It's like throwing Spiritmonger into Homelands. Why play anything else?
The seven cardinal sins of Legacy:
1. Discuss the unbanning ofLand TaxEarthcraft.
2. Argue that banning Force of Will would make the format healthier.
3. Play Brainstorm without Fetchlands.
4. Stifle Standstill.
5. Think that Gaea's Blessing will make you Solidarity-proof.
6. Pass priority after playing Infernal Tutor.
7. Fail to playtest against Nourishing Lich (coZ iT wIlL gEt U!).
In a format with fetches, plus fetchable duals, it was easy to cast and yes the best thing to do. It was basically the Goyf of the format from what I saw.Originally Posted by TsumiBand
I thought there was a stack of cards - Abzan Charm,Siege Rhino and Dromoka's Command.
We can infer that people enjoy Modern for the card depth and number of options you have to build a deck. With that in mind, why doesn't Wizards extend the length blocks are in Standard by six months (two-and-a-half years)? Makes it harder to playtest, but cards retain their value for a bit longer and if there are more decks to choose from that could lower the average cost of a deck. With blocks only having two sets each from now on, this should be feasible. I suppose WotC doesn't want to try anything fancy after the last change to Standard rotation was a failure.
Bring back extended?
http://mtgsalvation.gamepedia.com/Extended
Well, Extended was 4 years, right? Not advocating for that, just thinking out loud.
RIP Extended. I used to love it when I first started playing.
I don't think they're focusing on it, they're just better at it. And their mistakes in limited don't totally ruin formats - maybe Pack Rat shouldn't have been printed at rare (or printed) for RtR limited. It sucked to lose to Pack Rat in RtR limited. But it was still a fun format, because you still would only face a Pack Rat maybe 1/20 games.
When they make a mistake in Standard, it's very apparent. You face mistake that over and over again.
What would maximizing their profits look like? Every human being on the planet plays Magic? It's too abstract. They've done very well with the game in the last few years, and might be hitting a ceiling that was gonna exist no matter what. Obviously they could do a better job on the digital side.
The idea that eternal formats could be a cash cow for Wizards if they only got rid of the reserved list, did what we suggested etc. etc. is a convenient opinion for people who prefer eternal formats anyway. It is totally wishful thinking. They need to sell cards. Constantly. Every day. If I were made CEO of Wizards I would say fuck legacy and purposely print more cards that make the format worse. Chalice, TNN, etc. Maybe we could print a Dredge 8 in a commander set...
In business, there is always a "chase the new guy" school and companies that follow it. The basic idea takes your existing customers for granted and focuses solely on acquiring new customers. You also see this with employees, especially in retail and other low-wage industries, where newer, cheaper workers are more valued than longer-tenured, more experienced ones.
EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. A company follows this philosophy it works great for a few years, then crashes and burns, hard. The strategy uses up accumulated resources - customer/brand loyalty and reputation, existing employee base, etc. that has high delivered value but low growth value. An example would be Wal-Mart working to crush wages and employee expenses to the point where they could no longer - and still can't reliably at most stores - keep their shelves stocked with product. This led to mass drop in customers going to the stores, because why go to Wal-Mart for some cheap junk over the internet when they don't even have it in stock and you still have to wait for it? Wizards' new world order and never ending focus on a simplified Standard/Limited are great examples of this. It drives new sales and customers, but has a high churn rate, meaning if the growth ever hiccups, the whole house of cards crashes, and the growth ALWAYS hiccups, because sooner or later you run out of suckers for your current marketing/acquisition strategy, or enough of your existing base starts getting sick of being ignored for the new kid all at once - see the old cell phone company commercials with kindergartners - that they bail earlier than you expected.
Wizards is seeing these effects now. They've neglected the eternal formats, which hurts Standard players because there is even less of a market for their cards after rotation, or because they can't continue to play with their favorite cards in a larger format. They're only attracting one type of Spike with the self-limited card pools, but their attracting less of them since games like Hearthstone have an even more simplified friendly system at a dramatically lower cost that they will NEVER be able to match.
