In this article, MTGS staff member and Grand Prix veteran Ben Gomes highlights his experiences with the Grand Prix and how the changes to the Premier Play system will affect all of us. Whether you're a Grand Prix veteran yourself or you're just looking to dip your toes in the water, this article explains how things are going to look different for you in the months to come.
On August 2nd, Wizards of the Coast officially announced their changes to the Grand Prix circuit. These changes will have a serious impact on everything from how Grand Prix players compete to how we are able to follow along at home. I hope to break down these changes in a way that fully elucidates the implications they hold for the 2016 season and the Magic community.
Before I start, I think it's important to understand who I am and the perspective I bring to the table. I am a competitive player with a focus on Limited and Legacy. I avoid PTQs and instead prefer to compete in Grand Prix offerings. I traveled a fair amount in 2014 to attend Grand Prix events hosted in Sacramento, Mexico City, Montreal, Atlanta, and Portland. I was fortunate fortunate enough to cash in the majority of those and Top 8 one of them, allowing me to attend Pro Tour Magic 2015 in Portland. While I am at a different point in my life right now, and traveling is not quite as easy for me as it once was, I absolutely loved traveling for this game and I still plan to travel as much as my situation allows. In addition to being a competitive player, I genuinely just love this game and will generally value any opportunity that I get to play.
Before I start, I think it's important to understand who I am and the perspective I bring to the table. I am a competitive player with a focus on Limited and Legacy. I avoid PTQs and instead prefer to compete in Grand Prix offerings. I traveled a fair amount in 2014 to attend Grand Prix events hosted in Sacramento, Mexico City, Montreal, Atlanta, and Portland. I was fortunate fortunate enough to cash in the majority of those and Top 8 one of them, allowing me to attend Pro Tour Magic 2015 in Portland. While I am at a different point in my life right now, and traveling is not quite as easy for me as it once was, I absolutely loved traveling for this game and I still plan to travel as much as my situation allows. In addition to being a competitive player, I genuinely just love this game and will generally value any opportunity that I get to play.
Turning back to the matter at hand, the August 2nd announcement can be found here. I recommend that you take a break to read the announcement and then return. I will also be heavily referencing the Grand Prix announcement from last year, which can be found in two parts: here and here. While there are a lot of things going on in this year's announcement, we will be focusing only on the impact to the Grand Prix circuit—the highest level of competition that is wholly open to the public.
The Grand Prix changes can be broken down as follows:
The Grand Prix changes can be broken down as follows:
- 48 Grand Prix will be held in 2016.
- Grand Prix total prize payouts are increased.
- Grand Prix prize payouts will become more top heavy.
- Players finishing X-2 but not making Top 8 will now receive a travel award for the Pro Tour just like the Top 8 players receive.
- The cut to Day 2 is now X-3 instead of X-2.
- Grand Prix will be grouped by "theme" and multiple will be run at the same time.
- Grand Prix will be specifically scheduled not to make players choose between attending their nation's Regional PTQ and attending a GP in that region.
The Good
Grand Prix payouts will increase and become more top heavy. This is all around a good thing. We do not yet know the specific ways that they are redistributing the prizes, but every aspect of this is good for competitive players. When I made Top 8 at GP Montreal, my payout was $1,000 USD. While not a small sum, I still only came out ahead on my costs for the trip by a small margin. If strong players are going to be able to better sustain the travel costs off of prizes, there will be a greater incentive for these players to travel for the events. This plays well into Wizards' interest in "star building" to create recognizable figures for fans to follow so as to better promote the game. Additionally, the payouts are improving in another subtle way. In addition to Grand Prix paying out more money, the threshold for incrementing payouts higher has dropped. In 2015, Grand Prix payouts ratcheted up to $70,000 when they passed 3,600 players. In 2016, we see the payouts increase to $75,000 at 3,000 players. This means that the payout increase is being magnified even further by having the higher-payout bracket invoked at lower player counts.
