Oct 26, 2012 -- 12:45PM, Wizards_Sean wrote:

Sorry for the delay in responding here.

Agree or disagree with the decision to yank this data I think we can all agree that it's shameful that it took over a week to get this explanation. 

I believe the title of this thread is still relevant - What *IS* wrong with you, WotC? 

Now that this news has sunk in a bit, I have to correct myself when I said that this change doesn't affect me personally. I said that because I've rarely played constructed in the past 2 years. I've always been on the edge - I tried out a Jund deck in early Innistrad Block and Tempered Steel at some point in Standard - but overall I stuck to limited formats where I felt more confident.

And there's that word. Confidence. Confidence means a lot to a player of my psychology. I won't play without feeling confident that I know what I'm doing. What leads to confidence in its purest form, unmarred by ego and pride, is data. Magic players get data through public releases such as the What's Happening results page and through countless hours of playtesting.

When you strip us of data, you destroy our confidence, and it can only be rebuilt through playtesting. When all of us playtest individually, we are wasting hours of our lives trying to get a grip on a complex game that bears small rewards to the winner - but we keep playing for love of the game.

This love of the game is not enough to motivate me to do so much work of in-the-dark playtesting just to be able to play Daily Events with confidence. Daily Events are not the Pro Tour. When we did have access to decklists, my natural thirst for information was sated for free. In this data dark age, I still have that craving, but the amount of time I'd have to playtest is not worth it, and I will always have lingering doubt that my playtesting is off because I have such incomplete information about the metagame to begin with.

To summarize, I used to be interested in playing constructed Magic every now and then, but this change has killed that interest.

I totally understand why they want to do this, and can appreciate that they care enough about a meta to try to "fix" it.  However, I think that weekly events broadcast by other sources are much more a culprit than Daily decklists.  In fact, I would say that far more players pay attention to the top decklists on the results at a SCG event than those players that even know that this information even exists where you can pull up all of this data.  Proof?  I've been playing since Darksteel, kept my finger on the pulse of tournament play since... but only within the last 6 months knew that the Dailies results were posted real time.

I liked the lists not because I net deck, but because I like to see how people put in little twists of creativity and find interesting new tech in previously tested builds.  I learned about players to follow on Twitter that shared my style this way, and even made some friends.