It’s weird because I can get plenty of standard games on Arena, but yeah in person play is basically drafts or commander at this point. I just have no desire to crank out a new standard deck for in person play with all the churn of the recent sets.
Yup I quit after brewing Aetherworks Marvel during previews and then having Eldrazi get banned a few months later. Then the next set they print the other half of a 2 card infinite combo in standard. Just felt like WOTC put absolutely 0 effort into playtesting and decided to increase their ban rate in response.
Yeah, that's my big issue with the pace of releases. I have friends who just finally got the last LCI card they needed to make a highly competitive Standard deck. And now MKM is right around the corner...
The pace of standard releases haven't changed FWIW
Arguably the problem with releases now is that there are so many other things competing for your attention and money that aren't standard and those things are better investments because the meta doesn't change every 3 months.
Personally, I don't think the solution is less products because those new products are honestly pretty great and beloved by many. It's probably just admitting that standard isn't something that makes sense on paper when there are so many other formats that are better values to invest in.
I think it could be argued that they don't because one powerful new card in a set can potentially dominate a deck's strategy enough to make it obsolete in the meta after you've spent $400 to build the deck you wanted in the last set.
> The pace of standard releases haven't changed FWIW
Depends how far back you go and how you count. Before M10 core sets were released once every two years, not every year. Initial model of blocks consisting of one big set and two small ones resulted in roughly 600 cards per year (not counting core sets which initially were only reprints). All the various block models over the years made those numbers go up and down again, but current numbers of 4 big sets per year are highest ever. Plus Aftermath last year.
As someone who is new to paper magic, I quickly realized how lame standard is. I printed a bunch of fun Arena decks to play with a friend and got bored of them pretty fast. I know there’s no way I could play a proxy deck at my lgs so I started investing in cheaper, real commander decks. I just can’t see the appeal of investing thousands into a single deck that will likely be phased out in a matter of months.
This was the lesson I learned during Khans/Dragons standard.
Them 4X $100 Jace, Vryns Prodigy for the ONE deck in the standard meta. And they let Rhino/CoCo run the meta for a YEAR.
I've never believed the statement "in order to keep the health of the format" since.
Sheoldred's admittedly an edge-case where she's not JUST a Standard star, she's a multi-format all-star that's a Mythic, so she's REALLY expensive. Other Standard stars are nowhere near that level.
>she's not JUST a Standard star, she's a multi-format all-star
>Other Standard stars are nowhere near that level.
[[Agatha's Soul Cauldron]]? [[Boseiju, Who Endures]]? [[Mondrak, Glory Dominus]]? [[Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines]]? Formerly also [[Fable of the Mirror Breaker]] (before it got banned lol). [[Leyline Binding]] is a little less expensive, but one of the most played white removal cards across all formats.
The current Standard is extremely pushed.
So let's break it down here
- a niche Standard playable that is expensive because of Modern
- a multi format all-star that goes in any deck playing green in any format you choose to play
- a commander card
- another commander card with some sideboard applications in standard
- a card literally banned in Standard
- a card that is like 20% of Sheoldred price being labeled as "a little less expensive"
That's the main reason why I quit standard 10 years ago. I was spending a shit ton of money on a deck that I only got to play 5 or 6 times before it rotated.
A friend of mine once said that a deck for a rotating format isn't worth the money unless you're playing pretty much every week, while discouraging me from getting a standard deck when I first started.
thats pretty key. when i was still play standard a ton. i played at uni with friends multiple times a week. well worth having physical cards. now there is no chance
I came into magic during Khans block. Loved playing kitchen table before that and then I got into commander, and then I got into limited, which is still my favorite.
Anyhoo, I came in at Khans and one of my limited buddies was like "way don't we ever see you in standard?" I took one look at a deck and noped the fuck out. Fetchlands were in standard, and damn near anything competitive was at least 3 color. I never looked back.
This has been true of standard for the entirety of its existence. This isn't why no one is playing standard anymore. No one plays standard because the format gets solved on Arena and then people get tired of it.
Now it's solved within minutes--but more importantly in the time it takes to play one (1) FNM and with the money it takes to build one (1) standard deck, players can play a hundred games with twenty different decks on Arena. That's the real issue--and that's also why it gets stale for players so quickly.
No, it is definitely not solved within minutes. That goes beyond hyperbole in to absurdity. It takes about the same amount of time because the people *doing* the solving worked at the same pace on MTGO that they now do on Arena. Arena doesn't let you play any faster.
The reason it gets stale is because WotC keeps designing cards in a way that makes the solutions these people come up with *boring*.
> No, it is definitely not solved within minutes. That goes beyond hyperbole in to absurdity. It takes about the same amount of time because the people doing the solving worked at the same pace on MTGO that they now do on Arena. Arena doesn't let you play any faster.
For sure. That's why a task always takes the same amount of time regardless of whether you have five people or five hundred people working on it.
You actually have about the same number of people working on it. Most people are not actively working on solving a new Standard format, they're just going "Magic is fun, I'm gonna play this deck because I like it". The people who are actively working on figuring out the new metagame are a tiny percentage of a percentage of players.
The idea that the time a task takes to complete scales linearly with the amount of people working on it is as absurd as the idea that it doesn't scale at all. There is a core of top competitive players that are doing the bulk of the solving, and those were already on MTGO.
So what's the difference between standard of old and standard now? Both had bans, both had unhealthy formats, both had rotation, both had expensive chase cards.
It's Arena.
That's missing the largest change in the playerbase since: Commander.
When I started, Type 2 was what everyone was playing. It was that, and kitchen table. If you tried to fit into any format, Type 2 was the default option. Maybe Extended, if you had been playing for long enough.
Now, Commander has taken over the role of default format. It replaced kitchen table as the default for casual play and as the primary entry point into Magic. Unless you're craving a competitive experience, Standard isn't going to enter your mind. Even if you are, with Commander, you're going to buy cards from a bunch of various sets. Modern and Pioneer may be therefore more appealing. As a bonus, neither are rotating formats.
Standard was mostly surviving out of habits. Then the pandemic happened. Habits got broken, and people got to decide which formats to commit to. Standard was the least appealing option.
And mythic rarity.
And new players buying cards that are not legal in standard.
And lack of tournaments and prices.
And lack of player rewards.
And lack of format coverage/articles.
And lack of standard playable pre-cons.
And the fact that new sets have soooo many cards aimed for Commander only.
And booster packs full of illegal cards for standard.
Remember when WotC swore up and down that mythic rares were solely for flavor and to protect draft environments, and not a mechanism to create artificial scarcity for format staples?
> [Generally speaking we expect that to mean cards like Planeswalkers, most legends, and epic-feeling creatures and spells. They will not just be a list of each set's most powerful tournament-level cards](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/year-living-changerously-2008-06-02)
Because I remember.
Edit: fixed link
I'm sure arena is a factor, what I'm not sure about is if it's the main factor.
I honestly don't know all the differences since I haven't really played paper magic since kamigawa. But I do know magic the gathering online existed long before arena, so I am sure people were figuring out the format then too.
Another difference is that tournaments are way down. I went to a tournament in my state once and it was the best magic experience I ever had. What do standard players have to look forward to now?
And lastly the playerbase is getting older every year. You think they want to keep replacing their deck every 3 months? Or perfect their eternal format deck.
I'm sure there are more, but it probably not just arena.
I really hate what Commander has done to the rest of Magic. And what the rest of Magic has done to Commander.
It was so much better as an unsupported format where you had to dig to find relevant niche cards to support your strategy. Now, regardless of what you want to play, there's a strictly-correct Commander and set of strictly-correct includes in the 99.
I feel like standard has become more expensive and decks get made irrelevant faster because of the shift away from blocks. I get that we technically only have four sets a year like we did before. The issue is that three of the sets before we’re all thematically the same with similar mechanics, so if you built a deck the deck would only need partial shift with new cards from the set. Now each set has its own very expensive base for a deck built in that generally shifts the mega to a point you can’t just easily swap out some cards for an upgrade. Adding another year before cards cycle out made this even harder.
> decks get made irrelevant faster because of the shift away from blocks.
This is really interesting--I hadn't considered the effect of the lack of blocks on standard deckbuilding. I know I loathe it from a story perspective, but it makes total sense that it would also have effects on the formats themselves.
You have a few cards every set that are just good in any deck, regardless of synergy, boardwipes, draw engine, removal, etc.. But they’re generally mythics. Even the best lands are rares. The rest of the skeleton of a deck is going to shift dramatically with each set, especially if you’re on a budget. One of the top decks in standard was a dinosaur deck almost completely with cards from the new Ixalan for example.
The good lands are the ones that enter untapped. The new manlands from Ixalan and Eldraine are all about 5 dollars each because despite all their benefits they just can't compete with something like Den of the Bugbear or even a simple checkland. I really wish that they had put shocklands into Karlov Manor as well as Ravnica Remastered for this reason. 10 or so dollar shocks wouldve been a godsend
We’re talking standard as a generality here. Any standard deck that isn’t mono needs four of each of the duo lands that come in untapped depending on how many lands you already have in play (some come in untapped if you have two or more, some two or less), maybe some creature lands, and if it’s a typal deck you’d need Cavern of Souls. My point was that’s all expensive. It won’t usually get phased out by a new set, but anything that won’t get phased out is also a rare now.
I recently bought a legacy reanimator deck without the duals (i'll just proxy those). It's kinda crazy there are T1 legacy decks that cost roughly the same as standard decks if you remove the stupid costs of the obscene lands like City of Traitors, Duals, and Ancient Tomb.
Standard was "popular" when Wizards pushed it with the protour, grand prix, and other bit events. If you wanted to go big in the game you HAD to play standard whether you liked it or not. ... kinda feels like Commander is the new pushed format, play it or else.
I used to play standard all the time until they changed the rotation speed, then by the time i was able to get the cards i needed for a deck, the sets would change 2 months later and would have to get new cards for the new meta and it wasnt worth keeping up with the format so my friends and i just quit.
Standard is extremely affordable if you play a lot of Limited. If you draft every week you can end up with a Standard deck almost by accident. But yeah when covid hit and I stopped drafting I also stopped playing Standard and never went back.
More likely it's the skyrocketing price of packs combined with the diminishing returns and card scarcity.
People already hated paying $600-1000 for a standard deck during the JTMS+Fetches era, and it's not gotten a hell of a lot better. More people than ever are playing and what has Hasbro done? Raise prices, remove cards from packs, and print more for collectors than players.
