A friend and I are trying to start a series of regular Vintage PRE's to give Vintage players something to do that makes it worth their time. I haven't talked to anyone who wants to play a 3 round DE with terrible prize support.
I'm keeping my account, but until things change I will not buy anything EVER from the WotC store. I used to buy tix from them, as it was quick and easy, but I am not giving them my money until I'm satisfied. I'll continue to suppor the Dealers and people who deserve it. Besides, the automated delivery bot on MTGOTraders is sweet!
I've been thinking a lot about this, but something just occurred to me: Am I the only one thinking that WotC has made these EV- changes to help compensate for the loss of players due to how horrible the new client is? I can only imagine they are under intense pressure to continue to grow MTGO, but the client is severely holding back the best form of growth: adding new players at a rate greater than losing existing players. I would not be surprised if these changes were purposefully done to make the books for MTGO look strong(er) simply by squeezing more blood from the players, rather than offering a truly interesting platform that players are excited to play the wonderful game of Magic on.
I was kidding :) I don't have enough viewers to attract trolls yet!
Three Cabal Therapy is pretty much the industry standard for such a build.
The fact that you're flashing it back essentially for free means that you can potentially cast it six times in a match anyways, although due to the fact that you won't always draw them with under four copies, six is an exaggerated number.
Friday morning I downloaded a Grixis Therapy deck from MTGGoldfish, the deck that largely inspired this build. On a whim I played that in the Daily Event Friday night, lost round one to an Uba Stax deck (not sure if he had Stax, but it had shops, bazaar, Uba Mask and Ensnaring Bridge). I managed to win the rest of my rounds and cash the thing, so I'm very happy with the deck.
About that Ensnaring Bridge: I managed to beat down in game one with my pyromancer tokens, one turn I evaded his Ensnaring Bridge by targeting him with Ancestral Recall. I had my opponent down to six, and my out were Bolt Snap Bolt, Snap Ancestral, or Dack Fayden. Dack would have stolen the Bridge, causing it to look at the cards in my hand and allowed an attack. Too bad the deck only plays one! My opponent resolves Chalice at one, and I'm shut off of winning by any means other that Dack.
I managed to stay alive, and dig for Dack as much as I could. By the time I drew it, my opponent was at three, I said out loud that I could finally win. Dack cost 7 at that point from spheres, so of course I had to crack some fetches to play it. At that point, I reveal to myself that there are no more fetchable lands in my deck, and I cursed loudly. I forgot I was on camera, I may have apologized for swearing, IDK. I was pretty tilted! :D
Next game, I keep a hand with lots of land, pulverize, Dack Fayden. My opponent's first turn was Shop + Trinisphere. GGs man.
but everyone is saying people who accumulate tons and tons of PP devalue them because you have more than you can use.... unless you raredraft and dont stay for the draft. even if you only pull an EV of $7 from the cards ou raredraft, thats worth way more than untradeable PP
Not only paying PPs for a draft is like paying full price (because boosters will still be cheaper), but you also lose value and time. I doubt this will make many go there to simply rare draft and not play at all because that's turning your PPs into most likely less than half of their theorical value on average.
The problem is, some people just don't want to draft. I like drafting but I don't like doing it on mtgo because I'd most likely be losing money, so I do it very rarely outside of Cube.
So I wouldn't really worry about drafts being ruined.
Do people really troll your streams?? Sick :( Though a watcher is a watcher I guess... I am wondering why your cabal therapy deck only runs 3 with none in the sideboard. Is there a particular reason not to go to 4? Is not good in your opening hand?
I am not very invested in the whole Player Points thing because I don't generally play tourneys. (I have 96pps from the conversion and have no plans to use them.) What does bother me though is the idea of yet another sky falling because people are panicky and have no faith in the game.
On the one hand, if you play magic to any real degree of interest online you aren't really trying to build up a portfolio of investments. You are trying to build a playable collection. OK sure there are actual collectors who must have every single card. But I suspect those people are far and few between. If only because THAT task would be quite expensive (see the totals to own a playset of everything above) to manage.
