Is "Magic: The Gathering" pay-to-win?

The Game Room
1

This brief question was inspired by a thread in GQ about valuable baseball cards, but I decided to outsource it to this board rather than raise the question in the other thread.

Apparently, in collectible card games such as “Magic: The Gathering”, there are cards which are particularly sought after due to their rarity and their particular strength in gameplay; Black Lotus was the example mentioned in that other thread, and I googled around a little to see what kind of money such cards fetch among collectors.

That made me wonder whether it’s fair to describe such games as “pay-to-win”. As you are probably aware, that term, in online browser games, means a business model whereby playing the game as such is free, but where it is optional to purchase additional equipment (in exchange for real-world money) that will give you a decisive advantage over non-paying players. In online gaming, that business model is widey frowned upon, but I haven’t heard such accusations against M:TG, even though what I’ve read about the Black Lotus very much sounds like it.

2

Not in a long time. There are different types of tournaments and the rules can be complex, but the short version is that cards like the Black Lotus are banned from most tournaments. Wizards of the Coast, who make M:TG, came up with a business model that deprecates out-of-print cards rapidly in order to drive new card sales. Most tournaments are played with the most current in-print sets and expansions.

In that sense it certainly is “pay to play” because you need to keep buying new cards to compete, but a tournament winning deck is probably going to be on the order of a couple hundred bucks on the open market.

You can still play the game like it was originally intended, by opening packs with your friends and getting excited about getting one big card that you would hope you drew at the right time, but tournaments were never like that – players build out their tournament decks with fake cards and when they find one that works, they go about acquiring the cards they need at street values. I think this is what you pictured, the difference being that nobody needs to buy 5 figure cards to be competitive.

3

I think such a game could be called “pay for an advantage”.

While Black Lotus is gone, every set there’s always some card that’s more powerful than another card for it’s mana cost. You typically gain lands, which spawn one point of mana each, pretty fast, but in your first turn you’re unlikely to have more than one mana to spend. If you want to play a 5 mana card, no matter how powerful, the game might be over before you have enough lands to cast it. It’s still an advantage if the game lasts long enough to get one of these powerful cards (and it doesn’t get countered, etc, and of course a counter spell still costs money).

I believe WotC has moved away, to some extent, of simply making the best cards cost more money. I still play on occasion (prior to the pandemic) but I just borrow a friend’s deck, so I don’t know how the modern Magic economy works. “Back in the day” when I played more actively, I was regularly beaten in games by people with better decks; they had allowances and so could afford the better cards.

There was also the issue of booster packs. I don’t know how those are bought now but back when I played a lot it was a bit like playing the lottery (though with better odds, since you were guaranteed to get something). The more booster packs you bought, the more likely you were to get a good, rare card. IIRC you could buy “better” booster packs, not just more, for more money, of course.

Most games are just played for fun. You only play for money in tournaments. Any tournament player probably has a decent budget.

4

Yes absolutely. Definitely in comparison to other games that are considered pay to win there is a much higher cost of entry to have a competitive deck. Several top modern decks cost over $1000 in paper magic.

5

It really depends on who you play with. For casual play, my friends and I used to write the names of cards on lands. Actually possessing the cards is only required if everyone agrees that possessing the cards is required.

For tournaments actually possessing the cards is required, of course, but nobody is opening booster packs until they put together the deck they need. They just buy the deck (after carefully planning it out, of course). That makes it more expensive than, say, competing in a chess tournament, but less expensive than competing in an auto race.

6

If there is a separate cost tier for playing casually versus trying to build the best deck in a given format, doesn’t that prove the point that it’s pay to win?

7

I suppose it depends on how you define “pay to win.”

Most people define it as any game where you can exchange dollars for in-game non-cosmetic benefits at a rate that is either impractical (compared to grinding or general progress) or impossible (if the benefits are exclusive) for players who are not exchanging dollars. Digital CCGs are almost always pay to win because “freemium” players can theoretically grind their way to all the cards they want, but not at any kind of reasonable time commitment. That’s why Hearthstone’s battlegrounds and arena modes are so popular - they’re level playing fields.

But a physical CCG doesn’t have a “freemium” option. Every single card has a real-world value that somebody had to pay actual dollars for. There’s no way to get new cards without spending money, and the CCG business model has been around a lot longer than microtransaction-based PTW models.

So the case of physical CCGs it’s probably fair to think of the cards as equipment. Equipment costs are always higher at professional tiers than they are at casual levels of play. Think of how expensive golf clubs and guitars can get compared to what a beginner would buy. And like golf clubs, where nobody is stopping you from entering a tournament using a bunch of sticks with rocks hot-glued to the end, nobody is stopping you from entering a M:TG tournament with a budget deck.

