[The Mothership] sux

[Finn]

How long has it been since you thought magicthegathering.com had anything to offer you? For me it has been about five years since I went to that site for any reason other than going straight to Gatherer or following some link for an announcement. When Mark Rosewater first began his Making Magic column, I used to read everything on the site. This went on for years, but slowly I began to not enjoy the material. Increasingly, the subject matter stopped appealing to me.

If Legacy is, and has been for years, the second most popular format, why is there so seldom an article that has anything directly to do with Legacy? There is no mention of the kinds of topics that I am interested on the website of the company that makes the game. It seems to me that they are missing the mark on this one.

Why does the site suck? That is, why is there no content for a Legacy enthusiast like myself? I mean, ever...

[Aggro_zombies]

Because Legacy is expensive and they want you to focus on Standard and Extended instead.

EDIT: The Daily Decks feature occasionally has Legacy decks.

[sporenfrosch1411]

As a company, they are forced to address people that buy sealed products.
These mostly are coming from MTG:O, Sealed and Standard - so yeah, its natural that those groups will be given the most articles, because you see, most Legacy players won't buy as much Boosters as a Sealed player or a new Standard player.
Call me naive, but i find this to be quite simple.....

[swoop]

Think that people that play GSZ, Lavamancers, Jaces, MMs, Stoneforges, batterskulls.. etc do count as people who buy sealed products?

[Octopusman]

Think that people that play GSZ, Lavamancers, Jaces, MMs, Stoneforges, batterskulls.. etc do count as people who buy sealed products?

I own all of these (edit: except GSZ) and I didn't open one pack.
If Wizards wanted my money they should have sold me the singles directly on their website.

Totally agree with agrozombies - it's a promotional/marketing tool to sell product. Aka - we're not their target audience.

[Phoenix Ignition]

That's silly, I've played standard on many occasions and never opened a pack, but buying singles online supports the people who do open box after box. Needing these cards for Legacy is the same principle, although you just buy less on average. It still is in their interest to support Legacy (and Legacy, I've noticed, is a gateway drug into EDH and possibly even Modern if that happens). Heck, because of Legacy I got into EDH and bought 2 of the new commander decks, and have convinced my friend to buy 1. It is clearly in Wizards' best interest to keep people in the game in whatever format they can.

[Gambit]

That's silly, I've played standard on many occasions and never opened a pack, but buying singles online supports the people who do open box after box. Needing these cards for Legacy is the same principle, although you just buy less on average. It still is in their interest to support Legacy (and Legacy, I've noticed, is a gateway drug into EDH and possibly even Modern if that happens). Heck, because of Legacy I got into EDH and bought 2 of the new commander decks, and have convinced my friend to buy 1. It is clearly in Wizards' best interest to keep people in the game in whatever format they can.

I agree with this. An article that switches between legacy and vintage every other week by someone who knew what the fuck they were talking about would be good for everyone.

[derpp]

I like the mothership because it provides good insight into the design process, decent event coverage, and random interesting tidbits/arcana. Do I think it is a wealth of strategic knowledge? No. I also don't think it really ever has been. Not only is the mothership not designed to address the legacy population, it's not especially geared to the tournament-attending population either, and I don't think anyone can really fault it for that considering it's casuals that pay the bills.

[Wereodile]

The Building on a budget articles aren't terrible, I used to use his decks for FNM when I went.

[Nihil Credo]

There have been months in which I never played a single game of Magic. There hasn't been a week since 2004 in which I didn't read the design and development columns.

[Aggro_zombies]

The Building on a budget articles aren't terrible, I used to use his decks for FNM when I went.
Finn is looking for Legacy content and as far as I can tell, BoaB doesn't do non-Standard-legal decks.

Mike "Has-Been" Flores will occasionally do a look at the top 8s of Legacy GPs or talk about interesting Legacy decks if the format experiences an upswing in press, but it's pretty clear he doesn't play the format regularly if at all. Furthermore, there's tons of Standard content to analyze every week thanks to SCG Opens and MTGO events, and since Flores is the only columnist whose work is geared primarily towards serious tournament play, he's the only one who would take up Legacy on a regular basis. However, Standard is far more popular than Legacy (and is also much more of a cash cow - for every GSZ or Mental Misstep that makes it into Legacy, there are a dozen cards Standard players will be picking up), so that's his priority.