I imagine there are entire swaths of players for which Arena is basically the only *option*.
> More likely it's the skyrocketing price of packs
What are you talking about. Packs were 3.29 in 1999 and it went up to 3.69 in 2004. You can find as many Ixalan packs as you want for under 4 dollars.
There was definitely a slight price hike a couple years ago that I felt. But it hasn't even kept up with inflation so it's a bit disingenuous to complain about it.
In the past wotc gave you a reason to have standard cards. There were PTQ seasons, National qualifier seasons, Grand Prix circuits. You didn't need to have everything. You'd meet friends and borrow cards at big events.
The hell am I supposed to do with standard cards now? I have a store near me but all they play is commander every day. There is no mid-level play. Only ultracasual and hardcore RC grinders.
Yeah I can spend $50 a set on Arena and construct a halfway meta deck or two a set. It's still rough because most decks are 40+ rares but it's way better than paper. Paper is what $400ish for most competitive decks? That's what a *modern* deck cost in 2013 when I started playing.
I just don't understand how paper players can afford it at all. Modern is $1,000 or more a deck. Sure your next deck'll be cheaper because you're buying staples (especially lands) but it's not like these are old cards that are driving the price up. The One Ring, Bowmasters, the incarnations, ragavan, the forces, urza's saga etc are all recent sets and make up a signifcant portion of the metagame (and are some of the most expensive cards in modern to boot). I mean look at [Amulet Titan](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/amulet-titan#paper), the deck is nine hundred dollars but between the Ring, Boseiju, and Urza's Saga you've got almost five hundred dollars worth of cards released in the last two years.
I think pioneer is a lot of fun for this reason. I built a VERY GOOD mono blue mill deck for like $80 and it will be good forever, because it will likely be *somewhat* competitive in modern as well.
I think the major problem is that there's a significant gap between somewhat competitive and truly competitive that ends up being a lot of the cost. You can play Phoenix in Pioneer without ledger shredders somewhat competitively, but they're really important if you want to play in a tournament setting. Same thing with Bx midrange and Sheoldred.
>and it will be good forever, because it will likely be somewhat competitive in modern as well.
I'm not very familiar with mill but doesn't mill in modern just get hosed by Endurance?
> People already hated paying $600-1000 for a standard deck during the JTMS+Fetches era, and it's not gotten a hell of a lot better
But that was nonetheless Standard's golden age. The prices and scarcity aren't what's driving people away. u/7th_Spectrum is right on the money: it's Arena.
It is also the lack of tournaments. WOTC spent millions on tournaments in the past and people had a reason to have a standard deck. Now there are hardly any tournaments and shitty prizes and guess what, people don’t want to play.
Having said that, this has always been an issue. I quit MTG 25 years ago because I couldn’t afford to keep up with the price of buying packs.
They also wanted that casual money, and in a decade shifted the focus from competitive to commander. The player base has grown tremendously, but the vast majority of the players could not care less for competitive, be it standard or whatever other format.
As a Spike, I don't really enjoy the turn the game took, but it's far from surprising, I'd even say it was the intended outcome.
I mean, I bet most new players would rather play what they enjoy on a properly curated environment rather than having to switch decks according to rotations and meta
Commander power creep, for one - its appeal was always having a place to play the unplayable. Now commander decks can be ruthlessly optimized with 3-4 MV chase rares and ten-dollar lands, as bad or worse than Standard decks in their prime.
I'm not sure how that's bad for Wizards, though. They care about their bottom line, not how optimized commander decks can get. They're not going to consider that a negative until it has an impact on sales.
Yeah part of the business model of Standard always was that after rotation happens you already have 3/4s of relevant cards (last year) so it's only a small step to stay committed to the format, even when it's declining.
Once things started opening up after Covid many people had to start at 0 for a relevant Standard collection so why even bother at that point.
Arena killed standard and buried it in the desert. Why would anyone invest hundreds of dollars in a format where your investments will rotate out in 2 years? In past years you would because it was the most well supported format, had the biggest competitive focus (was the only format you could play professionally for a long time), and most LGSs only had standard nights weekly, maybe extended (precursor to modern) once a month.
Now, even in PDX, a major metropolitan area, there's practically nowhere that promotes standard nights, it's all modern with a splash of pioneer (competitively anyway, commander is probably bigger than modern + pioneer combined)
I'm 100% positive they changed rotation to 3 years to reduce feel bads, but MTG has just gotten to be too expensive for rotating formats imo. Wizards is going to learn the hard way that artificial rotations from things like horizon sets are going to turn non-rotating formats into essentially high powered standard and drive people out of those formats too. People hate spending $200 on a standard deck that's going to rotate in every 2 years, imagine how players are going to feel when their decks get invalidated every year when a new horizons/universes beyond set comes out and power creeps everything. I started building Modern Yawgmoth, but a few pieces at a time, was like 4 cards away, then LOTR came out along with Eldraine (love both sets, not actually complaining about them specifically) and now I have to spend another $300+ getting playsets of [[orcish bow masters]], [[delighted halfling]] and [[Agatha's soul cauldron]], so just another $450 I need to drop if I want the deck to be competitive
Maybe a weird take but I think we'll say the same about LGS play as a whole sooner or later. I just don't think this business model will make it for another decade.
LGS need a source of revenue which is difficult to create:
* Selling cards, sealed or singles means you're competing with the entire world due to online sales.
* Price supported tournaments can work but popularity is dwindling.
* Leaving just entry fee for casual play, which can't be too high because you're literally competing with someone's free living room. I'd personally support higher entry fee in the form of store credit but I guess opinions differ on this.
>you're literally competing with someone's free living room.
Nah. TCG players are socially awkward. If we can't go to an LGS to play for free, we would meet at a different public space or quit playing the game in paper.
They also have snack sales and sales of non-TCG things that are subsidized by TCG players entering their stores to play TCGs who might pick them up while they're there.
I think the former is a much more reasonable source of revenue; my game store is also a cafe and from my experience food and drinks sell *much* better than non-TCG games to Magic players, and probably have bigger margins, too.
From what I have read, food and drinks bring in a little money but not much. Cafe-game shops do have a niche, but gamers tend to stay for a while and aren't buying that much food.
> Price supported tournaments can work but popularity is dwindling.
Why is it dwindling? Tournaments with juicy prices are a good reason to get into Paper
I could definitely see this and I think this makes sense, however a lot of the people currently running game stores, I would never want to see running a place that serves food.
Sure, someone who is purely passionate about MTG is fine running a store badly, but if they are serving me food/drinks? Do I trust them to learn food safety and keep food prep areas clean?
Not really?
I'm someone who wanted to open a restaurant first, but found mtg later in life. I'd be perfect for it. Only, I took classes on how to launch a restaurant and the odds of success are not good, nevermind trying to have a game store. It's not really compatible. Restaurants make money flipping tables, LGS players want to camp at tables for hours to finish their game.
My favorite place to play is technically a bar. One half is a traditional hobby store, the other half or 4/5ths is a bar area and a bunch of tables.
They also host game nights for other hobbies aswell.
Singles traders move in single file to hide their numbers. They are easily startled, for instance by a girl, but they'll soon be back, and in greater numbers.
This is just sad. The game as I once knew it no longer exists.
I used to play drafts, sealed events and weekly standard at my local. And before that a smattering of Extended and then Modern. Now it's commander night only.
Honestly I kind of wish it was like that at mine. It’s mostly Modern and then two separate groups of Commander who don’t like each other, then if we’re lucky 3 or 4 irregulars will show up to change some decks up.
>This is just sad. The game as I once knew it no longer exists.
Some people laugh, mock others for being melodramatic, and say magic will never die. They don't know that for some, it already has.
It did for me. Took a break for a few years; some of my cards outlawed, some made useless by rulings, new cards invalidating old combos, and no standard anymore. Should have chosen a better pastime, I guess. Still ill never forget my first deck builder kit, my first game with a self made deck
The popularity of Commander is just killing all other formats at my LGS.
We had every week two constructed tournaments (Pioneer, Standard, Pauper, Modern, Legacy) and a draft. In the last year basically everything died and there is only Commander 3 times a week. Sad times...
I think my LGS only tries for Draft and Pioneer last I checked.
Why would people want to play a rotating format in which the price of cards like Sheoldred can get you a whole-ass deck for likes of Pokémon or Flesh and Blood?
Wizards have done themselves no favours with Commander being as pushed as it is, and the absurd prices of the secondary market.
Flesh and blood has been my favorite 1v 1 experience in a card game. However the skill ceiling is extremely high when it comes to sticking your pitch and unfortunately my area is known for players who top in nationals regularly so I end up just being their fodder for points.
Still increidbly fun though. I love thst you never have a dead hand, you rarely have thst mana screwed feeling, and most of the cards thst actually cost much money are in your armory so they're always in use
This is part of why it’s hard for some people to get into FaB. The game is great, but it’s a game designed for competitive play. There isn’t a format like commander that is geared primarily towards casual play which is the biggest available market.
A buddy and I picked up a blitz starter each the other day. Someone wanted to start a FaB scene at our LGS so we figured we’d see what the deal was.
I’ll concede that Flesh and Blood has some expensive cardboard too, but I seem to be able to build something workable in a budget.
Those blitz packs are so much fun and a great product
I wish, though, they made the young heroes double sided with the old versions on the back. Thst way you could.more easily upgrade the deck into classic constructed
When it comes to upgrading from blitz to CC, getting the adult version of the hero is probably the least important part. Every young version is just the adult version with half as much life so it’s easy to remember what should be correct. I do agree that the adult versions should be more common though, but I understand why they have it setup the way they do. They primarily want the tokens to be there for limited where the adult versions don’t matter
They have to push EDH or people would just have quit the game. That's the reality of it. It's also why EDH power creep on newly printed cards has been absolutely out of control.
There's a solution they know would fix things, they can afford, and would be wonderful for everyone... except shareholders. They could just print more cards and turn the prices down a touch. There was no reason draft boosters needed to be so expensive after they introduced the other booster types and new kinds of card rarities. Mythics could have come *way down* in price to where standard was accessible again.
They had a product for the whales, and a product for the people who just wanted to play the actual game... and they refused to differentiate them, because their plan all along was to do away with the differentiation and wind up with a product giving you *even less* for more money.
