It's like throwing Spiritmonger into Homelands. Why play anything else?
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It's like throwing Spiritmonger into Homelands. Why play anything else?
In a format with fetches, plus fetchable duals, it was easy to cast and yes the best thing to do. It was basically the Goyf of the format from what I saw.Quote:
Originally Posted by TsumiBand
I thought there was a stack of cards - Abzan Charm,Siege Rhino and Dromoka's Command.Quote:
Originally Posted by Megadeus
We can infer that people enjoy Modern for the card depth and number of options you have to build a deck. With that in mind, why doesn't Wizards extend the length blocks are in Standard by six months (two-and-a-half years)? Makes it harder to playtest, but cards retain their value for a bit longer and if there are more decks to choose from that could lower the average cost of a deck. With blocks only having two sets each from now on, this should be feasible. I suppose WotC doesn't want to try anything fancy after the last change to Standard rotation was a failure.
Bring back extended?Quote:
Originally Posted by NeckBird
http://mtgsalvation.gamepedia.com/Extended
Well, Extended was 4 years, right? Not advocating for that, just thinking out loud.Quote:
Originally Posted by rufus
RIP Extended. I used to love it when I first started playing.
I don't think they're focusing on it, they're just better at it. And their mistakes in limited don't totally ruin formats - maybe Pack Rat shouldn't have been printed at rare (or printed) for RtR limited. It sucked to lose to Pack Rat in RtR limited. But it was still a fun format, because you still would only face a Pack Rat maybe 1/20 games.Quote:
Originally Posted by rufus
When they make a mistake in Standard, it's very apparent. You face mistake that over and over again.
What would maximizing their profits look like? Every human being on the planet plays Magic? It's too abstract. They've done very well with the game in the last few years, and might be hitting a ceiling that was gonna exist no matter what. Obviously they could do a better job on the digital side.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
The idea that eternal formats could be a cash cow for Wizards if they only got rid of the reserved list, did what we suggested etc. etc. is a convenient opinion for people who prefer eternal formats anyway. It is totally wishful thinking. They need to sell cards. Constantly. Every day. If I were made CEO of Wizards I would say fuck legacy and purposely print more cards that make the format worse. Chalice, TNN, etc. Maybe we could print a Dredge 8 in a commander set...
In business, there is always a "chase the new guy" school and companies that follow it. The basic idea takes your existing customers for granted and focuses solely on acquiring new customers. You also see this with employees, especially in retail and other low-wage industries, where newer, cheaper workers are more valued than longer-tenured, more experienced ones.
EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. A company follows this philosophy it works great for a few years, then crashes and burns, hard. The strategy uses up accumulated resources - customer/brand loyalty and reputation, existing employee base, etc. that has high delivered value but low growth value. An example would be Wal-Mart working to crush wages and employee expenses to the point where they could no longer - and still can't reliably at most stores - keep their shelves stocked with product. This led to mass drop in customers going to the stores, because why go to Wal-Mart for some cheap junk over the internet when they don't even have it in stock and you still have to wait for it? Wizards' new world order and never ending focus on a simplified Standard/Limited are great examples of this. It drives new sales and customers, but has a high churn rate, meaning if the growth ever hiccups, the whole house of cards crashes, and the growth ALWAYS hiccups, because sooner or later you run out of suckers for your current marketing/acquisition strategy, or enough of your existing base starts getting sick of being ignored for the new kid all at once - see the old cell phone company commercials with kindergartners - that they bail earlier than you expected.
Wizards is seeing these effects now. They've neglected the eternal formats, which hurts Standard players because there is even less of a market for their cards after rotation, or because they can't continue to play with their favorite cards in a larger format. They're only attracting one type of Spike with the self-limited card pools, but their attracting less of them since games like Hearthstone have an even more simplified friendly system at a dramatically lower cost that they will NEVER be able to match.
