One potential medium-term consequence of the recent announcement that next season’s GPs won’t have byes is that the Planeswalker Point (PWP) system could be sunsetted. I have no idea if this will happen, but GP byes were the last remaining use for PWPs after they reversed course on a proposed minimum threshold for participation in PTQs. The site is obviously not in active production; it’s skinned for Magic Origins, a set that came out over four years ago; most of the achievements you can unlock refer to things from Tarkir block. So I don’t think it’s an outrageous step to think they could shutter it.

Unfortunately the Elo project came into existence only shortly before an event which was from my perspective catatsrophic: an update to WotC’s terms of service necessitated blanking out the names of everyone who hadn’t accepted the new terms. If you look at your own PWP history you will see a sizeable percentage of your opponents are not identified. This percentage likely grows as you go back in time in your history, since some of your opponents from 2010 will have stopped playing and haven’t had an reason to try to log into their Wizards account (at which point I think they’d be prompted to accept the new terms and I think they’d then start to appear).

Over the past three years I’ve salvaged just about every round of premier event results that is on the internet, and as long-time fans of the project know I also salvaged some rounds that are no longer on the internet. But the missing-opponents issue seemed to make attempting to crowdsource information from our collective PWP history a non-starter. Yet the thought of the system going down without ever attempting to draw information from it seems like a waste, especially if something useful could possibly come of it. I admit that part of my hesitation stems from my own personal foibles: I’ve always felt like this is a “small fry” operation and so I don’t really have the stature to go around asking things from people. This also has something to do with the fact that we don’t have a donate button on the site despite people asking for it for years—I don’t really know how to do it, or announce that we’ve done it, without feeling presumptuous.

Trying to reconstruct a tournament from players’ PWP history is going to be especially difficult because it’s not enough to just talk to the people I know how to reach, the people who are still active in the community (Chris Pikula, Jon Finkel, Randy Buehler, etc.). We have to find the people who are no longer actively playing since then their names will fill in for their opponents. In the darkest scenario, person #1 would have absolutely no information to give me, but after they’ve accepted the terms then when person #2 gives me their history I would be able to see if they played person #1; person #3 would have both #1 and #2’s name, and so on. The final participant to contact me would have everyone’s history, and I would be able to fill everything in since I’d have seen at least half of each match.

I only want to honestly try to do this for two events: Pro Tour Chicago 1998 and Pro Tour New York 1998. There are several reasons why I think these are more fruitful than a random GP from the same era:

• These are Pro Tours; the players involved were more engaged than people who played a random GP, so there’s more chance that present-day community members will know how to reach them.
• These two events were both draft. That means that if I reach a certain percentage of responses I might be able to deduce who played in which pod and use that information to infer results from people I haven’t heard from yet.
• Since these were both PTs, more people wrote reports than would have otherwise. We get a head start from them.
• Flatly, PTs matter more than GPs, so it’s a bigger gain for the community if we recover PT data.
• Partial information for both PTs exists. Both of these events had data that was once on the internet, but it was not captured by the Wayback Machine successfully. All of the day 2 links in the archived ptny98 coverage are broken and all of the day 1 links in the archived ptchi98 coverage are broken. But this is better than being completely in the dark. (Maybe there’s a chance that someone at Wizards will see me trying to do this and go look for an old CD-ROM in a broom closet in the basement which had a site backup from 1998 and find the results pages for me and we can call this all off.)

New York 1998, missing day 2, will be a smaller operation since I only need to find the 96 people who made the cut. Chicago needs all 324 people who attended. Including reports, I’m at 8/96 for ptny98 and 18/324 for ptchi98 before this blog post was even written.

The following sheet has the data for these two events: round-by-round everyone’s opponents that I know, plus a sheet that has a list of every person that I need to contact.

If you know how to get in touch with any of the people on this list and are willing to help out the project, could you let them know I’m looking for the entries in their history from these two events? They can either send me screenshots like this one —

— or they can go for a copy and paste text dump; that’d also be fine. I wouldn’t say no to data from other GPs and PTs from 1996-1999, but like I explained above the two events I’m really looking for right now are ptny98 and ptchi98. Data could come to me either via mtgeloproject at gmail.com or DM to Twitter @ajlvi. Thank you for helping me on this unreasonable undertaking!