The current state of Magic

[Claymore]

Why did Extended die a miserable death? That was during a time I quit magic (relevant: because of standard rotations).

Wizards might be playing it easy with Modern because of the experience they had with Extended. Not the same format since Modern doesn't explicitly rotate...but now they're forcing rotation...might be seeing them make the same mistakes again anyway.

I know I largely quit modern because the format became hugely uninteractive/"did you draw your sideboard", partially because they banned the decks that were able to squash the uninteractive combo decks.

[Ace/Homebrew]

Why did Extended die a miserable death?

IIRC... 7-Year Extended was unpopular by most metrics and was considered a format you'd play only because you had to (to qualify for an event or because the format of the next big event was Extended). WotC felt they could fix this by playing with the card pool and rotation schedule, going from 7-years of cards to 4. At the time, cards in Standard lasted 2 years before rotation, so 4-Year Extended was nicknamed 'Double Standard'.

These changes occurred as Faeries rotated out of Standard and Bloodbraid Jund began to dominate. This led to an extension of Faerie's domination of a format, only to inevitably be replaced by Jund as time continued. Players hated the idea that whatever had previously dominated Standard will then dominate 4-Year Extended. So an already unpopular format, played because sometimes you had to, became a completely undesirable format played by no one.


That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed 7-Year Extended. The format was distinct from Vintage/Legacy and Standard, and ever-changing (at a slow pace) due to the rotation. Most decks would lose a piece or two each year and have to find something to fill the gaps. The decks I remember from when I played were Hypergenesis, Foundry-Depths, Affinity, Dredge, All-In-Red, and Elfball.

[maharis]

The problem with this view:

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.'

Is this:

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.

There is a firm upper limit on the amount of people who are just going to buy new cards, buy new cards, buy new cards. Just imagine trying to sell someone on playing Magic. Let's assume they like the game.

Newbie: "So how do I get started?"
Veteran: "Head on down to your LGS and pick up some cards for your own deck!"
Newbie: "Great! Then I can play in those Friday tournaments?"
Veteran: "Well, sure, but you won't have an optimal deck, so you might not win a ton."
Newbie: "Oh... how do I optimize my deck?"
Veteran: "Well, it's probably going to cost somewhere between $150 and $300."
Newbie: "Whoa! I could just buy an iPad and play Hearthstone for that, any time I want. Is there any other way?"
Veteran: "Sure, you could play limited, where you build a new deck every week... that's about $15 for a tournament."
Newbie: "Oh... so what do I do with those cards?"
Veteran: "Well, you can save them for your collection."
Newbie: "Then I'll have an optimal deck?"
Veteran: "Well, not guaranteed... you still might have to trade and buy other cards."
Newbie: "Wait, don't I just spend the same amount as a regular deck over the course of a few of these limited tournaments?"
Veteran: "Yes, but you see we rotate the format every few months so---"

This is exhausting to even type out but you get the point.

It gets to what we were talking about upthread. You can't sell this game just as one of a zillion games. You have to sell its depth, breadth, community aspects. That's what you pay the premium for.

Supporting non-rotating formats keeps people invested in their cards and reduces the feel-bad of the up-front costs. And it allows people to keep going with the game as their life changes.

Obviously they need to sell new cards, but you can't just expect that to float you forever. This post put it well:

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.

Another thing to note is that this approach really pressures the LGSes who make up the backbone of the MTG economy. If Wizards is always focused on selling new cards, the singles that don't sell because they lack utility just rot in cases or back rooms. You end up with all this inventory that is just dead money. Eternal formats give old cards value. I was at the LGS last night and a friend picked up a set of Holy Day for some modern deck. That 80 cents isn't much, sure, but it's better than 0. Singles are how LGSes make a profit margin more than "buy pack for $2, sell pack for $4." Rotation is basically a huge game of musical chairs between the players and the stores and the one that's left holding the bag feels terrible.

[Richard Cheese]

Supporting eternal formats is also really in WotC/Hasbro's best financial interest, because it's the only way they build/maintain reprint equity in existing cards. How many packs of Theros got sold just because of Thoughtseize? Why was Thoughtseize a $50 card to begin with? Why are the Masters sets so popular?

Reprints are also comparatively cheap from a development standpoint.

