so i've been wondering, what happens in 5-10 years, when pioneer is as old as modern. what do we do then? create a newer format? so on and so forth?
honestly, i wouldn't be surprised if standard, modern, and pioneer all got rolled into one format in the next few years. lets say all cards within the last 10 years are legal. old cards rotate out once per year.
i could see draft being pushed harder in this scenario. it'd become almost the new standard- as well as a way for wizards to keep making sets and selling boosters. so what if it's 40% recycled themes/cards? it's draft, they're staples.
the new modern/pioneer/standard mashup format would be more or less stable, too, with the only changes being eventual retirement of very old cards.
I think Pioneer will eventually die, there is no actual reason to play it if it's not that much cheaper than Modern. Standard will never go away because it drives a ton of pack cracking and makes draft less of a waste. There will always be Standard. And I think that as long as the RL exists, there will always be a good home for Modern. But Pioneer only exists because they are so TERRIBLE AND STUPID about reprints. If they would just do Modern Masters every single year and make it so every staple was reprinted once every 4 years or so, everyone would win
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Project Booster Fun makes it less fun to open a booster.
It is exactly the first thought you hit on. In 10 years they will make another non-rotating format. The reason they won't lump them together is because of the bolded portion previously. Players as a whole HATE rotation. Standard is the only format that has survived having a rotation with brawl being a "technically around" but people hate that it rotates and as far as I can find it doesn't really exist. When modern came out people asked how wizards would handle when there were too many sets again and everyone agreed they wouldn't make a new format. Well, the one thing magic players are consistently good at is constantly being wrong about nearly everything. Though we are right sometimes, just looking back its easier to find the wrong.
I personally believe that the concept of rotation is psychologically unpleasant.
On the other hand, it FEELS that it should be more palatable (relatively speaking) if the “expiration date” of your cards reach further.
We haven’t ever tried 10 years for a rotating format and 10 years seems to be the line where a new format needs to be made. With 10 years, someone who buys a new card as a high school freshman might still be playing it when they graduate college. The Alara block would only just now be on the way out, for perspective.
Further, having that 10 year gap makes some sort of aesthetic sense. Instead of accumulating a bunch of ten-year “stepping stone” formats over time, we’d have vintage, legacy, modern for a non-rotating format without the reserve list, a large scale rotating format, and standard.
Finally, rotating does something for the format that wizards would probably like. I recall that the difficulty of making new standard-legal cards that can see retain some play post-rotation in modern was cited as one reason for pioneer being created. With a 10-year rotation, wizards could essentially promise players that keeping a competitive standard collection for long enough will eventually let them “graduate” to a more powerful format. Having a natural pipeline that feeds standard players directly into a “super-extended” seems like it should be Wizards' golden pie in the sky... especially as it lets the format die down in power over time if wizards decides to go in a more conservative direction.
We haven’t ever tried 10 years for a rotating format and 10 years seems to be the line where a new format needs to be made. With 10 years, someone who buys a new card as a high school freshman might still be playing it when they graduate college. The Alara block would only just now be on the way out, for perspective.
While it's true we never had a 10-year rotating format, extended was 7 years of sets and it was wildly unpopular. It's possible three extra years could help it but it's unlikely. The rotation of cards just sours everyone to the format as the appeal of larger formats is picking a deck and 'always' being able to play it. Obviously bans and meta shifts could invalidate a deck but those can't anticipate while rotations are as you said "Expiration Dates" on decks/cards.
I feel like this touches (albiet indirectly) several connected, for lack of a better term subjective problems and that the crux of them lay not in the speculation put forth but rather between the lines.
Going on, I’m gonna give this all the (what should be) mandatory disclaimer. This is all just my opinion….
I’m still cautiously optimistic about Pioneer but I feel like the real motivations behind it are less than pure and foreshadow some grim realities. When announced it was billed as something more affordable than modern which can avoid some of the common pitfalls of standard (for convenience I’ll lump this all together as “sometimes standard is really bad with one or two decks taking up most of the meta” but this is all slightly more complex than this) .
When people talk about the power level of older formats they tend to ignore the fact that said “power level” is more or less universal in modern (with “busted” stuff you can do being balanced by “busted” hate cards to prevent those things from happening) and this is also true in legacy / vintage with a bit of a bias towards blue. If asked to break down the “core” eternal formats I would say…
Vintage is a format where you can play most any magic card. This format can be ungodly expensive to play.
Legacy is a flavor of vintage lacking some of the most expensive cards in the previously mentioned format but still has many reserve list staples which makes the format unattainable for many magic players. It feels futile to complain about the reserve list, even if it’s such a parasitic concept at this time that it kills the formats which depend on it and will eventually devalue the cards it set out to protect by eventually relegating their use to Commander.
Moderns start date is a bit arbitrary but if put to the gun I’d say that it’s defined by lack of reserve list cards and being started after the blue bias of Magic’s early years. While the price can still be inhibitive there’s not really any reason for this since none of the cards are on the reserve list.
Pioneer is a strange beast. It’s a fetch-less eternal format which lines up more with printing policies than game mechanics or benchmarks.
Wizards could give a ***** less about what players (or independent shops for that matter) want (to be fair, not everyone wants the same things) next to the bottom line. I feel like the real “bad guy” in this situation is Arena. Arena is, in theory a good enough thing. It’s a fine game and if it lets more people enjoy magic more often, great. MTGO serves a real purpose at this time, it keeps formats like Vintage and Legacy affordable (in a form) to many more people and keeps them from being entirely dead formats. Arena doesn’t do anything like this because of their limited card pool. As mentioned by myself and others (Wizards included) standard can be really bad sometimes and if dependent on that Arena would suffer so they had to come up with other ways to play magic. This is also well and good but it becomes a pile of ***** when the apparent intention is to make Arena the center of the Magic universe. Anyway, I digress. The issue at hand isn’t arena but….
