When people make a big fuss about what Maro says, I always wonder whether I'm too cynical for thinking he's mostly some kind of PR apologist.Originally Posted by Barook
This is a bit wonky, because they made an active decision at one point to make blue the best color for non-color protection because "blue doesn't have enough keywords, despite having the two BEST keywords". then, they released some good non-color protection cards and said "oh, shit, this is way too strong".
Is that really true? I mean, yes, it takes that much to get the practice required to win one -- but it's not like they they are required by WotCto show up a week early. If the "pros" make a choice to prioritize winning magic over other aspects of their life, that's fine. But that doesn't make it incumbent on WotC to pay to support that choice.
Yeah he did. While I have lost the original link, I still have the question and MaRos insulting response:He did? The shittiest comments related to Legacy from Maro I can remember are
1) replacement duals that get around the RL would break Legacy (because two playsets would do so much when most decks don't even run one)
2) TNN's bullshit ability is well within the color pie since blue is the best color for non-color protection (factually wrong).
He imo indicates, that them not giving a shit about legacy is the reason "good deckbuilders" do not bother with the format in general, which means that he thinks that Legacy deckbuilders are inferior to Modern deckbuilders. If Legacy Deckbuilders would be unable to break the format, why SDT, TC, DTT, DRS & Co have been banned?Question:
"Wouldn't Modern regulate itself much better if it had more powerful police cards like Legacy does?"
Mark Rosewater:
"The thing that helps Legacy is not “police cards”. It’s that we don’t shine a major spotlight on it and get some of the best deck builders in the world to try to break it once a year."
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The thing here is that its counter to what they do in printing. I dont know the address to the archive of TMD, but there is a black and white post where its said Containment Priest was made to help Vintage. If the idea is not to depend on "Police Cards" in these formats why make them with the formats in mind?
It just makes sense that as your format grows, the issues you have and the answers to them will be focused. Also Modern is a format built on this same idea. Stony Silence is the perfect example of this very concept.
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
Well, it's difficult for me to defend MaRo ever, mainly because I think he isn't very good at his job and most of his ideas are antithetical to whatever "good Magic" would be, but I think his statement, while vaguely insulting, isn't really what you think it is and isn't what it seems to many of us at first glance. While he is wrong about one thing, he isn't actually wrong about the others.
This is most probably an actual fact. It isn't "police cards" that keep many things in check, it's the power-level/consistency level of a number of divergent strategies. Chalice of a Void is not a "police card" it's a powerful lock-piece, that exploits mana advantage to leverage higher CMC cards than would usually be "good enough." Containment Priest is far closer to what could be called a police card and while it does help some decks in some matchups, it and it's ilk isn't what keeps the Legacy metagame in check.The thing that helps Legacy is not “police cards”.
These actually are facts: they don't shine much of a spotlight on Legacy and it's true "some of the best deck builders in the world" do not look at Legacy. The key word there is "some." It's not a stretch to understand that, for example, Josh Utter-Leyton and LSV are better than average deck-builders. And when they do focus on Legacy and Vintage, they do usually do pretty well. That's not surprising. What isn't a fact: that either of these things explains the Legacy metagame. It doesn't.It’s that we don’t shine a major spotlight on it and get some of the best deck builders in the world to try to break it once a year.
So, his statement contains facts and truths, but draws the knee-jerk, incorrect conclusion based off those. A cabal of the greatest deckbuilders in the world can't break a current Legacy metagame, because the format is too deep, too explored and too homogeneous to allow for statistical outliers to be spontaneously discovered. You can, however, most assuredly discover a playable niche, that can exploit a metagame weakness, just as that Channel Fireball team did with that Death's Shadow deck. But as the numbers seem to have shown, the whole is usually quickly patched up.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
The format is permanently solved barring a mass banning or a whole new vein of cards being printed. Not sure what MaRo thinks having a Legacy GP would prove as far as identifying the best deckbuilding.
A better arrangement of the last 16 or 20 cards after you've put Blue Shell + Delver into a deck?
A more optimal arrangement of hatebears in DnT?
A way to make Eldrazi super-consistent?
A dredge deck that doesn't fold to GY/Dredge hate? (Lingering Chill looks to have really reduced the amount of effective Dredge hate out there)
There's a reason we run between 55-75% Brainstorm/Blue Shell in top 8's every year. You've got your main axis of attack - cantrips. Then you've got your Cantrip Predator decks - Chalice decks and hatebear decks. Then you've got your tournament filler - Burn, Nic Fit, Dredge, Belcher, etc, that can take down an event, but usually don't because of consistency or speed or limited angles of attack issues.
This is why we need the pros to build new decks for us. (We just had a legacy pro tour which brought nothing new right?)
Deaths Shadow isn't exactly a new concept, I think that the strategy was validated more or less at this event though. I think one thing about legacy is that there are incredibly powerful archetypes that could be T1 if they had more exposure. For example I always thought lands was one of the best decks in the format, then when the RG Hyper aggressive dark depths build came out it suddenly saw a lot more play and was viewed as a "real" deck. Granted stage printing and legend rule change helped a lot, but iI think even the old 3 and 4 color versions were really good just underplayed.
With all the drama going about the WC and Gerry Thompson, this flew more or less under the radar for many people:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/article...ion-2018-09-21
Amazon gets supply directly from WotC from now on. With Amazon undercutting the competition like madmen AND the most recent price increase for distributors on September 1st (IIRC, it was like 5 bucks per box), LGS are in a rough treat as they have to pay more for boxes while having direct competition from Amazon (that aren't just store resellers).
i assume wotc wants to go as digital as possible and wants ppl to play arena drafts and not in lgs. they might announce the end of fnm support next year.