And it would be an ongoing task at that. And sure sometimes your collection seems and looks like an investment. Short term investments for the volatile cards and long term for the more stable cards. But really if you view it ONLY that way you aren't getting the fun out of it you could otherwise.
On the other hand, people sell out their collections all the time. Sometimes because of cowardice/panic, sometimes because of bills, and sometimes because something else they want to buy is more urgent for them. And some (drafters) sell off anything with any value immediately so as to play again. So Player Points maybe affecting the economy is double edged.
It cuts into the amount of packs being earned by winners of tourneys and it may cut into the proceeds from drafts because of what Adam mentions: Rare Drafting. Which always happens to some degree. (But perhaps not as often online as irl.) Particularly someone drafting purely for sales value rather than playability. Is this going to be prevalent among people who don't enjoy draft but earn tons of points in constructed? Will the response to this be to make all the draft queues permanently phantom? No idea.
The Real question imho is: Are the new tourney prizes and prices (in player points) worth it? Not sure there is a good answer yet on that despite several vocal analyses in either camp. It may be, that despite the fact that you can no longer 4-0 a vintage daily (once the change happens) you may find that 3-0 is a better use of your time and the PPs while not directly translatable into earnings do count for something.
I am reserving judgement about whether they are a good or bad thing.
I love surprise and fear in my opponents. I particularly love it when that surprise and fear has synergy. I am not sure why the single kiki. It seems like a well timed path to exile ruins that plan pretty sharply. Love Keranos in from the sideboard. Less included to love negate with the plethora of interesting counters in Modern. Negate seems decidedly plebeian.
Also congrats on predicting that there would be shenanigans with Day's Undoing. I did not foresee it being mill/fog. Though partially that's because I paid 0 attention to Sphinx's Tutelage. I am not fond of these kinds of enchantments but it is hard to argue with a grindstone style effect. The downside is: Day's undoes all the milling the prior days did and also hitting off color cards and or land sounds like a pretty common event. Though I guess again surprise and fear had its toll in that tourney. People don't know how to play against it if they are not expecting mill. And fog can make even good players think twice about HOW to win through it.
Also love how the layout of the first deck looks. :D
If Player Points can be used to play in a draft, and people are concerned they'll accumulate too many PP, wont those people with thousands of PP just jump into drafts, Rare-pick through the ten minutes or so of actual drafting, and then drop from the event? Isn't that a way to mitigate the excess untradeable PP? Sure, you may not be able to score any bombs during the draft, but isn't that a batter option than untradeable PP not worth anything? For those that love to draft, won't people who have this idea completely screw up drafting pools? If you are just gonna scoop you are going to just take all the worthwhile cards at every rarity even if they don't cohesively make a deck because you arent sticking around for the draft. So you take one white mythic, three black rares, and two valuable blue uncommons thus weakening the rest of the pool for people trying to draft an actual strategy. I live 'bye's as much as the next guy but not if cards are going to be flooded into the market anyway and if i miss out on an Archangel of Tithes because someone rare-drafted and scooped to try and sell cards for tix, something that has actual value.
Cownose, I think that you have hit the nail squarely on the head. I feel the same way completely.
Fred, regarding your comment "It looks like we've been Wizarded...again". LOL that was hilarious and brilliantly accurate.
I previously could live with the DE events, but now I can't. And Dailies have become worse for me. I do not feel more special. I feel less eager to enter the Dailies now.
I AM AGGRIEVED!
(in All Caps! Which doubles the weight of the rant).
You're right, except that I hate 8-man single elim, and I only played some. Also, I only have Vintage decks anymore, so I don't get on-demand 8 mans, just scheduled 8 mans.
By the way, the way people in the Vintage community are quitting, the 8 person Daily Events might not fire either.
Pete, I normally love your articles--but I think your analysis here is WAAAAAY off.
