On the London Mulligan

Zvi says ban it, and the pros I’ve seen talking about it lean towards the ban camp, but there are dissenters like BenS.  People also almost universally like it in limited.  Are they right? Are they highly confused?  What’s really going on?

From the baseline of the Paris mulligan (draw 6, draw 5, etc), on a 6-card keep, the Vancouver mulligan adds scry 1 and the London mulligan adds Loot 1 (discard to bottom of library).  London is clearly better, but plenty of times you’ll scry an extra land away like you would have with a loot, or the top card will be the one you would loot away anyway and there’s no real difference.  Other times you’re stuck with a clearly worse card in hand.  It’s better on 6-card keeps, but it’s not OMFG better.

Except that’s not quite the actual procedure.. on the London, you (effectively) loot, THEN you decide whether or not to keep.  That lets you make much better decisions, seeing all 7 cards instead of just 6 before deciding, and the difference on a 5-card keep is that Vancouver still just adds scry 1, but London adds Loot 2.  That’ adds up to a HUGE difference in starting hand quality.  And you can still go to 4 if your top 7 cards are total ass again.  I’d argue that the London is fine at 6 but goes totally bonkers at 5 and lower.

If you have decks that rely on card quantity more than a couple of specific quality cards, going to 5 cards, even best-5-out-of-7, is still a big punishment.  That’s most limited decks, where a 90th percentile 5 is going to play out like a 40th percentile 7, or something like that depending on archetype.  Barring something absurd like Pack Rat, aggressive mulligans aren’t a strategy.  You mulligan dysfunctional hands, not to find great hands.  London just lets you be a bit more liberal with the “dysfunctional” label in limited, and it’s generally fine there.

For Eternal formats, where lots of decks are trying to do something powerful and plan B is go to the next game, London rewarded all-in-on-plan-A strategies like Tron, Amulet, and now Whirza (which also just got a decent Plan B-roko).  Before rotation, and for most of 2019, it looks to me like Standard was a lot closer to Limited, at least game 1 in the dark.  Aggro decks really don’t want to go to 5 (although they’re better at it than the rest of these).  Esper really doesn’t want to go to 5.  Scapeshift really doesn’t want to go to 5.  Jeskai really doesn’t want to go to 5.  Not that they won’t if their hands are garbage, but their hand quality is far more smoothly distributed compared to a Tron deck’s highly polarized Tron-or-not, nuts-or-garbage and that means keeping more OK hands because the odds of beating it (or beating it by a lot) with fewer cards isn’t as high.  Aggro decks need a density of cheap beaters and usually its other flavor (pump in white, burn in red, Obsession/counters in blue, etc).  Midrange needs lands and 4-5 drops and something to do before that.  Control needs enough answers.

There just aren’t that many good 5-card combinations that cover the bases, even looking at 5-out-of-7, you’re quite reliant on the top of the deck to keep delivering whatever you’re light on.  There wasn’t any way for most of the decks to get powerful nut draws on 5 with any real consistency, even with London, so they couldn’t abuse the 5-card hand advantage because going to 5 really sucked.  Then came Eldraine.. Guess who doesn’t need a 7-card hand to do busted work?

 

 

Innkeeper doesn’t get to 5 that often, but any 5 or 6 with him is better than basically any 6 or 7 without, so the idea still applies.  Hands with these starts are MUCH stronger than hands without, and because of London and OUaT, they can be found with much more regularity.  If you take something like Torbran in mono-R on a 5-carder, WTF are you keeping that doesn’t have to draw near-perfectly to make T4 good?  Same with Embercleave in non-adventure Gruul, you can only keep pieces and hope to draw perfectly.

Oko not only has a self-contained nut draw on 5 cards, its backup of T3 Nissa is a hell of a lot easier to assemble on 5 than, say, a useful Torbran or Embercleave hand or a useful Fires or Reclamation hand.  Furthermore, thanks to OUaT (and Veil for indirectly keeping G1 interaction in check), it can actually assemble and play a great hand on 5 far too often.  Innkeeper can also start going off from a wide range of hands.  The ability to go bananas on a reasonable number of 5-card London hands certainly stretches things compared to where they were with Vancouver.

