[Article] No Reserved List Legacy

[Lord Seth]

Fetching powerful lands should cost you a spell and mana. Stabilizing color requirements is really all that fetches are designed to do (and that is enough really.) Wotc also hates combo decks, so turning a fetchland into a Demonic Tutor would never fly. Crop Rotation is as close as we'll get in that regard I think.

Beyond dual lands, what else is really on the reserved list that is causing problems?

LED, Tabernacle, Gaea's Cradle, and Candelabra of Tawnos jump to mind immediately.

EDIT: Chains of Mephistopheles and Moat. To a lesser extent, also Mox Diamond, Aluren, City of Traitors, and Grim Monolith.

[Jamaican Zombie Legend]

The format and gameplay implications of No Reserve List Legacy have been covered already in this thread, but there's not a lot of talk about the financial implications, particularly the question of how exactly Wizards benefits from enacting a move like this.

Legacy doesn't move packs in the same way that Standard/Limited does and never would unless Magic trended towards YGO/Pokemon levels of power creep. And EDH/Commander has generally supplanted Legacy as the Eternal format in which you get to play with the entire history of the game (and does a much better job of that, I might add). There's really just not a lot of purpose to supporting the Legacy format besides keeping legacy (heh) players from kicking up an internet shitfit.

Think about it, what cards are there that are exclusively Legacy staples (i.e. not Modern or EDH staples) and not on the Reserve List that could sell $10 packs as marquee cards? Karakas? Port? It's such a tiny set of cards. Almost all of the big money, non-Reserved cards are shared staples in EDH which means they don't need Legacy to sell a reprint set; Commander Masters would do just fine with Wastelands, Forces, Derp&Tells, and what have you. And there's a much larger stable of $10-$40 cards to fill in the spots that aren't earmarked for chase Mythic status. Check out the prices of things like Crucible of Worlds, Rings of Brighthearth, Temporal Manipulation, and tell me Wizards doesn't have a ton of available reprint equity in Commander.

[barcode]

LED, Tabernacle, Gaea's Cradle, and Candelabra of Tawnos jump to mind immediately.

EDIT: Chains of Mephistopheles and Moat. To a lesser extent, also Mox Diamond, Aluren, City of Traitors, and Grim Monolith.

These cards are the most commonly played 40 Legacy cards from the Reserved List.:

Volrath's Stronghold
Volcanic Island
Undiscovered Paradise
Underground Sea
Tundra
Tropical Island
Transmute Artifact
Time Spiral
The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
Taiga
Serra's Sanctum
Shallow Grave
Scrubland
Savannah
Recurring Nightmare
Plateau
Phyrexian Dreadnought
Peacekeeper
Opalescence
Null Rod
Nether Void
Mox Diamond
Moat
Metalworker
Meditate
Lion's Eye Diamond
Intuition
Humility
Grim Monolith
Gilded Drake
Gaea's Cradle
Firestorm
Dream Halls
Cursed Scroll
City of Traitors
Chains of Mephistopheles
Candelabra of Tawnos
Bayou
Badlands
Aluren

[swoop]

Volrath's stronghold and Aluren are really so strong no print again please friend

[hymnyou]

What a waste of text. I can't believe I'm saying it ... but ... go play modern. If you want to tackle the issue of new players financially getting into Legacy then debunk the myth of cheap standard, the fact that half a dozen modern staples are also legacy staples and they are $80-100. "In Modern, if Tarmogoyf gets too expensive" ... Goyf is $146? There were $150 Underground Seas at GP Atlanta. I have no sympathy for a modern barnacle crying that Legacy is too expensive if he's spending $125 on a non reserved list quad reprinted Lhurgoyf.

Finally there are reserved list skirting ways WotC could get poor people into legacy, they actively choose not to do it

- From the Vaults Eternal: Force, Port, LotV, Wasteland, Sinkhole, Sneak Attack, Goyf, Some Artifact ... Jitte?, Pox, Karakas

this would benefit the masses with respect to modern and legacy, they would be hideous and forever a mark of shame on all who played them but they would squirt some supply into the market.

