No European Legacy GPs in 2017

[jmlima]

... In a world of Hearthstone and what not, Legacy and Vintage offer strategic depth and challenging gameplay unmatched by anything else related to Mtg, and as far as I know unlike any other game out there. This is their true gold, they are sitting on it and don't even know it.

I do believe you are glossing over what makes Heartstone so popular that cannot and will not, be ever matched by Legacy.

Times have changed, as an example, you now have 2sec to load a webpage, otherwise people will move away. Attention spans are shorter, there is an increasing competition for entertainment delivery and entertainment prices are motoring down. Heartstone is mass entertainment at its best. Its cheap, easy to understand, easy to get involved, you get rewarded for doing more and more in it and so on. As of today this is the future of entertainment.

Legacy, on the other hand, is extortionately expensive, very complex to get involved, and heavily dependent on an ever shrinking component base. You do not learn to play the best Legacy deck in a couple of hours. You do not get free cards for your decks by playing Legacy (you could argue you get packs in MTGO, but these are not directly translatable, try to start D&T and try to earn your Ports and Wastelands, oh wait, you are not even playing D&T without these...). And your entry cost to be seriously competitive is prohibitive to the vast majority. Not point complaining about entitlement, its nothing of the kind, its a simple decision, do I play a card game that cost $0 to start, or do I start in Legacy and shell out $500? Do I start a game I can easily understand in a couple of hours whilst being rewarded immediately for playing it, or do I try to figure how my burn deck will be able to beat Show and Tell on a regular basis without getting anything for my troubles?

Its irrelevant if we agree or not, fact is, you may not like the direction MTG is taking, but WotC are (commercially) making all the right choices. I work part-time in the video-game industry as a designer. We used to do highly complex con-sims, some of military grade. In the past decade, the sales for this type of games went from thousands to hundreds, to dozens, to a point where if they are not part of a military programme, they are not worth developing anymore. That is what is happening to all types of complex (and expensive) entertaining. Its a new age.

[jamesh]

Oh no question about the intelligence level required for legacy. It's higher. Basically you can boil it down to:

Most people are too dumb for mtg.
Most mtg players are too dumb for legacy.

Wizards want mtg to appeal to the maximum number of people so obv it will be dumbed down in future (even more than it has been in the last couple of years).

[Cartesian]

I do believe you are glossing over what makes Heartstone so popular that cannot and will not, be ever matched by Legacy.

Times have changed, as an example, you now have 2sec to load a webpage, otherwise people will move away. Attention spans are shorter, there is an increasing competition for entertainment delivery and entertainment prices are motoring down. Heartstone is mass entertainment at its best. Its cheap, easy to understand, easy to get involved, you get rewarded for doing more and more in it and so on. As of today this is the future of entertainment.

Legacy, on the other hand, is extortionately expensive, very complex to get involved, and heavily dependent on an ever shrinking component base. You do not learn to play the best Legacy deck in a couple of hours. You do not get free cards for your decks by playing Legacy (you could argue you get packs in MTGO, but these are not directly translatable, try to start D&T and try to earn your Ports and Wastelands, oh wait, you are not even playing D&T without these...). And your entry cost to be seriously competitive is prohibitive to the vast majority. Not point complaining about entitlement, its nothing of the kind, its a simple decision, do I play a card game that cost $0 to start, or do I start in Legacy and shell out $500? Do I start a game I can easily understand in a couple of hours whilst being rewarded immediately for playing it, or do I try to figure how my burn deck will be able to beat Show and Tell on a regular basis without getting anything for my troubles?

Its irrelevant if we agree or not, fact is, you may not like the direction MTG is taking, but WotC are (commercially) making all the right choices. I work part-time in the video-game industry as a designer. We used to do highly complex con-sims, some of military grade. In the past decade, the sales for this type of games went from thousands to hundreds, to dozens, to a point where if they are not part of a military programme, they are not worth developing anymore. That is what is happening to all types of complex (and expensive) entertaining. Its a new age.