Ah, that would make more sense, I know he was a longtime defender of Mike Long.
The odd thing is that if his argument is correct--that Mike Long was not actually a cheater and Wizards of the Coast built up the idea he was some kind of villain to make him a heel--then Wizards of the Coast looks absolutely horrible for leaving everyone with the impression he was a cheater when he wasn't. So either his statement is really stupid because Mike Long actually was a cheater, or it's really stupid because it says Wizards of the Coast allowed the accusations of cheating against an innocent person to become pervasive because of some weird idea it would help PR.
In fairness, he at least noted he didn't like the card and didn't think it should have been printed.
I think he was saying Long despitedespite his cheating is still one of the most influential players from early pro tour
I don't think so, as he made a point to note Long's lack of disqualifications, plus I know Rosewater has said in the past he doesn't think Mike Long was a cheater.
Between that and the new "Masterpieces" set skipping LGS's entirely, there's really no other way to interpret this except as an attack on game stores. Which is just yet another bizarre fucking decision by WotC. Like, Arena still sucks a lot, copying Hearthstone's interface doesn't really work that great when you can have dozens or hundreds of permanents on the board instead of just seven.
I mean, if you ever spent a lot of time on the Beta forums, the stuff from the game devs before they finally got disappeared off of them was beyond cuckoo. Three of them had never played Magic before and were trying to actively re-invent the game with tweaks and game modes. This isn't speculation, this is shit they said in the forums.
This, whatever the hell they're doing with digital, the card stock issues.. the upcoming release of Artifact... they just need to clean fucking house at that place. Hard.
From my understanding (talking the manager of the largest lgs in my area), essentially all of the profits comes from selling supplementary stuff such as storage boxes, playmats, sleeves and dice. Everything else basically just exists to facilitate traffic and have people purchase these things. Since lgs apparently arent making much from product sales anyways, it is WOTC's rationale that whatever harm this does to the lgs in lost product sales will be gained by 'new players' taking up the game because it is available in more mainstream establishments.
With that said, I am doubtful that MTG is the type of game that would receive much adoption (if any) from simply being available in places like Amazon and Walmart. Who is going to see the product listed or sold at these places and impulse buy it and then actually go through with finding a lgs or local community to learn this stuff, especially when there are other shinier toys available that have none of that commitment required. Their model is probably the closest thing you can get to printing money but they are still finding ways to screw it up.
WotC, and Hasbro by extension, have put MASSIVE amounts of faith in the "Magic" brand name, and that faith is just not warranted. It stinks of a lot of what they did with DnD 4th edition -- they relied on the "brand" to sell a product that players didn't actually want. And it failed horribly.
Yeah, the actual product isn't really a money maker. Sealed product, now-a-days, would seem to be more for running limited events than it is for people walking in and buying to just open. Sure it's there, but I really doubt if there is any store that could even do the sort of volume in sealed product that would keep it in business. If Channel Fireball or Star City didn't sell singles, etc, they'd be long since out of business.
Well, I've been saying it for the last few years, but Wizards' focus on "organic growth" (that is, getting people who already buy to just buy more) is likely the correct strategy. The methods they are using to do it though, well, they are suspect, at minimum. Expeditions/Masterpieces don't seem to have been a "good" answer, from the standpoint of sustainable sales. I think the Commander pre-cons were a success. These Mythic boxes, or whatever they are called, are not likely to be a great answer either though. The question, I think, that Wizards fails to answer, is "if one isn't interested in Standard, how does Wizards convince you to buy sealed product?" Just wider availability isn't a "growth" strategy, it's just a way to limit some of the product pipeline bottlenecks. It should "smooth" out sales, perhaps gain a tiny bit due to people buying from places where perhaps there isn't an LGS, but such growth will probably be incredibly modest.
I think all of these stop-gap measures will still fail to appreciably expand profits, because they do not offer any substantial EV increase and the lack of such is why most people don't buy sealed product. I think all future attempts will largely fail because the distribution model is just fundamentally flawed and is positively archaic by today's standards. You can try to staple whatever you want to it, but it's still not scale-able, it's still not very marketable, and it is hopelessly out of date compared to digital distribution (or LCGs, or whatever).
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
Thing is that they've milked the playerbase for the last few years (evident by the ever increasing amount of product they put out each year), but it appears that they've finally hit the wall, considering their revenue slightly declined last year instead of growing.
As for the EV thing - it puzzles me why they don't do more good EV sets and print the shit out of it to meet demand. Card prices would decrease, which would increase accessibility to the game, aka more people buying stuff. Instead, they have a raging boner for collectors, and by catering to them, they price people out of the game and enable scalpers left and right. It's the players that keep the game alive, not some chucklefucks with dozens of copies of high priced cards sitting in a binder. The original Modern Masters was a smash success since it provided good EV alongside being a good set. Why they didn't learn from this is beyond me. But hey, WotC is one of the most terribly managed companies on the planet (with a good game designed by Richard Garfield), so no surprises here.
For people who are already playing Legacy with their own favorite deck(s), the current state is probably great.
For people who are on the sideline looking in, the barrier to entry is at the Highest ever. There's only 400+ players for SCG Baltimore, only 800+ for GP Richmond. There were 1,600+ for GP Seattle pre-banning of DRS. I don't think this is a coincidence. It appears that the event attendance is becoming proportional to the number of people who can afford Underground Sea. This land is in Grixis-anything, Death Shadow, Storm, UB reanimator (if that's still a thing), and more. The finance aspect of Legacy is my primary concern even though I don't play decks requiring Underground Sea.
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