[Lemnear]

Supporting eternal formats is also really in WotC/Hasbro's best financial interest, because it's the only way they build/maintain reprint equity in existing cards. How many packs of Theros got sold just because of Thoughtseize? Why was Thoughtseize a $50 card to begin with? Why are the Masters sets so popular?

Reprints are also comparatively cheap from a development standpoint.

They will never do anything to seriously hurt vendor card stocks

[Fox]

Singles are how LGSes make a profit margin more than "buy pack for $2, sell pack for $4." Rotation is basically a huge game of musical chairs between the players and the stores and the one that's left holding the bag feels terrible.

A fine point, but it's important to remember that magic is also the only 'board' game where you can reliably walk into a game store and pay for a competitive platform with prize payout. At best [in a metropolitan setting] I could find maybe one pay-to-play tournament of a random board game - and it will be a shorter one like Race, 7 Wonders, or Star Realms...other than that you're talking about finding poker tables or maybe an LGS that wants to deal with the cluster that is miniatures [mostly X-Wing atm] league play.

The added incentive of opening money cards probably sells more limited than the mechanism by which those cards get value (using them for constructed play). Regardless, limited magic (and it's competitive structure) is still a quality 'board' game worth paying for; healthy constructed formats are only really important in that they keep up high player count [critical mass to reliably fire limited] and equitability [financial incentive, especially for newer or less-skilled players]. Maybe WotC will start to realize that something like block constructed [out of print sets] would be a useful tool for distracting people from particularly poor standard environments and reinforcing the idea of limited cards having value.

[iatee]

There is a firm upper limit on the amount of people who are just going to buy new cards, buy new cards, buy new cards. Just imagine trying to sell someone on playing Magic. Let's assume they like the game.

Newbie: "So how do I get started?"
Veteran: "Head on down to your LGS and pick up some cards for your own deck!"
Newbie: "Great! Then I can play in those Friday tournaments?"
Veteran: "Well, sure, but you won't have an optimal deck, so you might not win a ton."
Newbie: "Oh... how do I optimize my deck?"
Veteran: "Well, it's probably going to cost somewhere between $150 and $300."
Newbie: "Whoa! I could just buy an iPad and play Hearthstone for that, any time I want. Is there any other way?"
Veteran: "Sure, you could play limited, where you build a new deck every week... that's about $15 for a tournament."
Newbie: "Oh... so what do I do with those cards?"
Veteran: "Well, you can save them for your collection."
Newbie: "Then I'll have an optimal deck?"
Veteran: "Well, not guaranteed... you still might have to trade and buy other cards."
Newbie: "Wait, don't I just spend the same amount as a regular deck over the course of a few of these limited tournaments?"
Veteran: "Yes, but you see we rotate the format every few months so---"

This is exhausting to even type out but you get the point.

It gets to what we were talking about upthread. You can't sell this game just as one of a zillion games. You have to sell its depth, breadth, community aspects. That's what you pay the premium for.

This narrative assumes everyone is at heart a competitive player who wants to be constantly playing magic without wasting too much money. That is an easy trap to fall into, because basically everyone on this legacy forum is a competitive player who wants to play a lot without wasting too much money.

Most of the time the answer to "Well, sure, but you won't have an optimal deck, so you might not win a ton." is
"That's fine, I have a life, it's not like I'm going to spend every Friday night of my life playing."

And the answer to "Sure, you could play limited, where you build a new deck every week... that's about $15 for a tournament." is
"Cool, I guess I'll go to a few drafts this year."

Wizards doesn't need everyone to show up with a pimped out Standard deck every FNM. But if you are a very competitive player who wants to be constantly playing Magic at the highest level with a tier 1 deck, you're going to spend a lot of money. That is built into the hobby. This model has done well for 20 years without Wizards spending too much time or energy ensuring that the market for older cards is supported.

Right now, most people playing with older cards are playing kitchen table or commander. Old cards keep their value forever in those contexts. We ignore all of these casual scum players, but they are a major, major part of the business. People who go to a few drafts a year get to bring home their cards and can play with their new cards forever.

Wizards is not freaked out right now not because they need to find a better way to prop up a pyramid scheme where older cards will always have some monetary value and buying into the game is always a great investment. They're freaked out because Standard is the focus of competitive magic and recent Standards have been unpopular.

