Throwing the Baby in the Bathwater

How Not to Fix Competitive Magic

Italian Magician and exceptional poster Andrea Mengucci, fresh off a trip to New Zealand to call the Spotlight in Aukland, blogged thoughtfully about what to do about Magic’s Organized Play apparatus, the sentiment around which has been universally negative for at least the last decade. I disagree with virtually all of Mengucci’s points and suggestions but it is clear he took a lot of time and effort and in transcribing his thoughts and so I want to engage with it respectfully and in good faith. I unabashedly love Andrea Mengucci; his perspective is far more universal than it should be given how skilled he is at the game, and at the end of the day, he’s in the same boat as the rest of us, wondering why Magic sucks so bad and all the formats are marginally less rewarding to play than they used to be. I’m sympathetic to that. Big ups to him for caring enough about the state of the game he loves to sit down and write all this out.

I wouldn’t label myself as “competitive” (read: I am really bad at Magic) but I have been engaged with the game’s Organized Play systems since 2003 with a couple of brief breaks from 2008–2011 (undergrad) and 2020–2023 (covid), observing from many vantage points. In the interest of credentials I was the content manager at TCGplayer (all verticals, not just Magic) for the better part of a decade. I would never profess to be an expert on how all or any of this shit works but I’ve got some thoughts on this stuff that I haven’t really seen elucidated much elsewhere. I probably wouldn’t be writing this at all but an RC in a couple of weeks means Twitter is temporarily back on my phone (thank you Fireshoes for keeping me abreast of what’s going on in Modern. I wish there was an app that was just Fireshoes and maybe caro) and all the Riftbound glazing over the weekend coupled with the dregs of Twitter posting earnestly about What Wizards Should Do To Save Magic drove me absolutely nuts so here we are.

It should be acknowledged first and foremost that there is perhaps no one less qualified to speak to how to make Magic more accessible to a wide audience than a professional Magic player. Definitionally, their aim is to extract value from the community, not add value to it. It should go without saying that this does not apply to 100% of competitive Magic players that have ever lived, but since you’re likely reading this via a link from Twitter, an app that seems to be designed to piss off its end users so badly that they can’t log off no matter how much they would like to, I have to assume that the majority of folks reading this have had any sense of nuance detection blasted off of them with a blowtorch. But it bears repeating: competitive players aren’t really interested in a reciprocal relationship with Magic. If you disagree with this assertion, then ask yourself: what are a handful of pros transferring skills they developed in Magic to a different game really giving the Riftbound community? What is Riftbound gaining from a smattering of magicians gleefully posting about picking up the game two weeks ago, getting paired into some League of Legends goober in a 10K, and kicking their teeth in? What’s the benefit on Riot’s end?

In the ’90s, Wizards published a magazine devoted entirely to competitive Magic. In fact, their entire goddamn marketing strategy was oriented around showcasing competitive Magic. That’s it! They didn’t keep this going for long into the 2000s — partly because high-speed internet made the overhead of magazines pointless, but also ostensibly because how the hell do you calculate the return on investment of a Pro Tour? I haven’t seen a single post bemoaning the state of Organized Play in 2026 come anywhere close to tackling this question; the closest I’ve seen anyway come is an in-passing acknowledgement that Wizards’ marketing used to be oriented around competitive Magic, so why can’t they just go back?

(ANSWER: because this shit doesn’t fucking work, bozo)

The first section of Mengucci’s blog (title: Bring Back Planeswalker Points) begins by addressing the post-pandemic erosion of 1v1 play at the LGS level, which, to his credit, is an accurate representation of reality. Unfortunately Mengucci doesn’t really get into the why before positing some remedies, which is an important missing step because answering “how did this get fucked up” typically informs “how do we fix it.”

Since Kaladesh (read: 2016), Standard gameplay has been putrid. Putrid. There is no way to quantify that, but it doesn’t really matter since quality of constructed gameplay has never really been a core competency of Magic anyway. Case in point: most people look back on Thragtusk Standard fondly.

So if Standard has effectively never been good, and the few times it was good were on accident, then what happened at the LGS level that sucked so many players out of the ecosystem? It is tempting to blame one of three things: Covid, commander, and the three-year Standard rotation.