Maybe that will make for playable (albeit different) Eternal formats with a wide variety of decks trying to nut draw each other, kind of like Modern 1-2 years ago before Faithless Looting really broke out, with enough variance in the pairings lottery and sideboard cards that tier 2 and 3 decks can still put up regular results.  I have my doubts though- Modern was already collapsing away from that, and reducing the fail rates of the most powerful decks certainly doesn’t seem likely to foster diversity from where I sit- and if there is a direct gain, it’ll be something degenerate that’s now consistent enough to play.  Yippee.

It’s possible that some Standards will be okay, but even besides the obvious mistakes in Oko and Veil, this one has some issues.  You can’t ever have a cheap build-around unless it’s trivially dealt with by most of the meta (Innkeeper could be if Shock, Disfigure, Glass Casket, etc were big in the meta), in which case why even bother printing it?  You can’t have functionally more than 4x 1-cost acceleration without polarizing draws to 3-drop-on-turn-2 (or 5+ drop on turn 3) or garbage.  With only one card, and especially one card that might actually die, you can’t deckbuild all-in on it or mulligan to it.  With the 8x + OuAT available now, you can and likely should if you’re in that acceleration market at all.

I don’t trust Wizards to not print broken cheap stuff, and they probably don’t even trust themselves at this point, assuming it’s not actually on purpose, which it likely kind of is.  I barely mentioned postboard games where draws are naturally more polarized (and that polarization is known during mulligans), which leads to more mulligan death spiral games.  Nobody’s freaking out when a draft deck keeps 7 because it keeps plenty of average-ish hands as well as the good ones- you just have to mulligan slightly more aggressively.  When Tron or Oko keeps 7, you know damn well you’re in for something busted because they would have shipped all their mediocre hands and you have to mulligan to a hand that can play.. until we get a deck that can actually bluff keep a reasonable-but-not-broken plan B/C sometimes to get free equity off scared mulligans/fearless non-mulligans.

I wish I had a clean answer, but I don’t.  If all I were worried about were ladder-type things, I’d say you just get one mulligan, and have it be a London plus a scry, or even look at 8 and bottom 2, and you’re stuck with it.  If your hand is nonfunctional, then you just lose super-fast and go to the next game or match, no big deal.  That’s a lot of feels bad on a tournament schedule though where you lost and didn’t even get the illusion of playing a game and you’re doing nothing but moping for the next 30-40 minutes, and a lot of people aren’t even playing Magic in the way pros and grinders do.

To use a slightly crude analogy, they approach Magic like two guys who are too fat to reach their own cocks and agree to lay side-by-side and jerk each other off.  Some like to show off, a few like to watch, but it’s mainly about experiencing their dick, er, deck, doing what it’s built to do, and they can’t just play with themselves.  For those people, the London mulligan is like free Viagra making sure their deck is always ready to perform, so they absolutely love it, and that player type is approximately infinity times more common than the hardcore spikes who can enjoy a good struggle with a semi…functional hand.

For those reasons, I think we’re stuck with it, for better or for worse, and the best we can hope for is that WotC is cognizant of not allowing anything in Standard to do broken things on 5 with any frequency and banning ASAP when something gets through.

Reliever Sequencing, Real or Not?

I read this first article on reliever sequencing, and it seemed like a reasonable enough hypothesis, that batters would do better seeing pitches come from the same place and do worse seeing them come from somewhere else, but the article didn’t discuss the simplest variable that should have a big impact- does it screw batters up to face a lefty after a righty or does it really not matter much at all?  I don’t have their arm slot data, and I don’t know what their exact methodology was, so I just designed my own little study to measure the handedness switch impact.

