Was thinking about it today...what if they were no more format or actually 1 format named Magic...
I don't want to open a vigorous debate so please take it with 2 tablespoon of salt...I just want to know if some of you prefer when Magic was about putting any 60 cards together and play. Don't take me seriously, I'm not bashing on the current state of the game.
I know that for competitive Magic it would be impossible to manage...or even chaotic...but for the casual crowd...I would like to know if some of you (like myself) would prefer if they were minimal boundaries...would it make it more diverse or more narrow in term of deck and strategies (control, aggro, combo).
In fact I think that Limited and EDH are a great example of how it can be a success, yes there is some banning (for EDH) but diversity look ultrapresent...would it be possible to replicate it in a 60 card-deck constructed, 4 copies environment.
For the fun of it, would it be possible to come up with a 20-cards banned list (excluding skills, ante and Unhinged/Unglued) that would be a must in this ''speculative'' environment, for budget, power or logistic reasons. It may actually come up looking a lot like Vintage without Power 9...but let see if we can make a better casual crowd format.
My 20-cards Banned list would be the following...I think :
I would think the banned list would have to look totally different from your list, as well as be a lot bigger just to keep turn 1/2 combo decks out of the picture.
I agree with a bigger banned list than twenty...I like the Legacy banned list for the most part. I would ban Tolarian Academy over Jace in your list, and that's a start. Jace is ridiculously underpowered compared to the other cards on the list as well as those remaining in the format.
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Decks:
Legacy: RWBG Goblins RRR Burn WBU Affinity UBR Sac-Land Tendrils! BBBPox
Next possible deck: D&T, but that just wouldn't be right.
Modern: R Goblins (work in progress)
Standard: I only care about standard when Goblins is a deck.
Limited: I only care about limited when Goblins are in the set.
No. The game is too big for that now. Assuming there would still be cards printed for what would essentially be a Vintage-only environment, you would see genuine power creep en masse and not this thing of making creatures good and counterspells terrible that people like to claim is powercreep. 60-card casual is a thing. It is a thing that can exist alongside Standard.
I know that for competitive Magic it would be impossible to manage...or even chaotic...but for the casual crowd...I would like to know if some of you (like myself) would prefer if they were minimal boundaries...would it make it more diverse or more narrow in term of deck and strategies (control, aggro, combo).
So you recognize that having no formats would only work casually and not competitively. But casual is already free-form where you play it however you want so I think i'm missing the point of this thread.
Please keep in mind why standard was created in the first place.
Wizards noticed that players, once they have their powerful cards, stopped buying sets. Standard was a way of forcing people to buy new cards by making older cards obsolete. Either than, or make cards progressively stronger than alpha/beta/unlimited, a continous powercreep.
What you're proposing is not "no format magic", but rather "vintage/legacy" (because chances are you'll evolve into the legacy ban list) and tossing away every other format. While, yes, this will create a very diverse meta eventually, at the start it will be chock full of degenerate cards, and 99% of cards will be relegated to the shoebox.
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"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
So everyone of you think that if the format concept was thrown away, magic players would all build the strongest deck possible even when playing casual...meaning for fun.
I don't agree that it is a useless exercise, it's actually telling a lot on the new generation of magic players
I fully understand that the concept I want to discuss may look like I want to push legacy/vintage, in fact, my intentions is to understand why when you go to a LGS you have difficulty starting a 3-4 players games without the hassle of formats coordination and if it can be changed in the long term because in the end if you got 10 formats and 10 players playing only 1 format you got a problem. Limited is a solution, but can get expensive when you want to play casually...
I'm not frustrated or anything, I play Pauper, Edh, Cube, Std, Legacy, Vintage, Sealed, Modern regularly but I missed the time where I had 10-15 casual decks to play with, now with 80+ decks I feel that some were made strictly to be legal in abc format and it can become expensive when you think about it...maybe I'm to attached to my decks and I could just deconstruct them when they leave standard or become banned/bad in a format
Okay, here are the realities. I understand your "sadness" but the truth is, you can't go back home. That ship has sailed. There are too many cards now. Players would still want to win so they would put together the most broken, busted, ridiculous decks they could put together in order to achieve their ends.
