There are a few ways to play Magic for free, or at a vastly reduced cost. One can make proxy cards, or one can play paper or Mental Magic. One can use non-"Wizards of the Coast" created software programs to play Magic on the computer. I would like to address this topic from a broad, abstract perspective.

This article is not intended to be legally accurate, but seeks to discuss the issue on an ethical or moral plane. It is also not intended to be a vehicle to bash third-party Magic-related software. I do lean heavily on the Magic Online versus other software angle, primarily because it is the most concrete peg to hang otherwise nebulous concepts upon. I would like to approach this discussion from three main angles:

Angle 1 - The developer. My real life job is to develop software; I know the effort that goes into designing and developing even the simplest applications, and while that's not strictly the same as developing a Trading Card Game, I believe that can I speak from a context that is valid in the general sense.

Angle 2 - The "dark" moralist. This is the person who does not believe they are "stealing" and will present any argument to support their point of view.

Angle 3 - The "light" moralist. This is the person who believes in the simple, absolute truth that stealing is stealing, regardless of any of the arguments presented.

I do not intend to refer directly to these three angles, but if you read carefully you will see where each one pervades my lines of reasoning.

Now most customers are, by and large, honest people. Few would walk into a game shop, pick up a booster pack, and walk out without paying. I appreciate that one can argue they wouldn't do this because of the very real likelihood of a direct response to their person through security cameras/guards/police, etc, and I do accept that. But what I want to focus on is the argument that many people would not do this because they know that intrinsically it is wrong. They know this because their parents, schoolteachers, and society in general teach this.

When it comes to virtual product however, many of the same people display a much more relaxed attitude. Many people balk at the idea of spending money on virtual cards, presenting arguments such as "It doesn't cost Wizards anything to make them" or "I already have this card, the real card! Why should I pay for a copy that doesn't exist?" Let me first address the economics of Magic Online.

It costs Wizards a lot of money to provide the Magic Online service:

• Programming is a highly specialized skill, one that prospective employees spend a lot of money and time developing through college and university courses. They expect to be reimbursed for this effort and expenditure, and their skills are enough in demand that they generally are.
  
• The machinery - application servers and data storage devices - that runs the Magic Online system is not cheap, and requires a certain amount of investment to remain in good working order. It also requires personnel to support it.
  
• Internet bandwidth is not cheap, and I would imagine that the Magic Online service requires a fair chunk of bandwidth.

Wizards could choose to fund these various costs from the profits that they generate from the physical card business, offering the service to gamers as an incentive. Why might Wizards not do this?

Primarily, Wizards is a business, and by that very nature seeks to make money. Providing an experience at least equal to the physical card game experience for free, with many advantages such as availability of games/players, instant rules management, and complete access to cards from as many sets as are available on the service does not make for good business practice.

• It gives little or no incentive to the customer to purchase product, especially customers that merely want to play the game and are not interested in collecting said product.
  
• It reduces the profit margin of the company, and while it may raise the profile of the company, it does so in a negative way; more people joining the service and playing for free means more strain on the resources of the system leading to the need for more investment in the system, while the system itself does not generate any profit.
  
• Potential customers will become conditioned to playing Magic for free, and are therefore less likely to spend money on cards; if they choose to play in sanctioned tournaments in the real world they will tend to buy specific cards at the dealer tables, and are not likely to buy random booster packs.

Wizards' owns the Magic brand and has a legal right to make money from it, within the confines of the laws governing business.

Given these and doubtless other conditions that I either have not thought of or am excluding for brevity's sake, we establish that the Magic Online system needs to either pay for itself or at the very least make significant contributions, both to revenue and to the company/product profile, in a positive way. This would include introducing customers to the concept of Magic, not only from a game mechanics point of view but also from an "expected return on investment" point of view. E.g. the customer should have the same expectations of what quality and quantity of product their dollars will buy them, regardless of whether that is spent in the virtual or real contexts. Therefore, Wizards charges essentially equal amounts for virtual or real product.