Using PAs from 2015-18 where the batter is facing a different pitcher than the previous PA in this game (this excludes the first PA in the game for all batters, of course), I noted the handedness of the pitcher, the stance of the batter, and the standard wOBA result of the PA.  To determine the impact of the handedness switch, I compared pairs of data: (RHB vs RHP where the previous pitcher was a LHP) to (RHB vs RHP where the previous pitcher was a RHP), etc, which also controls for platoon effects without having to try to quantify them everywhere.  The raw data is

Table 1

Bats Throws Prev P wOBA N
L L L 0.302 16162
L L R 0.296 54160
L R R 0.329 137190
L R L 0.333 58959
R L L 0.339 19612
R L R 0.337 63733
R R R 0.315 191871
R R L 0.313 82190

which looks fairly minor, and the differences (following same hand – following opposite hand) come out to

Table 2

Bats Throws wOBA Diff SD Harmonic mean of N
L L 0.006 0.0045 24895
L R -0.0046 0.0025 82474
R L 0.002 0.0041 29994
R R 0.002 0.0021 115083
Total Total 0.000000752 252446

which is in the noise range in every bucket and overall no difference between same and opposite hand as the previous pitcher.  Just in case there was miraculously a player-quality effect exactly offsetting a real handedness effect, for each PA in the 8 groups in table 1, I calculated the overall (all 4 years) batter performance against the pitcher’s handedness and the pitcher’s overall performance against batters of that stance, then compared the quality of the group that followed same-handed pitching to the group that followed opposite-handed pitching.

As it turned out there was an effect… quality effects offset some of the observed differential in 3 of the buckets, and now the difference in every individual bucket is less than 1 SD away from 0.000 while the overall effect is still nonexistent.

Table 3

Bats Throws wOBA Diff Q diff Adj Diff SD Harmonic mean of N
L L 0.0057 0.0037 0.0020 0.0045 24895
L R -0.0046 -0.0038 -0.0008 0.0025 82474
R L 0.0018 -0.0022 0.0040 0.0041 29994
R R 0.0016 0.0033 -0.0017 0.0021 115083
Total Total 0 0.0004 -0.0004 252446

Q Diff means that LHP + LHB following a LHP were a combination of better batters/worse pitchers by 3.7 points of wOBA compared to LHP + LHB following a RHP, etc.  So of the observed 5.7 points of wOBA difference, 3.7 of it was expected from player quality and the 2 points left over is the adjusted difference.

I also looked at only the performance against the second pitcher the batter faced in the game using the first pitcher’s handedness, but in that case, following the same-handed pitcher actually LOWERED adjusted performance by 1.7 points of wOBA (third and subsequent pitcher faced was a 1 point benefit for samehandedness), but these are still nothing.  I just don’t see anything here.  If changing pitcher characteristics made a meaningful difference, it would almost have to show up in flipped handedness, and it just doesn’t.

Update:

There was one other obvious thing to check, velocity, and it does show the makings of a real (and potentially somewhat actionable) effect.  Bucketing pitchers into fast (average fastball velocity>94.5, slow <89.5, or medium and doing the same quality/handedness controls as above gave the following:

first reliever starter Quality-adjusted woba SD N
F F 0.319 0.0047 11545
F M 0.311 0.0019 65925
F S 0.306 0.0037 17898
M F 0.318 0.0033 23476
M M 0.321 0.0012 167328
M S 0.320 0.0022 50625
S F 0.321 0.0074 4558
S M 0.318 0.0025 39208
S S 0.330 0.0043 13262

Harder-throwing relievers do better, which isn’t a surprise, but it looks like there’s extra advantage when the starter was especially soft-tossing, and at the other end, slow-throwing relievers are max punished immediately following soft-tossing starters.  This deserves a more in-depth look with more granular tools than aggregate PA wOBA, but two independent groups both showing a >1SD effect in the hypothesized direction is.. something, at least, and an effect size on the order of .2-.3 RA/9 isn’t useless if it holds up.  I’m intrigued again.

How Casting Spells Should Really Work

Warning: extreme MTG nerdery ahead.

Starting with the Magic Origins update bulletin, I’ve observed the rules manager/team trying to work out the process of casting a spell, trying to allow what should be legal (using Bestow when you can’t cast creatures), disallow what shouldn’t be legal (casting Squee out of Ixalan’s Binding), and not twist themselves into a pretzel of incoherent nonsense in the process… which is what happened with the latest update to 601.3e.  Well, actually it started in the previous update with Mystic Forge rulings, but they doubled down on that mistake here and made it really bad.

