A couple of months from now, one of the largest live sporting events post-pandemic will occur in Las Vegas, Nevada. Conor McGregor, the Notorious one, makes his third (third? how many comebacks is this?) return to the Octagon at T-Mobil Arena to take on Dustin Poirier for their trilogy’s finale. Tickets for the live event start at $300, but you can drop up to $10,000 if you really want to be in range of the blood and sweat flying into the crowd. If that’s too rich for your blood, you can just spend $60 on ESPN Plus and watch the match from the comfort of your own couch.

And I won’t watch a minute of it.

Unpopular fact: I don’t like MMA. I have zero urge to watch two human beings beat each other into submission with their glove-covered hands. I get really uncomfortable when I watch someone become that injured in real time. I’ve never spent a dime on MMA and I doubt that I ever will, and no amount of explaining is going to make me feel different about it. 

Yet…I fully support its existence and completely understand the value that it brings to the practicioners of martial arts as well as the fans. 

And I feel the same way about the MTG pro scene. Since the recent announcements of the past week, I’ve been sad…sad that Magic is getting closer to losing something that brings the entire community so much value and knowledge even if the average casual player who buys a few packs, throws together a deck, and only plays at the kitchen table against friends will never understand the value. I, in essence, am closer to those people than to the average MTG professional player. Yet I hope that Hasbro (yes, Hasbro and not WotC…gotta have something to write on those quarterly earnings reports) understand why pro play puts MTG in a different, and yes, better, category than other games that don’t have such a structure and why I hope that they come up with something that serves to replace it.

In order to fill out the argument-as-analogy, let’s go back to MMA for a second. News flash: fighting is not a recent invention. Dana White didn’t invent two dudes trying to beat each other’s brains in. For as long as human beings have known that there were ways to apply force by using your bare hands either for self-defense or for other aggressive means, human beings have fought others. And while many martial art styles have developed kata or forms to try to simulate the methods of fighting without injuring someone else, everything eventually becomes a fight between two people. And for those at the highest levels of their respective arts, this fight is essential. There’s no way to know if your art is truly effective unless you practice it, and the only way you can practice it is by taking on some sort of risk of losing something, whether money, teeth, or consciousness. The earliest, pre-White Ultimate Fighting Championship was exactly that–a chance for practitioners of one style to enter a tournament against the best of other styles to find out if what you had been claiming was a powerful means of defense was actually that. And these battles were happening whether organized or not. If MMA as a spectator sport did not exist, it would be happening today in a basement somewhere or on the streets. But then we’d call it a fight at best or assault at worst. Either way, it would still happen and would still be necessary.

Professional Magic play is UFC without the blood and bad neck tattoos. 

Magic gets the same sort of value from a pro system, and no “MagicFests” are not the same thing. When you’re that good at something as complex as martial arts or Magic, you get to a certain point where you can’t get better unless you’re putting yourself at risk against the best. And pro players do put themselves at risk every time they enter a high-level tournament (although hopefully they keep all of their teeth). If you (or I) go 0-6 on the ladder or at FNM with some janky pile that we thought was great, we giggle about it. Maybe our friends ask us what in the blue hell we were thinking. Then we go get a beer and it’s over. If Sam Black or Reid Duke do the same thing in a Mythic championship (or whatever they’re called this week), social media goes nuts. “Is he slipping? Was he throwing the tournament? What’s wrong?” And that is a loss, whether to reputation or influence or even sponsors if serious. You’re not going to get the sort of intense, heavy focus on the moment if there’s nothing to be risked. 

As I’ve written about before, there’s something about competition at the highest levels that allows iron to sharpen iron. The rules and structure of competitions like MMA, in fact, create ideas and innovations that hadn’t existed before. As previously mentioned, the first UFC tournaments involved artists of all styles. From the wins and losses  of such competition, Brazilian jujitsu became a well-known practice worldwide, and these various styles influenced one another to create what most people today feel is the “best” way to apply force with your hands to another person.  Would this novel style have gained acceptance without an organized place to learn and perfect it? I doubt it. 

Professional Magic play is the place where iron sharpens iron, where new decks see the limelight and new players become trusted. Pro play creates records that enforce expertise. I might be a better writer or communicator than some pros, but I fully accept that I don’t have the wins and losses that PVDDR or LSV do to back it up. And that’s why when they write or make videos or stream, people listen. And they SHOULD listen. They got in the ring under the brightest lights and performed. In addition, they innovated…their intense preparation yielded new strategies and decks and uses for cards that most of us had never before considered and now accept as Gospel.  If there’s no professional play, is there as much focus, as much intensity of thought as their would be otherwise? I doubt it.

No, it doesn’t need to be organized by WotC. Star City Games has done yeoman’s work in producing and streaming their own tournament structure, and I hope that they’re able to pick up where they left off pre-COVID. But “professional magic” implies that it’s going to be something bigger than twelve people at your LGS, and the prizes will have to be bigger than 1000 tix that can be redeemed for a swell t-shirt. You can cater more to the casuals, but games and activities as diverse as chess, League of Legends, and Rubik’s Cube solving have competitions with thousands of dollars up for grabs. They aren’t random games held at conventions for funsies. They’re full-out competitions where prizes and prestige are at stake.

But there’s a thin line between where MTG is today and becoming akin to two guys fighting in a park at midnight. Organized play at the highest level needs to stay an integral part of Magic. Otherwise, much of the innovation and motivation to innovate will go away, and many of the brightest minds in the game will find somewhere (and something) else that will scratch that itch.