In the meantime, sales of new product would grind to a halt. Why bother? What are you going to get that's going to make your pet deck any better? Since nobody would play sealed or draft anymore, there wouldn't be as much new product opened anyway. So how would you get the few "great" cards that would come out? The prices for them would have to be outrageous for dealers to justify opening up boxes. At those prices, players would just say "screw this! I have plenty of cards already."
The end result is that WotC would go out of business and you'd just have kitchen table players sitting around playing the same decks week after week until they got bored because nothing was new and eventually the game itself would completely die except for maybe a few die-hard enthusiasts.
Welcome to the end of Magic the Gathering as we know it.
But no, the exercise wasn't pointless. You've essentially outlined the death of this game and what would ultimately happen.
Now can we go back to talking about something that actually makes some sort of sense?
So everyone of you think that if the format concept was thrown away, magic players would all build the strongest deck possible even when playing casual...meaning for fun.
I don't agree that it is a useless exercise, it's actually telling a lot on the new generation of magic players
I fully understand that the concept I want to discuss may look like I want to push legacy/vintage, in fact, my intentions is to understand why when you go to a LGS you have difficulty starting a 3-4 players games without the hassle of formats coordination and if it can be changed in the long term because in the end if you got 10 formats and 10 players playing only 1 format you got a problem. Limited is a solution, but can get expensive when you want to play casually...
I'm not frustrated or anything, I play Pauper, Edh, Cube, Std, Legacy, Vintage, Sealed, Modern regularly but I missed the time where I had 10-15 casual decks to play with, now with 80+ decks I feel that some were made strictly to be legal in abc format and it can become expensive when you think about it...maybe I'm to attached to my decks and I could just deconstruct them when they leave standard or become banned/bad in a format
Casual magic doesn't need format coordination.
Back when Highlander was the casual format of choice in Melbourne, Australia (60 cards, all cards restricted except basic lands, some further restrictions applied to how many powerful cards you could play), you'd often see Highlander decks played against competitive/semi-competitive Standard decks on store play tables.
Or you'd see someone play their block deck against someone's super-casual Timmy concoction that might have technically been a Legacy deck.
As long as the power imbalance between decks isn't so bad that one player is 80% or higher favorite to win, those games remain fun. Once you get to the 80% level (example: competitive Standard deck vs. an Innistrad block draft deck, or a competitive Modern deck vs an RTR block constructed deck) the games do get stale, but that is true in format-regulated Magic too - Naya Blitz will put up 80% or better against a kitchen table Standard deck.
This is my favorite and preferred way to play Magic since I started back in '99. I like having the freedom of playing with any card that I have in my collection. I think a tournament setting still needs formats but if I just want to go to the store and get a game of Magic I prefer to just play with my casual decks. I don't mind playing against any cards really but I'm not around people have playsets of cards like Jace or Power, so nothing completely broken happens in our decks.
Ok all, got your points, maybe I should have bold the 2 tablespoon of salt...it could have help. I never stated I would personally remove all concept of format...I ask what if...and made it pretty clear, in my view, that it was intended for casual, call it kitchen table, no price support, no rankings format..
My point was, is it possible to create a casual environment where we have minimal restrictions and where 5 people not knowing each other could cross a LGS door and start a game using available decks without having 1 of the player winning 90% of the game...the banned list was intended to identify/speculate on the cards that could make this concept impossible
As stated before I think EDH, more so Edh multiplayer has made this work pretty well...can it be replicated in 60 cards, 4 copies MTG....and what it would take...
Recently I went to multiple LGS where if you have let's say a Modern deck to try...you feels like you were playing Yugioh...Modern is an example here...it could have been Standard or Legacy at other place
Don't flame me and if you have no opinion or if you think this is a ridiculous idea just read the next post...thanks
Thanks Tivoko for your support, for one moment I feel like my thoughts on recent MTG envrionment were coming from another planet..
Thanks Sirgog, for most of my magic ''career'' I felt, like yourself, that casual didn't need coordination, but for 2-3 years I found that it became more complicated to integrate the concept of casual in my local mtg community...maybe I should move...
If you are playing "casually" you are already playing with most of the cards. EDH is a casual format, that's why you see that much diversity, while I'm sure if there was a competitive scene you would see much less viable decks.
As soon as you make any "format" competitive, the number of decks will be shrink, no matter what.
It is not flaming to say that it is not a good idea. If you put yourself out there, you have to accept the positive comments and the ones that are not so supportive.
Nobody has called you any names, just said that the idea is not a good one.
