MTGO Data Update is an Attack on Competitive Magic

On February 16th, the Magic Online team announced a change to the decklist sharing structure for Challenges and other competitive events on the platform. Tournaments with fewer than 64 players will have Top 8 lists shared. Tournaments with up to 128 players will have Top 16 lists shared. Only tournaments with more than 128 players will have Top 32 lists shared. Until recently, the Top 32 was shared regardless of event size.

Ryan Spain, from the MTGO team, explained the decision on Discord. According to him, "the caretakers" (Wizards of the Coast) view Magic as a puzzle that renews itself whenever a new set releases. They try to keep this puzzle healthy and fun in various ways — and tournament data is one of those ways.

The goal of the change is to provide enough decklists for the public to identify a Metagame, but not so many lists that it enables data-driven solutions and pattern identification by Magic-dedicated websites. For them, the ideal resolution of the puzzle needs to come from playtesting — not from replacing discovery with statistics.

In short, they will publish fewer decklists to slow down the speed at which the Metagame is solved.

This isn't the first time. In 2017, with the release of Hour of Devastation, Magic reduced the number of daily lists posted from Magic Online from ten to five. The company also created a curation process requiring decks to have differences of more than five cards between them, supposedly to prevent the Metagame from being "solved too quickly." The change came after a series of Standard bannings caused by various successive design mistakes — an anomaly for that time.

The decision was met with criticism, but with less noise than expected on social media. Somehow, everyone agrees the change harms competitive Magic. But each person points to different reasons and creates their own theories about the motives, which dilutes the argument that this is a terrible decision. And it is.

If Magic were a state, players would be citizens and Wizards would be the government. And in this case, they're saying they don't want to disclose fundamental data of public interest because they believe it's "better" for citizens not to know. They're willing to do this by creating a data blackout and undermining the transparency and reliability of what they still choose to share.

Freedom of information is a no-brainer for any social group, from democracies to card game communities. Democratic access to data is fundamental — it's the right of players, news outlets, and content creators to seek and receive information of public interest with accuracy and transparency. It's also essential that they can investigate, filter, and hold these data accountable.

Wizards' message with this change points in the opposite direction. They believe the game becomes more interesting when information isn't fully disclosed. That "discovery" is part of the process for players. This is far from practical reality and only creates more problems than solutions.

Social media has no filter, and information circulates all day long. The collective mind on Discord and social platforms will do the work of compiling data that Wizards seems unwilling to share.

So who loses? The consuming public. Especially tabletop Magic players.

The reduction of official data makes speculation more volatile and susceptible to artificial manipulation. With less data about the Metagame from official sources, the amount of speculation and market spikes induced by random lists becomes more frequent. Individual card prices will tend to see larger increases for defining staples whenever a Top 8 appears with a rare or mythic in over 50% of the lists.

If Badgermole Cub and Quantum Riddler are already notoriously expensive for Standard cards with Top 32 data, imagine if they had emerged and performed as they did with only the Top 8 being published?

Until Pro Tour Lorwyn Eclipsed, a significant portion of the community considered Badgermole Cub too strong for Standard. Today, players still consistently complain about Izzet being overrepresented by different archetypes over the past year.

Without data to prove whether certain strategies are actually broken or whether a card is showing up with excessive frequency, the debate around bannings will become more cacophonous, dissonant, and less based on concrete, well-founded information with easy access and little anecdotal manipulation. It will become even harder to argue that a format is healthy despite public perception. Likewise, it will be challenging to prove with numbers that a format is broken and bannings are necessary.

Percentage theory can be used much more frequently six months from now, when a strategy hits 40% or more representation with Magic Online data, because only the Top 8 will be evaluated. Or worse: the argument that Wizards is "hiding data" could also become a gaslighting tool to claim there's nothing wrong with a clearly unhealthy competitive scene.

Similarly, the narrative becomes almost entirely controlled by those who decide what is revealed. Wizards themselves have the freedom to use vague and cryptic arguments to say the problem isn't the game or a format's health, but that players themselves "haven't yet found the ideal answers to the problem " — making bannings less frequent since they won't be perceived as necessary as often as they seemed in the past few seasons.

The filter for defining what is competitive, instead of expanding, becomes even more restricted. The discourse will now be much more anecdotal and laden with regional nuances from paper tournaments than at any other time since the birth of internet forums.

Grinders tend to opt for reliable choices. With less data, there are fewer reasons to try innovations. Consequently, fewer creative choices with competitive validation will emerge. This means that "competitive Magic content" takes a massive hit that reduces the overall quality.

Deck Guides lose their base on plurality and matchup probabilities. Sideboard or maindeck techs will have less visibility because, if a player builds an excellent list but doesn't reach Top 8, they depend exclusively on social media sharing — and on people trusting the result they claim to have achieved — to showcase a new strategy or game plan.

Metagame reads cease to exist, become unreliable, or are considerably hindered. Without sufficient data, it becomes impossible to analyze health, potential bannings, representation of certain strategies in the larger scope, tier lists, and any other coverage aimed at clarifying the competitive environment for the community.

Deck diversity across all formats also suffers. After all, most "good ideas" start somewhere between a 5-0 League run and a Top 16 in a competitive tournament. We would never have discovered that Izzet Looting was still strong without Vivi Ornitier if it weren't for players experimenting with Izzet Cauldron without the combo and putting up results in Challenge Top 16s. We would never discover Boros Dragons as a potential answer to the Cauldron meta without Top 16 results, either.

Also, without diverse lists to explore, the Metagame — especially for format who rely too much on Magic Online — will appear stagnant more frequently and, consequently, tedious.

Vintage and Pioneer sustain themselves, from a competitive standpoint, on the platform, as they are almost nonexistent in paper play today. Legacy, which has strong regional tournaments, relies on Magic Online for its largest format read and global data collection on competitive health. Pauper, although popular in tabletop events, was born on Magic Online and has a massive culture of grinders and content creators who will have fewer reasons to innovate. In Modern, just a sequence of Top 8 appearances with two or more copies of the same deck can lead us to accuse strategies of being oppressive when, in reality, they don't represent the broad diversity the format possesses right now.

Reducing result posts creates confusion in the absence of concrete data to back up any analyses. It becomes easier to claim that a problem doesn't exist, that it's "public perception" and not real data. Hiding information and filtering what is disclosed harms the work of identifying problems in the competitive environment. With seven releases per year, it becomes even harder. After all, formats like Standard can change rapidly from one set to the next — perhaps that's the goal.

The problem exists and won't go away. Solving the Metagame too easily and it being "bad" with little variation is an issue to be solved in game design choices and remedied with targeted interventions and bannings. It needs to be addressed with structural management changes that don't involve hiding information and altering data disclosure formulas, but by identifying assertive solutions within the very game's creative design.

Once again, Wizards is using tournament data and third-party Metagame coverage as a scapegoat for their own mistakes and inability to manage formats well when the release window — especially for Standard — has never been so aggressive.

It didn't work the other times the company tried the same thing. Standard continues to have problems almost a decade after the change in League result posts and nearly three years after the change to posting only Top 32 results.

After all, the real problem isn't how much data makes solving the Metagame puzzle easier. It is from within Wizards of the Coast, somewhere between greedy business decisions and poor design planning for the competitive environment.

When those who should maintain transparency choose to conceal information that should be public, it falls to the press — in Magic's case, to content creators as well — to speak out, criticize, and unite to investigate and disclose the data they don't want to reveal. If the decision isn't reversed, perhaps that's the best course of action for the sake of competitive Magic's health and credibility.

Thanks for reading!