60 in 2018 while also increasing the guaranteed payouts from $30,000 to $50,000. The pro tour has been pretty flat with some ups and downs over the years but they’ve consistently put up at least a million dollars in prize money and held four large tournaments per year. That’s a huge part of the issue. The game has exploded in popularity both casually and competitively and the pro level payouts have stagnated.

It doesn’t matter if basketball players make millions. That is completely irrelevant.

If you are going to pay people to do a thing. If that thing requires full time labor. If you are going to promote the idea that this is something that can be done as a job exclusive of all other jobs. Then people who do that thing successfully must receive a minimum living wage.

Obviously nobody has spread the idea that being good at horshoes is a viable career. But if someone did start a horsehoes pro tour, and succeeding at the pro tour required full time practice, then a significant percentage of the top players better get a living wage.

In that case, maybe more of the pro players who are complaining about it should put their proverbial money where their mouth is and quit. If it actually starts hurting Hasbro’s bottom line, then maybe then they will start doing better by them. If it doesn’t hurt the bottom line, well, no harm no foul.

[quote=“Apreche, post:56, topic:314”]
If you are going to pay people to do a thing. If that thing requires full time labor. If you are going to promote the idea that this is something that can be done as a job exclusive of all other jobs. Then people who do that thing successfully must receive a minimum living wage.[/quote]
Fair enough. I just don’t quite feel like Hasbro is promoting it as an exclusively full-time job alternative. I feel like it’s something that the players themselves are promoting. But again, we may just be arguing semantics here.

Again, I think it depends on just how said pro tour is organized and promoted.

Also, I’d argue that the reason why full time practice on the M:tG or horseshoes or whatever else pro tour is required to succeed is because of the people who chose to work on it full time. If everyone who did the pro tour thing only did it part-time, then you could succeed by playing part-time as well.

And since you brought it up, well, there is a horseshoe pitching pro tour:

http://thehorseshoetour.com/

Honestly, anyone who professionalizes and monetizes their hobby is taking a big risk. I don’t expect any industry to cater to them.

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Obviously it’s a big risk. But the point is that the company is actively promoting it as a viable career path. The same happens with most eSports. Game companies and streamers are actively promoting the idea to kids that they could play Hearthstone, Overwatch, Fortnite, LoL, etc. as their only job. Some of then can actually back up that talk, though. M:tG, at present, can not.

But are they really? The word “professional” is already heavily diluted.

Is this not just a case of kids not knowing better and making poor life choices? Hobbies like this have always had a “pro” scene that consists primarily kids with disposable income from the upper middle class. Anyone who honestly thinks they have a chance of making a real living playing magic exclusively is delusional.

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