Magic: The Gathering Online

Magic: The Gathering Online (Magic Online or MTGO; formerly commonly referred to as MODO, for Magic Online Digital Objects) is a version of Magic: The Gathering played on the Internet. It went "live" in June 2002. Users connect to a server that may host thousands of users at a given time where they can play the game against other users and trade cards. It is only officially available for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Installation and purchase

The client software for Magic Online may be downloaded for free from Wizards of the Coast's website, but to play the game, it is necessary to register an account and purchase cards. As with "paper Magic", all cards originate from sealed booster packs and similar randomly collated sealed product; on Magic Online, these packs are represented as digital objects tied to a player's account. These "virtual" packs are purchased from the Wizards of the Coast website for the same MSRP as used by the physical product. Packs, once purchased, may be opened to add the cards within to the user's collection; traded to other users; or used to participate in Limited tournaments such as drafts.

The cards are also represented as digital objects tied to a player's account, and may be traded to other users. A "Deck Editor" interface exists to allow players to build Constructed decks out of their collections for use in online tournaments or casual play.

Gameplay

Games may be played casually between users; a series of rooms exist for friendly games, including one for new players, one for fun decks, and one for tournament practice. Tournaments are also organized and run automatically by the server; these can range in size from 8-player single-elimination tournaments with small prizes (dozens of which are running constantly) to heavily promoted events with larger spoils.

The game is played with an interface that mimics the tabletops that Magic is played on, with cards laid out in front of each player and "tapped" cards turned sideways. A player is prompted whenever he or she has priority or is required by a card to make an in-game choice. The server handles all of the game's rules and card interactions. A bug reporting system is in place to fix any issues that may arise due to unforseen card combinations, but it has a generally poor reputation. While the game runs smoothly for the most part, there have been situations where bugs went uncorrected for extended periods of time.

To enter a tournament, it is necessary to provide a certain number of "event tickets", usually six for Constructed events and two (plus the requisite sealed product) for Limited events. Event tickets are another kind of digital object, which must be purchased from the official store at US$1 each (or received in a trade from another player). Prizes for tournaments are generally sealed packs; ocassionally, additional prizes may be tossed in as well, such as new avatars.

History

Design

Magic Online was contracted out to Leaping Lizard Software, who designed and produced the initial implementation of Magic Online. Initially, the idea to charge based on packs, as opposed to a monthly user fee, was greeted with skepticism. Additionally, concerns were floated over how solid the server and trading code would be; if exploits were found, the entire economy could easily be destroyed. After a period of beta-testing, the game became available to the general public in June of 2002. The trading code has proven resilient so far; while the game engine has faltered several times, and standard fraud has still occurred as would be expected, there have been no mass-devaluations of cards. So far, no one has been able to give themselves free cards or exploit the server to force unfavorable trades with not logged-in users.

In 2003, the Magic: The Gathering Invitational was held online for the first time. It has been played on Magic Online ever since.

Version 2.0

In 2003, Wizards of the Coast decided to relieve Leaping Lizard of the responsibility of maintaining Magic Online, and took on updating it themselves with in-house progammers. Their first showing with the new team was to be the release of 8th edition in July of 2003, which they had ambitiously scheduled the online release to coincide with the paper release. The goal was to release a new version 2 of the software with new functionality and implementing the changes in rules that 8th edition had brought. Version 2 was released on schedule at the deadline with disastrous results. The servers constantly crashed, and laughable rules mistake bugs were in abundance, showing that the project had clearly been shoved out the door on the deadline unfinished. The game went to beta servers for a short time, but did eventually return to reasonably working order. That said, most of the promised features of version 2 were cut, and some functionality within version 1 was even removed for version 2, such as the "My Games" feature which allowed replaying games from earlier sessions.

To make up for the disruption, Wizards planned to throw "Chuck's Virtual Party," a weekend of free tournaments after the problems settled down. Unfortunately, it turned out that each user took up more memory in version 2 than the lightweight design of version 1. The result was that the servers crashed under the strain.

Recent events

In retrospect, some have merely chalked the decision to remove Leaping Lizard up to hubris. Others, however, point to certain intractabilities in later maintenance that suggest that Leaping Lizard had not delievered a very extensible program that, by nature, was too interconnected and hard to improve. Regardless, Wizards decided that version 2.0 was not worth supporting indefinitely. They decided to maintain version 2.0 in the background, but to start a new development team to rebuild Magic Online from the ground up. The labors of this new project would be called Magic Online version 3. Since Chuck's Virtual Party, Magic Online (version 2) has been reasonably stable, with Wizards carefully booting users to try and prevent a reoccurence of the events from before.

Magic Online version 3 has been planned to feature an updated interface and expanded in-game guidance. It is also being designed so it can run off multiple servers rather than one master server. It is slated to launch in the Fall of 2006. An open beta is planned for Summer 2006.

Trading and economy

Users may trade cards, sealed packs, event tickets, and in-game avatars (which are released for special events as promotions) with other players. A Trading Post exists for players to post requests for certain cards into a bulletin board or to place notices of cards they have available for trade/sale. A marketplace also exists in which an active listing of chat postings lists individual offers for specific cards for sale or trade. An unofficial Auction room also exists for traders to sell larger and often bulk numbers of cards quickly, and for buyers to find discounted prices. A large number of the users posting offers to buy or sell are entrepreneurs with large collections looking to make a profit by selling cards an their own websites or on eBay in addition to their in-game trades (though in practice the amount of money that can be made heavily trading in the game is not very large). Technically any transfer of cards in the game is not considered a "sale" because, for legal reasons, the digital objects are not actually owned by the collector, but rather Wizards of the Coast themselves. This enormously simplifies transactions, as issues such as import/export laws, duties, and underage concerns are sidestepped. Wizards has currently shown "benign neglect" of players buying and selling digital objects for (legal) currency on the secondary market.

