I have a challenging and well-payed day job. Thus for me games are and have always been entertainment for fun and relaxation. The recent announcement from Wizards of the Coast that they want to turn Magic the Gathering into an esport with a $10 million prize pool isn't very attractive to me. I don't need another job. And I consider pursuing a career as a professional athlete in any discipline, electronic or real, to be not a very good idea: If you become an engineer and it turns out that you are not among the world's top performers, you'll still bring home a good salary. If you become an professional athlete and it turns out that you are not among the world's top performers, you will live a life of poverty and hardship. It's a bit like playing the lottery: A small chance of striking it big and a large chance of ending up a loser.

Now the idea behind giving away 10 million bucks in prizes for eSports is not just to attract aspiring professional athletes. You also hope that the top matches end up being seen by a wide audience on platforms like Twitch, and that this in turn attracts a lot more new players to your game, so you make your money back. I can see how that can work with games like Dota, Counterstrike, or Starcraft. These games have visual elements to them which make them interesting to watch, and even a non-player of these games can understand what is going on. But if I look at Magic the Gathering, I am not 100% convinced that it makes for a great spectator sport. Even with the added visual effects of Magic Arena, it remains a card game. If you don't understand the rules of the game, and those rules are rather complicated (much more so than in Hearthstone), it is hard for a spectator to follow what is going on. Some decks relying on combos or control might look extremely boring for most of the match, until the player suddenly wins, with only people who know about that type of deck seeing it coming.

This summer the CEO of Hasbro talked on Jim Cramer's Mad Money about the importance of Twitch and eSports for both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering. That caused some confusion, because he wasn't making a distinction, and most people couldn't imagine D&D as an eSports. But as the many YouTube, Twitch, and other channels showing people playing D&D prove, Dungeons & Dragons is a very watchable game. It is a game that plays on two levels, one about story-telling, and another about rules and game mechanics. You don't need to understand the rules to be able to follow the story, so Matt Mercer describing a dragon attack makes for good viewing even for people who don't know the rules at all. Magic the Gathering has always tried to evoke a similar sense of story by having lore and artwork, but pretty much failed to do so. Playing a card with a dragon on it in Magic just doesn't have the story impact of a dragon in D&D.

An even bigger problem for Hasbro might be the increasingly negative attitude of gamers towards heavily monetized games. Valve recently launched their own trading card game, Artifact, on their own Steam platform, and got ripped apart by their own community for the monetization. And Artifact is a *lot* cheaper than Magic the Gathering.

In summary I understand where Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast is trying to go with Magic Arena. But I still think they are making a mistake by focusing so much on the competitive aspects of the game, and neglecting the casual / new player experience. I believe even 10 million dollars can't buy you enough players to make Magic Arena a big success.