8

Good analogy with golf - you can play with your friends at the local course sharing a cheap set of clubs you picked up on Craigslist and still have fun, but if you enter a tournament you’ll probably have needed to plunk down at least a few hundred on a set of clubs of your own. And if you keep competing in tournaments, you’ll probably need to do that every few years, as club technology progresses.

BUT – you’re still competing with the best of the best on skill. You can’t spend $40k on golf clubs and dominate at a tournament. Likewise with M:TG, the best decks don’t really cost that much and once you’ve spent a few hundred you’re on equal footing with the best players. Unless you’re competing in unlimited where cards like the Black Lotus are still around, in which case yes, it’s totally pay to play. But very few people play in those tournaments.

The key difference is that M:TG cards become obsolete over time because WotC declares them to be, not because new cards are better. So the equipment cost is recurring and there’s a sole supplier.

9

Certain formats can be but they’re not the most popular or supported formats. The pre-Covid “Friday Night Magic” sponsored events were restricted to the most recent card sets so there were no hundred or thousand(s) dollar card in play. You still had people looking up whatever the hot new deck was and buying the cards directly versus making decks out of their collection but I felt competitive enough making my decks organically. You have Draft events where you buy a set number of boosters and build your deck out of the cards at the table. You’re paying to enter but no one gets a competitive advantage by adding more money to the event. You have formats like Modern or Unlimited where it’s definitely pay to win and select out of print cards give you a strong advantage but those events aren’t the bread and butter of Magic: the Gathering.

10

That’s an interesting aspect, I wasn’t aware of that. So the manufacturer of the cards periodically annuls old cards? I suppose that announcement is only observed in sanctioned tournament play - in casual play among friends, who’s to stop them fom using a card that WotC has declared obsolete?

11

Theoretically, nothing, other than house rules and friendly agreements.

Back when I played Magic casually with friends (two decades ago, now), we usually had a house rule of playing with whatever WotC’s current “restricted” format was, which, as I remember it back then, was the current “base set,” and something like the previous two years’ worth of expansions.

12

Your friends getting bored and not playing with you :wink:

In my casual experience, most players still use most of the League rules such as a maximum of four of the same card per deck. Many times, people adhere to the current “legal” sets for the most common play types since it’s nice to know how your deck would perform in official play. But you also have a lot of people playing “kitchen table” Magic where you don’t sweat rank & file cards being out of rotation while keeping with the overall deck building guidelines. These people aren’t using $15,000 cards though. More like some “Common” cards that they just didn’t want to pay into chasing the newest card sets just for casual friendly play.

13

I’ll also note that there are several aspects to winning at MtG, and the first one below is really the only one which is driven by “pay to win”:

  • Having a good selection of effective cards. Some cards (typically, the “common” ones in WotC’s distribution within a pack) are, indeed, less powerful than others, but it’s generally not necessary to pay a fortune to assemble a good deck.
  • Deck design. Even the more powerful cards only really work well when used in a deck that takes advantage of what they can do. There are many different “themes” or strategies to designing a winning deck, and a number of different paths to victory in a game, and not every card works well in any particular type of deck. Those strategies ebb and flow in popularity depending on the current cards, as well as what proves to be effective at countering a particular type of deck.
  • Game play strategy. You need to know when to play certain cards for their maximum effect, and when to hold something in reserve to counter your opponent.
14

Exactly. To use an example of a video game I’m familiar with that has a pretty large “pay-to-win” component, there’s War Thunder. It’s a free to play game, but it has two different sorts of in-game currencies- whatever the normal silver ones are called, and the “golden eagles”, as well as research points. The silver ones and research points are earned in-game through playing and achieving various feats, while the “golden eagles” are paid for with real-world money.

So while it might take a LOT of playing to earn enough research and/or silver coins to buy a new tank, you can just spend golden eagles to buy one outright. So in the final analysis, you could spend $75 dollars and have better stuff on day 1 than someone who’s played it nightly for a month or two. That’s the classic “pay-to-win” model- someone willing to pay the money can have better stuff, or better stuff considerably faster than people unwilling to spend the cash.

I wouldn’t call any collectible card game “pay-to-win” out of the box, in that most of them have a relatively random selection of cards in the starter kits and additional card packs, and you don’t necessarily get more for your money in the same sense that you do in a classic “pay-to-win” video game. Buying an additional card pack doesn’t guarantee anything- you run a pretty good chance of getting nothing but low-mid tier cards in most packs.

That said, the secondary market in individual cards often makes it so that you can do that sort of thing if you like, at least until they deprecate those cards. And that deprecation is only really totally relevant in competitive play- you and your friends can make up your own rules that keep those cards in play.

15

This reminds me of my son playing World of Tanks and saying it was fun until level 5(?) when you get tossed into the next player tier and immediately get stomped by level 12 players in their tricked out tank rides. You can try to grind your way up but most of your earnings go right back into repairs from getting smashed and the only way to start progressing is to pay cash. There was no sense in playing after that point unless you wanted to pay real money because your progression and fun were effectively blocked.