If they were smart, they'd go heavy on tech, and bring back a lot of the spell effects they've either gotten rid of or tacked solely onto creatures, especially instants, because that would help differentiate their product from stuff like Hearthstone, because they literally cannot compete successfully with them on HS's terms. They also need to print more answer cards. Hard answers cover up for a lot of playtesting mistakes, because they tend to self-correct each other. it's not fun to have every spell you cast countered, but it's even less fun to lose to a combo deck that mind-slavers you for six turns straight or takes 7 turns in a row until it can finally kill you. This also gets back to letting colors besides blue interact with the stack in meaningful ways. They almost printed two decent white counterspells during the Time Spiral era, but costing the memory lapse at 2W killed it, and any kind of non-blue hard control with it. They have gotten better about letting other colors get access to draw spells, except white.
Maybe the new team releases a version of MTGO that's not hot garbage and starts fixing Standard and Modern and eventually Legacy, but it won't happen fast, because at least another year of card sets is already baked in, and it takes time to code. In the meantime, expect the financial numbers to get worse before they get better.
It was a card that fit literally every strategy that the color combination could do, and it was, simply put, the single biggest creature without help. In fact, there were nominally four cards that could deal with it in Standard and were Constructed playable, and keep it dealt with, and all but one of them shared a color with the Rhino. So there were relatively few decks that could straight-up race, and you were already behind, thanks to being Thoughtseized on Turn 1.
Abzan Aggro decks could have you dead-on-board through a removal spell on Turn 4. The Midrange decks would use the Rhino to hold the board, then drop Elspeths or Ajanis and just gain life out of easy reach or thump you with 6 3/3 flyers. Now, don't get me wrong - Rhino wasn't the be-all and end-all of that. But it outclassed the supposed "power" clan of the plane, with simply had a 3-mana 4/4. For that extra colorless maan, you were getting a relevant ETB, a keyword native to the card, and an extra point of toughness.
http://magicorganizedplay.tumblr.com...ay-ptq-formats
Wizards is on a roll right now. All PTQs at Modern/Legacy GPs are Limited now - with a 75$ entry fee.
Hm, all those poor folks travelling halfway around the world in order to play at a large competitive Legacy GP...bet they are sure glad they don't have to worry about having a second deck, or having to play their usual deck for an entire weekend. They'll be so happy to get to play Limited. How awful having to wait for the 2 er, 1 GP per year that is attendable, and then being expected to play your favorite deck all weekend.http://magicorganizedplay.tumblr.com...ay-ptq-formats
Wizards is on a roll right now. All PTQs at Modern/Legacy GPs are Limited now - with a 75$ entry fee.
It seems a stretch to call Siege Rhino "Legacy playable." As for Splinter Twin, I don't have any problems with that. Twin was a good deck in Standard, but it didn't dominate because back then they actually printed decent answers.
Of course, it’s looking like CopyCat won’t dominate either, and Mardu Vehicles looks like it’s the actual issue. But we’ll see if it has staying power or was just a good metagame choice for the Pro Tour.
This is goofy reasoning. The apparent idea is that if Modern/Legacy was uninteresting, people would head to Standard. I do not think that's the case. The people who are playing Modern/Legacy instead of Standard are largely people who wouldn't be interested in Standard (as it is) even if there wasn't Modern/Legacy to play. You don't get them to pick up Standard by making the alternatives worse, you do it by making Standard more interesting to them. Maybe that's not possible for some of those players (who'd be uninterested in Standard no matter what), but in that case, again, they wouldn't be interested in Standard so making Modern/Legacy worse wouldn't get them to check it out!
Modern/Legacy wsan't hurting Standard; Standard was hurting Standard because people just don't like the current environment and the last few weren't very popular either.
Siege Rhino gets a lot of the blame but in truth, much like any time there's a dominant deck in Standard (which is most of the time), it's the general card pool. Compare Monoblack Devotion. There really wasn't any one card that made that deck; it was the combination of cards that all happened to go straight into it. The cards that got the most hate were probably Thoughtseize and Pack Rat, but Pack Rat barely saw play in Innistrad-RTR and Thoughtseize, while still good, dropped off significantly when the format because Theros-Khans wasn't as good of an environment for it. What generally happens with any given Standard deck that dominates or even a particular card is that the supporting cast manages to be really great. There are a few exceptions (e.g. Skullclamp) but MOST cards that were a key part of a dominating deck in Standard would have been mediocre to worthless if placed in most other Standard formats. Something like Tolarian Academy probably wouldn't have even seen play in Innistrad-RTR, for exapmle.