Assuming (as always) no other relevant cards/effects, and speaking normatively throughout, if you have a Mystic Forge out and a Deathmist Raptor on top, you shouldn’t be able to cast it.  You can’t normally cast the top card of your library.  It’s not an artifact or colorless nonland card, so Mystic Forge shouldn’t let you cast it.  Done.  Full stop.  Nothing lets you cast that object, so you can’t take the game action of starting to cast it.  This shouldn’t even be a question.***

With the new update, Cascade on a 3 mana spell, which reads “… until you exile a nonland card whose converted mana cost is less than this spell’s converted mana cost” still (correctly) doesn’t recognize Beck//Call as a card with CMC<3 because it’s CMC 2+6=8…. while at the same time, Kari Zev’s Expertise, which says “You may cast a card with converted mana cost 2 or less from your hand…” somehow DOESN’T even recognize that it’s an 8 CMC card.  And Brazen Borrower’s Petty Theft can be cast from the graveyard using Wrenn and Six’s emblem. What in the actual fuck.  Eli- C’mon man.

In the explanation, Eli said “if you’re allowed to cast a spell with a certain mana cost or color…” and I don’t know if that’s just a typo or an actual misunderstanding, but Kari Zev’s Expertise says CARD, not SPELL, and it has to SAY card and MEAN card for anything to make any sense, and the failure to properly separate thoughts about cards and thoughts about spells seems to be at the root of all of the issues.

The process of casting a spell can be reduced to

  1. Casting an object
  2. as a spell with certain characteristics/targets/etc
  3. at a particular time

The tricky part is that the properties of the spell are not known at the start of casting, and the allowable times (and other things) depend on those properties.  Furthermore, since the gamestate changes between 1 and 2 when the object goes on the stack, what’s allowed and prohibited can change in the middle of casting (e.g. Squee and Ixalan’s Binding).  None of this is a problem, or even particularly complicated, but the algorithm to process it all has to be correct or it can spit out some fantastic levels of nonsense.

 

Let’s start with part 1, casting an object.  Their original attempt was that you can literally cast anything- a card from your hand, from your opponent’s library, whatever, and it would be dealt with later if it was illegal.  This was.. not a good idea, although it had the seed of one.  Since we don’t know what the spell is going to look like at this point, ignoring spell prohibitions here is correct, but something has to control what cards can be cast.  As it turns out, the correct answer to that is the same as the answer to why you can’t just put your opponent’s entire hand into his graveyard whenever you feel like it- you can only take legal game actions, and that isn’t one.  The path they went down instead, trying to determine what objects can be put on the stack based on what their spells might end up looking like, is effectively a category error.  The beginning of casting is about CARDS, not SPELLS.

There are *no other prohibitions* on what objects can be cast.  The set of legal objects should be defined *constructively*- cards in your hand by rule and whatever other objects effects allow you to cast (cards in the graveyard with Flashback, cards CMC<=2 in hand while resolving Kari Zev’s Expertise, copies from Isochron Scepter, etc).  Combined with the rules on timing and priority, which needs a small (obvious) rewrite to 117.1 to comply, we get the proper result

“A player with priority can cast a castable card” with the set of castable cards defined constructively as above.  There’s no way to cast an object at a random time because the only times casting something is an allowed game action are when you have priority or when something is telling you to during its resolution.  There’s no way to cast a random object because it’s never a legal game action.  This *does* allow you to start casting a sorcery during your opponent’s turn, or even start casting a land from hand, but this is actually fine and no different than starting to cast a spell you can’t choose targets for, which has been CompRules-legal the whole time.  The rest of 117 needs to be updated to “normally”, etc. to fit with this paradigm.

There are no cards that prohibit casting *cards*, so there are no prohibitions to worry about here (there are a couple that prohibit playing lands based on characteristics, but playing lands uses a special action and they don’t change characteristics in the middle of that action, so it’s not a problem).  All affirmative prohibitions (e.g. “Players can’t play creature spells”) affect *spells*, not *cards*, so there’s nothing else to worry about here.

 

As far as dealing with the spell aspect, once the object is on the stack, there’s no reason at all to intervene before the legality check in 601.2e as long as the previous steps can be followed (immediate rewind if you can’t choose legal targets, etc). No other objects move, so no more information can be leaked, and 601.3 is basically completely wrong/useless as it currently exists.  The only necessary checks in 601.2e are

  1. Land spells are illegal to cast (regardless of other types)
  2. If the spell was cast while the player had priority, the casting is illegal unless it is an instant, has flash, or was cast during the player’s main phase when the stack was empty.  (“as though it had flash” gets by this, obviously)
  3. If an effect prohibits the spell’s casting, considering the spell’s properties at this time, the casting is illegal.