BTW, up until 2 years ago, I was purely a casual player. And, even in that format, there were people who made crazy decks with turn 1 combo wins. So, spikes exist, even in casual play. When you play against a deck that has 4 Sol Ring, you know someone is trying to cast a very heavy spell early. The same player said that if he got 4 of the Collector's Edition Black Lotus (Retail $200 instead of $2500 and up) he would cram all of them in the deck. It's his kitchen table, he doesn't care if it is tournament playable. So, yeah, there would be a lot of people who would abuse your idea.
Those cards would skyrocket in price, beyond their already high prices, and newer cards would be near worthless, except for a very few.
And Wizards would go out of business.
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Currently playing:
Standard: WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern: UR Twinning RU G Venus Fly Trap G U Artifacts Aggro U
Ok all, got your points, maybe I should have bold the 2 tablespoon of salt...it could have help. I never stated I would personally remove all concept of format...I ask what if...and made it pretty clear, in my view, that it was intended for casual, call it kitchen table, no price support, no rankings format..
My point was, is it possible to create a casual environment where we have minimal restrictions and where 5 people not knowing each other could cross a LGS door and start a game using available decks without having 1 of the player winning 90% of the game...the banned list was intended to identify/speculate on the cards that could make this concept impossible
Just because it is casual does not mean people will not be spikes. Believe it or not, even casual players like winning.
As such, your proposed ban list will eventually expand because there will be casual player who will be playing broken decks. Eventually, your ban list will match legacy's. In the meantime, people will complain about broken decks.
The answer to your bolded part is yes, it is possible. It is called legacy.
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"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
Jace, it was only a preventive ''Dont't flame me'' not intended to target anyone or anything previously said. The discussion is ok at the moment and I could accept all the negative opinion with no problem...even if I prefer positive...
The thread reflect what I thought, MTG is hardly a casual game anymore, like many thing in 2013 it has become fairly competitive...a good example of this is the closing of a local mtg gaming store after 6 months of operations when at a prerelease there was some unintentional mishandling by the staff that frustated a good half of the players and ''force'' the guy out of business...players almost never lose with a smile today...and it may be just me but even if in some part of my life I'm really competitive...I don't think MTG should be taken too seriously unless maybe in pro tournament or when everyone expect it to be harsh not when 7-yr old girl play with 35 yrs old man at a prerelease..
Jace, it was only a preventive ''Dont't flame me'' not intended to target anyone or anything previously said. The discussion is ok at the moment and I could accept all the negative opinion with no problem...even if I prefer positive...
The thread reflect what I thought, MTG is hardly a casual game anymore, like many thing in 2013 it has become fairly competitive...a good example of this is the closing of a local mtg gaming store after 6 months of operations when at a prerelease there was some unintentional mishandling by the staff that frustated a good half of the players and ''force'' the guy out of business...players almost never lose with a smile today...and it may be just me but even if in some part of my life I'm really competitive...I don't think MTG should be taken too seriously unless maybe in pro tournament or when everyone expect it to be harsh not when 7-yr old girl play with 35 yrs old man at a prerelease..
Maybe there was less exposure for tournaments before ?
My point was, is it possible to create a casual environment where we have minimal restrictions and where 5 people not knowing each other could cross a LGS door and start a game using available decks without having 1 of the player winning 90% of the game...the banned list was intended to identify/speculate on the cards that could make this concept impossible
As stated before I think EDH, more so Edh multiplayer has made this work pretty well...can it be replicated in 60 cards, 4 copies MTG....and what it would take...
Recently I went to multiple LGS where if you have let's say a Modern deck to try...you feels like you were playing Yugioh...Modern is an example here...it could have been Standard or Legacy at other place
.
So essentially you want to make a new format for casual? Based on the fact when you show up wanting to test your casual modern deck nobody else had a casual deck that was modern?
If you create a new format called cdmagic casual, you're going to show up to your lgs, ask people if they want to play cdmagic casual, and they'll inform you they don't have cdmagic casual deck.
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I don't want to open a vigorous debate so please take it with 2 tablespoon of salt...I just want to know if some of you prefer when Magic was about putting any 60 cards together and play. Don't take me seriously, I'm not bashing on the current state of the game.
I know that for competitive Magic it would be impossible to manage...or even chaotic...but for the casual crowd...I would like to know if some of you (like myself) would prefer if they were minimal boundaries...would it make it more diverse or more narrow in term of deck and strategies (control, aggro, combo).
