Just another series of poor decisions made by WotC. I actually just sold all my MTGO collection last week (a pretty huge collection). There are a few main reasons I did so, and I'll write them here for those who are interested.

Disclaimer: I had a ton of fun on MTGO, it was a great place to try out new ideas and even test out formats I usually can't (Led me to my first vintage tournament win in paper magic). If you don't have a good LGS or playgroup it does give you that MTG fix. It even fixes the worst problems of magic which are in my opinion 1) cheating and 2) draws from going to time. Chess timers are amazing for the 2nd point, and the 1st point could be handled in real life by professional dealers at events handling everyone's deck, but probably won't be.

So here are the reasons I got out:

1. Lack of security/authentication. I had literal thousands of dollars on my account, and only a single password protected me from having my entire collection removed. To sell my collection I gave the dealer my password and within minutes the entire thing was gone. I had no idea how much my collection was worth until I sat down and looked at it, but that's just too much for digital objects that can get passed around so easily. WotC is not technologically capable of making me feel safe with that much money on their servers.

2. Lack of improvements over the last 2 years. I've had my collection on there for a while, and I've seen Hearthstone dominate the market with their smooth interface and no down time between games. Arena mode is everything draft should be. By the way, I think Hearthstone is a fairly boring game, but I play it more than magic because it's just so easy to. I hate planning literally 4 hours of my day to play a daily tournament. My match would be over within 20 minutes and you bet your ass every single fucking round went to time. Even 8 man pools had that problem. 3 rounds takes about 3 hours, regardless of what you're doing. You know the absolute most absurd part of it? The most popular Magic streamers have to open up Hearthstone/browser games/whatever other entertainment in between rounds because the game is so bad with time. Just think about that for a second, the game is so bad that even people who make their living off of streaming magic have to try to find some way to entertain themselves for about 50% of the time they're playing.
A 3 round tournament took 3 hours. 9 Games of Hearthstone? Maybe an hour? I hate hearthstone compared to magic, but come on MTGO... fix your shit. They even spoiled an arena-mode type gameplay they wanted to roll out. That was over a year ago and absolutely no changes towards that have been made.

3. Magic isn't as fun when you're not sitting across from someone. This is the most subjective, but damn, it's a pretty lonely experience playing a tournament of magic. You get the occasional "go yourself and die you stupid lucksack piece of " after you beat someone, but other than that it's just play to win. I like playing to win, that's mostly the point, but grinding tournaments online just feels like a job and not like fun. Your mileage may vary.

4. This is similar to 2, but I just found myself wanting to play MTGO less due to how much downtime there is and how you could either play against noobs in the tournament practice room and get inflated results compared to normal playtesting, or spend money every single time you wanted to try to play against good players. Where the hell is the ladder room where you get to play for rating points but not money???? Seriously, every single game has that now, and it adds so much replay value. If I could get to Platinum League or whatever the hell it is, that would be a reason to play MTGO, but NOTHING is worth playing unless you pay for it, and I just didn't really want to.

Overall I got a lot of fun out of the experience, but enough is enough. I see vintage card prices dropping, which to me symbolizes the fact that people just aren't getting into or excited about eternal online. I had 3 vintage decks made, and decided it was time now to sell out of the game. I'm not saying everyone should, but the lack of any improvements or even believable announcements about improvements was the last straw.

I'm out of MTGO, gg wotc