You have to hand it to Wizards of the Coast. These past few years they have really put their thinking caps on. Every few months they announce some new product, or tweak something pre-existing and cause a fervor among fans of Magic. In the span of less than three years they’ve put forth the following groundbreaking (for MTG) ideas: Planeswalkers, Premium Decks, Duel Decks, Planechase, From the Vault, Duels of the Planeswalkers, MTGO III, web-comics to go along with several brand new websites, and Mythic rarity. That is a murders row of great ideas coming to fruition in an astonishingly short time period. As fans, our collective heads are spinning. However there is often a faint whisper of disappointment after each release. Perhaps that is because perceived potential will always be greater than reality. A point of fact, however, there is a reason for the disparity: poor execution.
Jace means more than drawing cards
Video game reviewer and quasi-cultural icon Gabe from Penny Arcade once raved about Blizzard Entertainment because they did the best job of taking the artist’s ideas and translating them to a playable game. That is essentially what WotC’s R&D team is attempting with each new product. The difference is that Blizzard usually gets it right. They capture the essence of each idea within the game. Unfortunately for the average Magic fan, Wizard’s ability to do this is hit-and-miss. That is not to say they don’t occasionally knock ideas out of the proverbial park. When Planeswalkers arrived (months later than their expected release in Future Sight) they were fully polished and close to perfect. They did a great job of embodying more than simply the powers of each color but also the attitude. Reinhart doesn’t feel a strong connection with Jace because he likes to mill, but because Jace represents ‘blue wizardry’. It seems that a small delay in release of these cards gave WotC time to correct any small flaws. Perhaps WotC could have used that same delay to correct the once rather erratic Mythic Rarity. The topic has been covered already, but it was obvious Alara mythics were hastily chosen and the guidelines for ‘Mythic Rarity’ were not fully in place. By Zendikar, mythic rares were chosen near-perfectly. Perhaps WotC needed a more time to develop what was a brilliant idea into actual cards.
$35.99? not anymore
Too bad even without deadlines WotC can still disappoint. Not with sales numbers necessarily (CCGs aren’t really a meritocracy anyway) but with quality. The best example is also the latest. Premium Decks: Slivers could have been the sequel in perfection of From the Vault: Exiled but instead feels more like a gimmicky pre-con deck. Exiled had an MSRP price tag of $34.99 and quickly sold for more than double that due to low print runs and extremely high demand. What worked with Exiled (and From the Vault: Dragons before it) is exactly what would have been perfect for Slivers, include only great cards. Only! Instead Wizards continued perpetuating what Gathering Magic has come to call the Pre-con Glass Ceiling. The PGC describes the strangely low power levels of decks built by WotC R&D and released for sale to the public. Certainly in the case of starter decks players will want to tweak the cards they use, but why ask the same for a deck selling at $35? Simply put: you shouldn’t. And if that means charging more for future Premium decks, then so be it. People will pay for quality. The bottom line, this is another missed opportunity to make a great product. Instead you end up with something appealing on its release, but losing its desirability quickly. Duel decks have suffered even worse. Garruk and Liliana might be worth the $20 MSRP because of both alternate art planeswalkers, but few would call either deck the definitive ‘green’ or ‘black’ build. Again, why hold back when making a specialty deck? Divine vs Demonic could have been the coolest MTG item released to date. It wasn’t. From the Vault has proven that including better cards makes a product better, not only from a retail perspective but as a collectible.
some things right, others not so much
Cards and decks are not the only victims of this lack of follow through. MTGO III, Duel of the Planeswalkers, and the Draft Simulator had difficulty reaching their ambitious potentials. Faults and issues relating to MTGO have been covered ad nauseum here. Needless to say, if the vision was a seamless way to play MTG with duelists from around the world the resulting software has not entirely delivered. Duels of the Planewalkers was intended to take the weaker parts of MTGO, namely graphics and gameplay, and make them strengths. Unfortunately, the developers failed to transfer the strengths of MTGO as well. Creating a great-looking game with about as much depth as the Hotel 6 wading pool. Another great idea that lived up to about half of its potential is the Draft Simulator. Sharpening your skills by drafting ‘random’ packs of the latest core set against AI bots sounds appealing. However the packs don’t seem very randomized and you have little idea what your robot opponents end up with. Meaning you may have drafted a great deck, but compared to what?
