Back in December when the FNM multipliers were x3, the humiliation of losing almost all the time was counterbalanced but the knowledge that FNM was supposed to be hard, because it was a x3 after all. A large number of pro-players and people who had trouble understanding complex analytics and math came to the conclusion that FNM meant that people could grind (play a lot of games) their way onto the Pro Tour for Magic and that Would Be Bad.
If they had done the math correctly, they would have realized that in order to "grind" your way to anything that high you would still have to win or place almost all of the time to make the pro-tour, which meant that the only people who could manage that were probably still pretty good at the game and maybe deserved to be there.
I was not one of the people who was ever going to make it to pro-tour that way. Oh the pros were whining about pretty much everything that wasn't Snapcaster Mage ( it would take them about 4 months for non-pros to start whining about that and pros to declare that Delver was warping the format). It did not make the game look welcoming or good. It actually made the game's culture look like a bunch of selfish, entitled young men who couldn't read an annual report or do basic math. Reading some of the complaints made me question their advice on actual Magic strategy, if their concepts of business, competition and basic analytics could be so far off, perhaps I shouldn't take their word on things like "best" cards or strategies. I will tell you frankly that it made me scoff at any and all "Jedi Mind Trick" stories.
There were some problems with adjusting to Planeswalker Points. They were additive, not Elo and running the numbers or gaming the system was how people had planned their time and investment for the next year. The status of some kind of "players club" with benefits that put people on a "gravy train" where the pro tours wins paid for themselves for the elite players was in question, although most people seemed to have missed the fact that the pre-existing benefits were being honored and the new system was being worked out but not eliminated.
And when the dust had settled on all that, and the angst und sturm was recieved and listened to: the powers that be in Organized Play and WotC basically gutted any type of non-pro value to Planeswalker Points, promised there would not be another FNM Championship and created the World Cup to address the very real, very serious problems for non-USA countries to participate at elite competitive levels.
When they did that because the poor little pros were scared of the unwashed masses, they also reduced the value of side events and FNMs to things that made sure that they didn't mean a damn thing and no one would compete in them unless there was "EV" ( they could win a box or cash) or they wanted to try some crazy deck that wouldn't win in a real competitive environment.
All of a sudden FNM ( which is hella scary ) was only worth the same amount of points as a pick up draft that could get sanctioned by the store. And that meant there was no "leveled" play for someone who wanted to compete to improve or against their own record. Or work their way up to perhaps get good enough to compete at a GP. You can't tell.
And it was finals week, and I was sleep deprived and it felt like a betrayal of everything that has brought me into Magic that fateful Innistrad Pre-release where it wasn't a simple matter of "I really like this game" but "I want to be GOOD at this game." By reducing FNM which everyone on the Internet had been telling me was the "training ground" for higher level play to meaningless it meant that when I was playing there the play was meaningless as well. And I was angry, and hurt, and surprised that I cared so much.
But I did: ADRIENNE SMASH!
Actually, if you read this regularly you know better, I never use two words when I'm afraid someone might misinterpret what I mean. Adrienne Tweeted. I tweeted to Aaron Forsythe who was honestly confused why it would matter to someone like me that the multiplier was reduced, and didn't understand why Planeswalker Points made a difference. He thought it was about the leveling up.
It's not. Actually the leveling up is cute but meaningless too. But it does connote investment and time. I can compare my lifetime points and the rate at which I add to them to my win/rates. Magic doesn't currently encourage or track in a usable way my performance against my own record, but by switching to the additive system instead of the punitive Elo System they used before, I was really competing against myself and not damaging anyone who was ranked higher than me by beating them while being a "nobody".
Aaron asked me to explain. I realized I was thinking complicated things in a very emotional way and asked him for some time to make sure I was not just gut reacting. That was good. I took the time and found that I was the only one in the group of people that I had brought in that cared about the multiplier, but I found out a lot of other things too.
I was still thinking complicated things. I wrote them up as a business analysis and made a few hypotheses about what was going to happen at our local store. It is an interesting side note, but now, 8 months later I can confirm that all of the people who told me they didn't care about the FNM multiplier kept buying cards and studying the game but haven't been to an FNM since.