That’s it… almost.  Squee is still escaping from Ixalan’s Binding.  A Grafdigger’s Cage variant that functioned while in the graveyard could (conceivably) be successfully cast from the graveyard.  The fix for that is trivial though.  The set of spell prohibitions is locked in before the object is put on the stack, so prohibitions that depend somehow on the to-be-cast object itself still apply, and then that set of prohibitions is what’s checked in 601.2e.  Squee is stuck.  So is my cage.

And that’s it for real.  To summarize:

  1. The player picks a castable CARD (object), either a card in hand or an object an effect allows to be cast, completely ignoring any properties the resulting spell may or may not have, any spell-casting prohibitions, and the possibility/impossibility of completing announcement successfully.
  2. The set of spell-casting prohibitions is locked in.
  3. The object is put on the stack
  4. Announcement proceeds up to 601.2e (if possible, rewind if not)
  5. Legality vs. the prohibitions in step 2 is checked using the spell’s current properties
  6. If legal, proceed to 601.2f. If illegal, rewind.

 

***If you’re wondering how to verify a morph was properly cast with Mystic Forge, sure, it’s ugly, but verifying ANY morph was ever properly cast in any way is ugly, but we survived multiple formats with morph and manifest legal and played at the same time, and this is nothing in comparison.

The Bill James support measure is not objective

As discussed in The Independent Chip Model of Politics and HoF Voting and Bill James and the Trump polarization problem, the system doesn’t work.  There was a twitter exchange where Bill seemed hard-pressed to say anything more profound than the trivial and self-referential “the algorithm prints the output of the algorithm”.  If Bill were right, and the algorithm actually measured any objective value, then it shouldn’t much matter what sets of polls were run as long as there was enough mixing in the poll groups to have a link to everybody (polls of only R candidates and polls of only D candidates don’t say anything about how Rs would do against Ds, etc).

If the ICM distribution in the other post held, it wouldn’t matter if the population were sampled with one poll including everybody, sets of 4-person polls, sets of 3-person polls, sets of 2-person polls where one matchup was polled 100x more than the rest, or anything else.  They would all generate the same support scores.  This is the only distribution with that property.  We know the ICM distribution doesn’t reflect reality, but how much does that make the support scores sampling-method-dependent?  Well…..

As a toy model of the election, start with 4 candidates A/B/C/D who follow the ICM distribution with starting stacks/support in a 4:3:2:1 ratio.  From this, we can calculate the probabilities of each of the 4! order preferences.  For example, ABCD order has a probability of (4/(4+3+2+1)) * (3/(3+2+1)) * (2/(2+1)) = 13.33% and DCBA has a probability of (1/(4+3+2+1)) * (2/(4+3+2)) * (3/(4+3)) = 0.95%.  Since we know everybody’s order preferences, and we make the friendly assumption that we can always sample the population completely and that the preferences never change, we can generate the result of any poll and calculate support scores.  In this example, no matter how we poll, the 4:3:2:1 ratio holds and the support scores (normalized to add up to 10,000) are A: 4,000 B: 3,000 C: 2,000 D: 1,000.

Now let’s throw a wrench in this by adding candidate T who gets 40% in every poll he’s involved in and is everybody’s first or last choice.  For simplicity, and to make a point later, we’ll treat this as a population with 48 order preferences, 24 with T in 1st followed by the ABCD ICM distribution above for 2nd-5th and 24 with the ABCD ICM distribution for 1st-4th followed by T in 5th (P(TABCD) = .4 * 13.33%, P(ABCDT) = .6* 13.33%, etc).  Now we’ll poll this in different ways.  Because we can generate any poll we want, we can poll every possible combination once and see what the support scores are.  The only variable is how many candidates are included in each poll, and that gives the following support scores:

