"[04:11] (fante7) what the hell is Dan Bock on?
[04:12] (Tarren) Fante, a sightseeing tour of Tokyo at this point I'd say."
[EFnet #mtg]

Free Japan!

Okay, since many people have been discussing this online, and since many more have been emailing me, I figured it was about time I got around to writing my Pro Tour: Tokyo 2001 report.

First you have to understand a bit about me. To say I'm not much of a Constructed player is a bit of an understatement; I'm rather impatient, and I don't really enjoy playing the same deck OVER and OVER again throughout a tournament. This is why I enjoy Sealed/Draft. While you are playing the same deck over and over, the deck plays differently - or at least, not AS consistently - so the game is a bit more varied.

In the first week of the PT: Tokyo Qualifying season, I played a version of Squee-Bind built by the most notorious Squee player, Mike Hron. He was in third place at the end of day 1 at PT: Chicago '99 with a very similar deck. I had never playtested it. I showed up, made top 8, and didn't win mostly because I had never playtested it. But for the first time in about two years, I was actually excited about Constructed. For a variety of reasons, I was unable to play in most other PTQs until the very last one of the season. At this PTQ, I played a deck called Venison, which is an improved version of Full English Breakfast by Paul Barclay.

I won with that deck, lost two games all day, and had more fun in Constructed than I'd had in a long time.

I'm not much of a Constructed player. Did I mention that? I'm terrible at playtesting, terrible at constructing, and terrible at tweaking. I'm much better at trading, buying, and selling.

Japan is an amazing country; the culture, the heritage, the homogenous population all with comparatively high disposable incomes...

Ah, well, the plan wasn't for me to do well in Tokyo by playing in the PT.

Free Japan!

I come from Madison Wisconsin. For those of you who have never been to Madison, it is one of the greatest Magic cities in the world. With Pro Tour greats like Bob Maher wandering around, and with all the playtesting done out in the open, and with most information shared during playtesting, Madison players have always held a unique advantage at Pro Tours. This time though, I was determined to play a combo deck. I asked a couple of the better players around here to make one, but none were able to. I tried making one myself, however there was just nothing in the set. Nothing. In the one-week countdown before the PT, I decided I would not be playing.

When we arrived in Tokyo, (or rather on the plane ride over,) I realized I might as well scoop up the two Pro Points you get just for showing up. Having consulted with a couple WotC people, I was informed that you actually needed to register a legal deck and sit down for round one. That took away my first two choices of 1) not going to first round, and 2) playing High Tide.

So as a result, I built the deck I played:
25 Mountains
20 Islands
15 Plains

Originally it was 20 Mountains, 20 Islands, 20 Plains, but playtesting
revealed that I just needed to draw the Mountains.

So that was the extent of my PT Experience. While I did go 0-1 drop, it
should be noted that I finished above Bob Albright.

----------------------------------------------------

The second half:

While this second half is a tournament report, it will be more of a report on much of the non-tournament events that went on.

First of all, I've got to define a couple different classes of magic players. There are "Dealers," "Trader Dealers," "Consumers," "Players."

Trader Dealers (TD). These are people who usually think they are dealers, but they aren't, yet. Some of them will become dealers, and it scares the crap out of the real dealers. Trader dealers will set up at large events like PTs and GPs; they will buy, sell, and trade just like a normal dealer, only with smaller percentages on the losses for their clientele. They can afford to, since they have lower overhead than the real dealers. In most cases, ironically enough, the TDs are working by volume for a real dealer. They'll check the buylist of a dealer, see that he's buying Urza's Rage for $15, and hit the floor trading or buying them for $12-14.

Dealers. There aren't a lot of these guys, people who actually are dealers. Usually by the time a person reaches the stage of a dealer, its not the person who is a dealer, but a company. Couple rules; if you don't pay taxes on it, you're not a dealer; if you don't declare at customs, you're not a dealer; if you still have that waiter job, you're not a dealer.

Consumers. These are the guys that show up by the hundreds, even the thousands to the big events, PTs, GPs, Gencon, and so on. Lots of Consumers think they are Players, but they aren't. They may spend hours and hours on the game, they may be good at it, they may have even had a random PT finish of like 23rd, but they still aren't a Player.

Players. There aren't a lot of these, just as there aren't a lot of Dealers. Bob Maher, Jr. is a Player. Dave Williams is a Player. Most of the OMS's are players. Jon Finkel is almost a Player. A Player doesn't usually buy cards, they borrow them - but right before a tournament, a player will do anything to get that fifteenth piece of his sideboard...

Why are these distinctions important? Well for the first time since WotC has been having major events in Japan, the selling of cards was contracted to the PT Dealers. There have been many large events in Japan, (GP's, even Worlds '99,) however, this was the first Pro Tour in Japan. In the past, at the
GPs and at Worlds, it was legal for anyone to sell. Hobby Japan (I believe it was Hobby Japan, anyway) sold hundreds of tables at the cost of 5000Y (about $45, then) for HALF a table. Partly because of successful lobbying by the regular PT dealers, this usual Japan practice was put to an end.