Players now make Day 2 at 6-3. While the elitist in me might momentarily complain at the loss of exclusivity, this is all-around a good change. Day 2 drafts in Limited Grand Prix are some of the most fun that one can have in this game, and the more people that can experience it, the better. It's a little awkward that you can start Day 2 without any chance at Top 8 or a Pro Tour invite, but I think the benefit for people just starting their Grand Prix experience is huge. Another beneficial aspect of this change is that it complements the aforementioned change by providing an improvement to the experience of the general player in addition to the top performers. This means that Wizards has actually succeeded in addressing the needs of both groups of Grand Prix competitors, a feat that I think many might initially overlook.
Themed Grand Prix allow for coordinated and blanket promotion. Wizards realized with Modern Masters 2015 Edition that if you have coordinated events with the same features, you can efficiently use your article space to promote them all in the week(s) leading up to the event. I think that this change is a harbinger for a much closer relationship between DailyMTG's article offerings and Premier Play. If there is a weekend of Limited GPs coming up, they can do an entire theme week for Limited, akin to the recent "Tempest" theme week leading up to Tempest Remastered. Tying Premier Play more closely into their promotional structure is a reasonable move that I can see a lot of benefits to. On a personal note, it also makes me hopeful for more meaningful DailyMTG articles and fewer fluff pieces.
All players finishing X-2 will now receive a travel award for the Pro Tour. This remedies a failing that I had never even realized about the 2015 Premier Play changes. The concept that you would still get a Pro Tour invite but lose out on your plane ticket to tiebreakers is insane. I am ecstatic that they have changed this to function as I assume most people originally assumed it did.
The Bad
48 Grand Prix are scheduled for 2016. This represents an 11% drop in Grand Prix offerings from the 2015 season. This is essentially a return to the numbers we had in 2014: 48 GPs are scheduled for 2016, 54 were held/scheduled in 2015, and 46 were held in 2014. While I'm sad to see a drop in Grand Prix, this is perhaps the "bad" change about which I am least concerned. It's a reasonably small dip and we're still a couple GPs over what we saw in 2014. On a tangentially related note, I think that it is disingenuous for their announcement to recombine regions from their 2015 groupings. It's no easier for me to get to a Grand Prix in Chile than it is for me to fly to a Grand Prix in Japan, and their announcement has wrapped all of Central and South America in with North America. As one of the privileged players living in the United States, this actually doesn't affect me too greatly as there are multitudes of Grand Prix within a three-hour flight of me, but it does represent a mental grouping that will really punish South American players who lost one Grand Prix this year from last year—four Grand Prix in Mexico and South America scheduled for 2016, five were held or scheduled in 2015, and they are in danger of losing more if we continue to treat these areas as a single region.
Grand Prix are now grouped by theme. This is the one change which has caused the whole announcement to leave a sour taste in my mouth. I think we need to carefully analyze this one to truly grasp the extent of the implications of this change.
First, this change magnifies the problem of undersupported formats. If you enjoy a given format more than the others, you are seeing considerably less support for what you are interested in. This can be illustrated in a number of ways. First, let us look to Limited and Modern.
Modern has been struggling to get its place in Premier Play, and community backlash is the only thing that has kept it on the Pro Tour. The format kept the same number of Grand Prix as last year, however, so shouldn't the support for a Modern enthusiast be unaffected? In this case, Modern has seen a drastic reduce in effective support. A Modern player would have been able to attend or watch the coverage of a Modern Grand Prix nine times last year. Now, due to the "theme" consolidation, you can at most attend four Modern Grand Prix.
