All B/R update speculation.

[sdematt]

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

[joemauer]

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.

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.

[evanmartyr]

Is that a viable reason to have a card banned because of price? I mean obviously at this point thanks to no mana burn Mana Drain is almost just a strictly better counterspell which already sees some play... I guess drain would probably see a good deal of play if it were unbanned? (Assuming people can get their hands on them)

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.

[dontbiteitholmes]

Mana Drain is banned for power level, not price.

[Quasim0ff]

It's got to be a major league PITA to design stuff for Standard that makes it to Legacy, though.

Most of the time when it happens, people go, "Oh look they fucked up. Now X deck is really good again." talking about Snaps and Delver etc in this regard. It's not very often that something like Deathrite Shaman and Abrupt Decay happen at the same time and just power up a color combination that was just sort of subsisting before. I mean usually it takes a keyword like Affinity or whatever to be a "precon" that you just assemble with Legacy pieces.

DRS by itself wouldn't have probably gotten much attention in Legacy, but DRS and AD together suddenly offer a ton of relevant support cards to those colors. And AD has to say "can't be countered"; I wonder if it would have nearly the impressive effect without that. If it had gone any higher than like 3 cmc, then people be complaining about how it destroys too many planeswalkers or how it was "obviously a Jace killer" or whatever. Which, whatever, maybe; in order words I think that was a total fluke, it just happened that way b/c they made a cycle of uncounterable cards and DRS happened to also exist. No one was "thinking of Legacy", most likely.

I think I've said as much before but if I were in R&D I would be stressed as shit to come up with cards that work in Legacy and Standard. May as well just throw up your hands and wait for your collective selves to make the next "mistake" that finds its way into Legacy.

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.

[sdematt]

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.

The real question is, why the hell not?

-Matt

[imnotbrown]

The real question is, why the hell not?

-Matt

Because legacy doesn't make them nearly as much money.

[Lord Seth]

The real question is, why the hell not?

-Matt

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.

[Megadeus]

Since they love Modern so much do they test for modern? Or do they swing the ban hammer if anything gets too ridiculous?

[TsumiBand]

FWIW, I tried to ask him. vOv

tsumiband asked: Allegedly, you've said that "you guys" don't test new cards in Eternal formats. Is this so, and if so why? The players determine the gamut of decks to test, I have trouble believing that Vintage/Legacy/etc players would deny a chance to playtest new cards.. the only thing I can think is, the 'sweet spot' between what makes cards good in Standard/Modern/the rest of Eternal is not only very, very small, but also leads to huge demand for one card across too many formats(Mindsculptitis). What's up?

I meant our developers and playtesters do very little playtesting of eternal formats.

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. :/

[dontbiteitholmes]

Since they love Modern so much do they test for modern? Or do they swing the ban hammer if anything gets too ridiculous?

I think this question should answer itself. See Modern banned list.

[Derklord]

Because legacy doesn't make them nearly as much money.

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.

[AEnesidem]

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.

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.
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.

[bruizar]

They can. Did you never break a promise?

[Lord Seth]

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.

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.

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.

[CorwinB]

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.

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.

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.

[AEnesidem]

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.

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?

[Gheizen64]

and how exactly are they going to do that without breaking the reserved list?

FoW and Wastes aren't on the reserved list iirc.

[CorwinB]

and how exactly are they going to do that without breaking the reserved list?

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.".

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.

[(nameless one)]

I would love to see Snow Duals!