there is a disconnect here
Magic the Gathering is an amazing game. That point is indisputable. You wouldn’t even be reading this if you did not agree. The questions remains, why isn’t it even better? It should be. With their brain juices flowing, WotC should have put up a pantheon performance these past three years and instead settled for good. These products are playable and fun, but that is not the point. This is about missed opportunities and what-ifs. For example: What if WotC had released the Sliver deck we were all secretly hoping for? What if the Duel Decks weren’t intended for beginners? What if every pre-con deck followed the path of FtV: Exiled and the PGC was gone? What if MTGO and Duel of the Planeswalkers each had the other’s strengths? Fair questions. The answer is something like this: we would all be much happier. Execution is important. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask for a great notion to be delivered relatively in-tact. Blizzard did it with Starcraft and WoW. It is baffling as to why it is so difficult for Wizards of the Coast.
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I think this is a great analysis of what Wizards has done over the past few years. Your right they should be congratulated for delivering so many unique ideas in such a sort time.
I think your point on the glass ceiling of precons is a good one. It would be interesting to hear the decision making process about precons, marketing driven or otherwise.
I think you missed a point when it comes to planechase. A great new concept that, in my opinion, was executed brilliantly. However the precon decks that came with each planechase set were really a let down.
In order to come to terms with this situation I consider the following viewpoint. Products like Slivers and Duels Decks are made to be sold to big box retail outlets. With the intended audience of kids and teens shopping with their parents. The mature magic player might go out of their way to pickup a release at the big box store but we all know we get most of our card needs at the local shop or online. Many of my local card stores couldn’t get their hands on either of Garruk and Liliana or the Divine vs Demonic duel decks. Walmart or Target had them all from the distributors. Compare this to From the Vault: Exiled. Every experienced magic player on the planet wanted to get their hands on one of those. What I don’t understand is why they don’t make more FtV available to the pre-existing audience. I think it all comes down to what has the highest market value whenever developing these products.
Anyway great post. Keep em coming.
I think you pretty much made Leaf’s point with Planechase. You said it was a brilliant idea that had crappy decks.
Thats exactly what we’re talking about here. Great ideas, horrible execution. I give them bonus points as well for the great ideas, but wouldn’t it be great if the planechase decks were ALSO good?
The zombie one was pretty decent actually.
The decks themselves may not have been the absolute best, but they’re better than most precons in the last three or four years. It’s also a little incredible how many themes they squeezed into each of the decks. Enemy-color, Ally-color, Five-color, mono-color, Artifact theme, double-strike theme, creature type theme, etc. Playing all of those decks together in a four-player game gave a great sense of the depth in Magic. Add in Planechase and it’s great casual fun.
The trouble comes when only one or two people are playing the pack-in decks, then the flaws come out.
theyve done a poor job with all extra crap and im not realy a fan of planewalkers as cards or even considering another player aplanewalker . . . Also I do agree with their premiums needing to be better but i want them to slow down on production. again yu gi oh… if they pump out a bunch of premium crap like from the fault or dragons or slivers and keep making the duel decks extended then card values will drop or at least people will quit buying cards
would you rather spend allot for a premium that comes out once every other year or alot for something that comes out everymonth. . . the value would be high.
When assessing WotC’s overall success or failure in all the new stuff the past couple of years, don’t forget the rules changes that came with M10, and also M10 itself – both of those were bold moves that worked very, very well.
As for the individual shortcomings…
I’ll take your word on MTGO. I’ve never played it, but what I keep hearing (and to a lesser extent, seeing in screenshots) is that it is in desperate need of a face lift. I’ve also not played DotP, but what did you mean that it lacks depth? You weren’t very specific. Perhaps you meant, as I’ve heard others say, that you can’t build your own decks but rather can only modify the starter decks? If so, I wouldn’t call that a failure because I think they did that on purpose. They didn’t want DotP to be an electronic version of the Magic experience, because that would kind of invalidate MTGO. I think they wanted a Magic-based video game, which as I understand it, they made.
As for the promo products, I think From the Vault and Duel Decks are trying to do very different things. From the Vault seems to be for the veteran player who wants to bling out their collection/decks, and it seems to do that well. Duel Decks, however… okay, I confess I don’t really know what the *intended* purpose of those decks is. All I know is I was tickled to death to get Garruk vs Liliana for $20 because I’ve only been playing for two and a half years and I was able to scoop up lots of good cards that I could never find before (Mutilate, Rancor, etc) for a bargain price. Perhaps a failure overall, but *I* sure cashed in.