There’s a case to be made that Covid actually saved Magic. It was bad enough playing Throne of Eldraine Standard on Arena; could you imagine driving to a second location just to play that fucking shit in paper?! As a refresher, these are the Standard-legal sets that comprised Pandemic Standard:

• Core Set 2020 (Veil of Summer; Field of the Dead; Aether Gust)
• Throne of Eldraine (the whole fucking set)
• Theros Beyond Death (Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath)
• Ikoria (companions; Shark Typhoon; Lukka, Coppercoat Outcast)
• Core Set 2021 (didn’t see anything too offensive here, 1 for 7 not bad!)
• Zendikar Rising (Felidar Retreat; Omnath, Locus of Creation)
• Kaldheim (Alrund’s Epiphany; snow lands; Esika’s Chariot)

That is an atrocious run of sets, and I didn’t even highlight the cards that were ruinous to all the other formats. Keeping players out of LGSes during this stretch could literally only help the game’s long-term viability.

I have a weird relationship with Commander in that I truly cannot stand it. It’s a board game and I don’t like board games. I grew up as an only child playing mostly video games so I never really got a chance to develop any ability to convince anyone to act in their own self-interest within the context of a group project, which Commander basically is. That said, as an employee of TCGplayer for eight years, Commander paid all my bills and kept me fed and clothed so it’s hard to have too much pent-up resentment over it.

I think most competitive players have internalized that the reason competitive Magic is so shaky these days is because Commander cuts into everything. If these people had any curiosity about what appeals to someone other than themselves they’d quickly realize that this isn’t a zero-sum situation. Very few engaged Commander players find any appeal in competitive Magic, mostly because competitive Magic itself is not very appealing. It’s expensive, it’s difficult with no guarantee that your time spent will result in skill accrued, and it often forces you to interface with the worst/dumbest people the playerbase has to offer. Commander might be stealing space on retail shelves, but it isn’t taking anyone’s lunch. Without Commander, Commander players would likely just not play Magic at all.

Which leaves the three-year Standard rotation. Imagine Yu-Gi-Oh — rotations now purely come in the form of bans — but the cards are exponentially more expensive. In terms of quality, nothing on this side of the pandemic is likely to ever reach the depths of Throne of Eldraine Standard, but the current iteration is giving it a run for its money.

A three-year rotation makes Standard more expensive and necessitates more bans. The upside is ostensibly the optics — your cards stay legal longer. Like all optical illusions, this is completely fake. Something I find particularly egregious is the banning of Badgermole Cub after less than a year of existence. They knew it was going to exist alongside Llanowar Elves in Standard; surely there was at least one internal conversation along the lines of “do we believe in Badgermole Cub alongside Llanowar Elves for three years?” only for them to just ban the thing anyway even though it’s $50. Printing a card like Badgermole Cub is reckless; banning it after less than a year is fucked, and their willingness to just pull the trigger on it is probably a good enough reason to stay away from Standard entirely.

The real reason to keep Standard on a three-year rotation has little to nothing to do with optics. In late 2021, when the world was opening back up, I was at some tournament somewhere and was chatting with the store-owner about his weekly schedule of tournaments. I asked him why no Standard and he replied, “Arena offers Standard basically for free and we can’t compete with free.”

Of all the analysis I’ve seen on why stores’ Standard events don’t fire or fire with the bare minimum or whatever, the only other person I’ve witnessed put two and two together is Andrew Cuneo. It’s not a fun thing to bring up because it effectively grinds the conversation to a halt — what are they gonna do, shut down Arena?

If you’re wondering why Modern is actually the competitive tabletop format of choice, it has nothing to do with the lack of rotation or the gameplay. It’s because it’s not on Arena! Tabletop preferences are going to select for the experience you can’t really get anywhere else!

The advent of a three-year rotation for Standard was effectively necessitated by Arena. A format too small would ostensibly be solved really quickly given the sheer number of games played on Arena. If you think Standard’s bad now — and I do — I feel confident that a smaller, perpetually solved format is probably worse.

Anyways, Mengucci’s suggestion that Planeswalker Points should qualify you for anything at all is a really bad incentive that we’ve seen play out before. Not too much to discuss there.

