who could have known that a legacy playable 4 drop would hurt standardOriginally Posted by Darkenslight
made me lol, thx
splinter twin was also a really nice one, they really stacking the blunders quite fast
Lol "legacy playable" gets thrown around so easily these days. Sure you can put it in your deck, but you will never win anything because you're playing Siege Rhino in legacy for crying out loud. :p
I think showing Wolpert the door was a huge upgrade, and the new CEO seems to better "get it". We'll have to wait and see obviously, but they do seem aware they've got some real problems to be solved. And they already took the two biggest steps to solving them in getting rid of the dead weight that was causing them and acknowledging that they need to be fixed.
I play nic-fit on mtgo, along with manaless dredge and some other budget decks.
4 colour nic fit has gotten me the most 4-1's.
Its not T1 but its a playable deck for sure, maybe T2-T3. A deck like rug-delver has 0 single cards that can remove a rhino, the life-gain helps a lot against their main strategy, its an A+ card in such a matchup. At worst I gain 3 and they bolt / chump, or double bolt. Either way its a 3v1 pretty much.
Worth was definitely a problem, but as long as ALL of the incompetent management (which is the root of all evil) isn't purged, it's merely like a drop in the bucket.
I fully agree. I fail to see how the current shitting on enfranchised players that is going on is going to benefit them. I'll never ever play Standard as long as it's boring "Creatures: The Tappening feat. Planeswalkers". I've quit playing Legacy (and thus spending money on MTGO) because of their neglect of format management. Their new, excessive focus on Standard seems to be a mistake on par with the quickened Standard schedule that will bite them in the ass sooner or later:
"I shot your beloved dog. Now hurry up and buy my cat!"
Similarly, your unhappiness with legacy isn't WotC's problem. They can throw their money at other things.
How do you change the business model so that WotC can significantly profit off the eternal formats without burning the intermediary businesses (which WotC is reliant on) that have bought into expensive singles?...Find a business model that allows to support various formats or expect to lose players. ...
That's probably not the calculus that's going on at WotC (or Hasbro). Rather, I think they see support for eternal formats as an expense with little or no return.Stopping support for older formats is in no way going to increase the income WoTC generates. It simply doesnt' work that way.
It depends on the end results (which is obvious, I know).
But really, it can be a no brainer. If they piss off 100000 guys and gals, and get 1000000 in return, it was well worthwhile.
It's a bit like the MTGO conundrum. If it was only pissing off existing players to trade that player base for Hearthstone's player base, they would do it instantly , I'm pretty certain. But in there they have a much bigger issue, since a huge bet on digital, might mean a huge decrease on paper. So they are a bit stuck which you can see in their constant indecisiveness to break the link between both.
Ultimately, they want direct continuous revenue. Quite honestly, Modern and Legacy, through supplemental products might provide a minor bsoot to the bottom line, but bread and butter comes from Standard and draft and they, quite rightfully, focus all their marketing and promotion effort son that avenue. A lot of guys mention enfranchised players. But how many standard players become enfranchised? What is the percentage? 10%? Less? A bit more? Anyway, point is, the majority of new Standard players will play for a while and then move on to other things, not being like us sad old farts debating a card game where you get to play wizards and spells.
All they need to do is print actual duals in some way or the other (doesn't need to abolish the RL, we've had already another thread where this has been discussed to death).
As for money making, Legacy League on MTGO alone should pull at least 1+ million $/year by rough estimations from entries.
And it's been said over and over again that singles that aren't outrageously expensive are better for business. It would mainly hit the hoarders/speculators, but fuck those assholes in particular.
Yeah, I enjoy playing Eternal formats, presumably everyone here does. But if you've somehow come to the conclusion that 'Legacy could be good business for WotC', you're just not capable of looking at this stuff objectively. The company needs to sell new cards. Constantly. That is how they make money. Anything that gets in the way of 'Wizards is selling new cards, constantly' is bad business. Pretty sure Hasbro shareholders aren't gonna accept 'Well sales were down but Legacy had a really sweet year, lots of cool new decks and the format is really fun right now.'
If I were a Wizards exec I would try to make eternal formats worse. It is probably a bad thing that people enjoy playing Modern more than Standard. The Reserved List is in some ways a blessing in disguise - 'Sorry - you guys can't play a competitive format that's more fun and lets you play with your favorite old cards, you're gonna have to buy new cards instead.'
There are aspects of older formats that could possibly be better leveraged - e.g. maybe people would enjoy Standard more if it looked more like Legacy or Modern, was more spell-based, played with tight mana, free spells, resource constraints, etc. etc. It is possible that the drive towards Siege Rhino Standards isn't as well thought out as they believe, since most people ultimately want to pretend they're wizards, not zookeepers.
Ah, but that's, "cutting off your nose to spite your face," economically-speaking. It harms the long-term health of the game, as larger companies are far less willing to support he formats that keep older players in the game. Remember that there are Legacy-playable cards that can be reprinted, and wouldn't do that much damage to the current Standard. And no, I'm not talking about the Masterpiece series.
