This past weekend was stacked. Land Go's Commander Invitational, CCS's third Riftbound Qualifier, and a lot of money won over card games.

This week, two uncomfortable takes from the ChallengerTCG crew. Daniel Zidenberg: if you entered the main event for the prizing, you already lost. Here's where the money actually is. Jon Rosum: the game that made him a pro doesn't feel like Magic anymore.

Let's get into it.

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There are hundreds of thousands of dollars in EV sitting in the side events at every Riftbound RQ. Daniel Zidenberg on why the main event is a sucker's bet, and where the actual money is.

By Daniel Zidenberg

There are 40 players that make good money from the main event, everyone else wasted a weekend and walks away sad and defeated.

This sounds harsh, but it’s also an accurate representation of the prize structure that currently exists. No one signs up for a Regional Qualifier planning on getting $250 for Top 32, they’re trying to win a 5-figure shiny lottery metal card. Even if you manage to compete with some of the best players in the room on your leader, you still might fall just short losing on tiebreakers (ask me how I know this). The main event is more popular than it should be, given that the vast majority of people don’t have a shot at the rewards. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing for you though, there’s a huge opportunity people aren’t taking advantage of at every single Regional Qualifier. 

The Super Saturday Standard Challenge is the most underrated event in the venue, and in Sydney there was a laughable number of players that signed up.

There were 133 players who registered. That means only 5 players entered who weren’t able to cash out with 45% of a metal card at the end of the day. Keep this in mind too, all the best players that you’re worried about competing with for your favorite Best-Of prize card are all busy playing the main event, the field is considerably weaker than the competition you’ll face in the upper brackets of the main event.

Given that, why force yourself to fight the harder battle when you can easily lock a metal with a few wins in the side event? Playing in the main event is basically gambling away your free 1k+ prize wall metal for a 5% chance (or less, if your leader is popular) at a 10k payout. I know plenty of degenerate gamblers, but surely it has to feel good spiking a 1k card every time you play a Saturday event.

The other aspect of Super Saturday that doubles up on this principle, you still have Sunday open to do whatever you want. Interested in grinding for more money? Would you look at that, you’ve got 6500 tickets to compete for on Sunday too.

Are you slightly less insane than me, and you actually enjoy sightseeing in the city you travel to? Fantastic, you can pay for your trip on Friday and Saturday, then enjoy your vacation Sunday.

You COULD play a 1500+ person main event, where everyone who isn’t insanely good at the game gets 0 payout and walks away miserable afterwards. OR you could instead play an event with $100,000 of metal card prizing and very few professional players, having the option to play a $200,000 event on top of that on the following day (or go do something fun with your vacation).

Thank you for coming around to my point of view, please don’t queue into me on the second round of the next RQ. 

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Power creep, throwaway promos, and seven-turn Standard games. Ex-pro Jon Rosum on why competitive Magic stopped being worth the squeeze.

By Jon Rosum

This past weekend I went to attend SCG Cincinnati for Riftbound but I was able to catch-up with some of my friends from my pro Magic days. I was curious to see how things have been. To be completely frank, most of them did not have many nice things to say and it got me thinking about the reasons that I left competitive Magic

From a 2018 MODERN staple to an enabler that can kill you on t3 in 2026 STANDARD?

I’m not saying that no-power creep is a good thing, powerful cards with unique effects drive the buzz around sets and what makes them sell at the end of the day, but the running joke of the weekend was that these standard decks could probably beat some of the modern decks from the 2016-2018 era.

The floor of these decks is just way too high which leaves very little room to actually out-maneuver in a lot of situations. I think a healthy amount of variance is good but when the cards get so powerful you feel basically forced into playing them and it just leaves to be an incredibly unfulfilling play experience. My friend (who was a former Gold Pro) told me he played a match where they played a whopping 7 turns in Standard. That is just completely crazy to me. 

When I was a pro-MTG player, the best part of the game was that it felt like you had a lot of choice even in Standard. Whether it be in deckbuilding or in actual play. I remember playing UW Control in standard formats where there were multiple aggro decks / weird combo decks in Nexus of Fate but there was certainly a lot of room to play. 

Take SCG Cincinnati for example: Izzet decks made up 39% of the Day 2 Metagame, and the Cub decks made up around 22%. I know that there are many decks on this image but when the format is dictated by how strong your turn one play is, what you get is slop where everybody is trying to just kill each other the fastest OR you play a medium control deck that requires perfect answers at the exact spot in the curve (which I have done many times and this strategy won the tournament) but I feel like this is a bit too much. 

A healthy format has a good mix of powerful things to be doing and a lot of choice. Since this format is more of the former than the latter (and I witnessed a lot of matches this past weekend) it just leaves this experience where it feels like you are just gambling and that is a bit too atrocious for my taste and why I think we continue to see tournaments with less and less players. 

I would really love to know the thought process behind these choices.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that giving away promos as prize support is an actively good choice and I’m glad to see WOTC do this specifically for Magic. The problem is since Magic is just plagued by Secret Lairs, Bonus Sheets and 7 sets a year, these just lose any sort of appeal that they would have.

Also, why are we using a promo that was only good in a deck that got banned in Standard and one of a Planeswalker that hasn’t seen any play in around a decade? I know that every promo can’t be on the level of Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student and Cloud, Midgar Mercenary but there has to be a middle-ground because Emberheart Challenger and Liliana Vess have got to be close to the bottom of the barrel. 

Take One Piece and Riftbound for example. These TCGs learned very early on that people absolutely LOVE iconic promos especially if they are usable. Magic has the ability to choose ones that their players will be excited to acquire but instead when you get too many Liliana Vess’s / Emberheart Challengers you are just praying that every tournament is for a Universe Beyond IPs, yanno the promos that people actually want. 

I don’t want this to come across that I completely hate Magic, because at the end of the day it is still one of the best TCGs to play, at least casually. That being said, these two primary issues are really hard to overcome, especially if you’re coming from another TCG and want to dip your toes into competitive Magic. The juice is not worth the squeeze in the slightest. 

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