Wizards of the Coast Reverses MTGO Decklists Data Changes after Major Backlash

Wizards of the Coast has announced the reversal of recent changes to its Magic: The Gathering Online decklist disclosure policy. The decision reinstates the previous model for publishing complete decklists used in competitive events, following negative feedback from players and content creators.

The changes had limited the public exposure of decklists for a longer period after tournaments, aiming to slow down the Metagame's resolution and preserve diversity in local store scenarios. This measure was criticized for compromising competitive transparency and hindering technical analysis, journalistic coverage, and content creation.

With the reversal, decklists will once again be published according to the platform's traditional standard. According to the official statement, the company will continue to monitor the impact of its competitive information policies and does not rule out future adjustments.

Check out below the full statement:

Hey Magic Online (and decklist) fans, Wizards of the Coast here. Or at least the team that works with Daybreak on data. We’re going to pull back on the decklist change we asked the Magic Online team to make earlier this week. Full stop. Keep reading if you want to see what was going on in our brains.

We have been trying to solve the problem of Magic Online data being overrepresented versus the population size in data aggregators. Along the way we got lost in the math of what a representative sample size of those decklists would look like, and we moved too fast. We do want to help aggregators get more representative slices of the metagame—including tabletop—but we’re going to go back to the drawing board on how to do that, maybe by finding better pathways for tabletop decklists to get posted on official channels, maybe by finding ways to highlight additional events, or maybe something we haven’t thought of yet. We haven’t quite cracked that yet. We’ve got some homework to do.

We’re sorry for the disruption, and we return you to your originally scheduled Magic Online decklists.

Source: MTGO.com