I sent Aaron the analysis, I made sure that I identified myself as an outlier, I am not "his" target market. WotC doesn't even have words for my type of competitive player. But I am not alone. Other people had written me through email or facebook when I took a public stand. It made me realize how tiny the population that "represented" Magic culture online was.
I've been agitating for instructional design, teams and coaches, or at least a unified approach to recognizing Magic culture outside the expert level since I've been here in Sept. I've got formal ideas and approaches. I'm willing to explain and defend them. Doing so got Aaron and Helene's (the head of OP) attention enough to invite me to GenCon to speak with them.
Once again - I was surprised that I cared THIS much. I do. I care about this aspect of a hobby I'm half terrified of never mastering THIS much. I looked at my schedule and figured I could clear the time, but I'd have to figure out if I could handle the cost. I cared enough to try and swing it. Maybe we didn't need cable or something.
"No," said Helene on Twitter, "you'll be our guest."
Oh. OK. Thank you. Of course I'll make the time.
I staggered downstairs with the IPad in my hand and sat on the basement stairs and said to the kids:
"I think I just got invited to GenCon by WotC" and the children rightly concerned asked
"Are you OK?"
Actually, I was a little shaky.
The Non-Magic Geek Origin Story:
I still have the Arduin Grimore books that any respectable parent would have taken away from my 12 year old self now that the modern era of hover parenting and pearl clutching is upon us. And this is the boxed set I bought and pretended that I didn't know how to play to catch the attention of my handsome soccer playing next door neighbor, so that he would speak to me ( he was SOOO out of my league). His family had more money than mine, and he earned his allowance and had odd jobs so he could buy the hardcover books, the newly released Player's Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide.
I had a beaten up, probably illegal, xeroxed copy of the expert rules in a binder in my room and enough hand drawn maps and bad epic history with equally bad character sketches to create my own paper recycling center, but he didn't know that. I convinced my grandfather to buy me the box even though he didn't know why. It was just so I could look like I never played before. I've written about it before. I'm not sure what the opposite of a "fake geek girl" is but I pretended I couldn't read a 4 sided die to get him to talk to me. At that point I was running a play by mail campaign with my former classmates.
And frankly, sure he was cute and soccer playing and blond and all but if he liked me, maybe I'd get to see those super expensive hardcover books for AD&D.
I was already dreaming about a world where people met each other and bonded over games. The Greyhawk setting was released the next year. Shawn, my classmate from Brooklyn ( and mad genius) had made all of our worlds before, and a good number of our random charts. But I was far away and oddly I didn't read a lot of fantasy, so we decided that Greyhawk would be mine and she would keep track of the "universal" effects -( it was like Planechase for RPGs, that way our PBM was still connected to our individual games as we grew up and moved to different states and schools).
And we fantasized about meeting up again at GenCon someday. I played in my version of Greyhawk based on that first release for 16 consecutive years, and when I run from scratch instead of subbing as the GM for someone else's game I still run there. The three of us kept in touch with it into our 20s until we lost track of each other. Everynow and then I would get a phone call from Shawn and she'd tell me something that happened that I'd have to incorporate into my game and every now and then something on my world would trigger one of her random event charts and I'd call her. We'd stopped sharing campaign worlds but still shared the universe.
Of course at that time we were poor High School students. When our 20's came around I was the only one still gaming. Shawn had been playing with the science and math geeks who brought her into the "mainstream" D&D world back in Brooklyn, but I went to the next level because of a teaching assistant in Magnet school when I moved to New Jersey in junior high.
GenCon was the gaming nirvana where we imagined you'd get nothing but great gamers, all of the answers to the weird rules and see amazing miniatures and fantastic DMs. As high school wore on an I played with many groups and games it became the land of the mythical RPGA. We'd registered our all-girl gaming group but couldn't get ourselves to any events. I'd become an RPGA judge not too much later.