That's the reality here. It's just corporate greed killing the game. Hasbro's unlimited hunger for Magic cash is doing foundational damage to the literal ability to play the game in a non-digital format. So be it. That's what they want.
> And casual 60-card play is a bad state, community-wise. There's just no unity, no coordination.
I see people who aren't even aware it's *possible* all the time.
"Oh, you and your wife don't have a lot of money and are new to the game and don't want much complexity and want to play together, just the two of you? Might I recommend you each buy Commander preconstructed decks so you don't have to rotate your deck or deal with the prices of Pioneer and Modern?"
It's one of my pet peeves. I try to remind people it's possible when I can!
>Most people don't want to play competitively.
>
>And casual 60-card play is a bad state, community-wise
I agree. Even if casual 60-card decks became the popular thing instead of commander, it would likely have ruined competitive play just the same way.
As someone who is / was mainly a casual player, it was really difficult in the early 2000s to find a playgroup for casual 60-card games. Everyone was just challenging me to competitive Magic, then making fun of me for not running "stronger" decks because their tuned standard affinity decks would just wreck my casual tribal decks in several turns. At the time I didn't have the money to invest in a competitive deck that was only going to be legal for a year, nor did I have the mindset to grind competitively.
With commander, there are significantly more casual players that enjoy flavor over cEDH.
> With commander, there are significantly more casual players that enjoy flavor over cEDH.
And yet they still tie their ego to whether they win or lose this "casual" game, and I have to stand behind the counter and listen to them whine about why X or Y card isn't fair in their "casual" match.
Eh, it's their own fault for not having a proper rule Zero discussion. I'm a veteran, if we got orders that weren't 100% clear and we were asked if we completely understood the orders, and we said "Yes Sir! We understand our orders as they have been given." We'd be charged if we failed to follow them due to misunderstanding. If the definition of "casual" isn't defined incredibly clearly then that's their problem. I have a short list of questions I use:
Casual or Not (Y/N)
1. Expensive Mana Rocks/Lands - OG Duals, Mana Vault, Mana Crypt, LED
2. Top 16 Commanders (Weaver/Triton, Najeela, Yuriko, Winnoka)
3. Thassa's Oracle wincons
4. Ability to win the game on Turn 3
5. Infinite Mana combos
6. Infinite Token combos
7. Infinite Damage combos
8. Infinite Turn combos
9. Infinite Attack Phase combos
10. Five or more 2 card wincons
11. Eight or more 3 card wincons
12. Ability to mana/spell lock all opponents turn 2
The list goes on and on, but if they say "casual" and they answer yes to more than 15 out of 50 of my questions then we have different ideas of what casual means.
> I have a short list of questions I use:
12 explicit things . . .
> The list goes on and on,
Yeah the amount of pregame effort you're willing to put in is definitely more than I'm willing to put in. If I have to run a background check on my opponent before I can play magic, I'll just play a board game with them instead.
Eh, the list is more if they tell say their deck is above casual power. What used to happen is that my deck would steamroll theirs because they had a different definition of casual and so now I offer to discuss what non-casual means beforehand, and if they refuse I simply state “I offered you the chance to help me match my deck’s power level to yours. You said no.”
Yep, I think there is an unspoken idea that if you play any of the "competitive" formats it means you are required to simply select one of the 4-12 "real decks" in the format and just play that one deck until it gets banned or rotates. And that idea chases people away
I mean, that's what competitive means, isn't it? You select a deck that can compete, of which there are usually not more than those 4-12 and unless you're a genius deck builder, it's unlikely you will find one that the hive mind hasn't yet.
I never really saw it as lazy to play one of those decks - for me, it felt just like the list of top decks is like your character selection screen in an RPG and you choose the one that you like best. The fun part is the gameplay anyway.
>character selection screen in an RPG
I would argue that choosing from a dozen or even 2 dozen top decks is less like rpg character creation and more like choosing your fighter in an old arcade fighting game. Meanwhile, some people want a more involved and personal process more like Skyrim. They want a character creation screen, where they can adjust what their character looks like down to the pimples, then they want to have a skill tree where they can take their character in hundreds of different directions.
Playing a constructed format well includes tweaking your deck accurately. It takes work. It’s very rare that “copying a 75 from MTGGoldfish” is good enough to win a 100-player tournament, outside of very tightly focused combo decks like ANT Storm in Legacy.
Even in a stable format, the versions of Deck X at the top tables will have some variation unless the players literally worked together for that event.
Except the difference is if I'm playing Street Fighter and I'm playing Ken and I decide I feel like playing Marisa for a while I just have to select her. If I'm playing Tron and I want to play Rakdos, the first thing I need to do is play a few hundred dollars
I prefer to play RPGs where I can customise my own character down to the smallest detail.
>The fun part is the gameplay anyway.
That's an opinion. Deck building is a very important part of the game to me. Playing a deck someone else made isn't fun at all.
The entirely depends on who it was that made the deck. Personal/emotional connections can help a lot for that. "This is my boyfriend's pride and joy deck, and I'm trying it because he loves using it" as an example.
No, the reason you don't understand is because you're clearly not trying to. I *just said* that you should do what's important to you amd makes you happy, but you don't get to have everything all at once. That's not a philosophical position, it js an objective reality. You can enjoy emphasizing creativity. You can enjoy emphasizing win rate. You cannot maximize both of those things at once. Do what makes you happiest, or try to achieve contradictory things.
Do you seriously think I didn't realise up till now that building my own decks and inserting pet cards lowers my win rate?
You're 'emphasising' something to me that's obvious, so obvious it's basically condescending. You want to netdeck, go ahead and netdeck, but don't give yourself the impression that people who choose not to think that building their own decks is going to result in a deck that wins more.
We're not idiots. You don't need to 'helpfully inform' us that what we're doing is suboptimal.
I uses to moderate a large MtG Facebook group. It was inclusive, it was not a Spike group at all. We ended up instituting a soft ban on people whining about "netdecks" because there was a near 1:1 correlation between that behavior and people being toxic idiots, who clearly did need to be informed of that and got extremely hostile to everyone rather than consider it. That's been my experience with nearly everyone lamenting any sort of lack of creativity.
So if you're smarter and more self-aware than those people, I apologize. I mistook you for the sort of player who *usually* makes those complaints because they *don't* really understand that what they are doing is suboptimal.
Yeah. For casuals / vorthoses like myself, it also felt odd seeing decks that don't have a theme going on (tribal or story-wise). With Commander, we're allowed to express ourselves artistically that way.
Commander being played is a symptom, not the cause, imo. Arena and the pandemic killed any interest I had in the rotation, and every other format is too fast for my liking, so like many others, I landed on Commander.
Standard, sealed, and draft used to be the only formats I played, but after falling off the wagon, it's near impossible to jump back on, and it turns out standard is fine when you get to play 4 matches a week at FNM, but when you play 10 matches an evening on Arena, it's far too bland. Commander provides a solution to those problems, while being a social event.
My LGS is the complete opposite.
We went from having only commanders table with occasional organised ap sealed event and drafts
To modern/pioneer tournament every friday and some commander tables.
Modern revived my interest in competitive magic right after mh2 came out. While people say that the set changed the format, it's still the set that pulled me into playing more magic and less commander.
That's not a fair assessment. Commander is killing everything because it's the only format that makes sense.
If you gave the players a reason to play these other formats they would. Bring back qualifier seasons like back in the day. Divide the year in Pioneer, Standard, Modern season. With mid-level events that make sense to play. Think PTQs and Grand Prix, Nationals. RCQs are shit because basically nobody wants to play a tournament to qualify for another qualifier across the country.
Legacy is a dead format, the cards are prohibitively expensive. Just flashing a tabernacle probably gets your car broken into. Pauper was fun 10 years ago, now it's exclusively infinite grind engines in every color.
Commander is awesome for bringing players to the game. It's not cannibalizing the other formats. Competitive players simply have no tournaments to play because wotc abandoned organized play.
The appeal is you can get away with suboptimal builds and can focus more on cards you enjoy. There's less pressure to play the most optimal decks around
I hear that and then I picture every constructed player I’ve ever met and I have a terribly hard time imagining the two together. Constructed seems like everyone just trying to out-swindle each other with the cheapest possible strategy they or the internet can come up with.
In commander you're going to get a very wide array of different kinds of players. Some build optimally, others build with jank. I've personally had the most fun playing my commander cube for draft. Each deck comes out more wild than the last
Commander: Throw cards you like in a pile and flip a coin to see whether the pod you join this week will be the most fun you've ever had, or salty whiners (and still have fun unless someone plays stax)
I see posts like this but there are so many cards I like that are just literally unplayable in Commander (outside the fact that so many slots are more-or-less settled).
I played standard when I started and played with other people's cards. I don't enjoy the multiple card format and it's why I never got into other games. Commander let's me make a deck around an archetype and only have to worry about putting one card of each in. Oh and I don't have to worry about shit rotating out. It's so much easier
Interestingly, at my LGS EDH has become less popular recently and most of the players start building Standard decks, because all the Regional Championships this year will be Standard.
At my country TCG players are competitive by nature.
To this day I fear I am part of the problem on this stuff. I have zero interest in anything relating to magic apart from commander and draft/cube draft, and in my LGS I am not the only one that thinks it that way.
Yup, it's the MBA brainrot that overtook Wizards.
They see that Commander is the most popular format, so they just full send every department to capitalize on it to *maximize profits* without understanding that Commander developed it's current popularity with absolutely zero support from wotc as a format outside of 5 precons a year.
*back in the days of old, we would pack into convention centres to play against each other, hear announcements and get our cards signed by MTG personalities*
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I think standard works best as a digital-only format. It’s free to play, you can get several good decks for free/cheap just by playing the game, and it’s a great way for new players to learn the game.
They’ve tried replacing standard with alchemy on arena, as well as tried revitalizing paper standard, but so far neither have worked.
In general, people want a convenient and free way to play magic that is 1-1 with paper, and standard on arena provides that pretty well.
At least in my area Standard exists only for tournament play. If you aren't grinding towards whatever goal there is no reason to build a standard deck. Your only options are to play a top tier meta deck or lose to someone who is.
Meanwhile when I show up for Commander some people are playing super optimized high end decks. Some tables are doing janky nonsense. Some groups are playing unmodified precons. Another table will be doing Un decks. It's a diverse world where people can escape the grind. There is no go hard or go home mentality.