In fact I think that Limited and EDH are a great example of how it can be a success, yes there is some banning (for EDH) but diversity look ultrapresent...would it be possible to replicate it in a 60 card-deck constructed, 4 copies environment.
For the fun of it, would it be possible to come up with a 20-cards banned list (excluding skills, ante and Unhinged/Unglued) that would be a must in this ''speculative'' environment, for budget, power or logistic reasons. It may actually come up looking a lot like Vintage without Power 9...but let see if we can make a better casual crowd format.
My 20-cards Banned list would be the following...I think :
What would be yours...you can even submit it if you totally disagree with the concept if you want...
Legacy:
RWBG Goblins
RRR Burn
WBU Affinity
UBR Sac-Land Tendrils!
BBBPox
Next possible deck: D&T, but that just wouldn't be right.
Modern: R Goblins (work in progress)
Standard: I only care about standard when Goblins is a deck.
Limited: I only care about limited when Goblins are in the set.
Pauper:
RGoblins
URCloudpost
other decks
Goblins.
Erebos B | Ghost Council WB | Grimgrin UB | Jhoira UR
Jor Kadeen RW | Melek UR | Mimeoplasm GUB | Rasputin WU
Savra BG | Sisay GW | Teneb BGW | Thada Adel U | Wort BR
I draft and play EDH. If a Standard player can't understand who a card is for, it's probably for me.
I also write things about good films.
So you recognize that having no formats would only work casually and not competitively. But casual is already free-form where you play it however you want so I think i'm missing the point of this thread.
Sounds like Legacy to me. Am I missing something?
Core sets would be 75% worthless. Nobody would buy them.
Sets would have to keep getting better, in a very obvious way, to get any sales at all.
Decks that rule Legacy would rule all Magic after that.
Standard:
WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern:
UR Twinning RU
G Venus Fly Trap G
U Artifacts Aggro U
Legacy:
B Reanimator B
WU Stoneblade UW
EDH
WBGGhave, Guru of SporesGBW
URGRiku of the Two ReflectionsGRU
WUBRGScion of the Ur-DragonGRBUW
Casual
Far too many to list
useless exercise, lets move on.
Wizards noticed that players, once they have their powerful cards, stopped buying sets. Standard was a way of forcing people to buy new cards by making older cards obsolete. Either than, or make cards progressively stronger than alpha/beta/unlimited, a continous powercreep.
What you're proposing is not "no format magic", but rather "vintage/legacy" (because chances are you'll evolve into the legacy ban list) and tossing away every other format. While, yes, this will create a very diverse meta eventually, at the start it will be chock full of degenerate cards, and 99% of cards will be relegated to the shoebox.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
none
Modern
UBG B/U/G control
BBB MBC
WUR Control
WWW Prison
RRR Goblins
Legacy
BBB Pox
UBG B/U/G Control
UWU StoneBlade
UW Miracle Control
I don't agree that it is a useless exercise, it's actually telling a lot on the new generation of magic players
I fully understand that the concept I want to discuss may look like I want to push legacy/vintage, in fact, my intentions is to understand why when you go to a LGS you have difficulty starting a 3-4 players games without the hassle of formats coordination and if it can be changed in the long term because in the end if you got 10 formats and 10 players playing only 1 format you got a problem. Limited is a solution, but can get expensive when you want to play casually...
I'm not frustrated or anything, I play Pauper, Edh, Cube, Std, Legacy, Vintage, Sealed, Modern regularly but I missed the time where I had 10-15 casual decks to play with, now with 80+ decks I feel that some were made strictly to be legal in abc format and it can become expensive when you think about it...maybe I'm to attached to my decks and I could just deconstruct them when they leave standard or become banned/bad in a format
In the meantime, sales of new product would grind to a halt. Why bother? What are you going to get that's going to make your pet deck any better? Since nobody would play sealed or draft anymore, there wouldn't be as much new product opened anyway. So how would you get the few "great" cards that would come out? The prices for them would have to be outrageous for dealers to justify opening up boxes. At those prices, players would just say "screw this! I have plenty of cards already."
The end result is that WotC would go out of business and you'd just have kitchen table players sitting around playing the same decks week after week until they got bored because nothing was new and eventually the game itself would completely die except for maybe a few die-hard enthusiasts.