You seem to have accepted their argument that 10PP = 1 Ticket when economically speaking that is ludicrous. 10PP cannot possibly equal 1 ticket because the play points are untradeable and only usable to enter events. Just like a $10 Starbucks gift card is not worth $10 in real money, 10PP are not worth what Lee is claiming they are. There is a MASSIVE opportunity cost with them saying I can ONLY use my prizes to enter more events (something I frankly don't really want to do as I don't ever draft and only play dailies every once in a while). I can no longer use my winnings to build new constructed decks, and now cashing out my collection becomes much harder to do. PP are only an okay substitute for real prizes if you plan to use them to draft, which I know you do--but not everyone does. I can see how this is okay from your perspective (someone with a good collection who likes to draft), but it is VERY bad for a lot of people in different situations from yourself.
Let me give you an example: I have a great Vintage collection today, but when I started playing MTGO as a poor college student that certainly wasn't the case. The first step to building my collection happened when I got 1st place in a 128 player Ravnica release league. That netted like 70 boosters as a prize (Its been a long time so I don't remember how many it was, but it was A LOT for a college student with a $25 a month MTGO budget). Selling those boosters (I don't draft) allowed me to buy in to my first serious MTGO deck and allowed me to move to constructed for years (I played more DEs back then since I had a lot more free time). The winnings I accumulated from that deck built a lot of my current collection. This is all basically impossible under the new system unless I want to grind events forever--which I really don't/didn't.
There were a ton of ways they could have fixed the booster problem without screwing over the players, but they went with the option that 1) increased the cost of playing without a matching increase in prizes, 2) gave the players far less choice in how they play the game, 3) made it nearly impossible to use your winnings to build up better constructed decks, AND 4) makes is impossible to get your money back out of your collection if you decide to sell. This option is absolutely terrible for anyone who doesn't grind drafts (and is also terrible for people who are really good to boot as they will accumulate basically worthless PP they can't use).
Sure, I guess paying 12 tix is not good if you are trying something fun, are low of tix or are a new player but those are the situations where a 8man or 2man tournament is actually fine. I still don't understand why they messed with the entry fee and prizes of DEs. That was one of the few things that people were actually happy about mtgo. They just needed to take out half the boosters from the prizes and convert them to PPs. We would get the same deal that we have had for years and people wouldn't react this way.
I feel that some newer players would be put off at losing 12 dollars a tournament if they can't crack 2 wins an event. So I emailed Lee my feelings, and this is what we got: Cheaper tournaments with way worse prizes.
I went a long time where I was either just going 2-2, or bombing out completely. It was frustrating, but I'm also not as experienced as some of the other players. And I was always switching decks to have stuff to write about. I didn't mind losing 6 tix to pilot Landstill in a Daily after only running it in one Tournament Practice match. I don't know that I'd want to play 12 tickets to play for funsies.
I emailed them today, and made some additional suggestions, but who knows what will happen. I suggested instead of DOUBLING the D.E. entry fee, to just raise it a little bit as to not be such a shock to people.
The other thing I mentioned was that many people are VERY upset that PP aren't tradeable. I suggested allowing people to buy packs with their play points at full msrp, and to make spending the pp on more events the better deal so that players who just want to play more tournaments get the value they want, and the other folks can at least get some packs to do whatever with, even if the packs are less than they would have gotten under the old system.
I don't want to see a price hike, but from a business perspective I can understand why a hike may be needed. However, I do not agree with a doubling of a price under the guise that it's some kind of "fix" or positive change.
This reminds me of the Simpsons episode where it's set in the future, Lisa is president, and they need to raise taxes. They settled on calling it a Temporary Refund Adjustment to distract people from the truth (Milhouse had pitched the term "colossal salary grab").
Unfortunately for my interests this change is bad, but my real issue is why make this change at all. PP is just a bad version of event tickets as they are not tradeable objects. For the consumer we each have different desires so giving us tradeable objects is much better in general. If WOTC wanted to improve the event pay-outs then just do that, if they want lower denominations then make subtickets. But making untradeable items doesn't help the consumer.