The second section — Bring Back Pro Points — seems cogent enough, especially with so few Spotlight Series so as to not incentivize grinding an absurd amount.

The third section is Change the RCQ System. This is a bit of an awkward one.

I think PTQs were good for like 5% of players. In case you’ve never played in an old-school PTQ, they were 8–9 round tournaments played in shitty, cramped stores where they didn’t have enough seats for everyone and also refused to turn on the air conditioning. My most miserable Magic experiences have been at PTQs and I’m confident most people who have played one can say the same. They are a bad system.

PPTQs attempted to solve this by breaking up PTQs across two tournaments, but ultimately RPTQs were too similar to PTQs to feel too different.

From a bird’s-eye view, RCs are indistinguishable from GPs. RCQs are alright, but being an LGS-sanctioned 1v1 event in 2026 comes with all the issues associated with that. Standard events struggle to get enough players to fire, Limited events come with too many overhead costs (think in terms of judging) to really be feasible, Companion kinda sucks (although! As of 2026 they finally got the amount of swiss rounds correct for an RCQ with between nine and 16 players!). Basically, a competitive system where qualifying is effectively free if you put forth any modicum of effort and judges aren’t required to run tournaments make the whole experience feel pretty cheap.

RCs are effectively GPs. You could compare them to SCG Invitationals from the Before Times , only RCs aren’t mixed format, they get >1000 players on average, and they award PT qualifications down to Top 32 (at least in the US). Those are the differences. The similarities are that they are invitation-only, trivial to qualify for, and, despite a brief dalliance with Dreamhack, Star City Games (for my money, the finest TO that has ever existed full stop) runs the show.

So, at least in the US, the system is: an FNM-level tournament that TOs can run up to three times a season qualifies you for a Grand Prix that awards Pro Tour invites down to Top 32. This unfortunately compounds the issue of contemporary Magic being really, really expensive.

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Ostensibly, if you have the means to keep up with Standard, Pioneer, and Modern, flying to two RCs per season should be a drop in the bucket. In practice, though, what ends up happening is that some kid makes it to the finals of the RCQ, asks where the RC is, and if the distance necessitates flying, they sell the slot. I think I‘m generally aligned with keeping the Pro Tour as exclusive as it is, but that being said I can’t really think of a feeder system that’s cheap and scales internationally. That feels like a really tough problem to solve, especially considering all the known (and unknown) externalities.

Mengucci’s assertion that regional championships should have an entry fee (they already do in Canada) in order to “reduce the upfront cost of running the RCQ for stores” strikes me as odd. The idea of any corporation letting any sort of profit margin trickle down to the consumer in 2026 is really funny to me. Again, I agree with most of not all of Mengucci’s stated goals — my issues with his blog really only lie in his methodology in solving them.

For example, I agree that coverage legitimizes competitive Magic, but again — how do you quantify the value of that? This is important because the overhead of casting a tournament at a level of quality high enough to not just get made fun of is significant. Frankly, it’s hard to look at the diminished number of yearly GPs (I know they’re called Spotlights. I’m going to just keep calling them GPs) post-covid and tell yourself that each discrete event is profitable. If they were, they’d run as many as they could, right?

I’m not positive GPs are unprofitable post-covid. I think they probably are, but that doesn’t even really matter as long as GPs align with topline goals.

Starting at 39 minutes in, PT play-by-play announcer Marshall Sutcliffe and PT Hall of Famer Luis Scott-Vargas parlay a discussion about how disappointing recent expansions like Spider-Man and The Hobbit have been for limited play into insightful analysis of how Wizards’ parent company, Hasbro, has perhaps had more of a deliberate hand in recent years in extracting maximum value out of their only profitable subsidiary. This is all to say that the likely situation over at Wizards is that they’re unable to invest as many resources as they’d like into long-term branding plays (such as, to pull a random example out of a hat, establishing Magic as a legitimate competitive endeavor to aspire to in addition to its current identity to outsiders as “antiquated TCG from the ‘90s”) primarily because Hasbro leans so heavily on Wizards’ quarter-to-quarter profits to maintain portfolio solvency that they’re almost certainly dictating a lot of where Wizards’ resources are allocated. So any appeals to Wizards to do anything that would eschew short-term profits for long-term viability aren’t even going to fall on deaf ears — they are going to fall on ears attached to bodies trapped in hamster wheels, effectively rendering this blog, Mengucci’s blog, and any future posts about what Wizards should or shouldn’t do with Organized Play more or less pointless. Whoops!