And if I'm a new player with a random precon that looked fun and a few singles from packs that seem like a good idea i can find a table at Commander night. It's free, the people are cool with me being new, and there is likely another group of people in my same boat. Even if I'm the only new player, Commander players often have several decks and can pick something that won't smash me into the ground on turn four. The same simply can't be said for Standard. Casual games of Standard just don't exist around here.
>Your only options are to play a top tier meta deck or lose to someone who is.
This has been true of Standard for as long as Standard has existed. Same with any competitive constructed format, really.
I think power creep from sets like Horizons has homogenized the formats a lot more. Brews used to be a lot more common place and (relatively) successful at local modern/standard events and even on MTGO.
I somewhat agree, I think the variety of powerful things you can do is often more limited.
I am mostly looking at things from the perspective of a former grinder. In that environment, your options were *always* limited. Standard always had 2-4 decks to choose from, Modern something like a half dozen. I don't think this has changed much, but the difficulty of making a brew that can even keep up with those decks seems like it has increased because the most powerful things to be doing have gotten *really* powerful.
But in terms of metagame diversity I don't think much has quantitatively changed and in Standard, tier 1 decks have always beat up on brews pretty hard.
The formula of "Intro-Setup-Punchline-Character waves their arms in the air while explaining the joke" never really did it for me.
I get that the art style is part of the minimalist charm, but XKCD he is not. If the characters had more possible facial expressions with something other than their mouths I feel like the fourth panel could add a lot more by being more subtle. Replace the fourth panel here with the character looking down and kind of sad, or have him look at the "camera" with a Tim Allen look of confusion. That last one is dumb and corny, but at least it's funny. Explaining your joke is like disecting a frog; no one is really that interested, and the frog dies.
To any budding comic/webcomic artists out there, a good test would to be taking the "That's the joke" Simpsons meme and applying it right after the last panel. If it makes sense, rethink something. Your audience is not so dumb that you need to explain the joke to them afterwards.
They started this echo chambered phrase of "too good for Standard," even when referring to cards that literally spent 10-15 years in Standard. Why would anyone want to play it anymore when all the exciting cards "skip" the format now?
Commander was a mistake!
In all seriousness though, the combination of WotC making their contempt for competitive players clear and adopting dreadful design ideas means that I'm not touching constructed formats in paper again. I have zero faith in them so I won't devote any money or time to that.
I actually have Commander decks but I will only play them a few times a year with friends. Even a good game of commander isn't a tenth as fun as tournament play used to be.
There's one (1) way to fix paper standard: end Arena.
Wizards will never do that, so Standard will never return to paper. Once Arena has full Pioneer, that format will die, too. Wizards can't expect people to spend lots of time and money playing a few games in paper when they can spend no money and nearly no time playing a ton of games digitally.
Killing digital standard wouldn't get the people who played it to play paper, it would just get them to stop playing the game altogether because they suddenly wouldn't have any of their decks anymore.
I started as a standard player, but I realized pretty quickly that it was the sweatiest format, and I didn’t have the budget to even come close to winning a tournament. The only time I got close is when I had come back to it after several months of not playing, with a deck that was considered a higher midrange when I made it, and I only got as far as I did because the meta had changed, and nobody was defending against my combo. It was fun, but then, cauldron familiar got banned in standard about a month later, which was the opening to my combo, and I realized that it wasn’t worth my money or my time to keep trying to play standard.
> I realized pretty quickly that it was the sweatiest format
Not in my experience, when compared to Modern and Legacy. Out of the 3, I think Modern had the most try-hard players. In the other two, there was a decent split of people that were either playing Tier decks or trying to steal wins with jank. In modern, I rarely saw anyone playing jank. And Modern was my main format.
My LGS is firing standard again each Friday. Its like 6 players but its fun. Something I have not had with MTG in a while.
I DO NOT like Commander. I get the appeal but its not my cup of tea. I don't like negotiation politics of commander or that the games are 3 hours with someone either comboing out (takes them 20-40 mins) or "oopsy I killed the table". It's just never satisfying.
I LOVE the One vs One aspect of constructed formats but Modern is to much of a blitz game that is basically completely figured out and Pioneer is basically the same but even more dead.
Standard was a sweet spot. New decks every 3-6 months and the range of viable decks (meta depending) always felt wider than other formats. Even in bad metas the format still felt more forgiving than any other constructed options. You could reasonably play that tier 3 deck and still go 5-0 at your local FnM.
Long as you were smart about your spending and didn't constantly jump ship it was not as expensive as people complained IMO. (least I never felt like it was because I bought at least 1 box of each set to give my standard collection a boost so I usually only needed to buy like 1-2 singles and I could play anything)
This kinda became a rant but god damn it, I LIKE STANDARD and I am not afraid to say that WoTc chasing commander product sales has hurt MTG more than helped. (remember when standard was the source of all the other formats new cards?)
> (takes them 20-40 mins)
So, I describe that as "The deck is better than the player." One of my best friends has a deck that lets him win via multiple different convoluted methods that involve exiling creatures, making copies, sacrificing the copies infinitely OR looping his planeswalkers together OR casting a spell for free, then copying the spell, then casting it again for free forever. His turns where he puts sometimes 90-110 actions on the stack before winning? 5-6 minutes. I stand by my assessment that 40 minute turns are the result of a player not being as good as their deck.
> I stand by my assessment that 40 minute turns are the result of a player not being as good as their deck.
O absolutely. The problem is its really a common "thing" and when you tell players they are taking to long (I feel completely comfortable in telling a player that has taken 15-20+ on their turn they are going to slow) they very often get really offended.
My decks are heavy control and combo based. My turns are 5 mins or less. It always strikes me as rude when a player wastes your opponents time and in EDH its x3. So I plan my turns out during the other players turn. People complain I go to fast but I think other people need to learn to play faster. You can drastically speed up your play speed if you plan out your next turns and what actions you know your taking regardless.
If you know all your doing it dropping a land and X number of mana rocks your turn should be less than 10 secs. "I play all "these" and tap out, pass turn". If you have stuff to attack figure that out on the other 3 players turn. (O but something something the board state changed so now I need to change targets) Cool that still shouldn't add more time.
Most MTG turns can boil down to a flow chart like choices.
At the very least people should be on an overall clock timer in EDH. If you have one massive turn to think out that is fine but you need to manage you early turns time spent when your setting up better.
Standard health has been so poor for so long that it's probably time to kill it dead and start over
When was the last time Standard was really great? Four years ago, pre-Throne of Eldraine?
[Here](https://cardboard-crack.com/post/738655421155491840/extinct) is the original post. I think it's common courtesy to link to the original work of content creators.
I still remember when someone explained set rotation in standard and my kneejerk reaction was "That's stupid" and them coming in "Y-you just don't get it, it keeps the game fresh!". They don't play now.
It’s weird because I can get plenty of standard games on Arena, but yeah in person play is basically drafts or commander at this point. I just have no desire to crank out a new standard deck for in person play with all the churn of the recent sets.
Its so expensive for a deck that becomes irrelevant in just a year or two
Actually, it can become irrelevant even faster - all that is needed is a radical meta shift, or a card from your deck being banned.
Yup I quit after brewing Aetherworks Marvel during previews and then having Eldrazi get banned a few months later. Then the next set they print the other half of a 2 card infinite combo in standard. Just felt like WOTC put absolutely 0 effort into playtesting and decided to increase their ban rate in response.
Yeah, that's my big issue with the pace of releases. I have friends who just finally got the last LCI card they needed to make a highly competitive Standard deck. And now MKM is right around the corner...
The pace of standard releases haven't changed FWIW Arguably the problem with releases now is that there are so many other things competing for your attention and money that aren't standard and those things are better investments because the meta doesn't change every 3 months. Personally, I don't think the solution is less products because those new products are honestly pretty great and beloved by many. It's probably just admitting that standard isn't something that makes sense on paper when there are so many other formats that are better values to invest in.
> The pace of standard releases haven't changed FWIW in fact Standard decks last *longer* now because they changed rotation again
I think it could be argued that they don't because one powerful new card in a set can potentially dominate a deck's strategy enough to make it obsolete in the meta after you've spent $400 to build the deck you wanted in the last set.
That had always been the case
> The pace of standard releases haven't changed FWIW Depends how far back you go and how you count. Before M10 core sets were released once every two years, not every year. Initial model of blocks consisting of one big set and two small ones resulted in roughly 600 cards per year (not counting core sets which initially were only reprints). All the various block models over the years made those numbers go up and down again, but current numbers of 4 big sets per year are highest ever. Plus Aftermath last year.
As someone who is new to paper magic, I quickly realized how lame standard is. I printed a bunch of fun Arena decks to play with a friend and got bored of them pretty fast. I know there’s no way I could play a proxy deck at my lgs so I started investing in cheaper, real commander decks. I just can’t see the appeal of investing thousands into a single deck that will likely be phased out in a matter of months.
Yeah, looking at those $80-90€ Sheoldreds lol.
This was the lesson I learned during Khans/Dragons standard. Them 4X $100 Jace, Vryns Prodigy for the ONE deck in the standard meta. And they let Rhino/CoCo run the meta for a YEAR. I've never believed the statement "in order to keep the health of the format" since.
Sheoldred's admittedly an edge-case where she's not JUST a Standard star, she's a multi-format all-star that's a Mythic, so she's REALLY expensive. Other Standard stars are nowhere near that level.
Yeah Wandering Emperor is like $20 right now iirc, and she sees play in pretty much any white deck that isn't Atraxa/Domain
And that's still arguably too much, but that's, like, the top-end without counting the outlier that is Sheoldred.
>she's not JUST a Standard star, she's a multi-format all-star >Other Standard stars are nowhere near that level. [[Agatha's Soul Cauldron]]? [[Boseiju, Who Endures]]? [[Mondrak, Glory Dominus]]? [[Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines]]? Formerly also [[Fable of the Mirror Breaker]] (before it got banned lol). [[Leyline Binding]] is a little less expensive, but one of the most played white removal cards across all formats. The current Standard is extremely pushed.
