SCG 2012 Open Series & Legacy

[Fossil4182]

While this won't be a very sophisticated post, it would appear for the time being that SCG will continue to feature Standard, Legacy, and Draft opens through the first quarter of 2012. This is significant, at least on appearance, because it means that if SCG will be supporting Modern, it will only do so as a side event at best for the time being.

Without reading a lot into the schedule of events, it would seem for the time being, that SCG feels Legacy is more profitable to host as the Sunday Open event. It may also imply Legacy will be more popular than Modern in terms of attendance. I don't have a lot to go off of making these assumptions other than profitability and attendance would seem to be the primary decision criteria that SCG would base their Open series event line up on.

Thoughts?

[dontbiteitholmes]

It's the smart play. Truth be told Modern is still a bubble format. Everyone's really excited right now but very few people have played the format beyond maybe a handful of test games and maybe one or two events at most. If the format ends up as combotastic as it started out I think the player base is going to fall off pretty damn quick as that would get fairly boring.

Legacy is the safe bet for them. First off WotC is trying to elbow them out of the field by doubling the amount of GPs that SCG will have to compete with. Second, right now most of the people who don't play Legacy, but came for Standard and stayed the extra day are going to draft. That's just a given and several people I travel with do this every SCG weekend after giving up on Legacy since they never played outside of those weekends and were really strong drafters. If SCG hosts Modern instead a lot of the people who were going to Legacy just won't go at all, the price of all SCGs Legacy staples will fall through the floor, and they completely open the door for TCGPlayer or whatever outfit feels up to it to step in and fill the void with Legacy events.

If they do Modern they will lose all the Legacy players who don't care about Standard (I wouldn't go if SCG was Standard and Modern unless they were within maybe a 2 hour drive), they would have to compete with Modern GPs on some weeks which would leave the event hall a ghost town day 2, and most of the people who stay for day 2 of Modern would have drafted anyways or played Legacy. So yeah there's no reason for them not to run Legacy still for a good while in the future. Legacy players have less alternatives and will travel farther to go to SCG as well. I heard a rumor that SCG was going to switch to Modern because attendance at Legacy had been falling but if that's true it's only because of the draft opens stealing players and switching to Modern isn't going to patch that. Every SCG event I've been to in the past year has had a bigger Legacy event than the previous one I went to.

[dahcmai]

Well, from a purely monetary standpoint, it would be financial suicide to replace Legacy with Modern. The profit margin for Modern cards isn't all that hot actually. The spikes are really bad so far and I don't even want to get into that market. Legacy is very, very stable for the most part.

Cutting off being able to sell card from Mirrodin back excepting EDH and casual players isn't the smartest thing to do either. Duals are big money. No sense ducking out of that action. Halving the number of cards to sell out of your own inventory just seems kind of dumb. I think they will ride it out at the very least until Legacy starts looking like Vintage and Modern is surpassing it in interest.

They used to host power 9 series after all. They do like supporting the older formats to keep old stock moving. Can't blame them for that. Modern would flat hurt if it supplanted legacy on the storefront side.

I talked to a few store owners and most agree that Modern is fine and dandy, but Legacy keeps all the cards moving and not just newer ones. When tournaments were tried, it did ok, but when they noticed none of the older stuff sold anymore to those people. While you had pissed off Legacy players who didn't come due to the replacement. Duals sat in the case since even EDH players think twice about buying something like that. Legacy players snag them like pizza rolls at a Math convention. Not a good thing for a store to have legacy staples sit in the case unsold.

[GGoober]

I think another big reason is also partially CFB's recent interest in being very aggressive in buying Legacy/Modern staples (in particular Legacy). In part, I think CFB is also waiting to see how SCG reacts to their Open series and if they announce Modern over Legacy, they will start cashing out on the big $$ by holding their own series or be the prime store that have Legacy staples.

Not sure how big this impacts SCG but I'm sure it's not negligible.

[crovakiet]

I think another big reason is also partially CFB's recent interest in being very aggressive in buying Legacy/Modern staples (in particular Legacy). In part, I think CFB is also waiting to see how SCG reacts to their Open series and if they announce Modern over Legacy, they will start cashing out on the big $$ by holding their own series or be the prime store that have Legacy staples.

Not sure how big this impacts SCG but I'm sure it's not negligible.

Well Channelfireball's brick and mortar store is Superstars in San Jose, CA. They host weekly legacy tournaments as well as some Vintage now and then. I am sure doing this means that they constantly have to keep Legacy/Vintage stuff in stock...

[Cynicath]

Well Channelfireball's brick and mortar store is Superstars in San Jose, CA. They host weekly legacy tournaments as well as some Vintage now and then. I am sure doing this means that they constantly have to keep Legacy/Vintage stuff in stock...

I go to Superstars' weekly Legacy event once in a while. It's 10 proxy (as are their vintage events), and no one counts your proxies so one could conceivably run many more than 10. As such I doubt many people feel a strong need to pick up staples at the store. For the record I run a 0 proxy Stoneblade deck.

[Mark Sun]

SCG only announcing the first quarter schedule is them treading carefully. I wouldn't be surprised if they replaced Legacy with Modern mid-year. You have to give people what they want, and if it isn't Legacy anymore, SCG (and other stores) will have options.