That being said, Mengucci goes on to discuss formats, and the ramifications of what he proposes impact LGSes in ways I don’t think he fully intended, so they’re worth discussing.

Mengucci establishes Commander as a community-oriented board game that leverages Magic’s game engine to foster cooperation and good vibes among its participants. At its best, Commander is certainly this. But he ultimately uses the topic of Commander as a segue: “How do we turn Commander players into 1v1 players?” The truth is that taking too heavy a hand in doing that is likely ill-advised. I don’t think anyone assumes that Commander players are totally unaware that 1v1 Magic exists; if you search “magic the gathering” on YouTube, I imagine those search results would contain the latest Tolarian Community College offering and a smattering of Commander gameplay videos, but also some Pro Tour coverage from the mid-to-late 2010s (back before they shot matches from a neutral view—these days, gameplay coverage at the PT level objectively looks like shit. But I digress). This is all to say that if a Commander player wanted to play 1v1 Magic, they would. Commander is not necessarily an on-ramp to 1v1 or even competitive play. It’s its own thing. This is fine!

Mengucci segues this into the idea of Pauper as an on-ramp to competitive Magic. Most blogs I’ve written don’t hold up particularly well but this one does. It was originally written in 2017, so all the deck embeds are broken and the cards discussed are mostly irrelevant, but the bold points are the hold up.

The conceit of Pauper—a quaint, all-commons format—is definitely appealing, but once again, the optics are the inverse of reality.

The only thing Pauper’s premise actually delivers on is that the decks are cheap to buy (more on that in a bit). The gameplay is pretty degenerate. There are some busted cards legal in Pauper. Brainstorm, Counterspell, Crop Rotation, Thoughtcast, all the artifact lands, Lotus Petal, Simian Spirit Guide, Merchant Scroll—the list goes on and on. The major difference between 2017 and now, however, are the amount of supplementary-only cards that have been artificially (I say artificially since rarities in these sets are effectively fake) injected into Pauper. These cards get banned often but there are too many of them to ban so a lot of them are still just out there chilling, like Sneaky Snacker and Maelstrom Colossus. Sneaky Snacker is particularly egregious because it would’ve never been a common in a normal set.

There’s no good way to stop the firehose of fake cards. What are they gonna do — stop making Commander precons? — which puts the format in a perpetual state of precarity that would be exacerbated if Pauper suddenly became a format propped up by Organized Play, which Mengucci recommends, in part because the decks are so cheap.

Let’s talk about Kaladesh for a second. Kaladesh didn’t introduce Masterpieces — Battle for Zendikar did — but Kaladesh laid bare the ramifications of how they were executed. If you played Standard around that time, you might remember the singles from that set being pretty cheap. Each fastland (Spirebluff Canal, et al.) retailed for between $2 and $3, which was surprising given this was the first time they were printed. None of the mythic Gearhulks ever cleared more than $10, and the blue and green ones were quite good. Chandra, Torch of Defiance, the set’s chase mythic, didn’t clear $20 till after Kaladesh was out of print. The relatively low pricetag on these cards wasn’t because they weren’t tournament viable—on the contrary, Kaladesh was likely the strongest set in Standard the entire time it was legal. Most likely, though, you didn’t notice how low the prices on those tournament singles were. If you did notice and were a little savvy, perhaps you chalked it up to Kaladesh having such a high density of strong cards that they naturally pushed each other’s values down. That analysis is tempting to subscribe to but ultimately incomplete. Kaladesh cards were cheap because of Masterpieces.

I don’t have an economics degree, so this analysis might be flawed, but I’m confident enough in the broad strokes: traditionally, the price of card was dictated by the $MSRP of a sealed booster box against how likely you are to open that card in a booster box (this is why mythics are more expensive than rares, which are more expensive than commons, yadda yadda yadda). Masterpieces — the precursor to what we know now as a “bonus sheet,” containing ultra-premium treatments of cards like Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mox Opal, etc.—added substantially to the expected value of a sealed booster box. Drafters gleefully opened them and stores glefully took them in at buylist prices — only for them to never move. Meanwhile, the Kaladesh cards that did move — all the new constructed staples — sold at deflated prices.