But I never made it to GenCon. I snuck into gaming rooms at conventions when I was promoting the magazine to break up what was becoming the monotony of panels. Before that I as a younger single person, dressed well and slept in chairs at conventions I didn't have a room in to play with friends at east coast cons because I only had the cash for a badge (starving actress and all). But my whole life it was either lots of time - no money, or lots of money no time.
I was an RPGA judge from Living City forward although a participant long before that. I know I was a judge when Al-Qadim was new - I loved that supplement and I ran it in tournament. But honestly, I've forgotten almost as much as I remember from my years of convention gaming.
I stayed with D&D ( though not monogamously) all the way from those boxes of my childhood until the release of 4. I wasn't willing to learn a whole system and take the judges test, my players in my current social circle were 3.5 grognards and I had dropped out of the competitive gaming and convention circuit. I stopped running a magazine, I stopped writing fiction. I had stopped acting.
I kept playing, it was like the single link to the before and after, but the sad truth is that because of many things that group needed me to be the one to run things and I couldn't. All the imagination and art had shut down. I would have played but I couldn't run.
And that's where I was when Innistrad came along. There were things I had forgotten about myself and there were things that were healing enough to reconnect again. I know there are many stories of people who really let the game become a part of their life when things are shut down because of an injury or a move or something but my story of the game is that I was involved to open things up. I don't know a lot of Magic Origin stories other than the ones I created by teaching the game so I have no idea what the "norm" or the stereotype would be.
Being invited to go to GenCon was like being offered a chance for your inner child to kick your sullen wounded outer adult's ass. Not just dream come true, a dream deferred being put back on the table fully re-hydrated.
Oddly, not for the game you've played all your life, but for the one you just started.
It wasn't just surreal. It was unreal. To be perfectly honest, I figured it was an impulsive move and one possibly forgotten.
But it was real, and it was most likely because of what I had written about and been advocating for the team and coach based approach that I strongly believe Magic is missing and desperately needs.
And they gave me enough time that I was able to ask a lot of people questions about what they'd like to see in a non-pro OP and got a lot more responses and answers.
The Post Invitation
I gained some credibility as a Magic Player when I attended GP Baltimore from the players at my store. They knew at that point I wasn't just dabbling, but I took a little while to let anyone know that I was attending GenCon because I wasn't sure it was real. Pretty much I figured I'd wait until the travel arrangements were made because then I would know it wasn't some kind of impulsive thing that they had perhaps thought better of.
It did make me watch some of the culture more closely than I might have otherwise, I think I was slightly more interested in ProTour than I would have been without the invite, but it's hard to tell.
The bottom line is that I did go and I'm not sure how or when to write ALL the things, but here are some important ones.
- There was a moment where I realized that I was where my 10 year old self had dreamed of being and I cried because I was watching the first game I loved be celebrated for being exactly what it was supposed to be.
- There was a moment where I was asked to possibly take a strong position on the D&D Next design, I'll probably write about that in a curated way on the Dreamtime Blog, and I realized and vocalized that I can't really spread my energy into all the "fights", that if I were going to spend my energy in supporting but also critiquing WotC; D&D was my home, but a non-pro OP and instructional design for Magic was where my passion was. Even the week before GenCon I wouldn't have known that was true. I was also sad that there was a reason for me to have to have a choice to make.
- Talking to Aaron Forsythe made me realize that my thinking on coaching was too limited, that it's not right for me to think it would start at the non-pro level and organically move to elite. He was the best conversation I had that week about the subject, it was real, un-sentimentalized and grounded in both business and competitive reality. I had been told he was gruff, but to be honest my conversation with him was the one that I felt most comfortable and had the most productive exchange of ideas. I would certainly look forward to speaking with him again. He felt like some of my best working partners felt in hashing things out. Of course developing a style of OP that doesn't exist and doesn't cater to the top level is a huge thing. It cannot and should be rushed or haphazard, but I felt like it was something that could happen. I didn't feel head-patted, I did feel heard.
- I didn't get to play competitive Magic at GenCon because I apparently still didn't understand how to do pick-up side events - I need to get someone to come with me at these tournaments I'm obviously missing something that let me know what to join. I obviously don't understand how they work. Apparently I am a lost child who needs a Tournament Buddy.