That brings us to Siege Rhino. Siege Rhino was in formats with good mana fixing but also benefitted from Abzan probably getting the best cards of all of the clans. People forget, for example, just how good Anafenza the Foremost was, which saw play in the Siege Rhino decks as well. Siege Rhino was just the most "obvious" of the cards that did well in Abzan so it got all the blame. If we kept Siege Rhino legal but swapped the amount of support Abzan and Temur got, I think we would've seen Savage Knuckleblade instead be the 3-color creature that people complained about the most. Similarly, if Siege Rhino had been legal in RTR-Theros Standard, it would've been mostly ignored.
But that wouldn't really do anything to solve the various problems of Extended that resulted in it being cancelled. People are quick to blame the shift from a 7-year Extended to a 4-year Extended, but that happened because Extended wasn't popular already and that was an attempt to try to fix things. Maybe it failed, but Extended wasn't in a good state even before it.
Extended was 7 years for most of its time, but towards the end it was changed to 4 years in the hope of bringing its popularity back, as Legacy was beating it in popularity. It didn’t work, and if anything made it less popular.
Oh man, seeing WotC desperately trying to keep Extended alive was one of the saddest things I have witnessed in Magic.
It was like...it was already on the ground, dying and ready to go out with good memories about the times when everyone loved it. I think most Magic players have very fond memories of "Old Extended". But instead of letting it die, WotC put it on life support, performed tons of surgery on it and told everyone Extended was gonna be fine. And Extended tried, but it was already too late. Everyone, including once enthusiastic Extended players like myself, knew that its time had come. The game was over. But WotC couldn't let go. They tried this whole 4-year thing. Almost nobody cared. Extended was down on the floor, ready to go out but it had to hang on, for Wizards. It was ugly. Instead of going out the way it should have, WotC disfigured it and tried to made it into this new and exciting abomination that ended up being liked by absolutely no one.
The most depressing thing was seeing it still around on Magic Online for over a year after its death. It was like as if a once good friend had died in your living room, but you still had to look at him for over a year until someone eventually removed him. Never forget those 2/8-Man Queues that never fired. So sad. Maybe I got carried a bit off-topic here. It's just, Extended was my first competitive format. I played all my early tournaments in it and I loved it so much.
The seven cardinal sins of Legacy:
1. Discuss the unbanning ofLand TaxEarthcraft.
2. Argue that banning Force of Will would make the format healthier.
3. Play Brainstorm without Fetchlands.
4. Stifle Standstill.
5. Think that Gaea's Blessing will make you Solidarity-proof.
6. Pass priority after playing Infernal Tutor.
7. Fail to playtest against Nourishing Lich (coZ iT wIlL gEt U!).
I miss the format when Oathing into Morphling, Spike Weaver and Spike Feeder was the most powerful thing you could do with Oath of Druids.
Well, I think that was the Extended people liked. From what I can tell, the format was generally liked in its original form (Revised and The Dark onward) and after its first rotation (removal of Revised (except the dual lands, which stayed legal), The Dark, and Fallen Empires), as it offered much of the appeal of Legacy. But after its second rotation (when Ice Age and Mirage left), it seems people liked it less, and its popularity dwindled with each successive rotation, and people started shifting over to Legacy.
I miss the format when Vampiric Tutor and friends were something that was played by decks, and not combo. Storm really ruined combo decks in general and did a lot of damage to the format overall. Worst mechanic ever printed tbh.
http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=20349&iddeck=155228
7th in a field of 117 with 4 unplayable cards as the bigger creature core?
http://tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=20060&iddeck=152827
6th out of 92?
Try comparing the results of decks containing siege rhino, to say goblin matron? Not T1, def playable.
If standard doesn't get enough attention, cards will drop in price, and the return players get from playing limited will drop accordingly.
As the return from limited is lowered due to lower card prices, WotC will have to reduce the entry cost of limited events or less players will participate.
So no, this would not be a good move, its the start of a downward spiral in fact.
Basically try to imagine limited if there were no other formats. Cards would be worth nothing after the limited event ends, because there is no other format to play in. More popular the constructed formats are, higher the value of cards opened in limited gets ..
Storm is awesome, engine combo is way cooler than things like splinter twin. That being said, I get that people like different things (which is more the point I'm trying to make).
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