Magic: The Gathering Online

Magic: The Gathering Online (Magic Online or MTGO; formerly commonly referred to as MODO, for Magic Online Digital Objects) is the Internet version of Magic: The Gathering. It went "live" on the Internet in June 2002. The Magic: The Gathering Invitational has been played on Magic Online since 2003. Users connect to a server that may host thousands of users at a given time and may play the game and trade cards. It is only available for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Preparation

The client software for Magic Online may be downloaded for free from Wizards of the Coast's website, but to play the game, it is necessary to purchase the cards. As with "paper Magic", all cards come from sealed booster packs and similar randomly collated sealed product; on Magic Online, these packs are represented as digital objects tied to a player's account and are purchased from the Wizards of the Coast website, for prices that are comparable to the standard retail prices of the physical product. Packs, once purchased, may be opened to add the cards within to the user's collection, trade to other users, or used to participate in Limited tournaments such as drafts.

The cards too are represented as digital objects tied to a player's account, and may be traded to other users. A Deck Editor interface exists to allow players to build Constructed decks out of their collections for use in online tournaments or casual play.

Game play

Games may be played casually between users; a series of rooms exist for friendly games, including one for new players, one for fun decks, and one for tournament practice. Tournaments are also organized and run automatically by the server; these can range in size from 8-player single-elimination tournaments with small prizes (dozens of which are running constantly) to heavily promoted events with larger spoils.

The game is played with an interface that mimics the tabletops that Magic is played on, with cards laid out in front of each player and "tapped" cards turned sideways. A player is prompted whenever he or she has priority or is required by a card to make an in-game choice. The server handles all of the game's rules and card interactions. A bug reporting system is in place to fix any issues that may arise due to odd card combinations, but has a poor reputation amongst many players. While the game runs smoothly for the most part, there have been a few situations where minor bugs went uncorrected for extended periods of time.

To enter a tournament, it is necessary to provide a certain number of "event tickets", usually six for Constructed events and two (plus the requisite sealed product) for Limited events. Event tickets are another kind of digital object, which must be purchased from the official store at US$1 each (or received in a trade from another player). Prizes for tournaments are always sealed packs.

Trading and economy

Users may trade cards, sealed packs, event tickets, and in-game avatars (which are released for special events as promotions) with other players. A Trading Post exists for players to post requests for certain cards into a forum like bulletin board or to place notices of cards they have available for trade/sale. A marketplace also exists in which an active listing of chat postings lists individual offers for specific cards for sale or trade. An Auction room also exists for traders to buy and sell larger and often bulk numbers of cards at often discounted prices. A large number of the users posting offers to buy or sell are entrepreneurs with large collections looking to make a profit by selling cards on their own websites for Magic: The Gathering Online or on eBay in addition to their in-game trades (though in practice the amount of money that can be made heavily trading in the game is not very large). Technically any transfer of cards in the game is not considered a "sale" because, for legal reasons, the digital objects are not actually owned by the collector, but Wizards of the Coast is tolerant of players buying and selling objects for money on the secondary market.

Because of certain controls on the part of Wizards of the Coast, the economy of the game is quite stable. First, event tickets are ideal as a de facto unit of in-game currency, because demand is sustained by the tens of thousands of tickets used up every day to pay for tournament entry, and supply is limited by the fact that every single ticket in the market was purchased from Wizards of the Coast for US$1. As a result, "prices" for cards in the Trading Room are often quoted in tickets. However, because of the secondary market, a ticket is rarely actually worth exactly US$1. Also, because the ticket is the only unit of in-game currency, yet many of the cards have a value of less than US$1, trades for these cards are often offered in bulk. A common example is 32 commons for one ticket (32 items being the maximum number of objects Magic Online supports per trade).

Second, Wizards of the Coast allows collectors who have assembled a full set of digital cards (see Magic: The Gathering sets) to redeem them for a sealed, mint-condition set of the corresponding physical cards, for a period of up to 4 years after the set's online release. This helps digital cards retain their worth by backing them with a valued physical product.

Trading is usually done between two individual players, but Magic Online has accumulated a secondary automated traders market. These traders, known as "bots", are accounts owned by a third party that run on programming to sell and trade cards at variable prices and qualities. Some bots also are designed to exchange in a somewhat barterlike fashion found in the room called "1:1". These bots will trade most cards they have in stock in an even swap for a card that a player owns of the same rarity. A 1:1 bot will give an uncommon for one of your uncommons for example using no tickets in the exchange. Lastly, some bots are designed to help advertise competing sellers prices and give users a general sense of the values of cards they have. An example of this is "infobot". A player may chat with infobot and follow directions to inquire about card prices available in the current market supplied by vendors who tell the bot their pricing.

Most online tournament players fund their continued play by selling the packs they win as prizes (and/or the cards they open in Limited tournament) in the trading rooms for tickets, which they then use to enter more tournaments. Successful players who are able to sustain their tournament play indefinitely this way without further monetary investment boast of "going infinite".

A few early sets (notably the Invasion block) had very short print runs on Magic Online, and short supply combined with rising demand as Magic Online's user base grew and the server became more stable. Cards from these early sets demand much higher prices than their paper counterparts; popular rares sell on eBay for 5 to 10 times as much as the physical version, and even commons command a premium. The Odyssey block and 7th Edition had a shorter than normal print run, though not nearly so extreme, and therefore some rares are worth two to three times as much as the printed versions.

Cards available

Currently only about half of all Magic cards ever printed are available for use on Magic Online (the earliest set available was Invasion, which had been released in printed form in the fall of 2000; all cards from subsequent sets are online as well). This is because the development team decided that it would be too much strain on the programmers to program in all the card mechanics from older sets, which was feared would lead to a profligacy of bugs resulting from peculiar card interactions, and so priority was placed on developing new sets.

However, in the summer of 2005, Wizards of the Coast announced that Mirage will come out online in the fall, nine years after its 1996 print release. [1] This set was chosen as the earliest set usable on Magic Online because it was the first to be designed with both Limited and Constructed play in mind and the first to be intended as part of a three-set block. It is believed, though not yet confirmed, that the eventual goal of the developers is to have every expansion set from Mirage onward in the online game. The future online release of such "classic" sets will depend on the success of Mirage. This might mean they plan on releasing all sets, though that is unknown. In April 2006 Visions was released, which is the 2nd set of the Mirage Block.

New sets come out on Magic Online about three or four weeks after their physical release, due to extensive beta-testing, and fear that earlier beta-testing would spoil the set before the paper version's pre-release.

Next version

• Magic Online III, which will feature an updated interface and expanded in-game guidance, is slated to launch in Fall 2006. An open beta is planned for Summer 2006.

Official Sites

• wizards.com Home to the official site for Magic: The Gathering Online
• Gatherer Official Magic: The Gathering card database
• The DCI.com Official site for Wizards of the Coast organized play

Unofficial Sites

• MTGOTraders.com Place for articles that are MTGO related and buying cards.
• Cardshark.com Place for buying and selling real and online Magic the Gathering cards.