If they were smart, they'd go heavy on tech, and bring back a lot of the spell effects they've either gotten rid of or tacked solely onto creatures, especially instants, because that would help differentiate their product from stuff like Hearthstone, because they literally cannot compete successfully with them on HS's terms. They also need to print more answer cards. Hard answers cover up for a lot of playtesting mistakes, because they tend to self-correct each other. it's not fun to have every spell you cast countered, but it's even less fun to lose to a combo deck that mind-slavers you for six turns straight or takes 7 turns in a row until it can finally kill you. This also gets back to letting colors besides blue interact with the stack in meaningful ways. They almost printed two decent white counterspells during the Time Spiral era, but costing the memory lapse at 2W killed it, and any kind of non-blue hard control with it. They have gotten better about letting other colors get access to draw spells, except white.
Maybe the new team releases a version of MTGO that's not hot garbage and starts fixing Standard and Modern and eventually Legacy, but it won't happen fast, because at least another year of card sets is already baked in, and it takes time to code. In the meantime, expect the financial numbers to get worse before they get better.
It was a card that fit literally every strategy that the color combination could do, and it was, simply put, the single biggest creature without help. In fact, there were nominally four cards that could deal with it in Standard and were Constructed playable, and keep it dealt with, and all but one of them shared a color with the Rhino. So there were relatively few decks that could straight-up race, and you were already behind, thanks to being Thoughtseized on Turn 1.Quote:
Originally Posted by TsumiBand
Abzan Aggro decks could have you dead-on-board through a removal spell on Turn 4. The Midrange decks would use the Rhino to hold the board, then drop Elspeths or Ajanis and just gain life out of easy reach or thump you with 6 3/3 flyers. Now, don't get me wrong - Rhino wasn't the be-all and end-all of that. But it outclassed the supposed "power" clan of the plane, with simply had a 3-mana 4/4. For that extra colorless maan, you were getting a relevant ETB, a keyword native to the card, and an extra point of toughness.
http://magicorganizedplay.tumblr.com...ay-ptq-formats
Wizards is on a roll right now. All PTQs at Modern/Legacy GPs are Limited now - with a 75$ entry fee. :really:
Hm, all those poor folks travelling halfway around the world in order to play at a large competitive Legacy GP...bet they are sure glad they don't have to worry about having a second deck, or having to play their usual deck for an entire weekend. They'll be so happy to get to play Limited. How awful having to wait for the 2 er, 1 GP per year that is attendable, and then being expected to play your favorite deck all weekend.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
It seems a stretch to call Siege Rhino "Legacy playable." As for Splinter Twin, I don't have any problems with that. Twin was a good deck in Standard, but it didn't dominate because back then they actually printed decent answers.Quote:
Originally Posted by s&s
Of course, it’s looking like CopyCat won’t dominate either, and Mardu Vehicles looks like it’s the actual issue. But we’ll see if it has staying power or was just a good metagame choice for the Pro Tour.
This is goofy reasoning. The apparent idea is that if Modern/Legacy was uninteresting, people would head to Standard. I do not think that's the case. The people who are playing Modern/Legacy instead of Standard are largely people who wouldn't be interested in Standard (as it is) even if there wasn't Modern/Legacy to play. You don't get them to pick up Standard by making the alternatives worse, you do it by making Standard more interesting to them. Maybe that's not possible for some of those players (who'd be uninterested in Standard no matter what), but in that case, again, they wouldn't be interested in Standard so making Modern/Legacy worse wouldn't get them to check it out!Quote:
Originally Posted by iatee
Modern/Legacy wsan't hurting Standard; Standard was hurting Standard because people just don't like the current environment and the last few weren't very popular either.
Siege Rhino gets a lot of the blame but in truth, much like any time there's a dominant deck in Standard (which is most of the time), it's the general card pool. Compare Monoblack Devotion. There really wasn't any one card that made that deck; it was the combination of cards that all happened to go straight into it. The cards that got the most hate were probably Thoughtseize and Pack Rat, but Pack Rat barely saw play in Innistrad-RTR and Thoughtseize, while still good, dropped off significantly when the format because Theros-Khans wasn't as good of an environment for it. What generally happens with any given Standard deck that dominates or even a particular card is that the supporting cast manages to be really great. There are a few exceptions (e.g. Skullclamp) but MOST cards that were a key part of a dominating deck in Standard would have been mediocre to worthless if placed in most other Standard formats. Something like Tolarian Academy probably wouldn't have even seen play in Innistrad-RTR, for exapmle.Quote:
Originally Posted by TsumiBand
That brings us to Siege Rhino. Siege Rhino was in formats with good mana fixing but also benefitted from Abzan probably getting the best cards of all of the clans. People forget, for example, just how good Anafenza the Foremost was, which saw play in the Siege Rhino decks as well. Siege Rhino was just the most "obvious" of the cards that did well in Abzan so it got all the blame. If we kept Siege Rhino legal but swapped the amount of support Abzan and Temur got, I think we would've seen Savage Knuckleblade instead be the 3-color creature that people complained about the most. Similarly, if Siege Rhino had been legal in RTR-Theros Standard, it would've been mostly ignored.