DotP has exactly the problem you described – set pre-con decks. And a limited number. Not being able to build your own deck takes away most of the depth from MTG.
But is that really a problem? Was DotP *really* supposed to be MtG, just translated into another medium? If so, then you’re right, they botched it. If, however, the goal was to make a video game that refers back to actual MtG (either to get an outsider curious or to be an un-competitive “vacation” for an existing player) then they have succeeded. If Duels was supposed to BE MtG, then it failed. If it was supposed to be BASED ON MtG, then it succeeded.
I have Duels of the Planeswalkers and it falls into traps that people with a very limited grasp of the game think. First and foremost: “more is better.” Each of the precons have unlockable cards. Those cards just get added in. So instead of having a solid 60 card deck, you end up with an okay 80 card deck, filled with crap. There’s no level of customization. You either take all the unlockables or none of them, there’s no picking and choosing. In the green deck, you have TWO cards against flyers, both giant spiders. Meanwhile the blue deck has air elementals and mahamoti djinns.
The game is fun for a little while, but the replayability is very limited. Without deckbuilding – or at least minor editing, it’s poorly done. It reminds me a lot of the old Micropose game where the boss’s deck had one of every card in it.
I think that DotP’s deck customization subtly reminds the player that “more isn’t necessarily better.” There is always the option to take cards out of the deck that you’re not going to need or ones that just suck in comparison to others. I think that there should be a little tip popping up to say this instead of having the player discover this on their own (or at least having the idea pop in their head without any help from the game). Still, by the time you unlock all 19 cards for the deck, there are a few different directions you can go with it. Just a few, but DotP is supposed to the gateway drug to MTG’s addiction.
A few things:
I feel like they try too hard to “defend” the Magic Economy. G v L included nothing of importance to anyone. The sliver deck included nothing currently in use in standard or extended or even legacy.. They’re not in the business of selling singles and I think they try too hard to avoid selling things that are actually useful / worth money in the precons.
Of course I don’t want to see Day of Judgment in a preconstructed deck but there is a happy medium between cards that aren’t EVER played and arent worth anything (like most of the cards in GvL) and chase standard rares.
Leaf didn’t mention the beginners toolbox which I also thought was a good idea gone awry. Even when you’re first starting out you want GOOD cards. Why not give them 5-6 boosters from the current sets and some land for free? You could give them a small starter deck as well with predetermined cards but I’d MUCH rather they get their collection started with 5 REAL packs.
If I were helping someone get started Id say.. go grab some packs of M10+ and Ill give you some land / help you make a little deck. Semi-Random cards? You know what that means. Unusable crap that an intelligent player will get over in 2 hours. Heck Id rather they just buy a Duel deck for the same price! Then you get 2 planeswalkers and 2 usable decks!
I think the WotC “ideas department” needs to spend more time with the WotC “execution” department. The idea for Premium Decks gets a 10 in my book.. but in execution? A 4 on a good day. Id much rather have quality products, less frequently, for a higher price.
I have a friend who has a Sliver Overlord EDH deck. Now, for $35, he can foil out like half of it. I think that was more the idea: bling out cards that you already had, not get you a fully functioning deck out of nowhere. Just a guess, though.
I would agrue that this is what From the Vault was for. Getting cool alternate art/foil cards for your collection.
Premium Decks should mean just that, a deck.
I agree if fancy art is what you want then they need to make a odd set of all fancy new art remakes (very yu gi oh) but a premium deck is just that. a structure deck… woops did i just bring up yu gi oh again?
WhAT?!?!?! NOTHING IN USE IN STANDARD?!!
I bought Slivers JUST FOR THE ROOTBOUND CRAG!!!!!!!!! All the other cards are just for casual play sure, but that ONE LAND.
Oh boy, here comes a WotC fanboy, everyone hold on to their hats…
Actually, I kinda agree with you. The idea have been great, but sometimes the execution has been a little off (when I saw the title, I thought it was going to be to capital punishment. Looks like I need to up my game a little now). I can argue why they did certain things though. FtV:D was a test. It was a “Timmy” product that acted as a “Spike” one. One it went to Epic price proportions, they wanted to make sure that more of the “Timmies” got what they wanted, hence the foil Duel decks for Slivers.