My largest issue however is this shows a total lack of focus and inept prioritization at WOTC. We have an enhancement list miles long, we have been waiting for leagues, bug fixes, casual player improvements, etc and what did WOTC give us - Player Points... They must have put things on hold to jump on this idea and implementing it. In my mind this is the true problem and always has been, lack if product focus and decisions seemingly based on revenue rather than customer experience.
Try it yourself. Go to the deck editor, create a new tribal deck, set set to Origins and quantity to zero, add any of the new cards to the deck and right click on them. 'This card is not legal in this deck's format' right below the 'this card is not in your collection' both in red text. If you try to start a tribal wars game with a deck with origins cards, the deck is greyed out.
There is a potential workaround in that they are legal in Legacy.
Edit: Curiouser and curiouser. The five 'Mentor' cards are legal, the rest of the nonreprints aren't. Not only did someone muck up, they did so intermittently.
I don't care about the cost really. Obviously if the Daily Events were at something like 60 tix, it would be bad because variance could really bankrupt you easily and not everyone would be fine with spending 60 bucks to play a 4 rounds tournament. But I wouldn't mind paying 12, if they also increased the prizes at the same rate. The big problem is turning EV+ tournaments into EV-
After far too long of struggling with mana issues, negative variance, and the occasional grievous misplay, I cashed the Vintage Daily Event last night :)
My first thought? How this would have been a waste of my time under the proposed changes. First of all, I lost round one, so the best I could have hoped for under the new "improved" system would be a "free" Daily Event next time.
Let's imagine that I payed 12 for a four-round Daily and won play-points. Would it "feel more special"? Not at all. I have tickets for another event already, but what if I wanted to buy a new card for my deck that cost more than the value of the 3 packs I would have won under Play Points Prize Party? Then I'd be out-of-luck, or have to shell out more dough.
A friend and I are trying to start a series of regular Vintage PRE's to give Vintage players something to do that makes it worth their time. I haven't talked to anyone who wants to play a 3 round DE with terrible prize support.
I'm keeping my account, but until things change I will not buy anything EVER from the WotC store. I used to buy tix from them, as it was quick and easy, but I am not giving them my money until I'm satisfied. I'll continue to suppor the Dealers and people who deserve it. Besides, the automated delivery bot on MTGOTraders is sweet!
I've been thinking a lot about this, but something just occurred to me: Am I the only one thinking that WotC has made these EV- changes to help compensate for the loss of players due to how horrible the new client is? I can only imagine they are under intense pressure to continue to grow MTGO, but the client is severely holding back the best form of growth: adding new players at a rate greater than losing existing players. I would not be surprised if these changes were purposefully done to make the books for MTGO look strong(er) simply by squeezing more blood from the players, rather than offering a truly interesting platform that players are excited to play the wonderful game of Magic on.
I was kidding :) I don't have enough viewers to attract trolls yet!
Three Cabal Therapy is pretty much the industry standard for such a build.
The fact that you're flashing it back essentially for free means that you can potentially cast it six times in a match anyways, although due to the fact that you won't always draw them with under four copies, six is an exaggerated number.
Friday morning I downloaded a Grixis Therapy deck from MTGGoldfish, the deck that largely inspired this build. On a whim I played that in the Daily Event Friday night, lost round one to an Uba Stax deck (not sure if he had Stax, but it had shops, bazaar, Uba Mask and Ensnaring Bridge). I managed to win the rest of my rounds and cash the thing, so I'm very happy with the deck.
About that Ensnaring Bridge: I managed to beat down in game one with my pyromancer tokens, one turn I evaded his Ensnaring Bridge by targeting him with Ancestral Recall. I had my opponent down to six, and my out were Bolt Snap Bolt, Snap Ancestral, or Dack Fayden. Dack would have stolen the Bridge, causing it to look at the cards in my hand and allowed an attack. Too bad the deck only plays one! My opponent resolves Chalice at one, and I'm shut off of winning by any means other that Dack.
