Magic Online Vintage Cube LIVE – July 22 Update
Posted on Jul 22, 2024
Hello Vintage Cube Enthusiasts!
It was a big weekend for MTGO with the first Magic Online Vintage Cube LIVE Feeder League opening to players on Friday! Thanks to everyone who participated in the event or shared feedback on the tournament series overall. We knew the structure would likely need some tweaks, so we made it clear in the Announcement article that we had designed the structure with adaptability in mind and would adjust things as needed to best deliver on our goals for this tournament series.
Here are the primary goals we have in making these adjustments in rough order of importance:
- Ensure the ongoing integrity of the event.
- Help as many eligible players who want to participate as possible to enter at least one Feeder League course.
- Give players as large a window as possible to adjust their schedules to our updates.
- Keep the minimum cost for an entry as close as we can to the announced 6 Event Tickets or 80 Play Points rate.
- Don’t increase the number of wins in a row required to make it to the Ultimate Guard Finals at MagicCon: Las Vegas beyond one or two.
With those goals in mind, here are some changes we know we are going to make and some we are likely to make considering player response and opening-weekend Feeder League participation. Let’s start with a change we already announced Tweet:
Moving This Tuesday's 64-Player Drafts to Thursday
During this Wednesday’s downtime, an update goes live that will have 64-Player Draft events seat participants randomly instead of arbitrarily. We are moving the two Tuesday July 23rd 64-Player Drafts to Thursday July 25th at 10:30 AM and 5:30 PM Pacific so that all of the 64-Player Drafts will occur under randomized seating, removing a potential collusion exploit.
Why wasn’t it random before? It may be that during the original implementation, seating players via an arbitrary attribute–like a teacher lining up their class alphabetically–was deemed sufficient for the purpose. It’s not particularly exploitable if the players are always different and don’t know how they are being sorted. It’s possible randomization was the intent but the feature wasn’t implemented as intended, and this wasn’t caught in testing due to the difficulty in noticing and exploiting “arbitrary” instead of “random.”
Regardless of the original intent, with event integrity being paramount and the improvement on the way, we opted to push the Tuesday 64-Player Drafts to Thursday under randomized seating conditions. I know there are players out there who set aside time to queue up and play on Tuesday, and we’re sorry for any plans this change has disrupted, but it’s for the best that all the 64-Player Draft events take place after the update.
Week Two Feeder Leagues Canceled (Barring Surprises)
We knew we weren’t going to predict demand for this event perfectly. We hoped we’d err on the side of overdemand, but at a level we could live with or adjust for while maintaining our goals. It looks like we’ve landed on the latter. We need to make some tweaks, but it’s all within the tolerances of our toolbox.
We knew–and announced–that Feeder Leagues would need to close early if demand was exceptionally high. Out of the gate, entries were exceeding expectations to the point that if we’d wanted to run the Feeder League in Week Two, we would have had to close the Week One event early on Saturday morning and/or make fast-turnaround changes to the Feeder League structure for Week Two.
We decided it would be less disruptive to let people follow through on their plans to play on Saturday and cancel the second week of Feeder Leagues with some fair warning. While it’s a bummer to not have a Feeder League for this Friday, we thought it would be a much bigger one for the event to be closed before it hit opening weekend.
By building up enough 64-Player tokens to cover Weeks One and Two over the weekend and with a break already in place prior to Week Three, we will be able to announce any changes to the Week Three structure with lots of warning. Apologies to anyone who had Week Two earmarked for making their Feeder League run–we hope that with lots of warning and a better structure, you’ll be able to reschedule for a later week and have a better experience!
About that “Barring Surprises” bit: If we are somehow way low in our expectations on the number of people who will be saving their 64-Player Draft tokens for a later week and the 64s are filling up extremely slowly, we will open a small window of Feeder League availability on Sunday, July 29 since we didn’t get any Sunday availability in Week One. We do not expect to need to do this, but we will announce it on Twitter at 5:00 PM Pacific on Thursday if there will be a window of play on Sunday.
Week Three Adjustments in Discussion
So if Week One Feeder Leagues showed overdemand, how are we going to address it in Week Three? What other player feedback are we considering acting on? Here are the changes we are considering:
- Capping Entries at Account Level: We are considering an additional entry token for the Feeder League that is free via Magic Online Store code, but restricted to one per account. This means each account would only be able to enter the Feeder League once until we decide to allow players to redeem a second code (this could be while the Feeder League is active). We recognize that players with multiple accounts can circumvent this restriction, but it would help broaden the number of unique participants, even if it’s not a perfect solution.
- Adding Round(s) to Feeder League: We may add one or two rounds to the wins required to trophy a Feeder League, going from three to four or five. This increases the number of players who are competing for each 64-Player Draft token, but of course it also lengthens the odds of success. If we add any rounds, we will adjust the prize structure to account for the longer odds of success while keeping the entry fee the same.
- Adding More Start Times/Days for 64-Player Drafts: We hear the feedback that you would like a broader range of options for when to play your 64-Player Drafts. Moving the Tuesday events to Thursday for other reasons gave us some silver-lining variety for Week One, but we will explore tinkering the schedule for Week Three with a different suite of starting times - your feedback really helps here.
We only just got our first data on the event, and we haven’t seen any 64-Player Drafts yet, which will also be informative. We are going to continue discussing the possibilities here both internally and with our players for the next few days, watch the 64-Player Draft events closely, and come back with an official update to the Week Three structure next Monday, July 29.
Off and Running
We appreciate the strong support our community showed this weekend, and we thank you for your patience. We know everyone wants this event to succeed, and we know that if we are transparent about our goals and thinking, the MTGO/VC community will be with us - Keep helping us make this the best event it can be!
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