# in polls 5 (1) 4 (5) 3 (10) 2 (10)
T 4000 3340 2513 1429
A 2400 2628 2891 3189
B 1800 2001 2243 2525
C 1200 1351 1551 1813
D 600 681 802 1044
A/ABCD 40 39.4 38.6 37.2
B/ABCD 30 30.0 30.0 29.5
C/ABCD 20 20.3 20.7 21.2
D/ABCD 10 10.2 10.7 12.2

Even with T thrown in, the relative behavior of the ICM-compliant ABCD group stays mostly reasonable regardless of which poll size is used.   T, however, ranges from a commanding first place to a distant 4th place depending on the poll size.  Even without trying to define “support” in a meaningful, non-self-referential way, it’s obvious that claiming that any one of the 4 aggregated support numbers *is* T’s support (and that the other 3 are not) is ludicrous.  The aggregation clearly isn’t measuring anything when it can massively flip 3 ordinal rankings based only on changing poll sizes.

Integrating different factions (that are strongly ICM-noncompliant with each other) into one list doesn’t work at all- the algorithm can spit out a random number, but it’s hugely dependent on procedural choices that shouldn’t make much difference if the methodology actually worked, so any particular output for any particular choice clearly doesn’t mean anything, and there’s almost no point in even calculating or reporting it.

The Independent Chip Model of Politics and HoF Voting

I’d talked about the Bill James presidential polls before, and he’s running a similar set of polls for HoF candidates that have a similar kind of issue.  For whatever reason, this time around I realized that his assumptions are the same as the Independent Chip Model (ICM) for poker tournament equity based on stack sizes.  If you aren’t familiar with that, then assume we have 4 players, A with 40 chips, B with 30, C with 20, and D with 10.  Everything else being equal, A should win 40% of the time.  The ICM goes further than that, and for predicting the probability of second place, uses calculations of the form

Assuming A wins, what are the odds B gets second:  Remove A’s chips, and then B has 30/(30+20+10)=50% of the remaining chips, so B is 50% to get second *assuming A wins*.

If you don’t see the analogy yet, the ICM takes as input the stack sizes, which are identical to the probability of finishing first, and uses the first-place percentages to calculate the results of every poll subset.  Bill James runs polls and uses the (first-place) percentages to calculate every head to head subset.  The ICM assumption that to calculate the result between B/C/D, you just ignore A’s chips, is equivalent to the Bill James assumption that A’s support, if A is not an option, will break evenly among B/C/D based on their poll percentage.

That assumption doesn’t hold in politics, for reasons discussed before, and it doesn’t hold for HoF voting because different people prefer different player types even beyond the roid/no roid dichotomy.  As it stands, in the linked poll, Beltre would almost certainly be the leader in 4th-place rankings with ~70% 4th place votes and an average finishing position near or even above 3.0.  He’d likely get stomped in every head-to-head matchup, lose the overall rating, etc, but by using only first-place%, he looks like the clear second-preferred candidate, which is obviously very, very wrong.

It could have gotten even worse if Bonds didn’t dominate the roid vote.  Let’s say we had a different poll, Beltre 30%, Generic Roidmonster 1 (23.33%), Generic Roidmonster 2 (23.33%), Generic Roidmonster 3 (23.33%) where (if people ranked 1-4) the Roidmonsters were ranked randomly 1-3 or 2-4 depending on whether or not the voter was a never-roider or not.  In this case, each Roidmonster would have an average finishing position of 2.3 (Beltre 3.1) and would win the head-to-head with Beltre 70-30… yet Beltre wins the poll only counting first-place votes.

It’s clear that the ICM/James assumptions are violated, and violated to where they’re nowhere close to reality, in polls like this. In the same poll without Bonds, the Bonds votes would go overwhelmingly to Clemens and A-Rod, even though ICM/James assume a majority would go to Beltre. Aggregating sets of votes is going to keep a lot of the same problems because the vote share of any two people in a poll is (well, can be) strongly dependent upon who else is in the poll.  The ICM/James model are built on the assumption of independence there, but it’s clearly not close to true in HoF voting or in politics.