But that wouldn't really do anything to solve the various problems of Extended that resulted in it being cancelled. People are quick to blame the shift from a 7-year Extended to a 4-year Extended, but that happened because Extended wasn't popular already and that was an attempt to try to fix things. Maybe it failed, but Extended wasn't in a good state even before it.Quote:
Originally Posted by rufus
Extended was 7 years for most of its time, but towards the end it was changed to 4 years in the hope of bringing its popularity back, as Legacy was beating it in popularity. It didn’t work, and if anything made it less popular.Quote:
Originally Posted by NeckBird
Oh man, seeing WotC desperately trying to keep Extended alive was one of the saddest things I have witnessed in Magic.
It was like...it was already on the ground, dying and ready to go out with good memories about the times when everyone loved it. I think most Magic players have very fond memories of "Old Extended". But instead of letting it die, WotC put it on life support, performed tons of surgery on it and told everyone Extended was gonna be fine. And Extended tried, but it was already too late. Everyone, including once enthusiastic Extended players like myself, knew that its time had come. The game was over. But WotC couldn't let go. They tried this whole 4-year thing. Almost nobody cared. Extended was down on the floor, ready to go out but it had to hang on, for Wizards. It was ugly. Instead of going out the way it should have, WotC disfigured it and tried to made it into this new and exciting abomination that ended up being liked by absolutely no one.
The most depressing thing was seeing it still around on Magic Online for over a year after its death. It was like as if a once good friend had died in your living room, but you still had to look at him for over a year until someone eventually removed him. Never forget those 2/8-Man Queues that never fired. So sad. Maybe I got carried a bit off-topic here. It's just, Extended was my first competitive format. I played all my early tournaments in it and I loved it so much.
I miss the format when Oathing into Morphling, Spike Weaver and Spike Feeder was the most powerful thing you could do with Oath of Druids.Quote:
Originally Posted by Julian23
Well, I think that was the Extended people liked. From what I can tell, the format was generally liked in its original form (Revised and The Dark onward) and after its first rotation (removal of Revised (except the dual lands, which stayed legal), The Dark, and Fallen Empires), as it offered much of the appeal of Legacy. But after its second rotation (when Ice Age and Mirage left), it seems people liked it less, and its popularity dwindled with each successive rotation, and people started shifting over to Legacy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Soldier of Fortune
I miss the format when Vampiric Tutor and friends were something that was played by decks, and not combo. Storm really ruined combo decks in general and did a lot of damage to the format overall. Worst mechanic ever printed tbh.
http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=20349&iddeck=155228Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Seth
7th in a field of 117 with 4 unplayable cards as the bigger creature core?
http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=20060&iddeck=152827
6th out of 92?
Try comparing the results of decks containing siege rhino, to say goblin matron? Not T1, def playable.
If standard doesn't get enough attention, cards will drop in price, and the return players get from playing limited will drop accordingly.Quote:
Originally Posted by rufus
As the return from limited is lowered due to lower card prices, WotC will have to reduce the entry cost of limited events or less players will participate.
So no, this would not be a good move, its the start of a downward spiral in fact.
Basically try to imagine limited if there were no other formats. Cards would be worth nothing after the limited event ends, because there is no other format to play in. More popular the constructed formats are, higher the value of cards opened in limited gets ..
Storm is awesome, engine combo is way cooler than things like splinter twin. That being said, I get that people like different things (which is more the point I'm trying to make).Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
Why did Extended die a miserable death? That was during a time I quit magic (relevant: because of standard rotations).