Welcome to the end of Magic the Gathering as we know it.
But no, the exercise wasn't pointless. You've essentially outlined the death of this game and what would ultimately happen.
Now can we go back to talking about something that actually makes some sort of sense?
Casual magic doesn't need format coordination.
Back when Highlander was the casual format of choice in Melbourne, Australia (60 cards, all cards restricted except basic lands, some further restrictions applied to how many powerful cards you could play), you'd often see Highlander decks played against competitive/semi-competitive Standard decks on store play tables.
Or you'd see someone play their block deck against someone's super-casual Timmy concoction that might have technically been a Legacy deck.
As long as the power imbalance between decks isn't so bad that one player is 80% or higher favorite to win, those games remain fun. Once you get to the 80% level (example: competitive Standard deck vs. an Innistrad block draft deck, or a competitive Modern deck vs an RTR block constructed deck) the games do get stale, but that is true in format-regulated Magic too - Naya Blitz will put up 80% or better against a kitchen table Standard deck.
My point was, is it possible to create a casual environment where we have minimal restrictions and where 5 people not knowing each other could cross a LGS door and start a game using available decks without having 1 of the player winning 90% of the game...the banned list was intended to identify/speculate on the cards that could make this concept impossible
As stated before I think EDH, more so Edh multiplayer has made this work pretty well...can it be replicated in 60 cards, 4 copies MTG....and what it would take...
Recently I went to multiple LGS where if you have let's say a Modern deck to try...you feels like you were playing Yugioh...Modern is an example here...it could have been Standard or Legacy at other place
Don't flame me and if you have no opinion or if you think this is a ridiculous idea just read the next post...thanks
Thanks Tivoko for your support, for one moment I feel like my thoughts on recent MTG envrionment were coming from another planet..
Thanks Sirgog, for most of my magic ''career'' I felt, like yourself, that casual didn't need coordination, but for 2-3 years I found that it became more complicated to integrate the concept of casual in my local mtg community...maybe I should move...
As soon as you make any "format" competitive, the number of decks will be shrink, no matter what.
Nobody has called you any names, just said that the idea is not a good one.
BTW, up until 2 years ago, I was purely a casual player. And, even in that format, there were people who made crazy decks with turn 1 combo wins. So, spikes exist, even in casual play. When you play against a deck that has 4 Sol Ring, you know someone is trying to cast a very heavy spell early. The same player said that if he got 4 of the Collector's Edition Black Lotus (Retail $200 instead of $2500 and up) he would cram all of them in the deck. It's his kitchen table, he doesn't care if it is tournament playable. So, yeah, there would be a lot of people who would abuse your idea.
Those cards would skyrocket in price, beyond their already high prices, and newer cards would be near worthless, except for a very few.
And Wizards would go out of business.
Standard:
WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern:
UR Twinning RU
G Venus Fly Trap G
U Artifacts Aggro U
Legacy:
B Reanimator B
WU Stoneblade UW
EDH
WBGGhave, Guru of SporesGBW
URGRiku of the Two ReflectionsGRU
WUBRGScion of the Ur-DragonGRBUW
Casual
Far too many to list
Just because it is casual does not mean people will not be spikes. Believe it or not, even casual players like winning.
As such, your proposed ban list will eventually expand because there will be casual player who will be playing broken decks. Eventually, your ban list will match legacy's. In the meantime, people will complain about broken decks.
The answer to your bolded part is yes, it is possible. It is called legacy.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
The thread reflect what I thought, MTG is hardly a casual game anymore, like many thing in 2013 it has become fairly competitive...a good example of this is the closing of a local mtg gaming store after 6 months of operations when at a prerelease there was some unintentional mishandling by the staff that frustated a good half of the players and ''force'' the guy out of business...players almost never lose with a smile today...and it may be just me but even if in some part of my life I'm really competitive...I don't think MTG should be taken too seriously unless maybe in pro tournament or when everyone expect it to be harsh not when 7-yr old girl play with 35 yrs old man at a prerelease..
Maybe there was less exposure for tournaments before ?
So essentially you want to make a new format for casual? Based on the fact when you show up wanting to test your casual modern deck nobody else had a casual deck that was modern?
If you create a new format called cdmagic casual, you're going to show up to your lgs, ask people if they want to play cdmagic casual, and they'll inform you they don't have cdmagic casual deck.