Uh, no thanks. I think you missed my point. There's too many spoilers coming from about of miscellaneous (or downright random) sources. I find all the spoilers alright in spite of this, but I'd prefer WotC change it in the future.
I may be an enfranchised player like most of here as well and am personally annoyed by some of marketing's antics (although those tend to fall on the line of PR), but I don't actually see what they're doing now is entirely wrong either - we enfranchised players don't need the marketing, that they know very well. The reason why they still have to hype everything up is not for us, nor is it to annoy us, it's to cater to the group of new players who were attracted to their website - that is all.
MaRo could put up an article with nothing but the preview card and all of us enfranchised players would be done analyzing it in the same time it would have us read an actual article. But the new(er) players might not be able to and MaRo's article, while maybe a bit too optimistic, would provide tips for those players. Even the bad tips that we see through immediately the new players will learn through mistakes/experience. It may be overly optimistic, but the positive tone is still a good one for the game and community overall.
WotC knows that marketing means nothing to us enfranchised players, we are kept anchored mainly by the quality of the cards. But everything in preview season is marketing. Marketing has its own target market unrelated to us. Sure, R&D might be producing subpar products in the recent years in some of our opinions, but whoever really thought that they should drop Marketing so that R&D would be forced to "buck up" and produce "great cards" as to cater to us is also asking them to drop the entire other market completely and cater only to us - I hate to say it, but when people put it that way, it always comes with the "aura of entitlement" that we don't actually have. We can say us enfranchised players spend more, but all we have is "logic" (that's arguable, even), while what they have is "statistics" - so the "entitlement" that comes from that is sort of moot.
As for the diversity in marketing - that's simple. In the last 10 years (we've been through 10 years since Ravnica: City of Guilds already), media has evolved rapidly and very differently. Gone are the days of direct advertising - now Social Media and "Influencers" are the "In-Thing" for marketing and that demands diversity. Direct Marketing wasn't really helping us since in those ages, the media/marketing was sort of monopolized/influenced by some smaller groups of people and MTG (as a hobby under the subsection of "Hollywood Geek Hobby" stereotypes) didn't gel with those. But nowadays marketing/media is in the hands of literally everyone, so it's not surprising that WotC is scrambling to find as many of those who will ally with them as soon as possible.
"I play MTG" doesn't qualify - it is still media/marketing/influencer and that has a threshold level. MTGS is a great site for us enfranchised players, but what's the point of giving us a preview card since the site doesn't even reach the target market of marketing? (Also, we'll probably screw up the article considering the vocal negativity here, but that's another matter...) One could say other MTG websites also do the same, but to put it bluntly, those websites try to reach out to the outside (whereas MTGS here generally just sits and waits for those already in the game to discover and enter) via different means such as YouTube and Twitter. We're also too much of a bunch of mixed voices to form 1 coherent voice via Social Media and as a result, we don't qualify.
Anyway, even for us enfranchised players, they did do some positive changes - the largest of which was having the full spoiler the week before prerelease (which happened after the NPH incident). I guess we could sit here and argue that 1 week isn't enough, but considering we used to have to literally sit on the day before and finish analyzing the set the day (or night) before the prerelease, I'll say 1 week is still an improvement. Their "Social Media" test relatively speaking still in their early stages and if they pushed the full set preview too early, the "hype" (that's not targeted at us) might completely wear off by the time Prereleases hit (I'll say it already wore off most of the time, but hey I'm an enfranchised player and I'm hard to exactly impress outside of great cards (and flavor)).
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I may be an enfranchised player like most of here as well and am personally annoyed by some of marketing's antics (although those tend to fall on the line of PR), but I don't actually see what they're doing now is entirely wrong either - we enfranchised players don't need the marketing, that they know very well. The reason why they still have to hype everything up is not for us, nor is it to annoy us, it's to cater to the group of new players who were attracted to their website - that is all.
MaRo could put up an article with nothing but the preview card and all of us enfranchised players would be done analyzing it in the same time it would have us read an actual article. But the new(er) players might not be able to and MaRo's article, while maybe a bit too optimistic, would provide tips for those players. Even the bad tips that we see through immediately the new players will learn through mistakes/experience. It may be overly optimistic, but the positive tone is still a good one for the game and community overall.
WotC knows that marketing means nothing to us enfranchised players, we are kept anchored mainly by the quality of the cards. But everything in preview season is marketing. Marketing has its own target market unrelated to us. Sure, R&D might be producing subpar products in the recent years in some of our opinions, but whoever really thought that they should drop Marketing so that R&D would be forced to "buck up" and produce "great cards" as to cater to us is also asking them to drop the entire other market completely and cater only to us - I hate to say it, but when people put it that way, it always comes with the "aura of entitlement" that we don't actually have. We can say us enfranchised players spend more, but all we have is "logic" (that's arguable, even), while what they have is "statistics" - so the "entitlement" that comes from that is sort of moot.
As for the diversity in marketing - that's simple. In the last 10 years (we've been through 10 years since Ravnica: City of Guilds already), media has evolved rapidly and very differently. Gone are the days of direct advertising - now Social Media and "Influencers" are the "In-Thing" for marketing and that demands diversity. Direct Marketing wasn't really helping us since in those ages, the media/marketing was sort of monopolized/influenced by some smaller groups of people and MTG (as a hobby under the subsection of "Hollywood Geek Hobby" stereotypes) didn't gel with those. But nowadays marketing/media is in the hands of literally everyone, so it's not surprising that WotC is scrambling to find as many of those who will ally with them as soon as possible.
"I play MTG" doesn't qualify - it is still media/marketing/influencer and that has a threshold level. MTGS is a great site for us enfranchised players, but what's the point of giving us a preview card since the site doesn't even reach the target market of marketing? (Also, we'll probably screw up the article considering the vocal negativity here, but that's another matter...) One could say other MTG websites also do the same, but to put it bluntly, those websites try to reach out to the outside (whereas MTGS here generally just sits and waits for those already in the game to discover and enter) via different means such as YouTube and Twitter. We're also too much of a bunch of mixed voices to form 1 coherent voice via Social Media and as a result, we don't qualify.
Anyway, even for us enfranchised players, they did do some positive changes - the largest of which was having the full spoiler the week before prerelease (which happened after the NPH incident). I guess we could sit here and argue that 1 week isn't enough, but considering we used to have to literally sit on the day before and finish analyzing the set the day (or night) before the prerelease, I'll say 1 week is still an improvement. Their "Social Media" test relatively speaking still in their early stages and if they pushed the full set preview too early, the "hype" (that's not targeted at us) might completely wear off by the time Prereleases hit (I'll say it already wore off most of the time, but hey I'm an enfranchised player and I'm hard to exactly impress outside of great cards (and flavor)).