If you’ve worked at an LGS then you’re likely aware of the margins they live on. They’re razor-thin, to the point where it’s honestly a little nuts to open your own. Sets like Kaladesh and Aether Revolt, which adhered to the same Masterpiece model as Kaladesh did, were ruinous for stores. When people hop on Twitter and blast the bugle for more reprints, they do so without an understanding of how this shit actually works. I don’t profess to understand it thoroughly myself, but in this instance, a little curiosity about the externalities is more than sufficient.

These days, all the alternate treatments and bonus sheets, many of which contain cards that are not necessarily valuable, serve primarily to fudge the math on the expected value of a sealed booster box. If people like those printings, that’s great too. Plenty of sets are still dense with powerful mythics and rares (post-Covid sets that satisfy this criteria, off the top of my head: Neon Dynasty, Duskmourn, Bloomburrow, Avatar, Lorwyn Eclipsed, Secrets of Strixhaven, Dragonstorm), but for each of those, there are sets that have, like, a couple good cards and the rest are forgettable trash (again, off the top of my head: Edge of Eternities, Aetherdrift, Phyrexia). Some of these sets are better for stores than others but none are ruinous (except Spider-Man LOL), which brings us to the third section of Mengucci’s blog, titled “Promos.”

It is really hard to answer this question with much confidence without intimate knowledge of Magic finances and/or a degree in bizdev or some shit. That being said, the promos given out at RCQs are a joke; I am very confident there is lots of room for improvement there. A couple years back I let my friend David, who mostly plays online, borrow Nadu for an RCQ. Along with the deck, I gave him a stack of 20–30 promo Springleaf Drums to use as Springheart Nantuko tokens, which delights me to no end.

Mengucci’s incredulity over the quality of RCQ promos is earned. A list of all RCQ Top 8 promos, in order of season:

• Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx (the only good one)
• Selfless Spirit
• Thing in the Ice
• Eldritch Evolution
• Death’s Shadow
• Goblin Guide
• Supreme Verdict
• Force of Despair
• Fauna Shaman
• Laughing Jasper Flint
• Manifold Mouse

Positioning a foil Laughing Jasper Flint as a congratulations for winning a tournament is particularly hilarious. I understand not wanting to mess with the value of stores’ backstocks, but this conservative an approach is bizarre, especially when taken in context to other recent Play Design decisions (unbanning Mox Opal and Violent Outburst are two of the lowest-value bets I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of action at the 1/2 NLHE table at Turning Stone). Mengucci openly doesn’t understand who would be left holding the short end of the stick if a card like Quantum Riddler were made into an RCQ promo, and while I’m less confident than him that it would be an effectively free move, there is a lot of wiggle room between Quantum Riddler and Manifold Mouse.

Fucking Manifold Mouse. Making Manifold Mouse an RCQ promo after banning Heartfire Hero, Monstrous Rage, and Screaming Nemesis is a legitimate slap in the face. That’s some cold-ass bullshit right there.

Also, banning Screaming Nemesis is the dumbest shit, just like Rampaging Ferocidon before it. If the textbox “opponents can’t gain life” is so scary to you then stop putting it on cards, jackasses.

I can’t be too mad at Laughing Jasper Flint though. That one hits the elusive threshold of “so far beyond offensive that it horseshoes back to being awesome.” That shit is so funny to me.

At this point, I go to RCQs to get out of the house, look at my cards, play some games of varying degrees of intensity, and hang out with some like-minded homies. I go to RCs because they are effectively fishing trips with the boys where we’re also collectively trying to solve the same problem, which is still really fun. Again, Magic’s core competency has never been the gameplay of its constructed formats.

The steady quality fading of Organized Play has in fact been in full effect since the Obama administration. All you can do as an enthusiast of competitive Magic is know what you’re about and try and have some fun out there. Hoping for better is noble , but in the absence of complete information, being overly prescriptive about what you would do to make things better is where madness lies.