Hi Everyone!
Today, I want to look away from the MTGO economy and look at
Wizards as a company. This article is in response to the very popular article
from last weekend posted on this blog. I have a couple areas that I have a
great deal of expertise in. One of those areas is management.
I have hinted at it before when I wrote about the
flip-flopping regarding Vintage Masters on demand drafts. It appears to me that
Wizards management is awful. Click here to read comments about Wizards from current and former employees.
Based on everything I knew before last week about Wizards, I
confidently said, they make a good product but could be run more effectively. I
have been reading articles by Mark Rosewater for at least 10 years, every
single one. When I read that much from a certain person, I tend to be able to
pick up on what they were or are feeling when they write, even if they aren’t
the next iconic writer. Mark Rosewater wrote several times about how Wizards
had made a mistake or made a poor decision. Mostly it was about a single card
design, and it’s reasonable to expect that a card would slip through the cracks
and make it to print (the article on skullclamp comes to mind released right
after the ban announcement was made).
Sometimes it was about entire sets or blocks. In another
article he talked about how Kamigawa block was a success (I didn’t believe he
really felt that way but when I realized he did, but that was worse than
thinking he was lying to the readers). He talked about how Kamigawa was rich
with flavor but the power level was low (he didn’t mention it but the mechanics
were terrible too), and how Homelands was weak with flavor and had a low power
level.
I didn’t make any assumptions purely off that article, but
that was the article was when all my ideas came together. I realized that
Wizards didn’t completely get it. If I were in charge a bunch of people would
have gotten fired over Kamigawa block. It was so bad, I actually quit playing
magic for a number of years because of it. Let’s look at a Magic set like a
car. Let’s say there are two main factors to each, Magic has a flavor element
and an element I’m going to call playability and it includes quality of
mechanics and power level. Now lets look at the two main things a car needs to
do for us. It needs to go forward when we push the gas pedal, and slow down
when we push the brake pedal. Wizards calling Kamigawa anything other than a
complete 100% failure is like the car we’re testing accelerating to 100 MPH and
crashing into a wall at the end of the test track, then reporting, that our car
was awesome, it went really fast, it didn’t stop in time, but it went fast. I
have to point out that there is quality control that comes between the design
and prototype of the car. All this was supposed to have been done between the
design and the production of the prototype car.
I don’t mean to ramble but if the product doesn’t work,
regardless of one or some parts working well, the product didn’t work and as a result
is a failure.That's not to say the parts can't be used in other applications, but the project as a whole was a failure.
I read the reviews on glassdoor.com about wizards. When
everyone who leaves the company says it’s terrible and the only people who say
it’s great are the people who still work there, there’s something seriously
wrong. I have left jobs and don’t think it was a bad job, I just outgrew the
position.
I think that the reviews online about Wizards as a company
are interesting because it’s what I have always said about Wizards (confirmed
by Mark Rosewater articles). Wizards is run by a bunch of math nerds with Ph.D.’s
in math. That’s great for the designers to be nerds, but the nerds need to stay
out of the business operations of the company. Most of the complaints are
regarding the software development and that sales and marketing have more power
than they should. It makes sense that marketing should say, “I want it to be
like this so the final product will match our brand image”. But Sales and
Marketing needs to stick to what they know and let the coders do the coding.
Go ahead and shoot me an email at mtgconfidant@gmail.com or friend me on
facebook or follow me and let me know if you want to hear more about my
thoughts on these kinds of issues!
Thanks for reading!
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