I've been around most of the center of the country for SCG evens and GPs. And in this part of the country, the two largest Opens I've been to were the Standard Opens in St. Louis in early 2014 (763 players, nightmare 11-round Saturday where I was the only L3 other than the Head Judge) and DFW in late 2013 (650-ish, largest event I've ever been Head Judge of).Originally Posted by thecrav
Any updates?
SCG DALLAS MAR 13 - 14
STANDARD: 763 PLAYERS (LINK)
MODERN: 267 PLAYERS (LINK)
LEGACY: 190 PLAYER (LINK)
While SCG's Legacy attendance seems terrible, please consider we also had a 300+ players event in Eternal Extravaganza 2 past weekend.
237, not 267 for Modern from what the sheet says, just a little more than Legacy.
I've been making edits to my original blog post (which are explicitly noted with date of edit) as events trickle in. I've been pretty busy recently, so there's usually a few days or a week of lag time, but I'll hopefully get something written for Dallas soon.
HSCK is correct. I have the numbers at 763 for Standard, 190 for Legacy, and 237 for Modern.
The $20K two-day Opens have started to pick up a little bit of steam, but I don't think as much as most peole were expecting (the two previous cities have also attracted a lot of players in the past). Legacy and Modern Premier IQs have been roughly comparable, although Modern has had slightly more players the last two events. Standard Premier IQs have had lower attendance than the concurrent Legacy or Modern one every time it's been held (which as always been 9 am, so either Standard is less popular on the SCG circuit than most people think, or the 9 am start time detracts from Standard attendance in comparison to 10 am Legacy/Modern just as 9 am Legacy detracts from its attendance compared to 10 am Modern).
More details upcoming.
Kinda wondering how things look a year-ish later. Has attendance suffered at all?
I believe their Modern event last week was their biggest open ever with over 1000 players.
Looks like this thread got necroed up. I actually got quite a few messages on Reddit in the past six months or so about whether I had anymore data. Unfortunately, I stopped updating attendance figures in March or April for three reasons:
1. I got a lot busier. I rarely get a chance to play any more despite the fact that there are quite a few weeklies easily accessible in my local community, so you can imagine updating attendance numbers is very low on my priority list during my free time. When I have free time to devote to Magic, aside from occasionally playing, there are quite a few other projects that have much higher priority.
2. I live in Seattle, where SCG canceled two previously scheduled events and modified a third one before that (the December 2014 Open weekend was supposed to consist of Standard and Legacy Opens). As you can imagine, many players in Seattle were apathetic about SCG even before they recently announced they were withdrawing from the West Coast, especially as we have many great stores in the area. There's no point in wasting so much time analyzing a circuit that is as remote to me as MKM (exception: if I could get full decklists for the Legacy Classics or Opens, I would love to use that for metagame analysis for one of my other projects, but I believe Wizards told SCG to cut it out a while ago).
3. When I began my analysis, SCG had not yet announced their schedule for the second half of 2015. When they released their schedule in March or April for the second half of 2015 despite strong Legacy attendance numbers to that point, it was clear to me that this did not factor into their decisions and I didn't want to waste time on analysis that fell upon deaf ears.
Checking the numbers of the last few Standard Opens, the numbers stagnate around ~420 people, while the Modern Opens put up 1k+ people last week and 815 this weekend.
The Somerset Open had 523 Legacy Players.
Makes you wonder why they still schedule so many Standard events when they're clearly the least participated ones. I guess because Wizards is pushing SCG to do it.
Magic was designed to be played as a non-rotating, constructed game from the start. That is the most enjoyable mode this game has to offer, and I'm not surprised that the masses have voted with their attendance and their money by supporting Modern much more than Standard.
This particular standard format is also very expensive and widely regarded as stale.
It certainly doesn't help that the current Standard is a ridiculous expensive mess of 4 color decks that all look the same.
Well... actually, no. First, Magic wasn't designed to be Constructed, at least not in the way we think of it now. The idea was people would get some packs, then make a deck from what they opened. Basically Sealed, except you could get more cards by winning them from opponents. "Constructed" as we now consider it, in coming up with a decklist and then getting the cards together to play it, was not how it was designed.
As for the non-rotating, that's not really true either. The original idea was that the expansions would be standalone variations of the game and not meant to be played with each other (though players technically could). Ice Age was actually originally planned to be a new iteration of the game, separate from what came before. This was obviously scrapped and Standard rotation instituted instead. Here's Richard Garfield on the subject:
The intent was to print Magic: The Gathering only once, and that when we started to run out of "The Gathering," we would print Magic: The Gathering—Ice Age, sort of a second Magic edition. Ice Age would have its own card back, and people would play it by itself, though mechanically they could mix it with "The Gathering."
So to claim Magic was designed to be played as a non-rotating, constructed game from the start is really not true. The way it was designed from "the start" wasn't for Standard rotation, but it wasn't for anything resembling Legacy or Modern either.
And that there is a single standard card that is (checking...) down to 70$, from 80$ last month. When staple standard cards creep above 40$, casual attendance historically suffers. The Grinders will still play, but transitioning new players to regulars is very difficult. As a result, 'innovation' tends to be just variations on the same theme, and the format is insanely boring to watch. (I hate judging standard right now, why do you ask?)
The reason SCG pushes standard though is that it's the only neigh universal format. While the kinds of people who prefer Vintage and Legacy typically don't play it regularly, it represents both a gateway format for new players and a format that most 'normal' tournament attendees willingly play. It's also the format with the best ground-level support from WOTC.
The irony of 'Eternal' (and it's in quotes because I'm including Modern) is that the formats with the smaller playerbases tend to be the more devoted, willing to travel to a few events if they are available. You can expect a bunch of locals to show up to a Standard GP or Open because they live there, you tend to see a lot of people traveling to Modern and Legacy events because there just aren't many of them.
Check out my Legacy UBTezz Primer. Chalice of the Void: Keeping Magic Fair.
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Playing since '96. Brief forced break '02-04. Former/Idle Judge since '05. Told Smmenen to play faster at Vintage Worlds.
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Most of the 'Ban brainstorm!' arguments are based on the logic that 'more different cards should get played in Legacy', as though the success or health of the format can be measured by the portion of cards that are available and see play. This is an idiotic metric.
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