Wizards might be playing it easy with Modern because of the experience they had with Extended. Not the same format since Modern doesn't explicitly rotate...but now they're forcing rotation...might be seeing them make the same mistakes again anyway.
I know I largely quit modern because the format became hugely uninteractive/"did you draw your sideboard", partially because they banned the decks that were able to squash the uninteractive combo decks.
IIRC... 7-Year Extended was unpopular by most metrics and was considered a format you'd play only because you had to (to qualify for an event or because the format of the next big event was Extended). WotC felt they could fix this by playing with the card pool and rotation schedule, going from 7-years of cards to 4. At the time, cards in Standard lasted 2 years before rotation, so 4-Year Extended was nicknamed 'Double Standard'.Quote:
Originally Posted by Claymore
These changes occurred as Faeries rotated out of Standard and Bloodbraid Jund began to dominate. This led to an extension of Faerie's domination of a format, only to inevitably be replaced by Jund as time continued. Players hated the idea that whatever had previously dominated Standard will then dominate 4-Year Extended. So an already unpopular format, played because sometimes you had to, became a completely undesirable format played by no one.
That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed 7-Year Extended. The format was distinct from Vintage/Legacy and Standard, and ever-changing (at a slow pace) due to the rotation. Most decks would lose a piece or two each year and have to find something to fill the gaps. The decks I remember from when I played were Hypergenesis, Foundry-Depths, Affinity, Dredge, All-In-Red, and Elfball.
The problem with this view:
Is this:Quote:
Originally Posted by iatee
There is a firm upper limit on the amount of people who are just going to buy new cards, buy new cards, buy new cards. Just imagine trying to sell someone on playing Magic. Let's assume they like the game.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
Newbie: "So how do I get started?"
Veteran: "Head on down to your LGS and pick up some cards for your own deck!"
Newbie: "Great! Then I can play in those Friday tournaments?"
Veteran: "Well, sure, but you won't have an optimal deck, so you might not win a ton."
Newbie: "Oh... how do I optimize my deck?"
Veteran: "Well, it's probably going to cost somewhere between $150 and $300."
Newbie: "Whoa! I could just buy an iPad and play Hearthstone for that, any time I want. Is there any other way?"
Veteran: "Sure, you could play limited, where you build a new deck every week... that's about $15 for a tournament."
Newbie: "Oh... so what do I do with those cards?"
Veteran: "Well, you can save them for your collection."
Newbie: "Then I'll have an optimal deck?"
Veteran: "Well, not guaranteed... you still might have to trade and buy other cards."
Newbie: "Wait, don't I just spend the same amount as a regular deck over the course of a few of these limited tournaments?"
Veteran: "Yes, but you see we rotate the format every few months so---"
This is exhausting to even type out but you get the point.
It gets to what we were talking about upthread. You can't sell this game just as one of a zillion games. You have to sell its depth, breadth, community aspects. That's what you pay the premium for.
Supporting non-rotating formats keeps people invested in their cards and reduces the feel-bad of the up-front costs. And it allows people to keep going with the game as their life changes.
Obviously they need to sell new cards, but you can't just expect that to float you forever. This post put it well:
Another thing to note is that this approach really pressures the LGSes who make up the backbone of the MTG economy. If Wizards is always focused on selling new cards, the singles that don't sell because they lack utility just rot in cases or back rooms. You end up with all this inventory that is just dead money. Eternal formats give old cards value. I was at the LGS last night and a friend picked up a set of Holy Day for some modern deck. That 80 cents isn't much, sure, but it's better than 0. Singles are how LGSes make a profit margin more than "buy pack for $2, sell pack for $4." Rotation is basically a huge game of musical chairs between the players and the stores and the one that's left holding the bag feels terrible.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
Supporting eternal formats is also really in WotC/Hasbro's best financial interest, because it's the only way they build/maintain reprint equity in existing cards. How many packs of Theros got sold just because of Thoughtseize? Why was Thoughtseize a $50 card to begin with? Why are the Masters sets so popular?
Reprints are also comparatively cheap from a development standpoint.
