I was thinking about Modern last night, but is a Thopterbalance Jace deck really too good for Modern? Wizards needs to give control some cards. Holy hell.
-Matt
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I was thinking about Modern last night, but is a Thopterbalance Jace deck really too good for Modern? Wizards needs to give control some cards. Holy hell.
-Matt
This is why I never dove into Modern from the start, all my favorite decks/cards from the block they picked were banned.Quote:
Originally Posted by sdematt
Thopters, Dredge, Elfball, storm, among others.
Since then, I have kept waiting for the format to settle down in order to pick a deck to have for the format. In Legacy you can have one deck with little to no change for years at time and still stay competitive. I don't feel like Modern has reached that point yet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Megadeus
It has to be. That sounds shitty, and it's not ideal, but can you imagine if there were artificially restricted pools of current legacy staples (like Mana Drain, due to collectability, small print runs compared to the current player base, no reprints, loss to wear and tear, playable in other formats like Vintage)? Like if JTMS was what...6x rarer than he is (probably more rare, but I'm not sure how many Mana Drains/Jaces were printed), plus had been around for a long, long time so a reasonable percentage of them were moldering in parents' basements or were destroyed from wear and tear/floods/fires etc, and was a chase rare for the Modern players because it would be legal there too. He wouldn't be under 200$...he wouldn't be under 600$. And most control decks would still have to play 2-4 copies, so the price of those decks just shot up by 20% solely because of availability. And if the format continued to expand, you just couldn't play control without crippling your pocketbook or your deck.
And that sucks. Card availability should be a secondary concern to players. It should be a concern; you shouldn't be able to just decide to play a super expensive deck without having any of the building blocks and build it in an afternoon of light trading. You either drop a lot of money on it or you trade like crazy, but the average guy splitting an apartment with a roommate and working full time for a reasonable wage should be able to enter this format without spending a year building up cards just to be even remotely competitive with one deck.
I think that if Modern fails (and that's the big if), they should muck with Legacy to remove a lot of the reserve list staples. It would suck, and it would gut a decent number of decks of some important tools (a quick glance through says Mox Diamond, Aluren, Dream Halls, City of Traitors, Volrath's Stronghold, the broken Urza's Saga lands, Metalworker, Grim Monolith would be interesting losses to the format), and just start printing the Legacy equivalent of Commander's Arsenals.
This way they can reprint the most important parts of manabases whenever they feel like it, but slowly enough not to tank the value of the cards for shops. The only cards that lose value are the cards on the reserve list (who only have value because of the two older eternal formats and collectors anyway), banned list, and cards that get reprinted in the Commander's Arsenal...but it may be that getting people into an eternal format with a bunch of the starter necessities for 39.99 would drive up demand for the original versions enough that they'll stabilize their value.
You could get the manabases from Standard, or buy them. You could get the staples that hold the format down and keep deckbuilders honest with the Arsenal (Wasteland, Force of Will, etc). Shit, you could even make them look awful or something, to encourage people to chase after the old versions. You could release a smaller commanders arsenal, 1x of each good, played card in a set or block for 9.99 or something, so people could snag 2 Wastelands if they need two but don't need playsets of anything else from Tempest block. You could even have WotC selling Singles ONLINE from the cards they say "here, you can get legal copies of them, but they won't be as cool as the old versions and we're never reprinting them in sets so don't worry, you won't do a draft in two years and get three extra copies of Wasteland". There's a million ways WotC could make it easier for people to enter the format and not have to have an asinine banned list like Modern does.
Mana Drain is banned for power level, not price.
Wizards don't test for Eternal. MaRo has said so himself, over and over and over again. He also said it numerous times in his podcast.Quote:
Originally Posted by TsumiBand
The real question is, why the hell not?Quote:
Originally Posted by Quasim0ff
-Matt
Because legacy doesn't make them nearly as much money.Quote:
Originally Posted by sdematt
It's a heck of a lot harder to test for a card's impact in a format that has 50+ sets in it (Legacy) than a format that generally tops out at 8 sets simultaneously being legal (Standard). And due to that much larger card pool, Legacy is also a lot better at regulating itself than Standard.Quote:
Originally Posted by sdematt
Since they love Modern so much do they test for modern? Or do they swing the ban hammer if anything gets too ridiculous?
FWIW, I tried to ask him. vOv
I've asked him to clarify, this feels like a bit of a sidestep. I tend to ask questions that are beyond the character limit for stupid Tumblr though, so if I've miscommunicated it's due to inappropriate shortening and losing something in translation. :/Quote:
Originally Posted by blogatog
I think this question should answer itself. See Modern banned list.Quote:
Originally Posted by Megadeus
Well, that's their own fault. They could just screw the reserved list and print "From the Vault: Forgotten Realms" with all the Duals and Fetches and sell it for 500$ - i'm completly sure they would make huge amounds of money with that.Quote:
Originally Posted by imnotbrown
They can't "just screw the reserved list" and then hope not too many people will be pissed off. They can't break a promise like that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Derklord
They have stated that they regret their reserved list decision, but now it's here to stay and we'll have to live with it.
They can. Did you never break a promise?
No they can't, or at least if by "they" you mean R&D. From what I can tell, R&D wanted to get rid of it, but got told no by the higher-ups.Quote:
Originally Posted by Derklord
Though the Reserved List seems incidental anyway. The Reserved List doesn't apply to Modern, and they obviously don't test much for that format either.
They would certainly win a lot of money once or twice, but what would happen once people actually plays some full-powered Legacy (or Vintage, for what matters) ? I'm pretty sure once properly introduced to the format, and with the barrier of entry lowered, most players wouldn't go back cracking packs for Standard cards... In the end, Eternal players just don't make as much money for Wizards as Standard players, and I don't think they can fill Standard sets with Legacy or Vintage-calibre cards for power creep reasons.Quote:
Originally Posted by Derklord
In the end, my guess is that they just don't want people playing Legacy/Vintage. They pay lip service to it, even throw a couple goodies our way from time to time, but if they really wanted to push Legacy and lower the barrier of entry, they could do so quite easily even without having to break the Reserved List.
and how exactly are they going to do that without breaking the reserved list?Quote:
Originally Posted by CorwinB
FoW and Wastes aren't on the reserved list iirc.Quote:
Originally Posted by AEnesidem
I was responding to a post that was suggesting dumping the RL and printing "FtV : Forgotten Realms". And as Gheizen64 said, there is a number of staples they could reprint (first of which Force of Will, Wasteland, and Onslaught fetchlands) without breaking the RL if they were serious about helping people play Eternal formats and not just shed some crocodile tears about it "Sorry guys, we really tried, but no can do. Not our fault, really.".Quote:
Originally Posted by AEnesidem
They could also go with the "Snow Dual" plan if the only thing preventing them to remove the RL is the law department. Either they really wanted to remove the RL, in which case "Snow Duals" are a good way to help players, or they don't mind the RL being firmly in place, in which case their stance of "we don't want to print Snow Duals because it breaks the "spirit" of the RL" makes sense. But right now, their position looks extremely hypocritical to me.