MPL/Rivals qualification via Arena is rigged super-hard against outsiders compared to qualification via tabletop

WotC announced its long awaited roadmap for competitive play today, and it’s a mix of good and bad IMO.  The tabletop part of the announcement looks pretty good. We don’t have exact details, and there could be (and probably will be) some issues with balancing records needed to qualify for future invites, etc, but the path is clear.  Do well at a PTQ or GP, put up good (but not lottery-ticket-difficulty) results at the regional PTs, and you get to keep playing.  Do better than that and you qualify for the big PT finals. The regional PTs are like a Rivals league for the PT, and it’s a solution that allows more players into that ecosystem (meaning deserving ones are more likely to enter it and rise to the top) while also keeping travel costs more under control.  GPs matter again, and officially partnering with major tournament series (SCG, etc) is a no-brainer and better than the informal discretionary awards that WotC sometimes gave out to their high finishers in the past.

Tabletop

When it comes to qualifying for the next season’s Rivals via tabletop, it’s an advantage to start in the Rivals series as opposed to starting from scratch because Rivals players get automatic invites to all the regional PTs even if they bomb out in the season’s first event.  A random who bombs in the first event has to requalify from scratch, but given the unlikelihood of being a top-12 player anyway with a disaster finish in one of the season’s three events, it’s not that huge a handicap.  The much bigger handicaps are a random having to be qualified for the *first* event in a season to have the best chance of accumulating the requisite point total, as qualifying later than that basically only serves the purpose of trying to do well enough to auto-qualify for the first event of the next season.  Rivals members automatically get to play in the last PT of a season to try to auto-qualify for the first event of the next season.  I don’t see a trivial fix for that if the seasonal nature of MPL/Rivals is taken as a given, but these are handicaps that clearly can and will be overcome regularly.  Plenty of new players will make Rivals via tabletop.

Arena

The Arena qualification system has several serious flaws.  The first is that the tournaments are much smaller, so a random has to hit a lottery-ticket finish in one of two tournaments with a gigantic field (top-16 out of several thousand) to even qualify for an invitational. Compared to the tabletop system, where over 1000 people enter the ecosystem across bunches of tournaments, it’s absurdly more difficult. Second, even if you qualify and do well- or even win- the corresponding invitational, there’s *absolutely no mechanism* for auto-qualifying to the next invitational other than hoping WotC likes you and gives you a discretionary invite, and we already have precedent for the previous PT champion not getting invited.  This is in direct contrast to the tabletop system and doesn’t make any sense to me.

Because of this, starting in Rivals is a GIGANTIC advantage when it comes to qualifying for next season’s Rivals via Arena.  Rivals players *automatically* qualify for either 2 or 3 invitationals (depending on unreleased details), but even a random who qualifies and does well in the first event has to requalify from scratch to play another one or rely on WotC’s generosity.  Somebody might do that, but there are *twelve* spots up for grabs via Arena, and there’s no way in hell there are going to be 12 multi-time qualifiers across three 2x-16-spot-thousands-of-entrants qualifying events.  Rivals players effectively get to play one or two extra point-earning events, which is completely unfair and an advantage that doesn’t exist in tabletop.

That’s not even touching on the discretionary invite system.  I’m not going to bother talking about the 6 discretionary invites to the Rivals series, because I don’t have anything new to add to that conversation, but having extra discretionary invites to the invitationals on top of that is exactly the same problem as in the previous paragraph.  A discretionary invite to a regional PT isn’t that big a deal. Every random with a shot at top-12 is already playing in it.  A discretionary invite to an invitational is literally an extra point-earning event that some other people in contention don’t get to play in.. which is the kind of thing WotC just got roasted for, giving LSV a discretionary invite and an extra point-earning event in the race for Worlds.  This level of thumb on the scale is a *really* bad look for the supposedly merit/performance-based slots.

In conclusion, there needs to be a merit-based way for randoms who qualify for an invitational via Arena to stay qualified for the next invitational, and it has to be realistic, not “win” or “make top 4” or something crazy.  Discretionary invites to invitationals either need to go away completely or to award no points to the Rivals race (or towards Worlds, etc).

 

Be very, very skeptical of Judge Academy

For the non-Magic: the Gathering audience, some tournament judges filed a lawsuit alleging that they should have been classified as employees.  IANAL, and a lot of the issues are beyond the scope of what a non-expert can discuss at all with any confidence, but one aspect- that for-profit companies cannot accept volunteer labor- is one, that by a plain English reading (again, IANAL) they clearly violated thousands of times in the past, including with me personally.  Of course, I was “volunteering” with the implicit understanding that I was going to get “gifted” promotional cards and game product worth well into the hundreds of dollars afterwards, and I did.