[maharis]

This narrative assumes everyone is at heart a competitive player who wants to be constantly playing magic without wasting too much money. That is an easy trap to fall into, because basically everyone on this legacy forum is a competitive player who wants to play a lot without wasting too much money.

Most of the time the answer to "Well, sure, but you won't have an optimal deck, so you might not win a ton." is
"That's fine, I have a life, it's not like I'm going to spend every Friday night of my life playing."

And the answer to "Sure, you could play limited, where you build a new deck every week... that's about $15 for a tournament." is
"Cool, I guess I'll go to a few drafts this year."

Wizards doesn't need everyone to show up with a pimped out Standard deck every FNM. But if you are a very competitive player who wants to be constantly playing Magic at the highest level with a tier 1 deck, you're going to spend a lot of money. That is built into the hobby. This model has done well for 20 years without Wizards spending too much time or energy ensuring that the market for older cards is supported.

Right now, most people playing with older cards are playing kitchen table or commander. Old cards keep their value forever in those contexts. We ignore all of these casual scum players, but they are a major, major part of the business. People who go to a few drafts a year get to bring home their cards and can play with their new cards forever.

Wizards is not freaked out right now not because they need to find a better way to prop up a pyramid scheme where older cards will always have some monetary value and buying into the game is always a great investment. They're freaked out because Standard is the focus of competitive magic and recent Standards have been unpopular.

I guess the heart of our disagreement is that you think Wizards will do just fine attracting a mass of casual players while I think they need to cultivate long-term customers.

Someone with a small business once told me that something like half of their revenue comes from only a few hundred very loyal customers, while their total customer universe is in the thousands. That's what morgan_coke was getting to up thread. You can't ever assume perpetual growth, and strategizing as though your total customer universe is infinite is a losing proposition. Competitive players spend the most money on this game, even if it's not just ripping raw packs. When a player pays $300 for the latest Standard deck or a Usea from a store, that store can buy a case from Wizards.

I don't think Wizards is panicking just because Standard is poor. Their issues are structural. A strategy shift is required, even if it's not as drastic as gutting the RL.

[Lord Seth]

Why did Extended die a miserable death? That was during a time I quit magic (relevant: because of standard rotations).

According to my understanding, Extended was initially quite popular. As I said, it had much the appeal of Legacy. However, unlike Legacy (or Modern), Extended rotated. The first rotation wasn't a big fuss, but it seems the format took a hit when Ice Age and Mirage left, and continued to lose popularity in successive rotations.

The basic problem, as I understand it, is that Extended took the worst aspects of Standard and Legacy but without the things people like about either. You had a lot of crazy powerful decks like Legacy, but you didn't have cards like Force of Will around to do anything about them. Then you had rotation to deal with, like Standard, but in Standard the rotation was a way to keep the card pool small to do a better job playtesting (which they don't always succeed at, but they have a better success rate than Extended) and also as a way to make anything problematic rotate out in short order. So you have the rotation, except without the advantages that rotation brings. Well, I suppose it helps keep things "dynamic" but it's slower than Standard at doing so.

But whatever the reason for Extended's lack of popularity was, it was losing popularity. Legacy, which Wizards of the Coast had largely ignored and only created because people wanted a format they could play the dual lands that wasn't dependent on another format's restricted list (as type 1.5 had been), on the other hand, started booming, and not counting what WOTC calls "forced" play (i.e. PTQs, Grand Prix), Legacy was more popular than Extended.

Wizards of the Coast looked at this and figured that the problem with Extended was that it was such a different format than Standard that people weren't really able to import their Standard decks into it, and so people would rather play the nonrotating Legacy than Extended. So their solution was to cut Extended from 7 years to 4 years. This did, technically speaking, accomplish the goal of making it easier to move from Standard to Extended. The problem is that it more or less turned into the format where you got to play against all the decks you were sick of in Standard and were glad to see rotate out. Even more problematically, Caw-Blade happened. The deck dominated Standard to an extent not seen since Affinity, and perhaps even more so than Affinity did, and so Stoneforge Mystic and Jace got banned in Standard. But they didn't do it in Extended... for some reason. I guess there weren't enough Extended tournaments to really judge things. At any rate, an Extended Pro Tour was coming up soon, and Caw-Blade was completely legal in Extended, and nearly as powerful as it was in Standard. Likely accurate fears of a Pro Tour dominated by Caw-Blade caused them to make a last-minute adjustment to make it into Modern, and that was basically it for Extended, though they did at least care enough to usher out a bunch of bans in the next announcement before they stopped caring about it at all.

