Open Letter: Wizards, a true Magic the Gathering MMO would be a good thing

Dear Wizards of the Coast,

With all of the franchises that have had Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) of various sorts, there is a lot of promise to get new interest into older franchises. There’s the Conan, Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, Warhammer Fantasy, soon-to-be Warhammer 40,000, Star Trek, Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons and a whole host of other long running gaming franchises whether they are pay to play, free to play, graphics or text based, so on and so forth.

There is one thing that has yet to get the true MMO-treatment: Magic the Gathering (MTG).

Yes, there is MTG Online. Then again, even though it is an online game that a massive amount of people can be on and play on at any one time, it’s still just the standard card game played on a computer. The matches are done the same way as the regular tabletop game. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. After all, the card game is a well thought out, mostly well designed game. The “mostly” comes in because because some of the expansions were rather broken in some either overpowered or just pointless ways. Even as a card game alone, there are entire novels worth of lore and those touch on other sets of MtG lore that hasn’t even been touched on at any time in any way other than mere mention. There’s just a lot there that would really bring in a lot of people.

Yes, technically they are making another psuedo-MMO for the PS3 and PCs, Magic the Gathering Tactics. Still, at least from the way it looks, even though it does look like it might be good, it’s Magic the Gathering Battlegrounds mixed with MtGO. There really isn’t anything new there to grab someone attention other than pretty visuals. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Some games thrive on being beautiful.

Still, with the amount of different MMOGs out there, some of which actually try to emulate different ideas that came up in MtG (eg Wizards 101 and Battleforge even advertising the similarities on occasion), the question of “why not Magic” remains. One of the explanations could be that it would be too hard to come up with something. Yes, without focusing on a specific plane or set of two or three planes, it is too big to make something cohesive without heavy patching and expansion outputs. Even a set of planes might be difficult for that because each world has a massive history that has been shaped or wrecked by the pursuits of different planeswalkers. Each world has its own races, though some are consistent throughout (eg humans, elves and goblins). Each world has its own sights and, in some cases while dealing with these massive histories, you have to decide whether you want to deal with the time period to deal with.

There are the races and classes, some of which are standard in MMORPGs. Then you start dealing with things like the saporlings, thallids, balloths. slivers, shadows, the Eldrazi as well as other weird and unusual things on some worlds and it just starts getting weird. There’s also the fact that not everyone is a planeswalker in the story for the multiverse. So you can’t have everyone be planeswalkers to keep things down to a proper scale, but that bears another two problem. The first problem is which planeswalker motif gets used (if it gets used for players at all) since there’s the pre-Time Spiral block planeswalkers that are all but gods and then there’s the Time Spiral and post-Time Spiral block planeswalkers where near complete godliness is almost completely thrown out for slow, if not, no aging and specialty enhancement. The second problem is how to limit the amounts of planewalkers in a server.

Yes, it’s difficult. No one in their right mind would disagree with the fact that it would be difficult. The question that matters though isn’t whether or not it would be difficult, because even though there. The question that matters is whether or not it would pay off. If done right, set in familiar or fan-favorite worlds (eg. Dominaria, Ravnica or, to some extent, Mirrodin), it would probably grab the MtG players right off the bat. It might also attract many more people into the MtG fold, if it’s well done. Again, yes, it is and will be difficult due to size and scope and the interactions between the colors of magic. However, it’s not impossible.

You can try and fail but at least you took the risk on something that would pay off big-time. Don’t fail to try.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Gronli

Site [Wizards of the Coast] Read [Gamertell]