These would obviously sell out at whatever print run given near unlimited demand. The originals would see a small dip as speculators pretend to play wall street but the prices, as always, would rebound because demand is so strong for not-shitty looking foils. Before proposing shit legacy, this is a better solution.

[Cartesian]

Price issues aside, the 10 original dual lands give so much freedom in deck design, and no other lands come close to doing what they have done for the game, really.
I honestly can't think of a single format that wouldn't instantly become more diverse, and more fun with original duals, than without.
For this reason alone, any company who cared about designing the best game possible would find a way to work around the reserved list.

[Lemnear]

What a waste of text. I can't believe I'm saying it ... but ... go play modern.

Is this the Twilight Zone? Mr. Hashtags-discredit-arguments uses the #1 "argument" thrown at his endless Brainstorm rants himself? I'm amazed

[Dice_Box]

And today, in my feed, the third non Legacy podcast talking about this in as many days...

[TsumiBand]

Is this the Twilight Zone? Mr. Hashtags-discredit-arguments uses the #1 "argument" thrown at his endless Brainstorm rants himself? I'm amazed

At some point once you kick out all the pillars of a given format, it really does shift towards the next smallest format + a bunch of spells nobody gives a fuck about. The top 10 most played cards in Legacy, according to mtgtop8.com, are 70% lands; 1 is Wasteland, 3 are beta duals (Volcanic, Tropical, Underground), and 3 are matching fetches. Move to the top 20; the next 10 down are primarily spells printed since, like, Kamigawa (save StP) and a couple more lands and fetches.

That list, poorly formatted because I'm lazy and my lunch is almost over:

Name		Decks	Avg
Brainstorm	65.6 %	4.0
Force of Will	58.6 %	3.8
Ponder		53.0 %	3.4
Wasteland	48.8 %	3.4
Polluted Delta	42.8 %	3.5
Volcanic Island	42.1 %	2.3
Misty Rainfrst	37.2 %	2.6
Tropical Island	35.1 %	2.1
Flooded Strand	34.7 %	3.6
Underg. Sea	31.6 %	2.5
DRS		30.5 %	3.9
JTMS		30.5 %	2.3
Scalding Tarn	30.2 %	3.4
StP		29.1 %	3.8
Bayou		27.4 %	1.7
Verdant Cat.	26.7 %	3.1
Daze		25.6 %	3.5
Gitaxian Probe	24.9 %	3.3
SDT		23.9 %	3.3
Spell Pierce	23.9 %	2.1

Look how many Modern-legal spells* are the top 20 most played cards - 9 cards. Almost half that list. Now look at the lands that support those spells. After that, picture Legacy with one change -- using Ravnica shocklands over Beta dual lands. It is not hard to imagine why people would call a "No Reserve List" Legacy tantamount to Modern + random crap.

Now obviously there would be a whole meta to consider and things that were not amazing before might become playable afterwards, blah blah blah. That's perfectly fine. However, people will use the format's current starting point and top cards as a touchstone for the things that go on to define that new meta, and there's no way that Modern decks don't just filter down into this format after adopting like Wastelands and more relevant counterspells.

Like really, what hidden jewels exist in Legacy right now that removing the RP actually makes playable? Is there even a way to assess that? I have no idea how to answer this question, because I had a beer at lunch before my food came, so like... yeah man

* Okay, so many of the actual spells aren't necessarily "Modern-legal". A better phrase probably would have been "printed since 8th Edition" -- the point is, the most played spells in the format are Beta duals, fetchlands, and (by Legacy standard) incredibly recently printed spells

[thecrav]

I'd be interested to see this data played out further down the rankings but I am also too lazy to do so.

[Meekrab]

Look how many Modern-legal spells are the top 20 most played cards - 9 cards.

Eh? I count two: Spell Pierce and Gitaxian Probe.

[TsumiBand]

Eh? I count two: Spell Pierce and Gitaxian Probe.

Fixed, though I think my point was made despite my slight miscommunication -- the top 20 cards in Legacy are either duals, fetches, or spells printed since 8th Ed.