[Claymore]

Thanks for the explanation. I imagine a lot of the older extended decks utilized cross-block synergies so a rotation could be crippling to more than one deck. Plus once you got rid of the old sets you got into the newer inbred mechanics based blocks, where you really were just limited to playing Standard all stars.

---

So this is fun:

This was a solid month, topping at 1860 points. A rise out of the recent slums. Add to that last months data and we have a overall total of 2666. Two times the evil. The cut off is 123 total and 86 for Jan alone. Either way we get the same list. This leaves us with the following:

Miralces
Bug Control (Both Leo and Shardless)
Sneak Attack
Grixis


This means we lose this month DnT, BR Reanimator, Infect and Eldrazi. Yes, that is correct, the menace that was going to come and destroy the format, end life as we know it and kill our game has fallen from grace. In fact it placed 12th overall in January.

[Moosedog]

A lot of people have been alluding to this concept, which is explained well here; 1000 true fans. http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

The example refers to individual creators but the concept applies here. Wizard’s growth and success is because they did a great job (initially) cultivating true fans. As people here pointed out, recently the casual fan is getting more focus. The past decade wizards was able to increase the number of true long term fans while still appealing and growing the casual fan base. As others have explained this is a precarious balance because too much attention one way or other threatens the integrity of the entire structure. I think they have done a great job so far maintaining this balance, but to echo what others have said if they continue down this chasing the low hanging fruit to help quarterly numbers path it will alienate both sides long term.

[icedagger]

A lot of people have been alluding to this concept, which is explained well here; 1000 true fans. http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

The example refers to individual creators but the concept applies here. Wizard’s growth and success is because they did a great job (initially) cultivating true fans. As people here pointed out, recently the casual fan is getting more focus. The past decade wizards was able to increase the number of true long term fans while still appealing and growing the casual fan base. As others have explained this is a precarious balance because too much attention one way or other threatens the integrity of the entire structure. I think they have done a great job so far maintaining this balance, but to echo what others have said if they continue down this chasing the low hanging fruit to help quarterly numbers path it will alienate both sides long term.

Kind of agree. A lot of Wizards' problems right now is that they've relied too much on making money off Standard, but haven't really found a good way to cash in on and retain long-term customers who have grown tired of constantly keeping up with Standard.

[iatee]

They have Modern and it is extremely successful.

[Richard Cheese]

I wonder what percentage of Standard's popularity comes from people that actually like how the format works vs. how much support it gets in the form of large, competitive tournaments.

[Megadeus]

I wonder what percentage of Standard's popularity comes from people that actually like how the format works vs. how much support it gets in the form of large, competitive tournaments.

According to that poll they did, mostly the latter.

[Megadeus]

Thanks for the explanation. I imagine a lot of the older extended decks utilized cross-block synergies so a rotation could be crippling to more than one deck. Plus once you got rid of the old sets you got into the newer inbred mechanics based blocks, where you really were just limited to playing Standard all stars.

---

So this is fun:

We finally did it. Pushed all of the non brainstorm heresy out of the DtB section!

[Barook]

They have Modern and it is extremely successful.

And they monetize it rather poorly.

We finally did it. Pushed all of the non brainstorm heresy out of the DtB section!

Let's not go there and let another thread get closed by B&R discussion.

According to that poll they did, mostly the latter.

What poll?

[icedagger]

They have Modern and it is extremely successful.

Popular yes. Successful, not really; Or at least they aren't directly making much money off of supporting Modern.

Edit:
@Barook: I assume it's that poll where they tweeted asking how everyone liked Standard. Responses were ranging from 1-4 out of 10.

[Gheizen64]

We finally did it. Pushed all of the non brainstorm heresy out of the DtB section!

Blue mages master race confirmed

Heil Brainstorm.

[Lemnear]

Blue mages master race confirmed

Heil Brainstorm.

Gedankenwirbel!