- I did draft Avacyn Restored and Ice Age after the con was over though - with much better players than me so that was cool
I got to playtest new games, meet seriously cool people, meet up with some older friends, network, learn things. I got to speak with some pro-level players and learned a number of things that happen when you play at the higher level that are making me think strongly about how a non-pro and a pro environment might interact and feed each other.
Here is the Crazy Thing I am Doing
So this entry is here to refer back to, because I think by the nature of this journal I'm going to skip around. This is the origin story. GenCon is possibly a moment of definition. I'm more convinced than ever about the need for teams and coaches but I don't know what would work at an elite level so I'm taking concrete steps and getting trained and educated as a sports coach and learning the Principles of Coaching.
ESW 240 Principles of Coaching
Credits: 3.00
This course is designed for coaches involved with community youth sports programs as well as with school and college athletic teams. The course is based on standards set by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE). Emphasis is placed on the development of a coaching philosophy, relationships with players, staff, administrators, and parents, as well as the management and organization of a successful team/program. The course covers theories and techniques of teaching sports, evaluation techniques, and research related to competitive performance. This course meets General Education Core Goal 5: Information Literacy and Core Goal 10: Exercise and Health Sciences
Here is a thing I know- Little Leagues and non-high school teams have coaches who never expected to be coaches and many who never played sports because otherwise there would be no local teams for their neighborhoods or their kids. There is support to help them be coaches. The ones that are experts are not expected to be the most "emotionally intelligent" coaches and they get support from their organizations that teach them those emotional intelligence tools and appropriate responses responses. The coaches that are good at the people and balance part need to learn how to put together practices and strategize how to build strong teams. Sometimes coaches are moved from one sport to another they never expected to coach. They have to transfer coaching skills to unfamiliar systems and new scoring and skills. They have tools techniques and materials. Magic is not that different from sports.
Magic is not difficult to teach - it is difficult for people who don't teach to teach it. And they're left on their own to teach it.
Strategy has many ways to be learned, but right now only those who are "naturally" good at the game can get to the top. While the Premier Play world is still working on the right balance of competetions that will be fine, but it's creating a homogeneity at the top which will not be good for the game or the players in the long run, and frankly will be boring to watch. With teams and coaches in a non "expected value" environment new methods of practice, drilling and learning will allow different types of competitors to excel and create more diversity of approach. The game is deep but the approaches are narrow.
That can't happen without being able to build a system that allows for it. We don't have to do it from scratch. We can adapt useful and best practices from existing cultures and competitive environments that have to deal with similar issues. But we can't appropriate them, we have to apply and customize them.
I actually, for some reason, care enough to be trying to do that. Money, time and my GPA where my mouth is. I'm encouraged by the unexpected support from some players at the higher level. I promise that what I'm trying to do will be able to create bonds and investment between us as players and not new cliques or subsections, but my goal will be to turn it all over to WotC's OP. There needs to be support for the mid-level, clarity for the entry level and elite support for the premiere play but we should share a cultural center. I'd rather see WotC's OP be that center, but one that works for all of us. The game is 20 years old. The workplace changes Zac Hill described last Friday make me hopeful that we're heading into a sensible future. I'll never be the one to tell WotC they've made a mistake or they're killing Magic.
I'll be the one saying " this is how we can incorporate that into a practice drill" or " we should see if there ought to be a learning module on that.
I described a "perfect world" scenario to Aaron. I didn't realize that when I had one it was a first person - "In my perfect world" until I described it to him. It was about breaking things down and what you would really need for it to work. I was still in denial about the part where I wanted to do it, not just see it or propose it. I believe the technical term for that is denial.
I'm not that good at this game, and doing all this kind of stuff may actually slow down my learning curve and practice time. But all I really want to do is get better at playing Magic, if the tools aren't there for someone like me to do it, I guess I'd better help make them.
Ah competitive journals with their total honesty requirement. I really want to make good stuff. Even in my professional life that's really been my life's goal. I think the people at WotC are dedicated to making good stuff too. Profitable good stuff. I like enabling profit while making good stuff.
I can help make this work.
GenCon as shamanistic journey.