I'm fine with that. Honestly. You might think that that annoyed me, but it didn't. What bothered me was that it wasn't explained in advance. You can make the rules for a game any way you like them to be. You can have any kind of random events going on, any kind of crazy modifiers, and any kind of exceptions you desire - but if you don't inform the players of the game about the rules, the game is anything but fair. Many of the small Japanese Trader Dealers who showed up were disappointed, as well as the TDs from the other countries who were there, including those from France, Singapore, Australia, South Africa, USA, to name a few.

Well, now let's look at this from the third party point of view. This doesn't
have to be just about the one group of sellers versus the other. Perhaps WotC or Hobby Japan makes more by selling the tables to the dealers rather than contracting them out. Well, right away it looks like they make more. The contract is for $1,000 a piece? $2,000 a piece? That seems more (there were three dealers), but there are hidden costs to this system. For example, if only they are allowed to sell, then you have to make sure that no one else sells. This means, in the case of PT: Tokyo, a regiment of twenty or thirty security personnel walking around, making sure no one is exchanging money. What's twenty times some hourly rate times twelve hours a day times three days come to?

Ah, the security guards; these guys were hilarious. There were guys in bright yellow coats, bright blue coats, and white STAFF T-shirts walking around all weekend, with walkie-talkies. Despite the rules enforcement, there were still people selling.

How is that possible when it was illegal to sell except in the designated dealer area? There were three ways it was accomplished, but only one was legal. The first that I saw was money on the table. This was just done with a blatant disregard to the policy, but that always happens at PTs. The second way was developed by everyone's favorite Singaporean dealer: To buy a card, you would get a small deck box from him, which you took to the bathroom, put your money in, then brought back to his table. The third way, which was legal, was to take the consumer out the door and do the exchange outside. This method was actually confirmed as legal by all questioned WotC employees, and was even suggested by a few of them. However, the security guards decided to be harshest about this option.

They would follow people outside and make sure they went all the way past a certain point, sometimes harassing them along the way, and one time even
falsely accusing someone of selling inside!

So was this system necessary? Did they really need to have someone following me around everywhere I went? Is that just another hidden cost I that personally get to pay?

While a bunch of us were just hanging out, a European (I think) judge came up to me and said, "I'm warning you (to be careful) not because I was told to, but because I believe in what you are doing and that you are providing a service to the consumer."

So it then occurred to me that there is a fundamental difference that I may have missed between having three dealers and having a hundred and fifty. Quite simply, the prices are lower. Even the dealers' prices are lower when they have a hundred people to compete with.

So at the end of the weekend when I was talking to one of the dealers, he was telling me how disappointed he was in the weekend totals. However, he put the blame on the Trader-Dealers. And he was pissed. His stance was that he paid money for his table, and the TDs were taking business away from him, and he didn't even come close to the number he was expecting for this weekend.

Surely a very serious and valid complaint.

However I was later told that WotC did not advertise this Pro Tour as much as they have their previous GP's and Worlds '99. Part of the reason for this was that the site they chose was not as large as the previous sites.

But I'm pretty sure that that isn't the main reason. You see, regardless of whether or not the TDs and the Consumers were on the floor selling or just trading, they are at the very least trading. (Can you imagine that? Magic, the trading card game, being traded...) And some of the dealers' cards were priced unusually high. Now it WAS Japan, and it has long been known that there is a decent amount of arbitrage out there - however, even Japanese consumers won't stand paying overly outrageous prices when they can trade for the cards. Yes, there was illicit selling on the trading floor, but there were also people vying for space on the floor - the actual floor - just to trade! In Japan, a black bordered Japanese City of Brass might be worth the 6,500Y that the dealers had them priced at. However if a Japanese person spends five or ten minutes looking for a foreigner, to whom the card might be worth merely 3,000Y, or even 1,500Y IN TRADE, then that dealer is not going to have a sale. Note that it doesn't matter whether that Japanese consumer trades for the card or buys it.

The Dealer I was talking to made an interesting comment during his rant. The comment was that the TDs should not be allowed to take business away from them. Sadly, the only way to do that is to stop people from trading. How many "sales" were done by non-Dealers in that weekend? Now compare that number to the total value of cards that changed hands through trades? Each time one Consumer trades with another, or each time a Consumer trades with a TD rather than buying from one of the Dealers, that Dealer has just lost a sale. So here we have a situation where an event is occurring that takes money away from the Dealers, to which the only way to stop it would be to not allow people to trade.

My point is that just because something takes away business from a dealer, doesn't mean that thing is wrong or that it should be stopped.

Free Japan!

Japan never had Alpha, Beta, Unlimited, or even Revised. While they have been catching up, they shouldn't be forced to pay outrageous amounts... Not when the free market would have them paying less.

Free Japan!

Dan A Bock
262 / 270

"If the existence of truthful information hurts you as a businessman, then
you are not conducting business with the benefit of the consumer in mind."