They would need another tournament-minded column to have enough space for Legacy, but the Mothership is not geared towards that audience, and anyway places like SCG and ChannelFireball exist which cater to tournament players. The Mothership is mostly for providing a balance of content and allowing you to see things you wouldn't get to see anywhere else (like MaRo and Latest Developments giving you inside looks at R&D).

EDIT: I agree with Nihil - I read MaRo and Latest Devs on a regular basis. I also used to read Savor the Flavor, but Beyer is a hack.

[n00bas4urus_r3x]

I usually check it daily. While is occasionally play EDH now as my only means of magic, I like to hear the design principles and stories behind cards. I do read Flores, and he will discuss Legacy decks it still seems like entry level commentary on the format to introduce newbies to the concepts.

It would be cool to have a second market format article. Certain personal clearly support and enjoy EDH, Legacy and Vintage (I'm sure on the last two, at least someone, right?); a column featuring the second market formats could be really engaging and increase traffic to the site that otherwise wouldn't go. It could create a lot of hype for those players too with exclusive previews.

WOTC has a unique outlet for products in the secondary market. If you consider the FTV, Duel Decks, Premium Decks and Commander products, I believe Wizards has a large enough clientele that is not only interested but has deep enough pockets to drop a substantial amount of cash to get a hold of those cards. If they started making a "Legacy Deck Builder's Kit" or did FTV: Legacy, I think they would move product. New cards are being used due to power creep and new mechanics, and most of them are higher in rarity. This also results in product moving. I agree they're missing the mark by not having an column that caters to this market.

[JACO]

Actually they're whole online presence and marketing in general suck. For reference:
1) Flagship product 1B MTGO has the most horrible user interface, and they're on version III (3!); get a freaking clue and hire someone to design something that doesn't suck if you want to make a ton of money on it.
2) Speaking of MTGO, how in the hell are sets released online AFTER the paper product? That is unforgiveable, and they should be using MTGO to promote the paper.
3) The MTGO landing page on their website is equally terrible, and is a joke for such a massive product. Everything about that site sucks and nothing is intuitive or easy to find. As someone who's managed and edited content I can assure you there a many ways to do it better and more efficiently.
4) The web design and layout of their site is poop, from the menus on the left hand side to the top to the way decks are archived.
5) The content of their Magic branded site is mega-soft for pretty much everyone other than someone just getting into the game, or the most casual of gamers. There is nary a decent strategy article. If that is intentional (which I would guess it is based on the rest of WotC product/landing pages), that's a big mistake, and they could be drawing many many more people to the site to expose their other products to if they had better content.
6) Even Gatherer sucks now, and requires you to accept cookies in your browser to even search for anything. Are you fucking kidding me?
7) There should be more Legacy content, more Vintage content, more Extended (or Modern) content, more Commander content, and more content introducing and supporting casual formats. MARKET YOUR PRODUCT BETTER if you want to sell more packs; don't just try to make cheesy Duel decks and Event decks. Give people tons of reasons and ideas to support your game. They've had a new focus on growing the game from the "grass roots" level the past 1-2 years, but I think that's failed in most regards.

That's all I can think of off the top of the dome. There should be a lot of great reasons to go to the website of the most badass game every day, but if none of us can find those reasons they need some new leadership. I'm available and up to the task, in case there are any WotC spies amongst the leadership. Holla.

[hyperchord24]

they've changed their message boards a lot too over the years. That really turned me off.

[Amon Amarth]

I know I can't be the only one who is addicted to the Draft Simulator?! That thing is awesome. I also read Maro and Lapilles articles every Monday and Friday. There isn't a ton of reasons to go to there if you are a competitive player, unfortunately.

[vilik]

I agree that mothership content is probably only useful for beginners / casual crowd. Maybe for wannabe game designers.

I mean otherwise you have to be a) informative and/or b) entertaining. And they are neither (except for occasional coverage and standard decklist by Flores, but to be fair, that is just another way to promote the product to beginners).

I stopped going there since MaGo and JMS stopped writing.

