Vintage Leagues 'coming' to MTGO

The State of Magic Online was published today, and it made a passing reference to setting up leagues for vintage.

As someone who doesn't have four hour blocks to play, this might help me find time to play. Excited to see how this turns out.

I almost missed it when I read it myself 🙂


We expect to keep MTGO running for the foreseeable future and have no current plans to decommission it or stop content releases. #WOTCstaff

Lately there has been wild speculation on whether "Magic Digital Next" will replace mtgo and people have sold out their collections because wotc didn't correct these speculations. mtgotraders for example were forced to drop their tix buy rate quite radically. But none of that is happening in the foreseeable future, according to Elaine Chase.

Yes, leagues would be the best since the dailies take too much time and are usually on really bad hours in Europe. Had so much fun playing in the EVL season one organized by @yugular recently and would most definitely play in MTGO vintage leagues as well.

There goes the critical mass baloney that Lee Sharpe tried to sell us on. It was always "if you build it they will come", not the other way around. I look forward to this as I too rarely can spent 3-4 hours in a row in front of a computer to play Vintage for what amounts to probably 2 hours of actual play time. I will join these as often as I possibly can.

I kinda love the dailies as they have a tournament feeling in them, but I do acknowledge that leagues is the way to go if there are enough players.

From the mothership: "From adding new event adding League support for additional formats such as Vintage, we'll be looking to provide as many game types as the player base can support."

I for one am pretty excited about this. It's always been difficult to dedicate the time to daily's.

I know there are some folks who are upset to not have daily events and I understand. I was once one of those people. Then I tried a legacy league after missing a ton of Vintage daily events in a row. The fact that I was able to play the league when I wanted to play was amazing. Sure, the prize and entry fee aren't quite as good but I still enjoyed the hell out of it.

People will still have monthly power nine events. Streams for vintage can occur 24/7 with leagues. This is great.

@Islandswamp How much larger to you think the legacy playerbase is? It doesn't matter how convenient leagues are if only a few people from the league are on at a given time.

My prediction is this goes horribly.

last edited by diophan

@diophan I really don't know. All I know for sure is that there are more people who have decks but aren't playing dailies.
For instance I play every day without fail. I'd way rather spend that hour in a league instead of TP.
I think though that they should do it on a trial basis at first just in case.

There have been several times where a daily failed while six matches were going on in TP and the 2-mans .
The Facebook group we have has a list with a lot of MTGO vintage players. It seems like there's more people than we realize. I'm hoping this works out.

I think the leagues could be good. I know my cards have been gathering digital dust for a year, just because having two kids under 2, makes an online tourney a tough go. However a match here and there is super feasible.

What are the particulars of the leagues? How do they work?

I share diophan's concerns - if the vintage playerbase is too small, league matches will never fire (and the vintage playerbase is VERY small on MTGO). If you recall, a while back dailies went from "never firing" to "almost always firing" when they cut the number of Daily time slots. Switching to leagues is basically raising the number of Daily time slots to infinite.

I'm trying to remain cautiously optimistic, though. If we hit critical mass of players, the league experience is much better for streaming than the daily experience, and it's possible the playerbase has grown since before ... it's also possible that the league format attracts new players, particularly players from outside the US who don't have a daily scheduled at a convenient time for them right now.

When there were too many Vintage dailies, there was a concerted effort on the part of the Vintage playerbase to select a specific daily and all show up for that one. If we can get that same kind of effort going, I think leagues should be no problem. The "any time" aspect of it could be both a help and a hindrance.

I think it'd be really neat to get something set up where a bunch of people stream league matches at once and viewers jump between based on who's currently playing or who's got an interesting match. I'm picturing something like a voice chat that only streamers can talk in but everyone can hear so I can say "oh snap, this guy is playing Dragon, ya'll get in here!" or maybe a bot that sits in all the Twitch chats and advises when new matches are occurring on other channels.

@thecravenone Happy to help coordinate something like sometime if leagues pick up

@joshuabrooks said in Vintage Leagues 'coming' to MTGO:



If you can, try building a Legacy deck and playing a league to try it out. Basically they run for months, stop during downtime, then a new one starts. So you have lots and lots of time to finish league matches. They cost eight tickets or eighty play points and there are prizes depending on how you finish. Many people play all five matches in a row and do that over and over again, but people like me with the ol' wife, kid, job, etc, we seem to play them more slowly. They're a ton of fun, and I have wanted to play one with a Vintage deck for a long time.

You know, if people all logged on during the usual Daily Event times then the league match waiting period would probably shrink for that time period. Just saying... I bet that you could even message a buddy and stand a decent chance of being paired together, but I am only guessing.

Also I'd like to note that after Play Points but before leagues the Legacy Dailies were having trouble firing. Then they made leagues and the a ton of people signed up. If you have two months to finish a league it's easy to stay signed up for one at all times.

@Brass-Man But you are assuming that leagues will be operating off the current vintage daily player base.

A lot of the vintage league grinders use to play vintage dailies and I would say a lot will come back, every legacy league I see at least one user name that frequented vintage dailies in the past.

A lot of people sold out of vintage whilst waiting for leagues, some will come back as well as those who have been waiting to buy in for leagues.

There is a big amount of online vintage players who never have/will play in dailies due to timeslots.

Leagues can operate off 100 enrolled players.

@diophan There will be way more than a few online at a time.

Attending a daily event is next to impossible for me. But I would absolutely buy back into Vintage on MTGO for league play.

Leagues are also tricky in sense of time zones. Let's say that my available time slot is from 8~10pm CET, I will play against same group of players again and again, similar to 2 player queue right now. But that is me with my busy life, let's hope that this will be beneficial for online community since possibility to play Vintage even with same players always is better that no Vintage at all.

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