This is a quote from Aaron Forsythe's twitter. It was posted just after the Magic Show came live on April 23:
Is this irrefutable evidence? No. It is, however, certainly a push in the right direction. It also suggests that Wizards is either considering a new format or thinking about considering a new format. In either situation, Wizards absolutely does read forums like these and absolutely listens to players. They do not always do what players want them to do (read: Reserve List), but they certainly have their ears open for us.Originally Posted by Aaron Forsythe
Again, while you present the rational economic argument, most Magic players just do not understand it. It seems easier (not IS easier, just seems) to purchase a new deck for about 100-200 every time the block rotates than it is to invest chunks of 100 and 200 at a time for a deck that will not be complete for a few months. With Legacy staple prices rising, mostly the Duals, the format is entering an unsustainable, Vintage-like pattern. And we all know what happened to Vintage. A new format would salvage the best of Legacy and scrap the worst. Some cards and staples would be lost, but many would not. Indeed, many of the removed cards (most notably FoW, but even potential dogs like Goyf) inhibit format diversity. With a properly constructed banlist, this new format could be wide open to dozens of old, new, and reinvigorated decktypes. Diversity brought players to Legacy, and it will definitely bring players to this new format.
-ktkenshinx-
Since this is an opinion/speculation thread I would like to chime in. While I can grudgingly accept no reprints I don't want to play legacy light. I'm one of the very few that came to competitive legacy from competitive vintage. I started playing vintage because it was incredibly fast and cerebral. I was initially disappointed when I had to change to legacy but now I enjoy playing it. Actually touching the cards I grew up playing with is special playing astral slide vs goblins or another physcatog vs thresh is not so much.
The more and more I read this thread the less some postings make sense. "I wanted to play Vintage but couldn't afford it so I picked up legacy instead." That's my rough translation of what was said earlier in the thread. That's why wotc may be thinking about this new format. Lots of people want to play legacy but its hard to afford all at once. Sure you can play some decks that are fun or unique but who really wants to spend six months or a year piecing together a deck? Overall legacy lite doesn't appeal to me. I would rather see wotc man up and make legacy easier to break in to or let it kill itself like vintage. And I love legacy. It is the only format I would ever even consider playing.
I remember when you had to really think about trading a Shivan Dragon for a Mox Jet. And usually you thought about that trade for weeks wondering if you should've kept the Shivan.
No reprints, unfortunately, is something we're stuck with. (I think they will abolish the Reprint Policy sooner than we expect - but after they do that, they still won't reprint the good cards, so it won't matter for Legacy.)
Legacy Lite, though, is something that will benefit people who don't play it. If you already have the cards to play Legacy, some of those cards will now rise in value due to new demand. If you play Extended, when your cards rotate out, you will be able to sell them for a bigger chunk of what they were worth before they rotated out.
So the format will do something even for the people who aren't interested in playing it.
I hope you weren't referring to me. I own Power 10 + Drains + all the trappings, I also have 8 underground seas..., I like Vintage because it is fast. Legacy is fun because it reminds me of my casual days of bashing with dudes and tapping dual lands.
I pretty much mirror Jazzykats opinion. I'd much rather be playing Vintage, but play Legacy since it is more popular.
I myself would prefer wizards concentrate on making current eternal formats more popular rather than wasting time creating another format.
For the people who think a new Eternal format is a brilliant idea...
"Would you give a starving dog a rubber bone?" - Linus Van Pelt
Seriously guys, I'm not sure where this "Legacy is cheaper in the long run" thing comes from, but it's simply not true. Oh some staples rotate slower than others and some have never gone out of vogue but Legacy is littered with expensive cards that used to be good and decks that used to be tier 1. There are plenty of expensive cards that need to be added as well. Goyf is the best example but cards like FoD rack up quickly as well. Legacy decks become obsolete. Even when the cards are still legal, they become unplayable. How're those Resets and Fact or Fictions or Tradewind Riders looking these days? The fact is that the way the format shifts, you're looking at playing a new deck every year or two if you want to stay cmpetitive and it will cost you as much as a new T2 deck whether you have the duals and forces or not.
Where Standard is cheaper is you can get staples playing limited. Can't afford $200 in cards? Can you draft 8 times? Grats, you got 3 sets of playable commons, some decent uncommons and a good rare or two. Maybe you even won some packs. And it's easier to trade for T2 goodies.