[lyle h]

It's been a long time since I've been on The Source. I am a supporter of this change, and am down to necro a thread. This format becomes more and more insane to play. Ive owned this stuff since the 90s. When this thread was going strong this format was expensive, but not insane. Prices, are insane now. No reserved list Legacy is a breathe of fresh air.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Read the article the other day, and frankly, it was one of the stupidest things I'd read in some time. And I read the news.

What would banning everything on the reserved list actually solve? Seems the author was flailing for a nice, arbitrary designator for a group of cards that would include Stuff He(?) Doesn't Like, and that's how the reserved list came up.

Let's be honest: there are specific cards that define Legacy play and have always defined Legacy play (and competitive magic in the eternal formats) for as long as the format's been around. THOSE CARDS AREN'T ALL ON THE RESERVED LIST. Force of Will isn't on the list, yet Grandmother Sengir is. So the reserved list is not a guide for determining a card's playability, and thus, the author's argument doesn't really have any bearing on the gameplay of the format, and everything about gameplay that he says subsequent to his suggestion is nonsensical speculation.

If people complain about the price of the cards on the reserved list, and if the author's primary concern is economic in nature, why doesn't he realize that banning those cards not only would hurt collectors, but would cause the prices of "the next best things" to skyrocket? Storytime: I moved halfway across the country not long ago and sold about ten thousand junk commons I'd accumulated over my sixteen years of playing the game. I had, at the time, seven to nine copies of Serum Visions, that mediocre cantrip nobody cared about beause Brainstorm, Ponder, Preordain, Sensei's Divining Top, etc. are cards that exist. I threw all but a playset of the Visions into repacks for our family's glorified garage-sale, thinking I couldn't move them on e-bay without paying as much in shipping as they were worth, and I didn't think more about it. Until everyone realized, a couple of months later, that bans had made Serum Visions the best cantrip in Modern, and the price quintupled.

Yeah, Serum Visions isn't anything like Candelabra or Imperial Recruiter or the duals, but I tell that story to ask these questions: what would happen to the price of shocklands if duals were banned in Legacy? They'd go up. Maybe way up. Would the increase in the price of said shocks help people get into the format? No. Would it hurt the odds that prospective players would get into Modern because of the collateral effect of increasing prices? Yes. Would banning duals have an adverse effect on the people who are Legacy stalwarts? Yes. Why? Because the price of their duals would go down and many people, I think, would take such bannings as a whipcrack to the jimmies. Would it "solve the problem with Legacy" to ban duals, City of Traitors, etc.? No, and there never WAS a problem, at least as far as gameplay is concerned.

I've complained about card prices for years, and I won't argue that it's not tough to sink hundreds of dollars into the land-base for a deck that's otherwise pretty similar to its incarnation in other formats. But if anything is killing Legacy, it's the stupidity of people who don't seem to notice that Tarmogoyf is more expensive than most of the dual lands, not the price of said dual lands or the fact that they're not coming back.

Man I realize this thread is a necro but I'm still getting sent by how bad this economic argument is

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Eh? I count two: Spell Pierce and Gitaxian Probe.

Damn, 2015 was wild

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Damn, 2015 was wild

tbf a lot of that now is Modern Horizons cards which is kinda cheating

[TsumiBand]

The real answer is just proxy everything and never look back

[Zoid]

The real answer is just proxy everything and never look back

I don't understand why this isn't the default approach by most people.
Before I moved countries, we had proxy vintage events in my region just to get enough people to actually play it.
I think for legacy, proxies would have also been acceptable.
Since WotC doesn't care about the formats, why should people care if they are sanctioned or not?
TOs who are also traders obviously have an interest in selling you their stock but there will be the point where they rather sell something and run tournaments then 5 people showing up.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

I shouldn't have to!

But also, TOs don't sell proxies

[Zoid]

I shouldn't have to!

But also, TOs don't sell proxies

>Broke player uses sharpie on basic land
>Broke player added proxy to their inventory

Doesn't commander allow CE/IE/gold bordered cards already?