They will never do anything to seriously hurt vendor card stocksQuote:
Originally Posted by Richard Cheese
A fine point, but it's important to remember that magic is also the only 'board' game where you can reliably walk into a game store and pay for a competitive platform with prize payout. At best [in a metropolitan setting] I could find maybe one pay-to-play tournament of a random board game - and it will be a shorter one like Race, 7 Wonders, or Star Realms...other than that you're talking about finding poker tables or maybe an LGS that wants to deal with the cluster that is miniatures [mostly X-Wing atm] league play.Quote:
Originally Posted by maharis
The added incentive of opening money cards probably sells more limited than the mechanism by which those cards get value (using them for constructed play). Regardless, limited magic (and it's competitive structure) is still a quality 'board' game worth paying for; healthy constructed formats are only really important in that they keep up high player count [critical mass to reliably fire limited] and equitability [financial incentive, especially for newer or less-skilled players]. Maybe WotC will start to realize that something like block constructed [out of print sets] would be a useful tool for distracting people from particularly poor standard environments and reinforcing the idea of limited cards having value.
This narrative assumes everyone is at heart a competitive player who wants to be constantly playing magic without wasting too much money. That is an easy trap to fall into, because basically everyone on this legacy forum is a competitive player who wants to play a lot without wasting too much money.Quote:
Originally Posted by maharis
Most of the time the answer to "Well, sure, but you won't have an optimal deck, so you might not win a ton." is
"That's fine, I have a life, it's not like I'm going to spend every Friday night of my life playing."
And the answer to "Sure, you could play limited, where you build a new deck every week... that's about $15 for a tournament." is
"Cool, I guess I'll go to a few drafts this year."
Wizards doesn't need everyone to show up with a pimped out Standard deck every FNM. But if you are a very competitive player who wants to be constantly playing Magic at the highest level with a tier 1 deck, you're going to spend a lot of money. That is built into the hobby. This model has done well for 20 years without Wizards spending too much time or energy ensuring that the market for older cards is supported.
Right now, most people playing with older cards are playing kitchen table or commander. Old cards keep their value forever in those contexts. We ignore all of these casual scum players, but they are a major, major part of the business. People who go to a few drafts a year get to bring home their cards and can play with their new cards forever.
Wizards is not freaked out right now not because they need to find a better way to prop up a pyramid scheme where older cards will always have some monetary value and buying into the game is always a great investment. They're freaked out because Standard is the focus of competitive magic and recent Standards have been unpopular.
I guess the heart of our disagreement is that you think Wizards will do just fine attracting a mass of casual players while I think they need to cultivate long-term customers.Quote:
Originally Posted by iatee
Someone with a small business once told me that something like half of their revenue comes from only a few hundred very loyal customers, while their total customer universe is in the thousands. That's what morgan_coke was getting to up thread. You can't ever assume perpetual growth, and strategizing as though your total customer universe is infinite is a losing proposition. Competitive players spend the most money on this game, even if it's not just ripping raw packs. When a player pays $300 for the latest Standard deck or a Usea from a store, that store can buy a case from Wizards.
I don't think Wizards is panicking just because Standard is poor. Their issues are structural. A strategy shift is required, even if it's not as drastic as gutting the RL.
According to my understanding, Extended was initially quite popular. As I said, it had much the appeal of Legacy. However, unlike Legacy (or Modern), Extended rotated. The first rotation wasn't a big fuss, but it seems the format took a hit when Ice Age and Mirage left, and continued to lose popularity in successive rotations.Quote:
Originally Posted by Claymore
The basic problem, as I understand it, is that Extended took the worst aspects of Standard and Legacy but without the things people like about either. You had a lot of crazy powerful decks like Legacy, but you didn't have cards like Force of Will around to do anything about them. Then you had rotation to deal with, like Standard, but in Standard the rotation was a way to keep the card pool small to do a better job playtesting (which they don't always succeed at, but they have a better success rate than Extended) and also as a way to make anything problematic rotate out in short order. So you have the rotation, except without the advantages that rotation brings. Well, I suppose it helps keep things "dynamic" but it's slower than Standard at doing so.
