Quote Originally Posted by Ronald Deuce View Post
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.
Modern prices are pretty huge too. It's really the Shocks vs. Duals that keeps the price significantly below Legacy, when you look at averages. Sure, we have $150+ fringe cards like Recruiter, Cradle, Chains, Tabernacle, Eureka, etc. (I use the word fringe because you can play the format without investing in those cards, even if the card is only included in a single DTB), but most of the staple non-land cards are cheaper than Goyfs. If you are a player with a sizable Modern collection, you can trade your Goyfs and Lilianas for FOWs and Wastelands (and more) and have an entire Delver deck without the 6 dual lands necessary. Might have to pick up some C/U cards like Daze but that's negligible (and compensated by the value gained in trading down Goyfs/Lilis).

But a counterpoint to your argument is that Legacy has a defined cap on the number of possible players due to the Reserved List. It makes complete sense that Wizards and SCG are pulling back support, since supporting Legacy at the same level that they support Modern or Standard is completely impossible without removing the Reserved List (or at least making an exception for dual lands). I don't know the exact numbers on print runs of ABU/Revised, but the number of dual lands in existence is finite. There is nothing killing Legacy per se, but the Reserved List effectively caps its growth.