Pioneer is unfolding to be more or less as expensive as modern and seems to be shaping up to being dominated by a few decks in the same way standard can sometimes be. If these trends continue (and there’s no reason they wouldn’t) the whole thing is going to turn into something that costs as much as modern (with significantly fewer playable arch-types), as stagnant as a rotation-less standard and at the end of the day as busted as anything else (if my opponent wastes time durdeling my pioneer deck can easily end games fairly consistently by turns 3-4 ). Meanwhile, a great answer to the standard blues is still modern which could be made cheaper by some meaningful (non-reserve list) reprints.
honestly, i wouldn't be surprised if standard, modern, and pioneer all got rolled into one format in the next few years. lets say all cards within the last 10 years are legal. old cards rotate out once per year.
i could see draft being pushed harder in this scenario. it'd become almost the new standard- as well as a way for wizards to keep making sets and selling boosters. so what if it's 40% recycled themes/cards? it's draft, they're staples.
the new modern/pioneer/standard mashup format would be more or less stable, too, with the only changes being eventual retirement of very old cards.
I personally believe that the concept of rotation is psychologically unpleasant.
On the other hand, it FEELS that it should be more palatable (relatively speaking) if the “expiration date” of your cards reach further.
We haven’t ever tried 10 years for a rotating format and 10 years seems to be the line where a new format needs to be made. With 10 years, someone who buys a new card as a high school freshman might still be playing it when they graduate college. The Alara block would only just now be on the way out, for perspective.
Further, having that 10 year gap makes some sort of aesthetic sense. Instead of accumulating a bunch of ten-year “stepping stone” formats over time, we’d have vintage, legacy, modern for a non-rotating format without the reserve list, a large scale rotating format, and standard.
Finally, rotating does something for the format that wizards would probably like. I recall that the difficulty of making new standard-legal cards that can see retain some play post-rotation in modern was cited as one reason for pioneer being created. With a 10-year rotation, wizards could essentially promise players that keeping a competitive standard collection for long enough will eventually let them “graduate” to a more powerful format. Having a natural pipeline that feeds standard players directly into a “super-extended” seems like it should be Wizards' golden pie in the sky... especially as it lets the format die down in power over time if wizards decides to go in a more conservative direction.
Going on, I’m gonna give this all the (what should be) mandatory disclaimer. This is all just my opinion….
I’m still cautiously optimistic about Pioneer but I feel like the real motivations behind it are less than pure and foreshadow some grim realities. When announced it was billed as something more affordable than modern which can avoid some of the common pitfalls of standard (for convenience I’ll lump this all together as “sometimes standard is really bad with one or two decks taking up most of the meta” but this is all slightly more complex than this) .
When people talk about the power level of older formats they tend to ignore the fact that said “power level” is more or less universal in modern (with “busted” stuff you can do being balanced by “busted” hate cards to prevent those things from happening) and this is also true in legacy / vintage with a bit of a bias towards blue. If asked to break down the “core” eternal formats I would say…
Vintage is a format where you can play most any magic card. This format can be ungodly expensive to play.
Legacy is a flavor of vintage lacking some of the most expensive cards in the previously mentioned format but still has many reserve list staples which makes the format unattainable for many magic players. It feels futile to complain about the reserve list, even if it’s such a parasitic concept at this time that it kills the formats which depend on it and will eventually devalue the cards it set out to protect by eventually relegating their use to Commander.
Moderns start date is a bit arbitrary but if put to the gun I’d say that it’s defined by lack of reserve list cards and being started after the blue bias of Magic’s early years. While the price can still be inhibitive there’s not really any reason for this since none of the cards are on the reserve list.
Pioneer is a strange beast. It’s a fetch-less eternal format which lines up more with printing policies than game mechanics or benchmarks.
Wizards could give a ***** less about what players (or independent shops for that matter) want (to be fair, not everyone wants the same things) next to the bottom line. I feel like the real “bad guy” in this situation is Arena. Arena is, in theory a good enough thing. It’s a fine game and if it lets more people enjoy magic more often, great. MTGO serves a real purpose at this time, it keeps formats like Vintage and Legacy affordable (in a form) to many more people and keeps them from being entirely dead formats. Arena doesn’t do anything like this because of their limited card pool. As mentioned by myself and others (Wizards included) standard can be really bad sometimes and if dependent on that Arena would suffer so they had to come up with other ways to play magic. This is also well and good but it becomes a pile of ***** when the apparent intention is to make Arena the center of the Magic universe. Anyway, I digress. The issue at hand isn’t arena but….
Pioneer is unfolding to be more or less as expensive as modern and seems to be shaping up to being dominated by a few decks in the same way standard can sometimes be. If these trends continue (and there’s no reason they wouldn’t) the whole thing is going to turn into something that costs as much as modern (with significantly fewer playable arch-types), as stagnant as a rotation-less standard and at the end of the day as busted as anything else (if my opponent wastes time durdeling my pioneer deck can easily end games fairly consistently by turns 3-4 ). Meanwhile, a great answer to the standard blues is still modern which could be made cheaper by some meaningful (non-reserve list) reprints.
Modern: Goblins,Storm
Legacy: Burn
EDH: Simic Merfolk