If you’re at all into collectable card games of any form, you likely already know who Brian Kibler. If not, he’s a professional Magic the Gathering player who has won over a quarter of a million dollars in competitive play over the years. Recently, he’s taken to developing his own games, most notably the digital collectable card game SolForge (Free). He’s been big into Hearthstone (Free) as well, and writes tons of interesting stuff about these kind of things on his blog.

Most recently, he discussed how free to play, play to win, and the various challenges that go into collectible games. If you’ve been following along with the free to play trends for a while, a lot of it might be obvious to you, but I thought his discussion on what does and doesn’t constitute “pay to win," which is an accusation thrown around quite often in the free to play world, was pretty great.

Let’s take a step back for a second and look at other types of competitions, like Starcraft or golf. Would anyone describe these games as “Pay-to-Win?” Probably not. And yet could you imagine a professional Starcraft player trying to win an open qualifier using a computer that barely meets the minimum system requirements for the game? What about a golfer playing in a major with second-hand clubs purchased from a thrift shop?

Brian then goes on to discuss card rotation in digital card games, which is something that I find to be fascinating as all of these new digital card games will inevitably go through the same growing pains as Magic did which resulted in the variety of formats players can play (essentially meaning, which cards you’re allowed to use).

All around super interesting stuff, particularly if you’ve been following along with the development of Hearthstone and similar games as they’re maturing into their own solid free to play ecosystems. I don’t want to steal too much of Brian Kibler’s thunder by excessively quoting everything here, but seriously, give his article a read.