M:tG, in contrast, is playable in a variety of ways and even if you want to move beyond the kitchen table and play “Official”, you can do pretty well with a cheap deck. Maybe you won’t win each weekly tournament but you can still play and the ladder approach means that you’ll be playing with people at your skill/deck level so you still have fun playing competitive games.

16

So the argument here is that WotC does not sell the strong cards outright, they sell packs of randomly compiled cards, and if you buy one there’s a high likelihood that it only contains weak cards rather than the strong ones you hope for? And that it’s only the secondary market where strong cards are sold outright?

I can see that, but in that sense, I would say there’s an argument to be made that WotC effectively operates a lottery. The sales price of its packs is the price of a lottery ticket, and the strong cards that (rarely) show up in packs are the winning tickets. And it’s the chance of hitting such a strong card that makes people buy the packs. So the fact that the strong cards are bought and sold on a secondary market rather than by WotC directly doesn’t seem to make such a big difference, as WotC still benefits from the existence of this secondary market.

17

Personally I think the worst “pay-to-win” options are the ones like Battlefield 4 had, where you could buy extra random loot boxes of various tiers. So you can sort of tailor what tier of loot you’ll get, but it’s not necessarily going to be something useful. I am not at all surprised that the EU regulators declared that sort of thing to be a kind of gambling, because you’re basically paying for a roll of the dice, hoping you get something good.

18

Essentially, yes.

WotC doesn’t sell individual cards; they sell packs of randomly assorted cards, though in a given pack, there will be a distribution of cards at different rarity levels. Broadly, any given set of Magic cards has several rarity levels (typically Common, Uncommon, and Rare), and a pack will have a set number of cards at each rarity level (with more of the common cards, and fewer of the rare cards). While the more powerful cards are usually the rarer ones, that’s not always the case.

If one wants to get a specific card (or, more likely, several copies of a specific card), you’re almost undoubtedly going to be buying them on the secondary market. Many game stores sell individual cards, but there are also a ton of online sellers.

19

Kinda sorta. Each expansion set has a few cards that become the card to have but it’s more organic than that. Often someone finds a cool combo for a common or uncommon card and those become sought after despite not being especially rare. And there’s always some rares that are just disappointing from a games mechanics sense. I mean, it’s a “collectible” card game so the idea of needing to spend money and build a collection is right on the tin.

You can also build winning decks without exceptionally rare cards. Or play in a “Pauper” format where everyone builds decks from Common rarity cards.

20

I think this aspect of the game has not been adequately explained yet. There are a lot of ways to play Magic, called formats, and different formats involve different subsets of the total universe of cards. (There are tens of thousands of different cards.)

The most common format for tournaments and events is called Standard. Roughly, Standard consists of the past couple years worth of Magic sets. (There is usually a new set every quarter. Some sets are standalone, some are part of a larger story or aesthetic with other sets.)

So every few months, the oldest set(s) in Standard drop out and new ones are added. Thus, if you want to compete in official tournaments, you will have to regularly buy and trade for new cards to make new decks that conform to whatever is in Standard at that moment.

That doesn’t mean that your old cards become worthless, because there are other formats in which they might still be useful. Someone above mentioned Modern, which is non-rotating and consists of everything from 2003 (8th edition) forward. There are indeed some crazy expensive Modern decks, mostly thanks to fetchlands, which WOTC is not going to print any more of. (Not because they want to keep the value up, but because they are a huge time-waster in tournament play and they don’t want to reintroduce them to Standard.) But there are budget Modern decks that can do very well if you play them correctly.

Another format is Commander, also called EDH. This format limits you to one copy of every card (except lands) making deck building a very different process than other formats. You can also use pretty much any card from Magic’s history. There just aren’t that many super-expensive cards that also have great synergy with one another, so Commander decks are often fairly cheap, often relying on cards that were somewhat under appreciated in their time. (WOTC also sells new premade Commander decks every year. Some of them are good.)

Each format has different lists of banned and restricted cards. Cards are generally only banned outright when it turns out that they completely break the game. Cards that are banned in one format may be playable in another.

Of course, all of this is moot if you’re just playing at the kitchen table with friends. You can play with whatever cards you like, so long as everyone agrees. And go ahead and laser-print some fakes if you want.

My favorite way to play in person with friends is Cube draft. This involves one person assembling a large “cube” of cards (typically 360 or 720 cards). Each player then takes turns drafting cards and trying to put together a good deck from what they get. This requires zero ongoing expense once you assemble your cube.

Another popular casual format is pauper. As the name implies, it restricts the game to only common cards. You can often put together a pauper deck for under ten bucks.