That’s shady enough domestically with US citizens, but when US citizens went abroad to “work as a volunteer”, and WotC brought foreigners to the US to “work as volunteers”, they were almost certainly running afoul of various labor laws, and on at least one occasion, a judge made the mistake of saying “work” at the border and despite further explanation still wasn’t allowed in the country.  So when there’s talk about WotC playing fast and loose with legal obligations around labor.. it’s because they clearly did.  And still might, I don’t know.

To avoid these headaches, WotC (purportedly) ditched its judge program and there is a new organization to replace it, Judge Academy.  JA held an AMA on Reddit and while it isn’t worth reading the whole thing, they were incredibly evasive on a large number of questions, said they couldn’t disclose financials (for no actual legal reason), and their responses included some gems like (in response to why they aren’t a non-profit), “We also felt it was import not to compete with organizations like the Red Cross for the charitable support being given by these companies.”  Really.  That happened.  So the whole thing looks.. uh.. shady AF.

Looking into the incentives of all those involved and the methods of leverage that can be exercised makes it look even worse than just a shady money grab. Going down the line of what each party wants:

WotC: be free from the legal headache, still effectively control the judge program, spend as little money as possible

Major tournament organizers: still have a competent potential staff pool without spending any new money to train it, keep judges from organizing to ask for more money

High-level judges: still have paying jobs, improve the pay-to-mentoring/training ratio, not have to spend infinite time on the logistics of certification

Now, JA provides certification testing and foils for $100.  Without the foils, effectively nobody- and certainly not enough people to bother running a business with staff- would pay $100 to certify.  Major tournament organizers would have to pick up the slack and do it at no cost to the trainees.  So JA’s business is *entirely* dependent on WotC providing foils that can be resold for over $100 on the secondary market, and they have *zero* recourse if WotC decides they don’t want to do that anymore, either by stopping the foil supply altogether or intentionally sending them garbage to distribute.  If WotC does, JA disappears instantly, and both sides are well aware of that.  There’s also no chance (for various reasons outside the scope of this post) that JA actually has a contract stipulating a minimum resale value of foils.

So JA *cannot cause trouble for WotC* or WotC just kills it.  JA *cannot disobey WotC* or WotC just kills it.  Despite being legally separate entities, JA is 100% WotC’s butt muppet.  JA has less wiggle room than if they were actually all WotC employees because at least then they’d have some workplace protections, which is kind of ironic given the whole context.

Big TOs will be happy with this for several reasons. The first is that they don’t have to put more of their own resources into maintaining a qualified staff pool around their regions. The second is that because JA is essentially existentially forbidden from causing any trouble, it’s not going to agitate for better working conditions/compensation, and any energy directed at lobbying JA, or any misunderstanding that JA might ever do that is less energy directed at anything that could affect TO bottom line.

There’s not going to be any elected representation for obvious reasons. JA cant cause trouble, so they’re going to vet staff carefully and only work with people who “get it”. And by “get it”, I mean understand that JA is not an organization for judges, it’s an organization that exists to be WotC’s butt muppet, keep big TOs staffed and happy, and get Tim and some high-level judges paid.

There’s no financial transparency- and some combination of incompetence/misrepresentations/blatant lies whenever financials are discussed- because the whole arrangement is shady AF on every level. There’s no way they’re going to go from “shady and opaque” to providing a line by line accounting of their revenue and expenditures that shows everybody exactly how messed up the whole situation is. If JA were an organization for judges, they’d be happy to prove it with financials- and if they were legally registered as one of several types of organizations for judges, they would HAVE TO prove it with financials- but again, they’re not an organization for judges and they’re simply choosing not to be transparent.

When an organization is de facto funded by somebody else (by foils laundered to cash through subscriptions), is incentivized to act in somebody else’s interests, has denied to enter into any obligation to act in your interests, has refused to allow you any ability to determine that it is acting in your interests, and has dodged/obfuscated/misrepresented/outright lied to you repeatedly when these issues are raised, you have to be an absolute fool to trust that it really is going to act in your interests and not somebody else’s.