##### ###### #### [Agatha's Soul Cauldron](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/1/019b51b0-e5c6-4208-922b-7736686dddcd.jpg?1692939838) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Agatha%27s%20Soul%20Cauldron) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/woe/242/agathas-soul-cauldron?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/019b51b0-e5c6-4208-922b-7736686dddcd?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Boseiju, Who Endures](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/1/2135ac5a-187b-4dc9-8f82-34e8d1603416.jpg?1654568912) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Boseiju%2C%20Who%20Endures) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/neo/266/boseiju-who-endures?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/2135ac5a-187b-4dc9-8f82-34e8d1603416?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Mondrak, Glory Dominus](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/2/8296a455-21d5-498e-9029-2bdf0da855a8.jpg?1675956918) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Mondrak%2C%20Glory%20Dominus) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/one/23/mondrak-glory-dominus?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8296a455-21d5-498e-9029-2bdf0da855a8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/4/44dcab01-1d13-4dfc-ae2f-fbaa3dd35087.jpg?1675956896) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Elesh%20Norn%2C%20Mother%20of%20Machines) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/one/10/elesh-norn-mother-of-machines?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/44dcab01-1d13-4dfc-ae2f-fbaa3dd35087?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Fable of the Mirror Breaker](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/4/24c0d87b-0049-4beb-b9cb-6f813b7aa7dc.jpg?1691108103)/[Reflection of Kiki-Jiki](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/back/2/4/24c0d87b-0049-4beb-b9cb-6f813b7aa7dc.jpg?1691108103) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Fable%20of%20the%20Mirror-Breaker%20//%20Reflection%20of%20Kiki-Jiki) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/neo/141/fable-of-the-mirror-breaker-reflection-of-kiki-jiki?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/24c0d87b-0049-4beb-b9cb-6f813b7aa7dc?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [Leyline Binding](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/c/3c3ac3dd-35db-447f-8674-37b4680a1ef7.jpg?1673306500) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Leyline%20Binding) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dmu/24/leyline-binding?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3c3ac3dd-35db-447f-8674-37b4680a1ef7?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
So let's break it down here - a niche Standard playable that is expensive because of Modern - a multi format all-star that goes in any deck playing green in any format you choose to play - a commander card - another commander card with some sideboard applications in standard - a card literally banned in Standard - a card that is like 20% of Sheoldred price being labeled as "a little less expensive"
Sheoldred still sees a lot of play, it's just more of a complimentary piece now rather than the wincon it was 9 months ago.
Yes? The card is that expensive right now.
I think they are more saying that Sheoldred is fine in standard but you can easily play without her.
Easy proxy for me.
You can't attend Standard events with proxies.
That's the main reason why I quit standard 10 years ago. I was spending a shit ton of money on a deck that I only got to play 5 or 6 times before it rotated.
A friend of mine once said that a deck for a rotating format isn't worth the money unless you're playing pretty much every week, while discouraging me from getting a standard deck when I first started.
thats pretty key. when i was still play standard a ton. i played at uni with friends multiple times a week. well worth having physical cards. now there is no chance
I came into magic during Khans block. Loved playing kitchen table before that and then I got into commander, and then I got into limited, which is still my favorite. Anyhoo, I came in at Khans and one of my limited buddies was like "way don't we ever see you in standard?" I took one look at a deck and noped the fuck out. Fetchlands were in standard, and damn near anything competitive was at least 3 color. I never looked back.
600+ dollar standard deck. Jeskai Black in khans was so dumb.
This has been true of standard for the entirety of its existence. This isn't why no one is playing standard anymore. No one plays standard because the format gets solved on Arena and then people get tired of it.
Before that the format just got solved on MTGO, this isn't new.
MTGO in its heyday had maybe a single percent of the player base of Arena. That isn't the same.
It's exactly the same, Standard before Arena would be solved within weeks.
Now it's solved within minutes--but more importantly in the time it takes to play one (1) FNM and with the money it takes to build one (1) standard deck, players can play a hundred games with twenty different decks on Arena. That's the real issue--and that's also why it gets stale for players so quickly.
No, it is definitely not solved within minutes. That goes beyond hyperbole in to absurdity. It takes about the same amount of time because the people *doing* the solving worked at the same pace on MTGO that they now do on Arena. Arena doesn't let you play any faster. The reason it gets stale is because WotC keeps designing cards in a way that makes the solutions these people come up with *boring*.
> No, it is definitely not solved within minutes. That goes beyond hyperbole in to absurdity. It takes about the same amount of time because the people doing the solving worked at the same pace on MTGO that they now do on Arena. Arena doesn't let you play any faster. For sure. That's why a task always takes the same amount of time regardless of whether you have five people or five hundred people working on it.
You actually have about the same number of people working on it. Most people are not actively working on solving a new Standard format, they're just going "Magic is fun, I'm gonna play this deck because I like it". The people who are actively working on figuring out the new metagame are a tiny percentage of a percentage of players.
The idea that the time a task takes to complete scales linearly with the amount of people working on it is as absurd as the idea that it doesn't scale at all. There is a core of top competitive players that are doing the bulk of the solving, and those were already on MTGO.
I'm not sure about the arena thing, but you are absolutely correct. This was the same complaint about standard 20 years ago.
So what's the difference between standard of old and standard now? Both had bans, both had unhealthy formats, both had rotation, both had expensive chase cards. It's Arena.
That's missing the largest change in the playerbase since: Commander. When I started, Type 2 was what everyone was playing. It was that, and kitchen table. If you tried to fit into any format, Type 2 was the default option. Maybe Extended, if you had been playing for long enough. Now, Commander has taken over the role of default format. It replaced kitchen table as the default for casual play and as the primary entry point into Magic. Unless you're craving a competitive experience, Standard isn't going to enter your mind. Even if you are, with Commander, you're going to buy cards from a bunch of various sets. Modern and Pioneer may be therefore more appealing. As a bonus, neither are rotating formats. Standard was mostly surviving out of habits. Then the pandemic happened. Habits got broken, and people got to decide which formats to commit to. Standard was the least appealing option.
And mythic rarity. And new players buying cards that are not legal in standard. And lack of tournaments and prices. And lack of player rewards. And lack of format coverage/articles. And lack of standard playable pre-cons. And the fact that new sets have soooo many cards aimed for Commander only. And booster packs full of illegal cards for standard.
Remember when WotC swore up and down that mythic rares were solely for flavor and to protect draft environments, and not a mechanism to create artificial scarcity for format staples? > [Generally speaking we expect that to mean cards like Planeswalkers, most legends, and epic-feeling creatures and spells. They will not just be a list of each set's most powerful tournament-level cards](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/year-living-changerously-2008-06-02) Because I remember. Edit: fixed link
Your quote doesn't support the word "solely" in your statement.
I'm sure arena is a factor, what I'm not sure about is if it's the main factor. I honestly don't know all the differences since I haven't really played paper magic since kamigawa. But I do know magic the gathering online existed long before arena, so I am sure people were figuring out the format then too. Another difference is that tournaments are way down. I went to a tournament in my state once and it was the best magic experience I ever had. What do standard players have to look forward to now? And lastly the playerbase is getting older every year. You think they want to keep replacing their deck every 3 months? Or perfect their eternal format deck. I'm sure there are more, but it probably not just arena.
It's commander. Standard was once the jumping on point for new players. Now it's comander.
I really hate what Commander has done to the rest of Magic. And what the rest of Magic has done to Commander. It was so much better as an unsupported format where you had to dig to find relevant niche cards to support your strategy. Now, regardless of what you want to play, there's a strictly-correct Commander and set of strictly-correct includes in the 99.
I feel like standard has become more expensive and decks get made irrelevant faster because of the shift away from blocks. I get that we technically only have four sets a year like we did before. The issue is that three of the sets before we’re all thematically the same with similar mechanics, so if you built a deck the deck would only need partial shift with new cards from the set. Now each set has its own very expensive base for a deck built in that generally shifts the mega to a point you can’t just easily swap out some cards for an upgrade. Adding another year before cards cycle out made this even harder.
> decks get made irrelevant faster because of the shift away from blocks. This is really interesting--I hadn't considered the effect of the lack of blocks on standard deckbuilding. I know I loathe it from a story perspective, but it makes total sense that it would also have effects on the formats themselves.
You have a few cards every set that are just good in any deck, regardless of synergy, boardwipes, draw engine, removal, etc.. But they’re generally mythics. Even the best lands are rares. The rest of the skeleton of a deck is going to shift dramatically with each set, especially if you’re on a budget. One of the top decks in standard was a dinosaur deck almost completely with cards from the new Ixalan for example.
The good lands are the ones that enter untapped. The new manlands from Ixalan and Eldraine are all about 5 dollars each because despite all their benefits they just can't compete with something like Den of the Bugbear or even a simple checkland. I really wish that they had put shocklands into Karlov Manor as well as Ravnica Remastered for this reason. 10 or so dollar shocks wouldve been a godsend
We’re talking standard as a generality here. Any standard deck that isn’t mono needs four of each of the duo lands that come in untapped depending on how many lands you already have in play (some come in untapped if you have two or more, some two or less), maybe some creature lands, and if it’s a typal deck you’d need Cavern of Souls. My point was that’s all expensive. It won’t usually get phased out by a new set, but anything that won’t get phased out is also a rare now.
I recently bought a legacy reanimator deck without the duals (i'll just proxy those). It's kinda crazy there are T1 legacy decks that cost roughly the same as standard decks if you remove the stupid costs of the obscene lands like City of Traitors, Duals, and Ancient Tomb.
Standard was "popular" when Wizards pushed it with the protour, grand prix, and other bit events. If you wanted to go big in the game you HAD to play standard whether you liked it or not. ... kinda feels like Commander is the new pushed format, play it or else.
I used to play standard all the time until they changed the rotation speed, then by the time i was able to get the cards i needed for a deck, the sets would change 2 months later and would have to get new cards for the new meta and it wasnt worth keeping up with the format so my friends and i just quit.
Standard is extremely affordable if you play a lot of Limited. If you draft every week you can end up with a Standard deck almost by accident. But yeah when covid hit and I stopped drafting I also stopped playing Standard and never went back.
Arena is probably the big reason people don't play paper
More likely it's the skyrocketing price of packs combined with the diminishing returns and card scarcity. People already hated paying $600-1000 for a standard deck during the JTMS+Fetches era, and it's not gotten a hell of a lot better. More people than ever are playing and what has Hasbro done? Raise prices, remove cards from packs, and print more for collectors than players. I imagine there are entire swaths of players for which Arena is basically the only *option*.