The economy

Overall, Magic Online's economy is quite efficient. Event tickets act as a de facto unit of in-game currency; demand for them is sustained by the tens of thousands of tickets used up every day to pay for tournament entry. Every single ticket in the market was purchased from Wizards of the Coast for US$1, offering a baseline. Since they are tradable in-game, prices for cards in the trading rooms are usually quoted in tickets. Due to the secondary market, a ticket is usually worth slightly less than US$1; it hovers around $.85-.90 instead.

As for the cards themselves, Magic Online allows you to use the same cards in multiple decks. Since the maximum limit for non-land cards is typically 4, any duplicates of a card beyond the fourth are useless and can be traded off.

Due to the ease of trading away unwanted or extra cards, transaction costs on Magic Online are very low. While in real-life, the money gained by finding a better at a different store might not make up for the expense in checking the other store (gas, time, effort, etc.), it's incredibly easy to search for other values of a card you'd like to buy or sell. This ensures competition where all prices quickly move towards the market price.

One inefficiency that the market does have is that since the ticket is the main unit of in-game currency, cards which cost less than a ticket must be offered in bulk (or else as standard barters). A common example is 32 commons for one ticket (32 items being the maximum number of objects Magic Online supports per trade). If you only really wanted 24 commons, you either "waste" the rest of the ticket, or get other commons you didn't particularly want.

Automated trading

Trading is usually done between two individual players, but Magic Online has accumulated a secondary automated traders market. These traders, known as "bots", are accounts running programs designed to trade cards at variable prices and qualities. A simple bot might be one that will buy any three rares for one ticket, and offer any two rares it has for a ticket. More complicated bots can maintain detailed price lists and notice trends; for example, if many traders are selling it one particular card, that is a clue that the offering price is too high, and it should either stop buying that card or automatically lower the price it offers for it. Lastly, some bots are designed to help advertise competing sellers prices and give users a general sense of the values of cards they have. An example of this is "infobot". A player may chat with infobot and follow directions to inquire about card prices available in the current market supplied by vendors who tell the bot their pricing.

Tournament effects on the market

Drafters and their recently acquired cards represent a main source of singles to the market. Winners in any tournament usually get balanced amounts of the packs used to enter; for example, someone who won 3 packs in an Onslaught-Onslaught-Legions draft would recieve 2 packs of Onslaught and 1 pack of Legions. This conveniently is exactly what would be required to do a similar event again, along with a two ticket entry cost. For the not as lucky, or those needing tickets, they can sell singles from their opened packs to help defray the costs of the next draft.

Some online tournament players fund their continued play by selling the packs they win as prizes and extra cards they open for tickets, which they then use to enter more tournaments. Successful players who are able to sustain their tournament play indefinitely this way without further monetary investment are said to have "gone infinite".

Physical redemption

Wizards of the Coast allows collectors who have assembled a full set of digital cards to redeem them for a sealed, mint-condition set of the corresponding physical cards for a period of up to 4 years after the set's online release. This helps provide a safety valve for collectors, knowing that they could always revert digital cards to a valued physical product. It is also useful for a Magic Online player to be able to transition extra cards online into a physical collection, should they desire.

Shortages

When Magic Online launched in the summer of 2002, the current set of the time was late Odyssey block. As a result, the preceding Invasion block was only sold for a very short time on Magic Online. This short supply, combined with rising demand as Magic Online's user base grew and the server became more stable, helped spike some early cards' prices. Chase cards from these early sets demand much higher prices than their paper counterparts; popular rares sell on eBay for 5 to 10 times as much as the physical version, and even commons can command a premium. Odyssey block and 7th Edition also had a shorter than normal print run, though not as extreme.

Cards available

Currently only about half of all Magic cards ever printed are available for use on Magic Online (the earliest set available before was Invasion which had been released in printed form in the fall of 2000; all cards from subsequent sets are online as well). Modern sets tend to have cleaner rules than older sets and are thus easier to program. Including Invasion also allowed a full Type II (now Standard) environment to be available upon release (Invasion-Torment-7th edition). Asking people to buy cards from one year earlier proved chancy enough (see above on Shortages); trying to get people to buy over the entire history of Magic all at once would probably have overwhelmed the public, even if programming had not been an issue.

In the summer of 2005, Wizards of the Coast announced that Mirage would be released online in the fall, nine years after its 1996 print release. This set was chosen as the earliest set usable on Magic Online because it was the first to be designed with both Limited and Constructed play in mind and the first to be intended as part of a three-set block. Additionally, Wizards unambiguously owns the rights to the artwork in Mirage block, and Mirage block contains no ante cards (unlike Ice Age and Homelands). It is believed, though not yet confirmed, that the eventual goal of the developers is to have every expansion set from Mirage onward available online. The future online release of such "classic" sets will likely depend on the success of Mirage. In April 2006 Visions was released, which is the 2nd set of the Mirage Block.

New sets come out on Magic Online about three or four weeks after their physical release. It has been theorized that the delay is due to fear that earlier beta-testing would likely spoil the set before the paper version's pre-release, though not confirmed.

External links

Official Sites

• Official site of Magic: The Gathering Online
• Gatherer Official Magic: The Gathering card database
• The DCI.com Official site for Wizards of the Coast organized play