Could they have done it as a FtV? Sure, but I wasn’t going to buy it, and So-and-So isn’t going to buy it. But that’s ok, it would’ve been designed for a different market.
But, and here’s the important thing, they’re trying. “Sure, but we’d love for them to get better,” and in a way, I think they are. If you play 10 years ago (does that make me feel old? Yes) they didn’t do any of this stuff. Sure, you might find a Duelmasters tin or a World Championship Deck but that was it. I think they’re getting better about this whole “Magic-but-not-Magic” release thing.
But we’re geeks and we’ll complain about anything we love. Dr. Jeebus’ signature on MTGS was “Wizards could put $100 bills in packs and players would complain about the way they were folded.”
We are very positive about the direction WotC has taken these past few years. Its why we started the site.
As I wrote, the ideas have been top notch. If they executed these like we know they can it would be a lot harder to find complaints
Its just, as a die-hard fan, when they release something and I have zero interest after reviewing it? Thats a bad thing and very preventable.
I don’t really think they should make premium decks at all. Nobody buys them to play the decks as mentioned above. They get them for bling. I was so disappointed in the Divine Vs. Demonic. I opened it and thought things like, “Why was Souldrinker in the Demonic deck?”, “Where’s Exalted Angel?” and “Why did they waste a slot on Marble Diamond?”
Here’s a couple products I would pay money for:
“Return to…” sets. Decks that focus on previous sets that mix cards from that set with brand new non-tourney legal cards(though they could be re-printed in later sets).
Change the Premium Decks to something closer to “From the Vaults” but cheaper. Don’t waste paper on land, remove the foil gimmick, and just give us alternate arts based on a tribe or theme. Say a vampire set where $12.99 gets you new art for four or five randomly inserted new artworks out of twenty vampires (gotta keep the trade market) and a few playsets of various common and uncommon vampires. Give us the tools for the theme and let the players decide on how to build on the theme.
Change the duel decks to something similar. Split up the duel into single packs where so we could pick which premium Planeswalkers we want to own. Have each pack contain twenty two appropriate basic lands and a random assortment of 38 cards that the chosen planeswalker might play. The price would depend on the rarity of the cards, but again, in the $12.99 to $15.99 range. Hey, you could actually get 4 friends and each play a sealed game that way.
Sounds like a good idea, but I don’t think Wizards will ever do that, it seems more complicated than most ideas they put out there.
Wow. Just wow. I have to totally disagree with most of your points. If they fill precons and duel decks and such with all awesome & powerful cards, the market prices will skyrocket just like Exiled did . . . which means I will never buy them, just like I didn’t buy Exiled. The point of duel decks is to have a pair of balanced decks vs each other, and they all have some cool old reprints, and some not-so-exciting cards to fill up the deck. That’s a good thing, because if they filled the decks with expensive cards, then the decks would be too expensive, and it would kind of defeat the purpose.
As for the Slivers deck . . . you know they can’t reprint Sliver Queen, right? It’s on the reserved list. (I know you didn’t specifically mention Sliver Queen, but that’s the one everyone’s talking about.)
~
There is a happy medium here somewhere between cards that aren’t useful or worth anything monetarily… and packing “awesome and powerful cards” into every precon.
I think FTV Dragons balanced that well. It didn’t ruin the market at all.. the price went up to about $50 (from 35) but didnt really sell out anywhere. But the cards were BOTH cool AND usable/resellable. Which cards are resellable/usable in the Sliver deck exactly? GvL? The starter kit? I just think I should get SOME value out of collectors items that I buy.
I have to agree, the Sliver deck was a cool idea but it was a bit underpowered.
So I can assume you bought the Duel Decks then since they were so cheap?
And I don’t care about the lack of a Queen, I care they included crap like Barbed Sliver. As if they didn’t want the deck to be good. The Slivers deck could have been incredible, and its barely playable.
The sliver deck is just bad. The Queen is restricted, but they’ve changed that list before and have talked about doing it again. The weakest point of the sliver deck is that they put in a bunch of poor sliver choices and wasted too many slots on things that weren’t slivers or far too common (Amoeboid Changeling and Terramorphic Expanse as respective examples). The Overlord is the only real chase sliver in the deck. The other cards one would want are the Coat of Arms, Rootbound Crag, Heartstone, and Wild Pair. When I buy a deck based on the sliver theme, there shouldn’t be this many rare slots dedicated to nonslivers.
