Beyond the Norm: May 2019 News Flash

WAR Mythic Edition a Resounding Success

At 3pm on May 1^st, tens of thousands of people looking to spend $250 to buy a $1,000 bill logged onto HasbroToyShop’s eBay store. There were also some Magic players there who liked the $1,000 bill because it was shiny. In only a couple of minutes, Wizards of the Coast made around six million dollars. Of course, they then lost three million dollars when they didn’t have enough shiny cardboard to hand out.

This might seem like a bad thing, but using advanced mathematics that only a few others in the world understand, I was able to calculate that even after losing three million, Wizards was still able to walk away with three million dollars and a lawsuit.

“Mythic Edition was fantastic,” said an anonymous employee at Wizards. “People talk about how easy it is to take candy from a baby, but that’s really overstated. Babies cry, they have an iron grip, and people get real mad at you if you just whack them in the face. Taking money from nerds is far easier and far more profitable.”

When asked about the public backlash around the way it was handled, the employee laughed.

“Look, the lamestream media also tried to brand the first Mythic Edition as a ‘failure,’ but here we are, three Mythic Editions in, and they’re still selling out. Not only are we rolling in the dough, but there’s a lot of other good that’s come out of this process as well. You never hear the media talk about how this event has actually led to an influx in positive feedback for Hasbro. And there are a couple people who managed to pick up six or seven boxes of Mythic Edition; just think about how happy they must be! We look forward to our upcoming Mythic Editions, where we will be selling fewer boxes, but overselling more to raise the hype again. And for those who are still complaining that they didn’t get the shiny cardboard they wanted, fear not! We will be sending them some different shiny cardboard for free.” 

Wizard Announces MPL Application Process

When Wizards of the Coast first rolled out the Magic Pro League, there was a lot of excitement in the community, but also a lot of questions. How will I, a mid-level PPTQ grinder who never had a chance of making the Pro Tour anyways, become a member of the MPL? On this issue, Wizards was silent – until now. Here is the statement that we were able to exclusively obtain before it goes live in a couple of days:

“When we first rolled out the MPL, we made a promise: the world will know your name.

And then you’ll apparently go to some kind of club where the lights and sound are clearly not conducive to playing Magic.

But here’s the thing: all you scrubs assumed the world would know your name for playing Magic. That’s what we in the biz call an unforced error. In the ~five months since the Magic Pro League’s inception, we’ve definitely made some names know. You’ve probably heard of Rei Sato, for example, (REDACTED) who got uninvited from the Mythic Invitational, nice try, I’m not talking, who got booted from the MPL after (REDACTED) and whose name must never be spoken in public, and most recently, Yuuya Watanabe, who assembled all three pieces of Cheaty-Tron by getting disqualified from the Pro Tour, kicked out of the MPL and banned for 30 months, and banished from the Hall of Fame.

Turns out, this is where you come in! Every two months, we plan to expose another member of the MPL for cheating or other inappropriate behavior. We have some exciting months coming up, where people you believed to be upstanding individuals will be shown to actually be drug dealers, murderers, and cheaters. Better yet, if you have been finding success via illegal means, then we are interested in you! Send your application to Wizards of the Coast along with your rap sheet, and we’ll get back to you!”

Standard a Disaster

Since the release of War of the Spark, Standard has enraged its players by being, as usual, a complete disaster. With no deck over 10% of the metagame, Standard is more diverse than it has been in years.

“It sucks,” said one grinder. “I can’t just play the best deck because I have no idea what the best deck is.”

Early predictions of dominance by Nexus of Fate decks similarly disappointed grinders trying to solve the metagame. Some die-hards, however, are sticking by their beliefs.

“Nexus is objectively the most broken thing that you can do in Standard,” confided one Magic player with over twenty followers on Twitter. “Did it put up a 47% win rate at SCG Richmond and completely miss on Top 8? Sure. But that was last weekend. This weekend, everything has changed. I know we thought that Nexus was the best-positioned deck in Richmond, but we were off by a week: it is the best-positioned deck this weekend. And regardless of what happens this weekend, it will also be the best deck for the rest of the season. I try not to let evidence distract me from the truth.”

With paper MCQ’s firing around the world, Standard’s terrible state promises a weekend devoid of strong metagame picks. And Nexus isn’t the only point of disagreement. In conversations with many players signed up for MCQ’s this weekend, we found that their evaluations of decks and cards varied wildly.

“Esper Hero is the sleeper pick,” confided one active Discord user who prides herself on her hot takes. “The deck is pressure plus disruption taken to the extreme. It plays all the best cards and I’m pretty sure I don’t have a bad matchup.”

“Esper Hero is a steaming hot pile of garbage,” shared one starving grad student who has been playing Monored in Standard going on two years and has worshiped Goblin Chainwhirler as the one true God. “The deck is an identity crisis that doesn’t know what it wants to do. It plays a hodge-podge of draft chaff and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have any matchups that it’s actually favored in.”

Players felt similarly about most other decks in the format. When we polled players on Monored, Esper Control, UG Nexus, Gruul Aggro, Jeskai Superfriends, Bant Midrange, Esper Hero, Monowhite, Dimir, Sultai, Grixis, and even Feather (curse this horrible diversity of viable archetypes!), we found that, for each archetype, around 15 percent of players thought each of the decks was unbeatable and the remaining 85 percent felt it was unplayable. For science, we put these players in rooms together and watched as they failed to change the other’s opinion despite lots of shouting, anecdotal stories, and sample sizes that are far too small to be statistically significant.

Which deck will you be sleeving up this tournament weekend? (Because whichever you chose, you’re wrong.)

Ryan Normandin is a grinder from Boston who has lost at the Pro Tour, in GP & SCG Top 8's, and to 7-year-olds at FNM. Despite being described as "not funny" by his best friend and "the worst Magic player ever" by Twitch chat, he cheerfully decided to blend his lack of talents together to write funny articles about Magic.