Always ask yourself what you could do better in Magic

One enormous mistake most Magic players make is to try to justify their plays and try to prove that they are good enough players.

Magic is a very complicated game. When I was playing in my 2nd World Championship I was fairly convinced that the game was solved. I attributed my 8-10 record to bad luck, bad matchups etc. Shortly thereafter I fell off the pro tour circuit. I could not have been more wrong. Magic has proved again and again that it is one of the most complicated games around. It is far from solved.

Always ask yourself what you could have done better in a game of magic. Review your games. Look for your mistakes. Look for your tendencies. Know your mental shortcuts and do not be afraid to reconsider them.

The question you should always be asking yourself i s "How can I improve my game". Never ask "Why did this happen to me?" If there is anything in common among Magic pros that are constantly successful it is their neverending quest to question what they know of the game, listen to other good players and improve, improve, improve.

The new and "improved" standard

Hi Everyone!

If you saw the title and thought you must read this article, you likely already read Mark Rosewaters article on the new release cycle. The short version of that is, 2 set blocks and no core set and 18 month rotations for standard instead of 2 year rotations.

I thought to myself that this means that every 4 months, standard is going to rotate....but what does that mean, it means people will have to buy more cards. Seriously, think about it. Shorter rotation means that casual players who play Friday Night Magic will have a deck that will be good for about a year assuming it uses cards from the old block and the new block and the core set (we're assuming they made the deck right when the first set of a new block came out). The new format, making the same timing assumption, their deck only works for 18 months.

I hate to sound cynical to some readers, but seriously Wizards real purpose is to make more money. Mark Rosewater even said it would be "more work" for R&D that would be met by "additional staff". Sorry to burst everyone's bubble, but companies don't hire new staff because their employees are "working too hard", they hire new employees because they will create more revenue than they cost. I thought that part of the article was Rosewater trying to glaze over the fact that it's all about money, not "creativity" or whatever other crap they are selling as the reason (to be fair, I have said many times that Wizards is run by [people not well educated in the way of business] when it comes to business and it's possible that they are really doing this because "they care". But don't take that one to Vegas).

I'll do my best not to rant about Wizards anymore in this article because I know I have been doing a considerable amount of that lately.

I do however agree that the third set of blocks are usually the worst. Look at Saviors of Kamigawa, Maze's end, Fifth Dawn. I'm not saying they didn't have any good cards, I'm saying that these sets were bad for standard that they didn't add much to Standard (except SOK, worst set since Homelands and it still holds that title today).

What's the good side of all this? It's a big one, all the investors (or traders if you want to nitpick terms) in MTG and MTGO are going to have the opportunity to make even more money. Yay!!

Magic card prices are largely influenced by standard rotation, that's the best way to predict when cards will be high and low, not individual cards, that's a different kind of investing (that you should stay away from). When the sets rotate the prices change.

Here's how you make more money, new blocks will rotate every 6 months. It used to be every year. That's twice as many cycles of price fluctuations. I don't know what you plan to do, but I'm going to make some money on the new standard.

More about the dynamics of a game company like Wizards of the Coast

Hi Everyone!

I'm happy to report that my previous article on Wizards management was very popular and I got a great response so today I'm writing a follow up article. You can read the original article here. 

I did get a couple questions about why that doesn't work for Wizards but other companies promote the best worker to be the supervisor. The short answer is that while they do it, it doesn't work well there either. It's a pretty well known fact that many American businesses are run pretty poorly and one of the major weaknesses is quality management. In fact, several years ago I started saying, Small businesses are small for a reason. I still think this holds true, and the reason is typically poor management.

During my tenure as a college student I worked for many small companies that were trying and trying to grow but the growth plans kept falling apart. I thought then that there's a reason things aren't working and I could pinpoint the cause of failure, but I couldn't identify what was the right action to achieve success. Later on I learned all about the right thing, I suppose I had an advantage going into graduate school because I already knew what not to do. The reason for failure was always, of course, poor leadership.

Enough background on my experiences. What in the world does this have to do with Wizards of the Coast? We know management is important, and we know that Wizards is bad at said management. There is one unique thing about Wizards. I mentioned it earlier this week in my weekly youtube show (that's the link for the entire series if you're interested, episode 8 is the one I am referencing). Wizards being a game company requires exceptionally talented people to design and develop their games. I have a name for this kind of industry. I call it a "superstar industry". I think of it like any professional sport. Think about it. The players (designers at Wizards) get all the fame and win the games (make the cool cards at Wizards) and you hardly ever hear about their coaches (management at Wizards). In truth the coaches of world class athletes are responsible for making them perform their best, that's the same function of a manager. The easiest way to identify a superstar industry is to look at the "worker" and the "managers" and ask, can the manager do this as well as the "worker"? If the answer is no way in hell, it's probably a superstar industry. The relevant part to wizards is that there lies a special talent that people either have or don't have that allows the "worker" to be a "superstar". 

As I said before, I'm really good at identifying what's getting done wrong. The short version of what's wrong is that Wizards is promoting their "superstars" to be in charge of other people, departments, projects, deadlines. They give them this responsibility because they assume that since they're a superstar designer that they will be a superstar manager.....WRONG! People get this crazy idea that if someone is good at one thing they are good at everything. Good management needs to know that their skill at the task does not always (most of the time doesn't) translate to motivating or teaching others to being the best.

The bottom line is that players sometimes make great coaches, but have every pro sports player try to coach anyone else, the majority would be average coaches. The same thing happens with wizards, they hire the Mike Trout of designers to become the coach of the designers and his talent lies in designing, not managing designers.



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Mtg Confidant

Launching the mtgostrat bot

Two days ago the crew behind mtgostrat.com (a strategy site for all things Magic) launched a bot called "mtgostrat".

I am part of that crew and I am one of the people handling the bot. In this blog I will share my experiences as a new botter.

Here is our announcement on the site: http://mtgostrat.com/2013/12/announcing-mtgostrat-card-bot/

mtgostrat.com is starting this bot with a very small inventory: 10.000 cards and 300 tickets. The bot is mainly looking to buy rares and mythics at first. It has way too small a budget to invest in commons and uncommons and will have to stay away from the Pauper format, as its future is uncertain at best (Premier Events fire rarely and the Daily Events are gone - Pauper cards are falling broadly right now).

I have heard that it takes a long time for a bot to turn a profit (maybe even a year?) and it will be interesting to see if the 1000+ fans of the site and YouTube.com/MagicGatheringStrat can make a difference.

If you have any experience of launching a bot with a budget this small, please share

And do please check out "mtgostrat" on Magic Online and sell it some rares and mythics.