bmkibler

The new Book of Boba Fett

When the stream is over and it’s time for treats and attention

They're certainly very fun, and add a lot of variety, though, and that's at least probably worth the complexity cost in the long term.

My gut instinct is that this is likely to be a feature that's really popular with highly invested players but hurts the game mode's accessibility with new players, which I always felt was one of its biggest strengths compared to other games in the space.

My first impressions of @PlayHearthstone Battleground Buddies is that they are really cool but also really overwhelming, and the opacity of buddy meter progress can lead to frustrating situations when it's super hard to figure out the correct play.

I'm looking to make new friends so I decided the best way was to hang out at the bar with Bob and meet some new buddies.

(Ladder later)

I *hope* this is a shorter term symptom of the impact of Covid on interest in paper Magic and not a long term realignment for either SCG or WotC, but I'm afraid we won't see a return to the "glory days" of either for a long time, if ever.

And frankly, that just makes sense. There is clearly a tremendous demand for that kind of content, and it's keeping WotC making money while the entire organized play system is largely dormant due to Covid, and frankly hard to plan for the future because of uncertain variants.

I certainly disagree with a lot of the decisions WotC has made with respect to organized play in recent years, but not holding live PTs and GPs or allowing stores to run PTQs or even FNM for a while has to be the biggest factor in decreased sales of cards for competitive decks.

A lot of people are taking the "highest revenue ever" from Hasbro earning calls and twisting it to suggest that all aspects of paper Magic are at their peak and WotC is just neglecting OP, but in a world that can't safely run live events, they pivoted to stuff like Secret Lairs

The reason for this is that Magic writing is uniquely lucrative because it sells cards. If I played a new deck at a Pro Tour or Grand Prix, my article about it could directly sell a bunch of copies of the cards in it and make SCG a bunch of $, so they paid writers well.

I see a lot of people saying Wizards OP decisions are to blame for this, but I think they're underestimating the impact of Covid cancelling all major in-person play for the past two years. Why would someone buy the new decks @PVDDR or someone writes about from SCG with no events?

When I shifted my content focus to @PlayHearthstone, I had sites ask me to write for them, and their offer was over an order of magnitude less than I was getting paid for my weekly articles for SCG, because selling digital cards only made one party any money.

I just wanted to touch a bit more on the news of @StarCityGames cutting back drastically on strategy content and letting most of their writers go.

When I was a pro Magic player, most of my money came from content creation. And I was one of the top prize money earners at the time

When the world is just exhausting

This is way worse for Pro Magic than either the MPL or the cancelation or the MPL or lower prize money at events ever could be.

Covid is obv a huge factor, but SCG basically saying strategy content isn't worth supporting anymore says a lot about MTG OP.

F's in the chat for Roguestone because it's patch day.

Step one in “ban every Modern Horizons card” is complete.