I like legacy guys, but let's call a spade a spade, the shit is expensive. You could pay for my 07 Saab convertible for half a year for the value of a countertop deck and a set of 40 duals would cover it for 8 months. I know which one I'd rather have.
What Legacy deck that has become "obsolete" doesn't have parts in it that can be used for other decks?
Threshold decks.
Mystic Enforcer, Werebear and Quirion Dryad are all outdated when compared to Natural Order (for Progenitus), Tarmogoyf and other nuts creatures.
aka, power creep.
Those are like under $5 dollar cards. Obviously the big elephant is Tarmogoyf, but other than that most decks don't need a lot of money to stay competitive.
uh.... the counter/top deck and the 40 duals. this isnt 1988, nino brown called and wants his saab back.
This is an unusual and relatively recent phenomenon, and I am not sure we can universalize it to all cards. Savannah Lions and Kird Ape evolved into Isamaru evolved into Watchwolf and so on into the era of Goyf, Rhox, Nacatl (and Thoctar/Leatherback if you are involved in Standard). Aggro power creep was recent, and I can't imagine that Wizards will push the envelope much more than they already have. If these are the new benchmarks for aggro (benchmarks that won't change any time soon), then Legacy will be a pretty decent investment for the coming years.
That said, I do agree with you. Poor Enforcer/Werebear/Dryad/Nantuko Shade/Spiritmonger/etc. We knew ye well.
-ktkenshinx-
Unfortunately, since reprints are impossible, that dog will go hungry. The new format is to feed another hungry dog, with food it will find substantial.
Because while you are right that the new format just won't be Legacy, it will still serve a useful purpose for other players that Legacy can't serve any more, since the expense of the original duals means not enough people can play it. The idea isn't to ban the original duals in Legacy, not to kill Legacy for the new format, but to have the new format perform a function for Magic as a whole that Legacy is now unable to do for it.
I would take a Saab convertible over a Trans Am any day...
Nantuko Shade is still good. See Eva Green.
You go ahead and take the slips of cardboard with some bad pictures on them and the convention centers packed with the smell of unwashed virgins. To each their own. I'm not really in a position to judge, I used to write articles about Magic and I was part of a top 50 WoW raiding guild for a while. But I don't think you'll find many people that would rather take the cardboard over the convertible, if the option was presented to them as such.
Jak, let's say for grins and giggles that you had the old BHWC Landstill, and you took a several year hiatus from the game. You take your former tier 1 Landstill deck and try and morph it into something currently competitive. So you're keeping the Plows and Tundras and the Trops and Force and Daze and Brainstorm. But you're buying 4 goyfs, 4 CB, 4 SDT, 3 Spell Snare, 4 War Monks, an NO, a Prog, the extra Trops and Tundras to round out the deck, some Trygon Predators, Ponders, a Dryad Arbor, some Misty Rainforests, etc. Even buying played cards, you're spending enough to buy 2 gem mint Jund decks. And there's no guarantee that Scars of Mirrodin doesn't contain the base for a deck that totally invalidates CB/Top decks. Suddenly, your $500 investment in updating your deck is wasted as the deck becomes as competitive as ATS or Solidarity or whatever other archetypes appeared and died in the time that I was out of the game. So sure, you've got Trops and Tundras and Daze and Force and now Goyfs, but you're scrambling to find something else to build and it's going to cost you at least another $300-$400 to retune into something viable again.
I built a competitive T2 deck on MTGO for half the cost of a paper played revised Underground Sea. Is it tier 1? No, but it's good enough to win games, and it cost me $45 in tickets. Build a Legacy deck that can even post 35% against the field for $45 at dealer prices.
And guys, the investment thing... If you want a good investment, buy Berkshire Hathaway "A" stocks. Not going to get anything more solid than that. It's a sure thing, you'll never lose value and the value of the stocks will continue to climb. All you have to do is come up with the 6 figures to pony up for that initial investment (closed today at $115k/share), and then it's way more solid than playing around with the more volatile stocks. I mean, there's this misconception that people have that BH A class is too expensive, but once you buy them, you don't need to buy anything else, you can just sit on your A stocks. They've gone up 76% over the last decade, even with the recent market crash. Talk about a rock solid investment!