Legacy players aren't your nose, they're some small wart on your back.
Pretty sure if your 3 color 4 mana spell resolves vs. RUG they already lost. The idea is to mana screw you, rewind the turn and pressure you into soft counters, all while chimping out with a flying Wild Nacatyl for U.
Player retention is already terrible and enough cards already lose value after leaving Standard. No desirable Modern/Eternal format means that you're going to lose alot of money each Standard season with no chance of recovery - even worse than now.
If more people enjoy older formats, then Wizards should look at why people enjoy said formats instead of continously delivering boring, dumbed-down, ill-received Standard formats.
This is right, and the potential impact of this on the long-term health and viability of the game is the key disagreement between people.
What seems to have happened is that their player growth ballooned and plateaued very quickly. I'm not sure what drove that -- though if I had to guess -- it seems to have coincided with the rise of Modern. RTR was the boom time -- and that's when the shocks were reprinted.
It seems that Wizards' market reacted positively more to the accessibility of a long-term format than their short-term options. But they took the major growth as a validation of their Standard strategy. Smash cut to 3 years later... And you're banning stuff because attendance is suddenly falling.
People like the depth of the card pool. I mean, how long are people going to pay $15 for the thrill of playing three rounds of draft? Sure, maybe for a few months -- but constructed is retention, and deeper formats even more so. They are the reward for starting out.
Wizards is trying to acquire more customers, but even then there's an upper limit on who this game will appeal to. I think it's a big mistake.
Wizards is a business. Their business goals are not 'make sure people have a good way to recover the money they spent on Magic'. Their business goals are to take as much of your money as possible. When you're having fun, it's easier to forget how much money you're spending. When you're not having fun, you begin to question why you just bought into another Standard deck.
When you're an eternal player, obviously the issue with Standard is that you don't get to play with cool cards like Brainstorm and Daze. But honestly most Standard players aren't actually complaining about 'too many creatures' or saying 'why can't I cast Brainstorm, I love Brainstorm'. They are complaining about losing to a Mindslaver effect 5 times in a tournament, mono-black devotion mirrors, etc. So their core problem is that they still haven't figured out how to reliably construct good Standards. This is actually not an easy problem to solve. They're better at it than they used to be - they don't print Memory Jars very often. But if 20 people at Wizards can successfully solve a Standard they just designed and 'hey, it's fun' - well then 20 pros can obviously do it in one weekend too. It's possible that this is why this problem will never disappear.
On the other hand, Wotc have more or less figured out how to make new limited formats. New limited formats aren't always amazing, but they're almost always playable, pretty fun for a while, skill-testing and not immediately solvable. Pros will disagree pretty strongly on pick order and color preferences, sometimes even late into a format. Old school players know that today's limited formats are incomparably superior to limited back in the day. Limited is great.
The % of people who play legacy is a tiny drop in the bucket for this business. When you play legacy on MTGO, you play against the same people again and again. It is an adorable little bunch of wizards, most of whom are also on this site. I play paper legacy in the East Coast - which probably has the highest density of eternal players overall - and I expect to bump into and play the same people again and again. The idea that this raggedy crew is or could ever be responsible for real money for Wizards is totally delusional.
Seriously doubt Modern had anything to do with it. The two driving factors were demographics (huge number of people who played as kids in the original boom came back to the game at the same time) and the development of Duels as a digital entry point for new players.
Cost of Standard is definitely an issue and recuperating money helps with that. WotC dropped the greedy 1.5 year rotation rather quickly due to the amount of people that complained and quit due not being able to keep up with Standard anymore.
As for the business standpoint, Wizards makes money, yes, but they're utterly terrible at maximizing their profits. Eternal formats could be monetized alot better.
Duels was/is their main way to get new people into the game. That's probably one of the reason why things started to stagnate, as Hearthstone wipes the floor with its digital competitors. And it isn't just HS, several other games have popped up that try to take market share from MtG, hence Hasbro's push to get the dinosaurs at WotC into the digital age for real this time instead of their amateurish, half-assed attempts in the past.
Latest example: MTGO bring back old Standard formats to relive their past glory, starting with various decks from Mirage/Tempest Standard. That's fucking awesome, I nostalgia'd hard since that was the time when I started playing Magic. But I'll be damned if I pay 10 bucks for 3 matches with a random deck to win more Itchy & Scratchy money. Their price gouging is absurd compared to their way cheaper competitiors.
That's a question: Is standard languishing because WotC is focusing on limited instead (and is that a good business move for them)?
I'm not just being shitty here, what was the actual problem with Siege Rhino? Was it just a super midrange-to-end-all-midrange beatstick and that was too much for Standard?
I thought that overall people enjoyed the Siege Rhino format? From my understanding the Junk deck that played Rhino was basically the equivalent of The Rock, you were basically playing the best cards in the format period and you had basically answers to everything your opponent was trying to do. The lists were very similar to what are being played in frontier right now.
If it was a good business move to screw over Standard in favor of Limited, they wouldn't nuke Standard with bans while getting ready to hand out more bans.
Siege Rhino Standard in a nutshell:
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