But whatever the reason for Extended's lack of popularity was, it was losing popularity. Legacy, which Wizards of the Coast had largely ignored and only created because people wanted a format they could play the dual lands that wasn't dependent on another format's restricted list (as type 1.5 had been), on the other hand, started booming, and not counting what WOTC calls "forced" play (i.e. PTQs, Grand Prix), Legacy was more popular than Extended.
Wizards of the Coast looked at this and figured that the problem with Extended was that it was such a different format than Standard that people weren't really able to import their Standard decks into it, and so people would rather play the nonrotating Legacy than Extended. So their solution was to cut Extended from 7 years to 4 years. This did, technically speaking, accomplish the goal of making it easier to move from Standard to Extended. The problem is that it more or less turned into the format where you got to play against all the decks you were sick of in Standard and were glad to see rotate out. Even more problematically, Caw-Blade happened. The deck dominated Standard to an extent not seen since Affinity, and perhaps even more so than Affinity did, and so Stoneforge Mystic and Jace got banned in Standard. But they didn't do it in Extended... for some reason. I guess there weren't enough Extended tournaments to really judge things. At any rate, an Extended Pro Tour was coming up soon, and Caw-Blade was completely legal in Extended, and nearly as powerful as it was in Standard. Likely accurate fears of a Pro Tour dominated by Caw-Blade caused them to make a last-minute adjustment to make it into Modern, and that was basically it for Extended, though they did at least care enough to usher out a bunch of bans in the next announcement before they stopped caring about it at all.
Thanks for the explanation. I imagine a lot of the older extended decks utilized cross-block synergies so a rotation could be crippling to more than one deck. Plus once you got rid of the old sets you got into the newer inbred mechanics based blocks, where you really were just limited to playing Standard all stars.
---
So this is fun:
Quote:
This was a solid month, topping at 1860 points. A rise out of the recent slums. Add to that last months data and we have a overall total of 2666. Two times the evil. The cut off is 123 total and 86 for Jan alone. Either way we get the same list. This leaves us with the following:
Miralces
Bug Control (Both Leo and Shardless)
Sneak Attack
Grixis
This means we lose this month DnT, BR Reanimator, Infect and Eldrazi. Yes, that is correct, the menace that was going to come and destroy the format, end life as we know it and kill our game has fallen from grace. In fact it placed 12th overall in January.
A lot of people have been alluding to this concept, which is explained well here; 1000 true fans. http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
The example refers to individual creators but the concept applies here. Wizard’s growth and success is because they did a great job (initially) cultivating true fans. As people here pointed out, recently the casual fan is getting more focus. The past decade wizards was able to increase the number of true long term fans while still appealing and growing the casual fan base. As others have explained this is a precarious balance because too much attention one way or other threatens the integrity of the entire structure. I think they have done a great job so far maintaining this balance, but to echo what others have said if they continue down this chasing the low hanging fruit to help quarterly numbers path it will alienate both sides long term.
Kind of agree. A lot of Wizards' problems right now is that they've relied too much on making money off Standard, but haven't really found a good way to cash in on and retain long-term customers who have grown tired of constantly keeping up with Standard.Quote:
Originally Posted by Moosedog
They have Modern and it is extremely successful.
I wonder what percentage of Standard's popularity comes from people that actually like how the format works vs. how much support it gets in the form of large, competitive tournaments.
According to that poll they did, mostly the latter.Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard Cheese
We finally did it. Pushed all of the non brainstorm heresy out of the DtB section!Quote:
Originally Posted by Claymore
And they monetize it rather poorly.Quote:
Originally Posted by iatee
Let's not go there and let another thread get closed by B&R discussion.Quote:
Originally Posted by Megadeus
What poll?Quote:
Originally Posted by Megadeus
Popular yes. Successful, not really; Or at least they aren't directly making much money off of supporting Modern.Quote:
Originally Posted by iatee
Edit:
@Barook: I assume it's that poll where they tweeted asking how everyone liked Standard. Responses were ranging from 1-4 out of 10.
Blue mages master race confirmed :cool:Quote:
Originally Posted by Megadeus
Heil Brainstorm.
Gedankenwirbel!Quote:
Originally Posted by Gheizen64