If you don't have the scratch to show up and play Legacy, it wouldn't matter even if it WAS cheaper (and again, I don't think that it is), you get what you can afford. For what you'd spend on your car with financing, you could get a car that's twice as niice if you'd just go out and pay cash. But that's how life works, you'll pay more in the long term because you can't afford to shell out in the short term, but that's ok because something is better than nothing and playing T2 is better than not playing at all.
I'm looking at buying a condo. $100k loan at 5% over 30 years with no PMI (VA guaranteed loan) assuming a measly 1.25% property tax rate with taxes held in escrow (pretty much a given on a first time home loan) and I'm looking at paying $230,000 over the life of the loan. For that kind of money, I could buy 2 condos and rent one out. Hell, let's even take the property tax out of that, since I'll be paying that either way. Still looking at $193k, nearly double the amount I borrowed. Also, keep in mind that most people are looking at .5% for PMI at least, since the VA loans are only available to veterans and veterans spouses. It'd be such a better investment to just buy it cash... Except I can't afford to do that. Just like I can't afford to go out and spend $1500 on a deck in a single pop. I could maybe build it over the course of 4 or 5 months without too seriously impacting my standard of living, but not if I went back to working a 40 hour week.
If you've got the cards and you want to go "oh man, I don't have to invest anything in playing", fine. But try and put yourself in the position of someone that doesn't have oodles of useless cash laying around that they'd like to trade for little slips of cardboard with bad artwork on them before you tell everyone how easy it is to buy into Legacy.
The list I will use:
4 Force of Will
4 Counterspell
4 Brainstorm
4 Standstill
3 Fact or Fiction
3 Stifle
4 Pernicious Deed
4 Swords to Plowshares
2 Diabolic Edict
2 Disenchant
2 Crucible of Worlds
4 Flooded Strand
3 Tundra
3 Underground Sea
3 Tropical Island
4 Mishra's Factory
3 Nantuko Monastery
3 Wasteland
1 Plains
4 Blue Elemental Blast
4 Engineered Plague
4 Meddling Mage
3 Duress
Instead of looking at the deck as a whole, break it down.
Buy
4 Tarmogoyf $61.00 = $244.00
4 Counterbalance $5.78 = $23.12
4 Top $5.36 = $21.44
3 Spell Snare $3.26 = $9.78
4 RWM $0.67 = $2.68
3 NO $22.95 = $68.85
1 Prog $10.88 = $10.88
4 Ponder $0.48 = $1.92
3 Trygon Predator $1.43 = $4.29
4 Misty Rainforest $8.59 = $34.36
1 Dryad Arbor $1.38 = $1.38
Total = $422.70
Sell
4 Counterspell $0.50 = $2.00
4 Standstill $7.44 = $29.76
3 Fact or Fiction $2.08 = $6.24
3 Stifle $10.77 = $32.31
4 Pernicious Deed $7.35 = $29.40
2 Diabolic Edict $0.95 = $1.90
2 Crucible of Worlds $8.34 = $16.68
3 Underground Sea $70.14 = $210.42
4 Mishra's Factory $4.24 = $16.96
3 Wasteland $16.36 = $49.08
Total = $394.75
A deck that was around 4 years ago can be traded in for one of the most expensive now. Legacy is an investment and the cards (probably not creatures) that were good way back when are likely to still be good. The point is that you are able to buy a deck, and you won't lose your money. Even if it becomes obsolete, the pieces have other homes and still retain value.
I am not saying that this makes it a cheaper format than Standard (or Extended) since some people are great at getting out before the prices drop. What I am saying is that cards in Legacy hold their value.
What does it matter what you smell like when we play, unless you're trying to distract me.
Cool, Im glad you were almost somebody once.
Neat. I was a goblin for halloween when I was like 11.
But they dont get the cardboard or the convertible. they only get use of the convertible for 6 months.
Yeah, and whenever they rotate out, what kind of return will you be able to get on those jund decks ? huh ? Whats a good mono white kithkin deck going for these days ?
Kind of like what ANT does to goblins ? Guess nobody plays goblins anymore.
Didnt you already get called out for just making numbers up earlier ? Exactly where did you get the $300-$400 figures ? If he had the duals, fetches, goyfs, etc, wtf is going to cost $300-$400 more ?
