In General: Magic Online BS

Hello and welcome back to In General. On Sunday's here at TGZ, I take over to talk about anything an everything relating to Magic the Gathering. This week I am taking a page out of somebody else's playbook. Actually, the same page out of a few different books.

I have mentioned on the blog before that I am a fan of Matt Sperling's article series, "Sperling's Sick of It." These are short text articles that discuss current events and how they have gotten underneath the author's skin. You can check out some of his stuff HERE.

This isn't a new or unique concept. Many other internet content creators that I follow have been using this idea for years. Ex: Brady Haran's "Paper Cut", Cinemassacre's "You Know What's Bullshit". In the old days this was just called an editorial. You submitted an article to your local print media publication that detailed your opinion on a subject. Mostly vapid nonsense, zero objective information or critical value, but often amusing.

Today I am going to reappropriate this idea for my own purposes (as if I haven't ever done this before). Here are a few things about Magic Online that I think are BS:

You Can't Build Your Own Cube

Simply put: why not? When the new MTGO client released I was absolutely sure that this feature was going to be a part of it. It is in such high demand that Magic redditors are practically beating down Wizard's door. Why can we not draft from our own cards? Why can we not make our own Cube to play with our friends? Why are you still forcing us to play the Magic Online Cube/Legacy Cube/Holiday Cube on your schedule? We should definitely be able to do that whenever we want by now. What harm could this possibly do?

Multiplayer Still Sucks

It kind of sucks in real life too, but it is much worse online. If you have tried to play Commander online lately, you will know what I am talking about. It is a painful experience that feels like it takes a decade just to finish a game. Most of the time you won't even get to finish one because players will just leave the game when they get board or when they have to go to work on Monday morning. It takes that long. We take for granted all of the little shortcuts that we get to use in real life. Sure shuffling is a pain, but it doesn't matter how long you shuffle if someone can just go ahead and take their turn while you do it.

There is also the issue of matchmaking. It is pretty tough to even get enough players to start a game. People are so repulsed by the experience that they don't even want to play multiplayer on MTGO.

Final thought: why is there not support for other multiplayer formats like Emperor, Star, Windmill, etc.?

In Fact...

Why can't you just make your own format on MTGO? Instead of waiting around for the platform's developer to add support for things like Tiny Leaders or Winston Draft, why doesn't Wizards just make the whole thing open source and let the community add the features they want. At the very least there could be an editing tool that let's you create custom parameters for a match. And I mean one that isn't terrible.

Card Availability

Not every card in the game is actually available on MTGO. Vintage Masters was a huge step towards fixing this problem, but it didn't get all the way there. The example that is bothering me the most right now is Custodi Squire from Conspiracy. This card would be super sweet in Pauper and I would like to play with it. Thanks.











No Voice Chat

I play a lot of games on Steam. Like many people I greatly enjoy the ability to use Valve's voice-over-ip servers free of charge. The ability to use live voice chat in games would really enhance the user experience. It would make it easier to playtest certain decks or formats. It would let you have a conversation with your friends while you play.

Now I understand that there would be some concerns about the vulgarity of language and abuse. I don't want MTGO turning into a Call of Duty match. But there is already a system in place to report your opponent for poor behavior or sportsmanship. Also, and this is the best part, you can just turn it off if you don't want to interact with your opponents. How hard is that?

Double points if they can get the MTGO client to include both voice chat and video chat. How cool would it be to be Skyping your mates and playing a game of Magic with them all in the same client? Pretty dang cool.

Well I am glad that I got that off my chest. Sometimes it just feels good to complain a bit, you know? It also feels great to ask rhetorical questions to an internet word processing suite. Life is good. I'll be back early this coming week as we begin full coverage of the new set, Dragons of Tarkir! See you then, Zoners!

-GG