I understand what you are saying about entry cost to Legacy being prohibitive, and I don't disagree. However, I don't think Legacy is significantly more complex to learn than other Mtg formats. The basic Mtg rules are the same. But it is more difficult to master. It is also more expensive, but that does not in any way change the fact that it is a better strategy game. Very high strategic depth might not be what everyone is looking for. Casual games exist for a reason, but so does strategy games. If you judge a game only by popularity and sales, you are not trying to evaluate its pure quality as a strategy game. Chess is relatively easy to learn, insanely difficult to master competitively, and a complete disaster from a modern sales perspective.

[jmlima]

... Casual games exist for a reason, but so does strategy games....

The point I'm trying is not that complex strategy games do not exist or that there is no public for them, the point I'm making is that you can sell thousands of one and millions of the other. If you are investing millions to develop, you need to recoup them. Even if you were investing thousands, if the choice is to make thousands or millions, any sane business would go for the millions, let alone a corporate giant like Hasbro.

Commercially, WotC is right. That is all I'm saying.

[Lord Seth]

http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post...ew-nonrotating

Nothing official, more a statement of future intent. It sounds likely to me though. Try some time in the future "Post Modern" (Silver Dot onwards perhaps) and see how it fits. Honestly, it stinks. Issues with Modern are fixable. If Modern dies, that's totally on them.

Seriously? "As Standard and Modern get more far apart"? They already are far apart! They were far apart when it was started and quite honestly I don't see them as having gotten more far apart, at least in terms of transitioning ability. Outside of Modern being more expensive, it's not any harder to jump from Standard to Modern than it was at the start (in terms of how many cards in your Standard deck transition to Modern); your Standard deck was already going to be unplayable in Modern from the get-go; at best you'd have maybe a few cards in it that happened to be playable in totally different decks in Modern. Back then it was Snapcaster Mage and Liliana, now it's Collected Company and Jace.

The funny thing is that the reason for the shortening of Extended was that they noticed Extended wasn't as popular as Legacy (which received much less support) and thought "ah, the problem is that it's too hard to jump to Extended from Standard" and shortened it, which didn't exactly work. I suppose to be fair a new nonrotating format might work better, but still it seems eerily similar to that bad reasoning. Though at least there they did have the legitimate issue that Extended was unpopular.

[Sidneyious]

I don't believe modern will become the legacy when the create a new-modern format which is very likely and actually inevitable for their goal with modern. You can already see that the entry barrier for Modern is getting higher and higher, which results in fewer Standard cards watering down. So they have to make a new cut to get rid of some old staples at some point. The interesting question will be how players will react to this. WHen it happens the first time players will know it at least could happen again. Essentially you have a new extended format then with a intransparant rotating structre.

When they make a new cutoff they will be pissed because they spent this much money now it's useless.

[CabalTherapy]

Legacy is inaccessible, they are right on that. We play it anyway, simply because it is a better game, much better than anything else they have to offer. I have tried Modern, really tried, and it sucks, there is nothing else I can say about it. Draft is not my thing, and I don't even want to say anything about Standard.

Based on what I have heard they think that Legacy is the same game as Standard or Modern, only less accessible, but that is a mistake. In a world of Hearthstone and what not, Legacy and Vintage offer strategic depth and challenging gameplay unmatched by anything else related to Mtg, and as far as I know unlike any other game out there. This is their true gold, they are sitting on it and don't even know it.

+1

Well said.

[Lord Seth]

I don't believe modern will become the legacy when the create a new-modern format which is very likely and actually inevitable for their goal with modern. You can already see that the entry barrier for Modern is getting higher and higher, which results in fewer Standard cards watering down. So they have to make a new cut to get rid of some old staples at some point. The interesting question will be how players will react to this. WHen it happens the first time players will know it at least could happen again. Essentially you have a new extended format then with a intransparant rotating structre.

How are fewer Standard cards "watering down" into MOdern? Standard cards took the format over earlier this year and caused the most dominant deck the format has ever seen. And after that happened, Nahiri singlehandedly catapulted UWR Control to Tier 1. They're still having an impact.