So because you built a virtual tier 3 t2 standard deck for MTGO for X amount, you want someone else to then build a legacy deck in reality for that same amount ? Im not getting the relation. Standard has 1-3 viable strategies, legacy has tons.
sure, I'll take that into account.
I dont have umpteen squidillion oodles of useless cash laying around, but I do just fine. I only play every week or two, its not like Im in some sure hurry to play legacy every single week with a brand new deck.
I think a lot of people are exaggerating how much interest there is in this proposed format; it's easy to say, hey, sure I'd play; it's another thing to actually show up. A lot of the younger players I know either
1. make constant trades (at a loss) keeping little inventory to compete in standard.
2. don't even read spoilers for sets and have no idea what cards are even in the latest set but buy packs to add to their school cafeteria deck.
Trying to hunt down shocklands from six years ago, not really on their radar...
A superextended MIGHT draw in some of the EDH crowd or people returning to magic who played from 4th-Mirage (I myself fit that category), as they could get a cheaper manabase and still see some of the stuff they knew as it was reprinted in 6th edition. But I'm not sure the numbers are really there to warrant it.
bad analogy, but I'm making it anyway: I see eternal as a bit like Pithing Needle: There was enough demand to keep it $15-20 for quite some time, but as soon as M10 deluged the market, it proved that the demand really wasn't what we suspected it was all along. I believe superextended would follow that same path and be barely an improvement over legacy. At least the current price bubble is keeping people excited about acquiring cards now: I'm betting superextended or whatever it gets called would follow the same cyclical trajectory of current extended, gathering few, if any, players beyond what it currently has.
My response at SCG to Peter Jahn's latest:
I'm a more formats the better kind of person; wish FNM rotated between block/standard/limited/extended (for rare months with four fridays).
OTOH, I still don't know why "support" is a reason for the creation of a new format -- Peter's article is clear that he thinks it's just about keeping card supplies up, but a lot of the internet pundits keep repeating that WOTC needs to be making money off of all formats or something to that effect. As if PTQs create money... Which is highly arguable to say the least.
I also think that forum goers are misrepresenting themselves as the vast majority of players when they say that extended is dead and this would bring tons of people into the before-standard game. I doubt it. There are people who are interested in that and there are people who aren't and can't be (no credit card for online singles, etc.); I just can't imagine that kids who run tier 3 standard decks are going to be clamoring to jump into a game that is even harder for them to compete in than extended currently is. And that's where the big numbers that WOTC wants to draw from are located.
But they're not here to say that and even if they are, they probably think that it'd be unpopular to admit it. I've lost track of the times I've seen people make horrendous-value trades with stores before events like regionals just to convert from one deck to a slightly better metagamed deck, trading in Wrath of Gods for like $2 each. Would a "supported" eternal format keep people from making "bad" decisions like that just in case they might go to a "super extended" ptq someday, or would it just make people feel worse for trying to stay relevant in standard with limited funds?
I've never sold a magic card, ever, and have about six sleeved legacy decks built at the moment (hard to say if my collection would get "better" or not if I switched to masques-on, probably no), but I'm clearly in the minority there.
There's certainly that danger.
What I think is the cause of the perceived need for reprints of the original dual lands, and hence, the cause of the current Legacy price bubble as well, is the fact that the very popular Mirrodin block is set to rotate out of Extended this fall. Whether people want to sell their cards, or just continue playing with them, the fact that a limited supply of the original duals keeps the pool of Legacy players small is bad news for people with a lot of Mirrodin cards.
So in Fall 2010, your Chrome Mox rotates out - not out of Standard, but out of Extended... with nothing left for it but the fading shadow world of Legacy and Vintage.
In Fall 2011, your Umezawa's Jitte follows it.
In Fall 2012, your shocklands.
And then in Fall 2013, your Tarmogoyf heads to the near-oblivion of Legacy and Vintage!
Legacy is supposed to be a safety net for players as they hear rotation's winged chariot approaching... and the current price bubble for Legacy is indicating that it's not doing that job as well any more.
So the intended scenario is that the new format will stimulate demand for cards, and thus Extended players will be happy that their cards are not going to be worthless soon, so Extended thrives... and thus Standard players will be happy that their cards won't drop as far when they rotate out of Standard, since Extended is thriving.
This means two things.
One is that the new format will have to be fun to play for it to be popular enough to do anything.
The other is that the new format will have to keep more people from quitting Extended than it takes away from Extended.
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