I managed to stay alive, and dig for Dack as much as I could. By the time I drew it, my opponent was at three, I said out loud that I could finally win. Dack cost 7 at that point from spheres, so of course I had to crack some fetches to play it. At that point, I reveal to myself that there are no more fetchable lands in my deck, and I cursed loudly. I forgot I was on camera, I may have apologized for swearing, IDK. I was pretty tilted! :D
Next game, I keep a hand with lots of land, pulverize, Dack Fayden. My opponent's first turn was Shop + Trinisphere. GGs man.
Yes, but that doesn't mean everyone will just rare draft instead of drafting to win the draft.
but everyone is saying people who accumulate tons and tons of PP devalue them because you have more than you can use.... unless you raredraft and dont stay for the draft. even if you only pull an EV of $7 from the cards ou raredraft, thats worth way more than untradeable PP
Fish swim, birds fly, people on Twitch troll.
Not only paying PPs for a draft is like paying full price (because boosters will still be cheaper), but you also lose value and time. I doubt this will make many go there to simply rare draft and not play at all because that's turning your PPs into most likely less than half of their theorical value on average.
The problem is, some people just don't want to draft. I like drafting but I don't like doing it on mtgo because I'd most likely be losing money, so I do it very rarely outside of Cube.
So I wouldn't really worry about drafts being ruined.
Do people really troll your streams?? Sick :( Though a watcher is a watcher I guess... I am wondering why your cabal therapy deck only runs 3 with none in the sideboard. Is there a particular reason not to go to 4? Is not good in your opening hand?
==Edit== for the fireballs.
I am not very invested in the whole Player Points thing because I don't generally play tourneys. (I have 96pps from the conversion and have no plans to use them.) What does bother me though is the idea of yet another sky falling because people are panicky and have no faith in the game.
On the one hand, if you play magic to any real degree of interest online you aren't really trying to build up a portfolio of investments. You are trying to build a playable collection. OK sure there are actual collectors who must have every single card. But I suspect those people are far and few between. If only because THAT task would be quite expensive (see the totals to own a playset of everything above) to manage.
And it would be an ongoing task at that. And sure sometimes your collection seems and looks like an investment. Short term investments for the volatile cards and long term for the more stable cards. But really if you view it ONLY that way you aren't getting the fun out of it you could otherwise.
On the other hand, people sell out their collections all the time. Sometimes because of cowardice/panic, sometimes because of bills, and sometimes because something else they want to buy is more urgent for them. And some (drafters) sell off anything with any value immediately so as to play again. So Player Points maybe affecting the economy is double edged.
It cuts into the amount of packs being earned by winners of tourneys and it may cut into the proceeds from drafts because of what Adam mentions: Rare Drafting. Which always happens to some degree. (But perhaps not as often online as irl.) Particularly someone drafting purely for sales value rather than playability. Is this going to be prevalent among people who don't enjoy draft but earn tons of points in constructed? Will the response to this be to make all the draft queues permanently phantom? No idea.
The Real question imho is: Are the new tourney prizes and prices (in player points) worth it? Not sure there is a good answer yet on that despite several vocal analyses in either camp. It may be, that despite the fact that you can no longer 4-0 a vintage daily (once the change happens) you may find that 3-0 is a better use of your time and the PPs while not directly translatable into earnings do count for something.
I am reserving judgement about whether they are a good or bad thing.
I love surprise and fear in my opponents. I particularly love it when that surprise and fear has synergy. I am not sure why the single kiki. It seems like a well timed path to exile ruins that plan pretty sharply. Love Keranos in from the sideboard. Less included to love negate with the plethora of interesting counters in Modern. Negate seems decidedly plebeian.
Also congrats on predicting that there would be shenanigans with Day's Undoing. I did not foresee it being mill/fog. Though partially that's because I paid 0 attention to Sphinx's Tutelage. I am not fond of these kinds of enchantments but it is hard to argue with a grindstone style effect. The downside is: Day's undoes all the milling the prior days did and also hitting off color cards and or land sounds like a pretty common event. Though I guess again surprise and fear had its toll in that tourney. People don't know how to play against it if they are not expecting mill. And fog can make even good players think twice about HOW to win through it.