Getting to the heart of the matter, some people prefer not to spend money on Magic Online and would prefer to play on other services that attempt to offer the game of Magic either for free or very low cost. I have not used these services myself, so I will refrain from discussing the technical specifics of them, but will rather approach the moral space they occupy.

As a business, Wizards has the right to make money on its products. As individuals, the people at Wizards clearly enjoy their jobs and wish to keep them. Like all individuals, they have families to feed or goals in life to achieve, and require money in order to survive in society, just as any other person would. As a business, Wizards needs to make money to continue to exist.

A situation that deprives Wizards of this opportunity can be classified as "a type of theft" in one way or another, in much the same way that being ignorant of the laws of a given country does not absolve you of your responsibility to obey those laws. The type of theft can be expressed in different terminology depending on the legal or moral classification; it may be a case of copyright infringement, were an individual or group uses protected artwork or other material without appropriate licence or permission; it may be a projected loss of revenue, where an individual fails to purchase product, for example.

How does this affect a person who has a significant collection of Magic cards? Perhaps playing with a deck on a free service that they own all of the cards for in physical form. Surely by owning the "real" cards they are automatically granted some kind of licence - a moral one, surely, if not a legal one - to use those cards virtually?

Unfortunately for this postulation, Wizards offers a sanctioned product in the same venue, in the same space as the free product. There is an "official" way to play with virtual cards, and that official way requires payment. If Wizards chose to ignore the online space completely, then one could conceivably condone this line of reasoning from a moral point of view at minimum. But Wizards choose to exercise their right to promote, distribute, and draw revenue from this marketable space, and therefore you're either playing by their rules or you're not.

What then of the argument "I'd never buy Magic cards, so it doesn't matter if I play for free, because they wouldn't be getting any money off me anyway." Quite frankly then, it is no different to stealing the physical cards. You are partaking of their entertainment business with no intent to reimburse them.

Perhaps the classic "Wizards make plenty of money, so what does it matter if I..." argument? They make money because other people choose to support their endeavour by walking the official line. If everyone subscribed to this logic, then the goose would be firmly slain in short order. You are effectively stealing from Wizards and your potential Magician friends.

The idea of using non-Wizards sanctioned programs as pure deck test platforms is perhaps the most interesting one for the purposes of debate, as there are pretty good arguments on both sides of this coin:

On the one hand it is entirely possible to look up cards on Gatherer, make notes, and build a deck either as a card list, on paper, or in your head, and run through some "Mental Magic," even jotting down possible turns and possible combinations of cards and plays. Actually running up a mock deck with either physical or virtual proxies and goldfishing it is practically equivalent to the "Mental Magic" process.

It is hard to argue that this particular activity fits our definitions for "a type of theft," as there is a certain shred of credence to the argument that between such "sanctioned" tools as the Draft Viewer and Gatherer, Wizards themselves are maybe only a half step away from offering such a service, and while one can test ideas with pen and paper and Gatherer, it is often simply less cumbersome to have some version of the actual cards to hand.

On the other hand, the outcome of these sessions can or will influence the buying decisions of the tester. This can influence Wizards, who must surely gather data even in some broad level from resellers of individual cards, even if it is only general trends of popularity. If they do, I am sure it would factor into the types of cards they are willing to consider for reprinting, perhaps in Nth Edition or other sets, for example.

In addition, Magic Online itself presents the user with a solitaire option. The major difficulty and most interesting point in this part of the discussion comes as we look at the "Eternal" formats, where the cards have not been ported to Magic Online and are long out of print in physical form. How else can one be expected to test ideas for these formats if not to use systems that do offer ease of access to the cards? It is a grey area for sure.

I believe that there are many more points to be raised concerning this issue. I don't claim to offer the definitive absolute here, but merely seek to present an impartial theoretical discussion of the landscape as I see it. I'm not a businessman or a legal expert. My goal is really to entice you, the reader, to ruminate upon the subject and perhaps to share those thoughts in a civilized manner in the forums.

Simon