[Aggro_zombies]

Setting aside issues of web design and MTGO (I don't know anything about the former and don't use the latter), I think you're being a bit harsh on their content. I mean, look at what they're trying to do:

Design column - MaRo
Limited strategy - Steve Sadin or whatever his name is
Casual formats - that one fat dude
Flavor/Creative column - Beyer
Semi-competitive Standard - whoever is doing Building on a Budget now
Competitive Constructed column - Has-Been
Quirky Casual formats - Noel Decorva or whatever his name is
Development Column - LaPille or whatever his name is

And then I have no idea what the point of the "Week that was" column is.

So there's two columns aimed at casual players, one aimed at people interested in getting into Constructed on a local, FNM level, two columns aimed at different facets of competitive play, and three columns that are basically Wizards-exclusive content (in the sense that only people inside Wizards have enough information to write them). That's not that bad.

I think you're expecting the site to cater to you too much. I would not cut any of the Wizards-exclusive content (although I would get that hack Beyer out and replace him with a competent writer for Savor the Flavor). Casual content shows up a lot less often on the web than content for competitive players, which seems odd since I'm willing to bet that a plurality of Magic's players - if not an outright majority - are casual players. For competitive content, there's already tons of that out there from a lot of different places, and - importantly, I think - a lot of it is generated by the community, including a lot of top pros who are intimately involved in producing the weekly tournament results.

If you want more strategy content, go to a different site. If you want advertising, well...Duels of the Planeswalkers was (is) an attempt to push Magic out to appeal to a wider gaming audience, though I have no idea if, or to what degree, it succeeded. They already do ads on various other mainstream game sites during spoiler seasons for upcoming sets, and a lot of in-store stuff too. Without access to their market research, I have no idea how effective it would be to do extra stuff on top of that.

[Koby]

WotC is really really good at designing table-top games.

And fairly poor at developing the shrink wrap around everything else. I don't fault them for this fact, since the former more than makes up for the latter. I just wonder why they haven't figured this out and attempt to outsource the shrink wrap bullshit to people who do know how to effectively market/engage/present their awesome games in a form that's digestible to a broad spectrum.

MTGO is a tell-tale sign of what happens when WotC ventures into domains they have no clue designing.

[ParkerLewis]

There have been months in which I never played a single game of Magic. There hasn't been a week since 2004 in which I didn't read the design and development columns.

Friend !

Although I have to say the development column went seriously downhill lately. Forsythe was great, then Drew Levin (i think ?) was fine, but then Tom La Pille... man this guy is baaaad. He usually spends most of his articles saying he's happy with whatever (mostly what he has done) and the rest giggling at whatever pointless and mondane thing like specifically uninteresting Multiverse comments ("see ? these two people disagree, how funny !"), and he provides awful shitty moronic reasonings on a range of subjects (see the whole Mystical Tutor banning explaining for example, a column that was adequately derailed by the community).

I also miss MaGo. That guy was always funny as hell. One of my funniest read ever on the Mothership were (still are) two of his articles, the one on banding (http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/21) (although to be fair, he was mostly telling a funny story rather than creating something himself here, but still) and MTG.Combos - Time Spiral Edition (http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/feature/371).

On the other hand, MaRo still is good, although his best design topics are probably behind him (i'd say he covered all main bases there are a couple years ago already, and now he has far less ability to cover new ground that could be interesting both for his long-time and recent readers).

[Broham]

The "mothership" was Duelist Magazine. And for me at least, the information stopped being appealing when they retired it.

[CorpT]

but then Tom La Pille... man this guy is baaaad. He usually spends most of his articles saying he's happy with whatever (mostly what he has done) and the rest giggling at whatever pointless and mondane thing like specifically uninteresting Multiverse comments ("see ? these two people disagree, how funny !"), and he provides awful shitty moronic reasonings on a range of subjects (see the whole Mystical Tutor banning explaining for example, a column that was adequately derailed by the community).

It is embarrassing that LaPille still has a job there.


We tested (http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/138) [New Phyrexia] for months in the Future Future League, and I promise you that it will change the face of Standard.

As Jace, the Mind Sculptor is the elephant in the room here, I will address it directly. I can think of at least two cards in New Phyrexia that are targeted specifically at planeswalkers. In our Future Future League testing, those two cards proved to be potent weapons.

He wrote that before the printing of Batterskull when CawBlade was very, very good but before it completely broke the format. Embarassing. Just as bad as his Mystical Tutor "reasoning". I hope he has some other redeeming quality behind the scenes because his skills at communicating with players should get him fired.