Also love how the layout of the first deck looks. :D
If Player Points can be used to play in a draft, and people are concerned they'll accumulate too many PP, wont those people with thousands of PP just jump into drafts, Rare-pick through the ten minutes or so of actual drafting, and then drop from the event? Isn't that a way to mitigate the excess untradeable PP? Sure, you may not be able to score any bombs during the draft, but isn't that a batter option than untradeable PP not worth anything? For those that love to draft, won't people who have this idea completely screw up drafting pools? If you are just gonna scoop you are going to just take all the worthwhile cards at every rarity even if they don't cohesively make a deck because you arent sticking around for the draft. So you take one white mythic, three black rares, and two valuable blue uncommons thus weakening the rest of the pool for people trying to draft an actual strategy. I live 'bye's as much as the next guy but not if cards are going to be flooded into the market anyway and if i miss out on an Archangel of Tithes because someone rare-drafted and scooped to try and sell cards for tix, something that has actual value.
Oh, I understand. I don't play 8mans as well (I guess I would if the EV was good but I'd still prefer dailies).
I do have access to modern decks (although most cards are not mine) but I haven't been willing to play it lately.
Your articles are interesting and humorous. I really hope some day you get into the eternal formats :)
Cownose, I think that you have hit the nail squarely on the head. I feel the same way completely.
Fred, regarding your comment "It looks like we've been Wizarded...again". LOL that was hilarious and brilliantly accurate.
I previously could live with the DE events, but now I can't. And Dailies have become worse for me. I do not feel more special. I feel less eager to enter the Dailies now.
I AM AGGRIEVED!
(in All Caps! Which doubles the weight of the rant).
Bye,
Michelle
You're right, except that I hate 8-man single elim, and I only played some. Also, I only have Vintage decks anymore, so I don't get on-demand 8 mans, just scheduled 8 mans.
By the way, the way people in the Vintage community are quitting, the 8 person Daily Events might not fire either.
Pete, I normally love your articles--but I think your analysis here is WAAAAAY off.
You seem to have accepted their argument that 10PP = 1 Ticket when economically speaking that is ludicrous. 10PP cannot possibly equal 1 ticket because the play points are untradeable and only usable to enter events. Just like a $10 Starbucks gift card is not worth $10 in real money, 10PP are not worth what Lee is claiming they are. There is a MASSIVE opportunity cost with them saying I can ONLY use my prizes to enter more events (something I frankly don't really want to do as I don't ever draft and only play dailies every once in a while). I can no longer use my winnings to build new constructed decks, and now cashing out my collection becomes much harder to do. PP are only an okay substitute for real prizes if you plan to use them to draft, which I know you do--but not everyone does. I can see how this is okay from your perspective (someone with a good collection who likes to draft), but it is VERY bad for a lot of people in different situations from yourself.
Let me give you an example: I have a great Vintage collection today, but when I started playing MTGO as a poor college student that certainly wasn't the case. The first step to building my collection happened when I got 1st place in a 128 player Ravnica release league. That netted like 70 boosters as a prize (Its been a long time so I don't remember how many it was, but it was A LOT for a college student with a $25 a month MTGO budget). Selling those boosters (I don't draft) allowed me to buy in to my first serious MTGO deck and allowed me to move to constructed for years (I played more DEs back then since I had a lot more free time). The winnings I accumulated from that deck built a lot of my current collection. This is all basically impossible under the new system unless I want to grind events forever--which I really don't/didn't.
There were a ton of ways they could have fixed the booster problem without screwing over the players, but they went with the option that 1) increased the cost of playing without a matching increase in prizes, 2) gave the players far less choice in how they play the game, 3) made it nearly impossible to use your winnings to build up better constructed decks, AND 4) makes is impossible to get your money back out of your collection if you decide to sell. This option is absolutely terrible for anyone who doesn't grind drafts (and is also terrible for people who are really good to boot as they will accumulate basically worthless PP they can't use).