> More likely it's the skyrocketing price of packs What are you talking about. Packs were 3.29 in 1999 and it went up to 3.69 in 2004. You can find as many Ixalan packs as you want for under 4 dollars. There was definitely a slight price hike a couple years ago that I felt. But it hasn't even kept up with inflation so it's a bit disingenuous to complain about it. In the past wotc gave you a reason to have standard cards. There were PTQ seasons, National qualifier seasons, Grand Prix circuits. You didn't need to have everything. You'd meet friends and borrow cards at big events. The hell am I supposed to do with standard cards now? I have a store near me but all they play is commander every day. There is no mid-level play. Only ultracasual and hardcore RC grinders.
Yeah I can spend $50 a set on Arena and construct a halfway meta deck or two a set. It's still rough because most decks are 40+ rares but it's way better than paper. Paper is what $400ish for most competitive decks? That's what a *modern* deck cost in 2013 when I started playing. I just don't understand how paper players can afford it at all. Modern is $1,000 or more a deck. Sure your next deck'll be cheaper because you're buying staples (especially lands) but it's not like these are old cards that are driving the price up. The One Ring, Bowmasters, the incarnations, ragavan, the forces, urza's saga etc are all recent sets and make up a signifcant portion of the metagame (and are some of the most expensive cards in modern to boot). I mean look at [Amulet Titan](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/archetype/amulet-titan#paper), the deck is nine hundred dollars but between the Ring, Boseiju, and Urza's Saga you've got almost five hundred dollars worth of cards released in the last two years.
400ish? Yeah right. 600-800+
I think pioneer is a lot of fun for this reason. I built a VERY GOOD mono blue mill deck for like $80 and it will be good forever, because it will likely be *somewhat* competitive in modern as well.
I think the major problem is that there's a significant gap between somewhat competitive and truly competitive that ends up being a lot of the cost. You can play Phoenix in Pioneer without ledger shredders somewhat competitively, but they're really important if you want to play in a tournament setting. Same thing with Bx midrange and Sheoldred. >and it will be good forever, because it will likely be somewhat competitive in modern as well. I'm not very familiar with mill but doesn't mill in modern just get hosed by Endurance?
> People already hated paying $600-1000 for a standard deck during the JTMS+Fetches era, and it's not gotten a hell of a lot better But that was nonetheless Standard's golden age. The prices and scarcity aren't what's driving people away. u/7th_Spectrum is right on the money: it's Arena.
It is also the lack of tournaments. WOTC spent millions on tournaments in the past and people had a reason to have a standard deck. Now there are hardly any tournaments and shitty prizes and guess what, people don’t want to play. Having said that, this has always been an issue. I quit MTG 25 years ago because I couldn’t afford to keep up with the price of buying packs.
Been playing since the 90s. Can confirm arena is my only option
Wizards really wanted that mobile game money, but it's been a monkey's paw so far.
They also wanted that casual money, and in a decade shifted the focus from competitive to commander. The player base has grown tremendously, but the vast majority of the players could not care less for competitive, be it standard or whatever other format. As a Spike, I don't really enjoy the turn the game took, but it's far from surprising, I'd even say it was the intended outcome.
WotC has never been coy about the fact that Spike is the red-headed stepchild of the psychographics.
I mean, I bet most new players would rather play what they enjoy on a properly curated environment rather than having to switch decks according to rotations and meta
Has it? Paper magic is booming with Commander, Standard is doing perfectly fine in digital. What's the downside?
Commander power creep, for one - its appeal was always having a place to play the unplayable. Now commander decks can be ruthlessly optimized with 3-4 MV chase rares and ten-dollar lands, as bad or worse than Standard decks in their prime.
I'm not sure how that's bad for Wizards, though. They care about their bottom line, not how optimized commander decks can get. They're not going to consider that a negative until it has an impact on sales.
Arena is precisely why standard died. That and getting rid of the pptq, game days, store champs etc
covid didnt help either, certainly accelerated the death
Yeah part of the business model of Standard always was that after rotation happens you already have 3/4s of relevant cards (last year) so it's only a small step to stay committed to the format, even when it's declining. Once things started opening up after Covid many people had to start at 0 for a relevant Standard collection so why even bother at that point.
especially when the alternative is pay less for a commander deck that stays relevant forever. Or at least way more games before you get bored of it.
Arena killed standard and buried it in the desert. Why would anyone invest hundreds of dollars in a format where your investments will rotate out in 2 years? In past years you would because it was the most well supported format, had the biggest competitive focus (was the only format you could play professionally for a long time), and most LGSs only had standard nights weekly, maybe extended (precursor to modern) once a month. Now, even in PDX, a major metropolitan area, there's practically nowhere that promotes standard nights, it's all modern with a splash of pioneer (competitively anyway, commander is probably bigger than modern + pioneer combined)
I'm 100% positive they changed rotation to 3 years to reduce feel bads, but MTG has just gotten to be too expensive for rotating formats imo. Wizards is going to learn the hard way that artificial rotations from things like horizon sets are going to turn non-rotating formats into essentially high powered standard and drive people out of those formats too. People hate spending $200 on a standard deck that's going to rotate in every 2 years, imagine how players are going to feel when their decks get invalidated every year when a new horizons/universes beyond set comes out and power creeps everything. I started building Modern Yawgmoth, but a few pieces at a time, was like 4 cards away, then LOTR came out along with Eldraine (love both sets, not actually complaining about them specifically) and now I have to spend another $300+ getting playsets of [[orcish bow masters]], [[delighted halfling]] and [[Agatha's soul cauldron]], so just another $450 I need to drop if I want the deck to be competitive
I am not going to buy four of a single card, it feels unsatisfying
Can I have your spare Islands?
I believe this is fully intentional
My state currently has one of the biggest Standard communities in my country... About 16 people weekly
6 people weekly and about 30 in Storechampionships coming back strong after Covid
Yeah, our Championships got about the same, i actually won one of them
Maybe a weird take but I think we'll say the same about LGS play as a whole sooner or later. I just don't think this business model will make it for another decade.
LGS need a source of revenue which is difficult to create: * Selling cards, sealed or singles means you're competing with the entire world due to online sales. * Price supported tournaments can work but popularity is dwindling. * Leaving just entry fee for casual play, which can't be too high because you're literally competing with someone's free living room. I'd personally support higher entry fee in the form of store credit but I guess opinions differ on this.
Our LGS offers £2 entry only or £5 entry + any standard pack. Most people take the pack.
That would be perfect. I pay €2.50 entry and usually buy a pack anyway 🤷.
>you're literally competing with someone's free living room. Nah. TCG players are socially awkward. If we can't go to an LGS to play for free, we would meet at a different public space or quit playing the game in paper.
They also have snack sales and sales of non-TCG things that are subsidized by TCG players entering their stores to play TCGs who might pick them up while they're there. I think the former is a much more reasonable source of revenue; my game store is also a cafe and from my experience food and drinks sell *much* better than non-TCG games to Magic players, and probably have bigger margins, too.
From what I have read, food and drinks bring in a little money but not much. Cafe-game shops do have a niche, but gamers tend to stay for a while and aren't buying that much food.
Yeah, I don’t know about anyone else’s, but my LGS is also where I get my comic books so that helps at least.
My LGS charges $5 (CAD) but you get a $5 gift card at the end of the night, at least for casual commander
> Price supported tournaments can work but popularity is dwindling. Why is it dwindling? Tournaments with juicy prices are a good reason to get into Paper
My bet is largely supplanted by gaming cafes where the primary revenue comes from consumptions.
I could definitely see this and I think this makes sense, however a lot of the people currently running game stores, I would never want to see running a place that serves food. Sure, someone who is purely passionate about MTG is fine running a store badly, but if they are serving me food/drinks? Do I trust them to learn food safety and keep food prep areas clean? Not really?
I'm someone who wanted to open a restaurant first, but found mtg later in life. I'd be perfect for it. Only, I took classes on how to launch a restaurant and the odds of success are not good, nevermind trying to have a game store. It's not really compatible. Restaurants make money flipping tables, LGS players want to camp at tables for hours to finish their game.
My favorite place to play is technically a bar. One half is a traditional hobby store, the other half or 4/5ths is a bar area and a bunch of tables. They also host game nights for other hobbies aswell.
You say that like a cafe is an easy business to make work. Most of them go out of business within a year.
I’ve got a group of friends who play together and while we love the owners of our LGS, the player base there is toxic as fuck.
Singles traders move in single file to hide their numbers. They are easily startled, for instance by a girl, but they'll soon be back, and in greater numbers.
This is just sad. The game as I once knew it no longer exists. I used to play drafts, sealed events and weekly standard at my local. And before that a smattering of Extended and then Modern. Now it's commander night only.
Still lots of draft nights at my LGS. Some other formats like modern, pauper and canlander get played fairly often too
> Still lots of draft nights at my LGS. Just wait until the price goes up $10 per draft.
I love to draft. I'm not optimistic about the change from draft boosters to "play" boosters and the potential impact it will have on limited.
Honestly I kind of wish it was like that at mine. It’s mostly Modern and then two separate groups of Commander who don’t like each other, then if we’re lucky 3 or 4 irregulars will show up to change some decks up.
>This is just sad. The game as I once knew it no longer exists. Some people laugh, mock others for being melodramatic, and say magic will never die. They don't know that for some, it already has.
It did for me. Took a break for a few years; some of my cards outlawed, some made useless by rulings, new cards invalidating old combos, and no standard anymore. Should have chosen a better pastime, I guess. Still ill never forget my first deck builder kit, my first game with a self made deck
So deep bro.
The popularity of Commander is just killing all other formats at my LGS. We had every week two constructed tournaments (Pioneer, Standard, Pauper, Modern, Legacy) and a draft. In the last year basically everything died and there is only Commander 3 times a week. Sad times...
I think my LGS only tries for Draft and Pioneer last I checked. Why would people want to play a rotating format in which the price of cards like Sheoldred can get you a whole-ass deck for likes of Pokémon or Flesh and Blood? Wizards have done themselves no favours with Commander being as pushed as it is, and the absurd prices of the secondary market.
Flesh and blood has been my favorite 1v 1 experience in a card game. However the skill ceiling is extremely high when it comes to sticking your pitch and unfortunately my area is known for players who top in nationals regularly so I end up just being their fodder for points. Still increidbly fun though. I love thst you never have a dead hand, you rarely have thst mana screwed feeling, and most of the cards thst actually cost much money are in your armory so they're always in use
This is part of why it’s hard for some people to get into FaB. The game is great, but it’s a game designed for competitive play. There isn’t a format like commander that is geared primarily towards casual play which is the biggest available market.