And having played two of the recent the recent sets, I’ll say they are not balanced at all. Jace almost beats Chandra at about 70% of the time and Divine beats Demonic about 80% of the time.
“The Overlord is the only real chase sliver in the deck. The other cards one would want are the Coat of Arms, Rootbound Crag, Heartstone, and Wild Pair.”
Because after all, who wants Crystalline Sliver? Coat of Arms is SO much better. And seriously, Necrotic Sliver? Why would I want my army to double as a fleet of Vindicates when I could be using Wild Pair? It boggles the mind.
Your right about the Crystaline Sliver, but you can get a set of Necrotics for under $3.00. Just because it’s good doesn’t mean its coveted or has trade value. Constructed play value, being out of print for a while, and rarity determine that.
You keep saying “lack of execution” when you actually mean “not to my taste.”
There is no card, however “crap” you consider it, that someone is not playing with and appreciating somewhere. None.
Tahngarth’s Glare.
Thats like saying “there’s no such thing as a bad movie”.. just movies that don’t meet your taste. Have you seen Gigli? Have you read Barbed Sliver? Creative efforts, while in many ways subjective, can be scrutinized like anything else.
the sliver deck is indeed pure shit compared to what it should be. no taste or opinion about it. like they said if its a premium deck then make it a premium playable deck. slivers are amazing and its not really hard to make them work. charge $50 i would have bought it, but after seeing whats in it i didnt buy it for what it is. the duel decks dont bother me much cuz i can see them as just begginer decks and they are not a lot of cash. i dont really buy anything but booster boxes and singles online for my decks, other than the from the vaults shit and was going to get the slivers but not now.
Not everything WotC sells has to be resellable or have any sort of intrinsic value on the secondary market for it to be a great product. As far as they’re concerned, if a new player sees the sliver deck and plays with it and likes it, they’ve done their job. Most of the standalone products out there (MTGO excepted, if you can even call it standalone) aren’t meant for the players that go out and play tournaments; they’re for the kitchen-table folk who couldn’t care less if their cards are worth any money so long as playing with the cards is fun. In my opinion, the duel decks and the slivers deck are a lot of fun to play with and would probably be fun to mess around with, and really, that’s the whole point of Magic for a lot of people.
You are correct, the value is not the point. I am simply using it to prove the desirability of certain items because WotC does not release sales numbers for each item.
The point is not $$$ but quality! I can pick up a playset of Sinew Slivers for $3 and replace almost any other cards in the deck. Its ludicrous.
Finally I will not believe that they made a theme deck around Slivers (a tribe only veteran players even know about) and intended random new-comers to throw $35 at it.
Yes, because Wizards love to pay tens of thousands of dollars to produce an overpriced set that the one person you mentioned will love.
Oh, and casual players would really rather go out and pay, $35.00 for one deck instead of buying 6 boosters and playing a draft.
These sets are bad, not because of the resale value, but because of how poorly thought out they are. They don’t even represent the theme that well. (Read my statements above for examples.)
I’ve been playing sliver decks since Tempest and this is the worst one I’ve ever seen. It looks like a deck that was drafted and not one that had access to every sliver possible. As I stated above, they should just give us the tools for the set (Like one of every common and uncommon sliver and a few random rare slivers and then let us decide how to make the decks.)
I agree, that would have been a much better way to do this.
[...] Casual. trackback Yesterday I clicked through twitter to read a post on Gathering Magic entitled Execution Counts Too. The post is about Wizards recent product releases and the disappointment in execution. I think a [...]
Hillarious addition to this conversation:
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/64
25% said NONE OF THESE
25% said PvC which has exactly ZERO info revealed so far
and the rest is almost EXACTLY split between the rest.
I voted for Tactics. It did sound interesting. But I wasn’t thinking about it as a Magic product, though. I was thinking about other video games with Tactics in the title. Those are good regardless of the theme.
[...] on. We here at Gathering Magic have explained the shortcomings of Premium Decks: Slivers here and here. Why then would we be excited about the next release of the Premium series? Say what you want [...]