Limited experiences an even more crippling cut in support. Remember that in 2014 alone, I attended four Limited Grand Prix in the first five months of the year. In 2015, Limited saw support equal to that of Standard. Now we see Limited going from frequent and heavy support to just four weekends a year. This is equal to the amount of support it received per quarter last year. That means that my travel itinerary from 2014, where I cut multiple tournaments from my schedule, is now the most that any Limited enthusiast could hope to achieve. This exacerbates the problem that the cuts to the Grand Prix system came wholly from the allocation awarded to Limited, illustrated by Tables 1 and 2:
Table 1 - GP Events
GPs | Limited | Team Limited | Standard | Modern | Legacy | Total |
2015 | 19 | 4 | 19 | 9 | 3 | 54 |
2016 | 11 | 5 | 20 | 9 | 3 | 48 |
Table 2 - GP Weekends
GPs | Limited | Team Limited | Standard | Modern | Legacy | Total |
2015 | 15 | 4 | 17 | 9 | 3 | 48 |
2016 | 4 | 4 | 13 | 4 | 2 | 27 |
Legacy experiences the same cuts, dropping from three Grand Prix in 2015 to only two weekends in 2016. This has the "benefit" of exposing an additional consequence of this change: "stars" of the format have less exposure because they can no longer attend multiple tournaments. Tying this back into the mainstream tournaments, the fledgling professional aspirants normally make their name as a specialist in a specific format before branching out to become more rounded. As an example, my "specialty" is Limited. As these tournaments become condensed, these players do not have the ability to cut their teeth as often in their preferred format. They also do not get their name out there as much. If your name only gets mentioned once every three to six months, it does not matter if you are totally dominant because you will not get the opportunity to play enough for people to know who you are. You also will be less likely to feel like its worth your time try. This is crippling to Wizards' interest in "star building".
Let's look back to how this affects the people not competing at Grand Prix. You are losing out here too. If you like to watch a specific format, you are not able to see this format on a regular basis anymore. You want to watch Modern? Congratulations, it's now only once every three months. Same for Limited. Legacy is back down to only twice a year. Team Limited is the only one that "broke even", so to speak, with an increase of one tournament, but no increase on number of weekends. While Standard did decrease too, its share of GP weekends massively increased, with Standard almost having as many tournament weekend as all other formats combined: 13 Grand Prix weekends for Standard, 14 Grand Prix Weekends for everything else. This means that coverage is only catering to you if your interest is in Standard more than any other formats.
There's an additional impact that I am sure will feel small to some, but is very important to me. "Themed" Grand Prix weekends discourage international travel. This matters to me for two reasons. First, I love seeing and competing against great players from other countries in Grand Prix. When Grand Prix worldwide are synchronized, there is much lower potential for watching and facing players from afar. Second, I have made friends across the globe through my involvement in this game, and I think the cross-pollination created by Grand Prix is important for forging and maintaining these friendships. I also know that I only improved in my Limited game because a Norwegian player pointed out a fundamental weakness that was holding me back. The intangibles of cultural exchange come side by side with the tangible benefits of the joint improvements we experience in the game. With the "theme" grouping of Grand Prix, there's fewer and fewer reasons for Magic players to interact far away from home. The international community and spirit of this game is being damaged by this change.
The "themed" grouping of Grand Prix is serving to further homogenize tournament support's focus on Standard, and it's cutting out the side of the game that brought people together the world over.
In Summation
I think that Wizards has made many improvements for the game with this announcement, but I feel that all of those improvements are outweighed by the few huge negative changes that came with the announcement. We are seeing the diversity of the game cut heavily across the board, and it is functionally impossible to be a competitive player focused on anything other than Standard at this point. Worse, it serves to prevent people from sharing their hobby with people of other backgrounds and cultures.
In Summation
I think that Wizards has made many improvements for the game with this announcement, but I feel that all of those improvements are outweighed by the few huge negative changes that came with the announcement. We are seeing the diversity of the game cut heavily across the board, and it is functionally impossible to be a competitive player focused on anything other than Standard at this point. Worse, it serves to prevent people from sharing their hobby with people of other backgrounds and cultures.
Wizards likely saw the fervor of Modern Masters 2015 Edition Weekend and wanted to capture that for each Grand Prix, but they mistook the internet-wide hype and enthusiasm as being for the coordinated Grand Prix, and not simply for a Modern Masters 2015 Edition Grand Prix. They will indeed get to promote Grand Prix weekends in a coordinated fashion as they did for the Modern Masters 2015 Edition trio, but they are sacrificing so much of what made Magic Premier Play as amazing as it was. I am sad to see so many parts of the Grand Prix circuit that I value being discarded.
All-in-all, this change leaves me pretty confused.