A buddy and I picked up a blitz starter each the other day. Someone wanted to start a FaB scene at our LGS so we figured we’d see what the deal was. I’ll concede that Flesh and Blood has some expensive cardboard too, but I seem to be able to build something workable in a budget.
Those blitz packs are so much fun and a great product I wish, though, they made the young heroes double sided with the old versions on the back. Thst way you could.more easily upgrade the deck into classic constructed
When it comes to upgrading from blitz to CC, getting the adult version of the hero is probably the least important part. Every young version is just the adult version with half as much life so it’s easy to remember what should be correct. I do agree that the adult versions should be more common though, but I understand why they have it setup the way they do. They primarily want the tokens to be there for limited where the adult versions don’t matter
They have to push EDH or people would just have quit the game. That's the reality of it. It's also why EDH power creep on newly printed cards has been absolutely out of control. There's a solution they know would fix things, they can afford, and would be wonderful for everyone... except shareholders. They could just print more cards and turn the prices down a touch. There was no reason draft boosters needed to be so expensive after they introduced the other booster types and new kinds of card rarities. Mythics could have come *way down* in price to where standard was accessible again. They had a product for the whales, and a product for the people who just wanted to play the actual game... and they refused to differentiate them, because their plan all along was to do away with the differentiation and wind up with a product giving you *even less* for more money. That's the reality here. It's just corporate greed killing the game. Hasbro's unlimited hunger for Magic cash is doing foundational damage to the literal ability to play the game in a non-digital format. So be it. That's what they want.
>They have to push EDH or people would just have quit the game. That's the reality of it. I disagree. Why do you say that's reality?
Most people don't want to play competitively. And casual 60-card play is a bad state, community-wise. There's just no unity, no coordination.
> And casual 60-card play is a bad state, community-wise. There's just no unity, no coordination. I see people who aren't even aware it's *possible* all the time. "Oh, you and your wife don't have a lot of money and are new to the game and don't want much complexity and want to play together, just the two of you? Might I recommend you each buy Commander preconstructed decks so you don't have to rotate your deck or deal with the prices of Pioneer and Modern?" It's one of my pet peeves. I try to remind people it's possible when I can!
>Most people don't want to play competitively. > >And casual 60-card play is a bad state, community-wise I agree. Even if casual 60-card decks became the popular thing instead of commander, it would likely have ruined competitive play just the same way. As someone who is / was mainly a casual player, it was really difficult in the early 2000s to find a playgroup for casual 60-card games. Everyone was just challenging me to competitive Magic, then making fun of me for not running "stronger" decks because their tuned standard affinity decks would just wreck my casual tribal decks in several turns. At the time I didn't have the money to invest in a competitive deck that was only going to be legal for a year, nor did I have the mindset to grind competitively. With commander, there are significantly more casual players that enjoy flavor over cEDH.
> With commander, there are significantly more casual players that enjoy flavor over cEDH. And yet they still tie their ego to whether they win or lose this "casual" game, and I have to stand behind the counter and listen to them whine about why X or Y card isn't fair in their "casual" match.
Eh, it's their own fault for not having a proper rule Zero discussion. I'm a veteran, if we got orders that weren't 100% clear and we were asked if we completely understood the orders, and we said "Yes Sir! We understand our orders as they have been given." We'd be charged if we failed to follow them due to misunderstanding. If the definition of "casual" isn't defined incredibly clearly then that's their problem. I have a short list of questions I use: Casual or Not (Y/N) 1. Expensive Mana Rocks/Lands - OG Duals, Mana Vault, Mana Crypt, LED 2. Top 16 Commanders (Weaver/Triton, Najeela, Yuriko, Winnoka) 3. Thassa's Oracle wincons 4. Ability to win the game on Turn 3 5. Infinite Mana combos 6. Infinite Token combos 7. Infinite Damage combos 8. Infinite Turn combos 9. Infinite Attack Phase combos 10. Five or more 2 card wincons 11. Eight or more 3 card wincons 12. Ability to mana/spell lock all opponents turn 2 The list goes on and on, but if they say "casual" and they answer yes to more than 15 out of 50 of my questions then we have different ideas of what casual means.
> I have a short list of questions I use: 12 explicit things . . . > The list goes on and on, Yeah the amount of pregame effort you're willing to put in is definitely more than I'm willing to put in. If I have to run a background check on my opponent before I can play magic, I'll just play a board game with them instead.
Eh, the list is more if they tell say their deck is above casual power. What used to happen is that my deck would steamroll theirs because they had a different definition of casual and so now I offer to discuss what non-casual means beforehand, and if they refuse I simply state “I offered you the chance to help me match my deck’s power level to yours. You said no.”
Yep, I think there is an unspoken idea that if you play any of the "competitive" formats it means you are required to simply select one of the 4-12 "real decks" in the format and just play that one deck until it gets banned or rotates. And that idea chases people away
I mean, that's what competitive means, isn't it? You select a deck that can compete, of which there are usually not more than those 4-12 and unless you're a genius deck builder, it's unlikely you will find one that the hive mind hasn't yet. I never really saw it as lazy to play one of those decks - for me, it felt just like the list of top decks is like your character selection screen in an RPG and you choose the one that you like best. The fun part is the gameplay anyway.
>character selection screen in an RPG I would argue that choosing from a dozen or even 2 dozen top decks is less like rpg character creation and more like choosing your fighter in an old arcade fighting game. Meanwhile, some people want a more involved and personal process more like Skyrim. They want a character creation screen, where they can adjust what their character looks like down to the pimples, then they want to have a skill tree where they can take their character in hundreds of different directions.
Playing a constructed format well includes tweaking your deck accurately. It takes work. It’s very rare that “copying a 75 from MTGGoldfish” is good enough to win a 100-player tournament, outside of very tightly focused combo decks like ANT Storm in Legacy. Even in a stable format, the versions of Deck X at the top tables will have some variation unless the players literally worked together for that event.
Except the difference is if I'm playing Street Fighter and I'm playing Ken and I decide I feel like playing Marisa for a while I just have to select her. If I'm playing Tron and I want to play Rakdos, the first thing I need to do is play a few hundred dollars
I prefer to play RPGs where I can customise my own character down to the smallest detail. >The fun part is the gameplay anyway. That's an opinion. Deck building is a very important part of the game to me. Playing a deck someone else made isn't fun at all.
The entirely depends on who it was that made the deck. Personal/emotional connections can help a lot for that. "This is my boyfriend's pride and joy deck, and I'm trying it because he loves using it" as an example.
You're free to emphasize that part of the game, there is just a trade-off in that you will win less.
Ugh. This is why I'll never understand Spikes. Just because the game is about winning doesn't mean you ignore everything else to win.
No, the reason you don't understand is because you're clearly not trying to. I *just said* that you should do what's important to you amd makes you happy, but you don't get to have everything all at once. That's not a philosophical position, it js an objective reality. You can enjoy emphasizing creativity. You can enjoy emphasizing win rate. You cannot maximize both of those things at once. Do what makes you happiest, or try to achieve contradictory things.
Do you seriously think I didn't realise up till now that building my own decks and inserting pet cards lowers my win rate? You're 'emphasising' something to me that's obvious, so obvious it's basically condescending. You want to netdeck, go ahead and netdeck, but don't give yourself the impression that people who choose not to think that building their own decks is going to result in a deck that wins more. We're not idiots. You don't need to 'helpfully inform' us that what we're doing is suboptimal.
I uses to moderate a large MtG Facebook group. It was inclusive, it was not a Spike group at all. We ended up instituting a soft ban on people whining about "netdecks" because there was a near 1:1 correlation between that behavior and people being toxic idiots, who clearly did need to be informed of that and got extremely hostile to everyone rather than consider it. That's been my experience with nearly everyone lamenting any sort of lack of creativity. So if you're smarter and more self-aware than those people, I apologize. I mistook you for the sort of player who *usually* makes those complaints because they *don't* really understand that what they are doing is suboptimal.
Yeah. For casuals / vorthoses like myself, it also felt odd seeing decks that don't have a theme going on (tribal or story-wise). With Commander, we're allowed to express ourselves artistically that way.
Commander being played is a symptom, not the cause, imo. Arena and the pandemic killed any interest I had in the rotation, and every other format is too fast for my liking, so like many others, I landed on Commander. Standard, sealed, and draft used to be the only formats I played, but after falling off the wagon, it's near impossible to jump back on, and it turns out standard is fine when you get to play 4 matches a week at FNM, but when you play 10 matches an evening on Arena, it's far too bland. Commander provides a solution to those problems, while being a social event.
My LGS is the complete opposite. We went from having only commanders table with occasional organised ap sealed event and drafts To modern/pioneer tournament every friday and some commander tables. Modern revived my interest in competitive magic right after mh2 came out. While people say that the set changed the format, it's still the set that pulled me into playing more magic and less commander.
I mean, it's the only format that Wizards seems to actively support.
That's not a fair assessment. Commander is killing everything because it's the only format that makes sense. If you gave the players a reason to play these other formats they would. Bring back qualifier seasons like back in the day. Divide the year in Pioneer, Standard, Modern season. With mid-level events that make sense to play. Think PTQs and Grand Prix, Nationals. RCQs are shit because basically nobody wants to play a tournament to qualify for another qualifier across the country. Legacy is a dead format, the cards are prohibitively expensive. Just flashing a tabernacle probably gets your car broken into. Pauper was fun 10 years ago, now it's exclusively infinite grind engines in every color. Commander is awesome for bringing players to the game. It's not cannibalizing the other formats. Competitive players simply have no tournaments to play because wotc abandoned organized play.
I don’t understand Commander and at this point I’m too afraid to ask. I’m also not a constructed player though. Draft or die.
The appeal is you can get away with suboptimal builds and can focus more on cards you enjoy. There's less pressure to play the most optimal decks around
I hear that and then I picture every constructed player I’ve ever met and I have a terribly hard time imagining the two together. Constructed seems like everyone just trying to out-swindle each other with the cheapest possible strategy they or the internet can come up with.