Sure, I guess paying 12 tix is not good if you are trying something fun, are low of tix or are a new player but those are the situations where a 8man or 2man tournament is actually fine. I still don't understand why they messed with the entry fee and prizes of DEs. That was one of the few things that people were actually happy about mtgo. They just needed to take out half the boosters from the prizes and convert them to PPs. We would get the same deal that we have had for years and people wouldn't react this way.
I feel that some newer players would be put off at losing 12 dollars a tournament if they can't crack 2 wins an event. So I emailed Lee my feelings, and this is what we got: Cheaper tournaments with way worse prizes.
I went a long time where I was either just going 2-2, or bombing out completely. It was frustrating, but I'm also not as experienced as some of the other players. And I was always switching decks to have stuff to write about. I didn't mind losing 6 tix to pilot Landstill in a Daily after only running it in one Tournament Practice match. I don't know that I'd want to play 12 tickets to play for funsies.
I emailed them today, and made some additional suggestions, but who knows what will happen. I suggested instead of DOUBLING the D.E. entry fee, to just raise it a little bit as to not be such a shock to people.
The other thing I mentioned was that many people are VERY upset that PP aren't tradeable. I suggested allowing people to buy packs with their play points at full msrp, and to make spending the pp on more events the better deal so that players who just want to play more tournaments get the value they want, and the other folks can at least get some packs to do whatever with, even if the packs are less than they would have gotten under the old system.
I don't want to see a price hike, but from a business perspective I can understand why a hike may be needed. However, I do not agree with a doubling of a price under the guise that it's some kind of "fix" or positive change.
This reminds me of the Simpsons episode where it's set in the future, Lisa is president, and they need to raise taxes. They settled on calling it a Temporary Refund Adjustment to distract people from the truth (Milhouse had pitched the term "colossal salary grab").
It looks like we've been Wizarded...again.
Unfortunately for my interests this change is bad, but my real issue is why make this change at all. PP is just a bad version of event tickets as they are not tradeable objects. For the consumer we each have different desires so giving us tradeable objects is much better in general. If WOTC wanted to improve the event pay-outs then just do that, if they want lower denominations then make subtickets. But making untradeable items doesn't help the consumer.
My largest issue however is this shows a total lack of focus and inept prioritization at WOTC. We have an enhancement list miles long, we have been waiting for leagues, bug fixes, casual player improvements, etc and what did WOTC give us - Player Points... They must have put things on hold to jump on this idea and implementing it. In my mind this is the true problem and always has been, lack if product focus and decisions seemingly based on revenue rather than customer experience.
Try it yourself. Go to the deck editor, create a new tribal deck, set set to Origins and quantity to zero, add any of the new cards to the deck and right click on them. 'This card is not legal in this deck's format' right below the 'this card is not in your collection' both in red text. If you try to start a tribal wars game with a deck with origins cards, the deck is greyed out.
There is a potential workaround in that they are legal in Legacy.
Edit: Curiouser and curiouser. The five 'Mentor' cards are legal, the rest of the nonreprints aren't. Not only did someone muck up, they did so intermittently.
I don't care about the cost really. Obviously if the Daily Events were at something like 60 tix, it would be bad because variance could really bankrupt you easily and not everyone would be fine with spending 60 bucks to play a 4 rounds tournament. But I wouldn't mind paying 12, if they also increased the prizes at the same rate. The big problem is turning EV+ tournaments into EV-
Well, the good news was that they still cost 6. The bad news is everything else about the events.
After far too long of struggling with mana issues, negative variance, and the occasional grievous misplay, I cashed the Vintage Daily Event last night :)
My first thought? How this would have been a waste of my time under the proposed changes. First of all, I lost round one, so the best I could have hoped for under the new "improved" system would be a "free" Daily Event next time.
Let's imagine that I payed 12 for a four-round Daily and won play-points. Would it "feel more special"? Not at all. I have tickets for another event already, but what if I wanted to buy a new card for my deck that cost more than the value of the 3 packs I would have won under Play Points Prize Party? Then I'd be out-of-luck, or have to shell out more dough.
I think it's even more bad news to be honest.