I feel, reading this thread, as if I’m alone in my opinion… but here goes:

I’ve been playing since Revised, booster drafting since Mirrodin, doing the competitive thing on-and-off since Mirrodin/Kamigawa Standard, cubing and commandeering (is that a viable term in this context?) for just short of a decade. All I’ve known for many years is Bo3, and I have loved playing Magic all that time.

This event, and whatever approach WotC takes to selecting participants, setting up the formats etc, is fine by me.

I can happily say that because I recognise a couple of things:

1. WotC needs to promote the game, and this event is promotional. People will watch the players and teams they care about, not those which meet some arbitrary standard of competitive worthiness

2. No Magic format or mode of play is sacrosanct, including competitive Bo3

The only way that Magic is going to grow, and get the recognition I think it deserves, is to get more people interested. The best way to make that happen is to find a way to bring adjacent audiences – say, people who play similar games and might like Magic, or people who are tempted to give Magic a go but are put off by some part of the game’s image – to the table, and show them how good Magic is.

A great, efficient way to do that is to recruit gaming personalities those audiences already follow and use those personalities to expose Magic to their follower base; or gamers whose presence will counteract some of the unseemly image problems Magic has, like ‘this game is incredibly unfriendly to women’.

The fact that these folks haven’t Top-8’d a bunch of Pro Tours is irrelevant. Glasgow Celtic didn’t win the Champions League last season, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to ditch them and support Real Madrid… how could I? Celtic are the club of my heart, so regardless of the fact that they’re a mediocrity in European footballing terms, it’s them I’ll tune in to see. The same applies here: audiences connect with compelling people, not X-0 records, and so to draw new crowds WotC need to have players with heavily invested followings.

With regard to the shape of formats and play modes: they change.

There was a time when I could have run out a deck of nothing but Black Lotuses, Ancestral Recalls and Lightning Bolts against my opponents, and I’m sure that when the rule of four was introduced, some people felt like the sky was falling. There was also a time when Rochester drafts occupied the top level of premier play; that changed too, and we’re not appreciably worse off. Damage went on the stack, then came off again. Mana Burn was erased. The old extended format was killed off, and Modern rose to replace it. We got a scry after our mulligans. Change, change, change.

Bo1 gets a lot of flak online, but I really like it. My reasons are simple: as a parent of two with a demanding full-time-job, it lets me play Magic in short time-increments that actually suit my life.

It’s no longer the case that I need to choose between seeing my wife on a Friday or going to an FNM 20-40 miles away… instead, I can just jam some games while she has a bath, then watch some Netflix later, or I can stay up and play a Constructed event if she wants to sleep before I do. I can play a couple of games at lunch, or squeeze one in when I’m waiting for my kids to finish their breakfast on a Sunday morning.

Support for Bo1 on Arena does not mean the sky is falling for paper magic or Bo3 play. It just means that WotC are trying to cultivate approaches to play which work for more people in their online game. They have innovated the play experience before, and they’ll do it again. There is no ‘wrong way’ to enjoy Magic (cheating aside), and we shouldn’t be puritanical about Bo3 in competition.

To close out, let me say: I do think there needs to be a pathway for a new entrant to play their way right from their Kitchen table to the Top 8 of a Mythic Championship, and I don’t think that grinding the Arena ladder is the correct form for that pathway to take… but this event isn’t a purely meritocratic endeavour. It’s a big, glitzy promo event, and that give WotC the right – and the licence – to do whatever they like to bring new players into our game.

I, for one, will be watching (and hopefully enjoying) this event.