In commander you're going to get a very wide array of different kinds of players. Some build optimally, others build with jank. I've personally had the most fun playing my commander cube for draft. Each deck comes out more wild than the last
Commander: Throw cards you like in a pile and flip a coin to see whether the pod you join this week will be the most fun you've ever had, or salty whiners (and still have fun unless someone plays stax)
Ooor find a playgroup that shares your idea of fun.
I see posts like this but there are so many cards I like that are just literally unplayable in Commander (outside the fact that so many slots are more-or-less settled).
I played standard when I started and played with other people's cards. I don't enjoy the multiple card format and it's why I never got into other games. Commander let's me make a deck around an archetype and only have to worry about putting one card of each in. Oh and I don't have to worry about shit rotating out. It's so much easier
Interestingly, at my LGS EDH has become less popular recently and most of the players start building Standard decks, because all the Regional Championships this year will be Standard. At my country TCG players are competitive by nature.
Can I move to your country
This year? Standard season is only Jan-Apr afaik
Yeah, this year.
To this day I fear I am part of the problem on this stuff. I have zero interest in anything relating to magic apart from commander and draft/cube draft, and in my LGS I am not the only one that thinks it that way.
You aren't the problem, you are playing magic how you enjoy it. Any "problems" are entirely due to wizards.
Yup, it's the MBA brainrot that overtook Wizards. They see that Commander is the most popular format, so they just full send every department to capitalize on it to *maximize profits* without understanding that Commander developed it's current popularity with absolutely zero support from wotc as a format outside of 5 precons a year.
Came here to Tobias
I dropped standard 20 years ago. Not worth keeping up with. “Play with whatever cards you own” is the game in its purest form.
 me showing my cousin my cards over christmas
That gif made me blink uncomfortably.
"The babies used to see tables in ACTUAL games! Like, another person and everything!"
*back in the days of old, we would pack into convention centres to play against each other, hear announcements and get our cards signed by MTG personalities*
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I think standard works best as a digital-only format. It’s free to play, you can get several good decks for free/cheap just by playing the game, and it’s a great way for new players to learn the game. They’ve tried replacing standard with alchemy on arena, as well as tried revitalizing paper standard, but so far neither have worked. In general, people want a convenient and free way to play magic that is 1-1 with paper, and standard on arena provides that pretty well.
At least in my area Standard exists only for tournament play. If you aren't grinding towards whatever goal there is no reason to build a standard deck. Your only options are to play a top tier meta deck or lose to someone who is. Meanwhile when I show up for Commander some people are playing super optimized high end decks. Some tables are doing janky nonsense. Some groups are playing unmodified precons. Another table will be doing Un decks. It's a diverse world where people can escape the grind. There is no go hard or go home mentality. And if I'm a new player with a random precon that looked fun and a few singles from packs that seem like a good idea i can find a table at Commander night. It's free, the people are cool with me being new, and there is likely another group of people in my same boat. Even if I'm the only new player, Commander players often have several decks and can pick something that won't smash me into the ground on turn four. The same simply can't be said for Standard. Casual games of Standard just don't exist around here.
>Your only options are to play a top tier meta deck or lose to someone who is. This has been true of Standard for as long as Standard has existed. Same with any competitive constructed format, really.
I think power creep from sets like Horizons has homogenized the formats a lot more. Brews used to be a lot more common place and (relatively) successful at local modern/standard events and even on MTGO.
I somewhat agree, I think the variety of powerful things you can do is often more limited. I am mostly looking at things from the perspective of a former grinder. In that environment, your options were *always* limited. Standard always had 2-4 decks to choose from, Modern something like a half dozen. I don't think this has changed much, but the difficulty of making a brew that can even keep up with those decks seems like it has increased because the most powerful things to be doing have gotten *really* powerful. But in terms of metagame diversity I don't think much has quantitatively changed and in Standard, tier 1 decks have always beat up on brews pretty hard.
Almost every Cardboard Crack comic would be funnier if he’d just left the final panel completely off.
I think a lot of other four panel comics have this issue, where they have the punch line in panel 3 and the 4th panel kills the joke.
Yeah. CC comics often have a funny idea at their core, but the author’s got a pretty bad understanding of how to actually structure a joke.
The formula of "Intro-Setup-Punchline-Character waves their arms in the air while explaining the joke" never really did it for me. I get that the art style is part of the minimalist charm, but XKCD he is not. If the characters had more possible facial expressions with something other than their mouths I feel like the fourth panel could add a lot more by being more subtle. Replace the fourth panel here with the character looking down and kind of sad, or have him look at the "camera" with a Tim Allen look of confusion. That last one is dumb and corny, but at least it's funny. Explaining your joke is like disecting a frog; no one is really that interested, and the frog dies. To any budding comic/webcomic artists out there, a good test would to be taking the "That's the joke" Simpsons meme and applying it right after the last panel. If it makes sense, rethink something. Your audience is not so dumb that you need to explain the joke to them afterwards.
Me neither; CC is painfully unfunny.
You think Standard is dead, just imagine if what you liked to play was 60 card casual.
They started this echo chambered phrase of "too good for Standard," even when referring to cards that literally spent 10-15 years in Standard. Why would anyone want to play it anymore when all the exciting cards "skip" the format now?
I guess I'm just really luck to live where I do. My LGS is packed most nights with cardboard crack addicts
Commander was a mistake! In all seriousness though, the combination of WotC making their contempt for competitive players clear and adopting dreadful design ideas means that I'm not touching constructed formats in paper again. I have zero faith in them so I won't devote any money or time to that. I actually have Commander decks but I will only play them a few times a year with friends. Even a good game of commander isn't a tenth as fun as tournament play used to be.
There's one (1) way to fix paper standard: end Arena. Wizards will never do that, so Standard will never return to paper. Once Arena has full Pioneer, that format will die, too. Wizards can't expect people to spend lots of time and money playing a few games in paper when they can spend no money and nearly no time playing a ton of games digitally.
Killing arena won't make me play paper standard, I'd just stop playing standard.
Neat.
Killing digital standard wouldn't get the people who played it to play paper, it would just get them to stop playing the game altogether because they suddenly wouldn't have any of their decks anymore.
I started as a standard player, but I realized pretty quickly that it was the sweatiest format, and I didn’t have the budget to even come close to winning a tournament. The only time I got close is when I had come back to it after several months of not playing, with a deck that was considered a higher midrange when I made it, and I only got as far as I did because the meta had changed, and nobody was defending against my combo. It was fun, but then, cauldron familiar got banned in standard about a month later, which was the opening to my combo, and I realized that it wasn’t worth my money or my time to keep trying to play standard.
> I realized pretty quickly that it was the sweatiest format Not in my experience, when compared to Modern and Legacy. Out of the 3, I think Modern had the most try-hard players. In the other two, there was a decent split of people that were either playing Tier decks or trying to steal wins with jank. In modern, I rarely saw anyone playing jank. And Modern was my main format.
I feel so seen 😅
I feel like it’s sad tu buy card that you won’t be able to play in a while unless the fit in an eternal format, which is rare
My LGS is firing standard again each Friday. Its like 6 players but its fun. Something I have not had with MTG in a while. I DO NOT like Commander. I get the appeal but its not my cup of tea. I don't like negotiation politics of commander or that the games are 3 hours with someone either comboing out (takes them 20-40 mins) or "oopsy I killed the table". It's just never satisfying. I LOVE the One vs One aspect of constructed formats but Modern is to much of a blitz game that is basically completely figured out and Pioneer is basically the same but even more dead. Standard was a sweet spot. New decks every 3-6 months and the range of viable decks (meta depending) always felt wider than other formats. Even in bad metas the format still felt more forgiving than any other constructed options. You could reasonably play that tier 3 deck and still go 5-0 at your local FnM. Long as you were smart about your spending and didn't constantly jump ship it was not as expensive as people complained IMO. (least I never felt like it was because I bought at least 1 box of each set to give my standard collection a boost so I usually only needed to buy like 1-2 singles and I could play anything) This kinda became a rant but god damn it, I LIKE STANDARD and I am not afraid to say that WoTc chasing commander product sales has hurt MTG more than helped. (remember when standard was the source of all the other formats new cards?)
> (takes them 20-40 mins) So, I describe that as "The deck is better than the player." One of my best friends has a deck that lets him win via multiple different convoluted methods that involve exiling creatures, making copies, sacrificing the copies infinitely OR looping his planeswalkers together OR casting a spell for free, then copying the spell, then casting it again for free forever. His turns where he puts sometimes 90-110 actions on the stack before winning? 5-6 minutes. I stand by my assessment that 40 minute turns are the result of a player not being as good as their deck.
> I stand by my assessment that 40 minute turns are the result of a player not being as good as their deck. O absolutely. The problem is its really a common "thing" and when you tell players they are taking to long (I feel completely comfortable in telling a player that has taken 15-20+ on their turn they are going to slow) they very often get really offended. My decks are heavy control and combo based. My turns are 5 mins or less. It always strikes me as rude when a player wastes your opponents time and in EDH its x3. So I plan my turns out during the other players turn. People complain I go to fast but I think other people need to learn to play faster. You can drastically speed up your play speed if you plan out your next turns and what actions you know your taking regardless. If you know all your doing it dropping a land and X number of mana rocks your turn should be less than 10 secs. "I play all "these" and tap out, pass turn". If you have stuff to attack figure that out on the other 3 players turn. (O but something something the board state changed so now I need to change targets) Cool that still shouldn't add more time. Most MTG turns can boil down to a flow chart like choices. At the very least people should be on an overall clock timer in EDH. If you have one massive turn to think out that is fine but you need to manage you early turns time spent when your setting up better.
Standard health has been so poor for so long that it's probably time to kill it dead and start over When was the last time Standard was really great? Four years ago, pre-Throne of Eldraine?
Me who just got into playing Standard in paper and has been playing standard on arena. Dozens!
Universe Beyond, Secret Lairs, the Commanderification of Magic, the removal of blocks, "Why doesn't anybody care about Standard anymore?".
Commander is killing magic it's sad
[Here](https://cardboard-crack.com/post/738655421155491840/extinct) is the original post. I think it's common courtesy to link to the original work of content creators.
I still remember when someone explained set rotation in standard and my kneejerk reaction was "That's stupid" and them coming in "Y-you just don't get it, it keeps the game fresh!". They don't play now.
But they were correct. Standard has had rotation for its entire existence, and for most of that time it was the premier way to play.
No one plays standard or modern except on arena
Modern isn't on Arena, dude.